A MODERN UTOPIA

BY

H. G. WELLS


Prepared by Martin Guy from "Tono-Bungay and A Modern Utopia" printed
by Odhams Press Limited, London, W.C.2., 1908.

Italic text is indicated ~like this~, accented characters thus: .



CONTENTS


A NOTE TO THE READER

THE OWNER OF THE VOICE

I.  TOPOGRAPHICAL

II.  CONCERNING FREEDOMS

III.  UTOPIAN ECONOMICS

IV.  THE VOICE OF NATURE

V.  FAILURE IN A MODERN UTOPIA

VI.  WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA

VII.  A FEW UTOPIAN IMPRESSIONS

VIII.  MY UTOPIAN SELF

IX.  THE SAMURAI

X.  RACE IN UTOPIA

XI.  THE BUBBLE BURSTS

APPENDIX.  SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT



A NOTE TO THE READER


This book is in all probability the last of a series of writings,
of which -- disregarding certain earlier disconnected essays -- my
~Anticipations~ was the beginning.  Originally I intended ~Anticipations~
to be my sole digression from my art or trade (or what you will) of an
imaginative writer.  I wrote that book in order to clear up the muddle in
my own mind about innumerable social and political questions, questions I
could not keep out of my work, which it distressed me to touch upon in a
stupid haphazard way, and which no one, so far as I knew, had handled in a
manner to satisfy my needs.  But ~Anticipations~ did not achieve its end.
I have a slow constructive hesitating sort of mind, and when I emerged
from that undertaking I found I had still most of my questions to state
and solve.  In ~Mankind in the Making~, therefore, I tried to review the
social organisation in a different way, to consider it as an educational
process instead of dealing with it as a thing with a future history,
and if I made this second book even less satisfactory from a literary
standpoint than the former (and this is my opinion), I blundered, I think,
more edifyingly -- at least from the point of view of my own instruction.
I ventured upon several themes with a greater frankness than I had used
in ~Anticipations~, and came out of that second effort guilty of much
rash writing, but with a considerable development of formed opinion.
In many matters I had shaped out at last a certain personal certitude,
upon which I feel I shall go for the rest of my days.  In this present
book I have tried to settle accounts with a number of issues left over or
opened up by its two predecessors, to correct them in some particulars,
and to give the general picture of a ~Utopia~ that has grown up in my
mind during the course of these speculations as a state of affairs
at once possible and more desirable than the world in which I live.
But this book has brought me back to imaginative writing again.  In its
two predecessors the treatment of social organisation had been purely
objective here my intention has been a little wider and deeper, in that
I have tried to present not simply an ideal, but an ideal in reaction
with two personalities.  Moreover, since this may be the last book of
the kind I shall ever publish, I have written into it as well as I can
the heretical metaphysical scepticism upon which all my thinking rests,
and I have inserted certain sections reflecting upon the established
methods of sociological and economic science....

The last four words will not attract the butterfly reader, I know I have
done my best to make the whole of this book as lucid and entertaining as
its matter permits, because I want it read by as many people as possible,
but I do not promise anything but rage and confusion to him who proposes
to glance through my pages just to see if I agree with him, or to begin
in the middle, or to read without a constantly alert attention.  If you
are not already a little interested and open-minded with regard to social
and political questions, and a little exercised in self-examination,
you will find neither interest nor pleasure here.  If your mind is
"made up" upon such issues your time will be wasted on these pages.
And even if you are a willing reader you may require a little patience
for the peculiar method I have this time adopted.

That method assumes an air of haphazard, but it is not so careless as
it seems.  I believe it to be -- even now that I am through with the
book -- the best way to a sort of lucid vagueness which has always
been my intention in this matter.  I tried over several beginnings of
a Utopian book before I adopted this.  I rejected from the outset the
form of the argumentative essay, the form which appeals most readily to
what is called the "serious" reader, the reader who is often no more that
the solemnly impatient parasite of great questions.  He likes everything
in hard, heavy lines, black and white, yes and no, because he does not
understand how much there is that cannot be presented at all in that way;
wherever there is any effect of obliquity, of incommensurables, wherever
there is any levity or humour or difficulty of multiplex presentation,
he refuses attention.  Mentally he seems to be built up upon an
invincible assumption that the Spirit of Creation cannot count beyond
two, he deals only in alternatives.  Such readers I have resolved not to
attempt to please here.  Even if I presented all my tri-clinic crystals
as systems of cubes----!  Indeed I felt it would not be worth doing.
But having rejected the "serious" essay as a form, I was still greatly
exercised, I spent some vacillating months, over the scheme of this book.
I tried first a recognised method of viewing questions from divergent
points that has always attracted me and which I have never succeeded
in using, the discussion novel, after the fashion of Peacock's (and Mr.
Mallock's) development of the ancient dialogue; but this encumbered me
with unnecessary characters and the inevitable complications of intrigue
among them, and I abandoned it.  After that I tried to cast the thing
into a shape resembling a little the double personality of Boswell's
Johnson, a sort of interplay between monologue and commentator; but that
too, although it got nearer to the quality I sought, finally failed.
Then I hesitated over what one might call "hard narrative." It will be
evident to the experienced reader that by omitting certain speculative
and metaphysical elements and by elaborating incident this book might
have been reduced to a straightforward story. But I did not want to omit
as much on this occasion.  I do not see why I should always pander to
the vulgar appetite for stark stories. And in short, I made it this.
I explain all this in order to make it clear to the reader that,
however queer this book appears at the first examination, it is the
outcome of trial and deliberation, it is intended to be as it is.  I am
aiming throughout at a sort of shot-silk texture between philosophical
discussion in the one hand and imaginative narrative on the other.

                                                            H. G. WELLS.



THE OWNER OF THE VOICE


There are works, and this is one of them, that are best begun with a
portrait of the author.  And here, indeed, because of a very natural
misunderstanding this is the only course to take.  Throughout these papers
sounds a note, a distinctive and personal note, a note that tends at times
towards stridency; and all that is not, as these words are, in Italics, is
in one voice.  Now, this Voice, and this is the peculiarity of the matter,
is not to be taken as the Voice of the ostensible author who fathers these
pages.  You have to clear your mind of any preconceptions in that respect.
The Owner of the Voice you must figure to yourself as a whitish plump
man, a little under the middle size and age, with such blue eyes as many
Irishmen have, and agile in his movements and with a slight tonsorial
baldness -- a penny might cover it -- of the crown. His front is convex.
He droops at times like most of us, but for the greater part he bears
himself as valiantly as a sparrow.  Occasionally his hand flies out with
a fluttering gesture of illustration.  And his voice (which is our medium
henceforth) is an unattractive tenor that becomes at times aggressive.
Him you must imagine as sitting at a table reading a manuscript about
Utopias, a manuscript he holds in two hands that are just a little fat
at the wrist. The curtain rises upon him so. But afterwards, if the
devices of this declining art of literature prevail, you will go with
him through curious and interesting experiences. Yet, ever and a gain,
you will find him back at that little table, the manuscript in his hand,
and the expansion of his ratiocinations about Utopia conscientiously
resumed.  The entertainment before you is neither the set drama of
the work of fiction you are accustomed to read, nor the set lecturing
of the essay you are accustomed to evade, but a hybrid of these two.
If you figure this owner of the Voice as sitting, a little nervously, a
little modestly, on a stage, with table, glass of water and all complete,
and myself as the intrusive chairman insisting with a bland ruthlessness
upon his "few words" of introduction before he recedes into the wings,
and if furthermore you figure a sheet behind our friend on which moving
pictures intermittently appear, and if finally you suppose his subject
to be the story of the adventure of his soul among Utopian inquiries,
you will be prepared for some at least of the difficulties of this
unworthy but unusual work.

But over against this writer here presented, there is also another
earthly person in the book, who gathers himself together into a distinct
personality only after a preliminary complication with the reader.
This person is spoken of as the botanist, and he is a leaner, rather
taller, graver and much less garrulous man His face is weakly handsome and
done in tones of grey, he is fairish and grey-eyed and you would suspect
him of dyspepsia.  It is a justifiable suspicion.  Men of this type,
the chairman remarks with a sudden intrusion of exposition, are romantic
with a shadow of meanness, they seek at once to conceal and shape their
sensuous cravings beneath egregious sentimentalities, they get into
mighty tangles and troubles with women, and he has has his troubles.
You will hear of them, for that is the quality of his type.  He gets
no personal expression in this book, the Voice is always the other's,
but you gather much of the matter and something of the manner of his
interpolations from the asides and the tenour of the Voice.

So much by way of portraiture is necessary to present the explorers of
the Modern Utopia, which will unfold itself as a background to these two
inquiring figures.  The image of a cinematograph entertainment is the one
to grasp.  There will be an effect of these two people going to and fro in
front of the circle of a rather defective lantern, which sometimes jams
and sometimes gets out of focus, but which does occasionally succeed in
displaying on a screen a momentary moving picture of Utopian conditions.
Occasionally the picture goes out altogether, the Voice argues and argues,
and the footlights return, and then you find yourself listening again
to the rather too plump little man at his table laboriously enunciating
propositions, upon whom the curtain rises now.



CHAPTER ONE

TOPOGRAPHICAL


SECTION 1


The Utopia of a modern dreamer must needs differ in one fundamental aspect
from the Nowheres and Utopias men planned before Darwin quickened the
thought of the world.  Those were all perfect and static States, a balance
of happiness won for ever against the forces of unrest and disorder that
inhere in things.  One beheld a healthy and simple generation enjoying
the fruits of the earth in an atmosphere of virtue and happiness, to
be followed by other virtuous, happy, and entirely similar generations,
until the Gods grew weary.  Change and development were dammed back by
invincible dams for ever.  But the Modern Utopia must be not static but
kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage,
leading to a long ascent of stages.  Nowadays we do not resist and
overcome the great stream of things, but rather float upon it.  We build
now not citadels, but ships of state.  For one ordered arrangement
of citizens rejoicing in an equality of happiness safe and assured to
them and their children for ever, we have to plan "a flexible common
compromise, in which a perpetually novel succession of individualities
may converge most effectually upon a comprehensive onward development."
That is the first, most generalised difference between a Utopia based
upon modern conceptions and all the Utopias that were written in the
former time.

Our business here is to be Utopian, to make vivid and credit able if we
can, first this facet and then that, of an imaginary whole and happy
world.  Our deliberate intention is to be not, indeed, impossible,
but most distinctly impracticable. by every scale that reaches only
between to-day and to-morrow.  We are to turn our backs for a space upon
the insistent examination of the thing that is, and face towards the
freer air, the ampler spaces of the thing that perhaps might be, to the
projection of a State or city "worth while," to designing upon the sheet
of our imaginations the picture of a life conceivably possible, and yet
better worth living than our own.  That is our present enterprise. We are
going to lay down certain necessary starting propositions, and then we
shall proceed to explore the sort of world these propositions give us....

It is no doubt an optimistic enterprise.  But it is good for awhile
to be free from the carping note that must needs be audible when we
discuss our present imperfections, to release ourselves from practical
difficulties and the tangle of ways and means.  It is good to stop by
the track for a space, put aside the knapsack, wipe the brows, and talk
a little of the upper slopes of the mountain we think we are climbing,
would but the trees let us see it.

There is to be no inquiry here of policy and method.  This is to be
a holiday from politics and movements and methods. But for all that,
we must needs define certain limitations. Were we free to have our
untrammelled desire, I suppose we should follow Morris to his Nowhere,
we should change the nature of man and the nature of things together;
we should make the whole race wise, tolerant, noble, perfect -- wave
our hands to a splendid anarchy, every man doing as it pleases him,
and none pleased to do evil, in a world as good in its essential nature,
as ripe and sunny, as the world before the Fall.  But that golden age,
that perfect world, comes out into the possibilities of space and time.
In space and time the pervading Will to Live sustains for evermore a
perpetuity of aggressions.  Our proposal here is upon a more practical
plane at least than that.  We are to restrict ourselves first to the
limitations of human possibility as we know them in the men and women of
this world to-day, and then to all the inhumanity, all the insubordination
of nature.  We are to shape our state in a world of uncertain seasons,
sudden catastrophies, antagonistic diseases, and inimical beasts and
vermin, out of men and women with like passions, like uncertainties of
mood and desire to our own.  And, moreover, we are going to accept this
world of conflict, to adopt no attribute of renunciation towards it, to
face it in no ascetic spirit, but in the mood of the Western peoples,
whose purpose is to survive and overcome. So much we adopt in common
with those who deal not in Utopias, but in the world of Here and Now.

Certain liberties, however, following the best Utopian precedents,
we may take with existing fact.  We assume that the tone of public
thought may be entirely different from what it is in the present world.
We permit ourselves a free hand with the mental conflict of life, within
the possibilities of the human mind as we know it.  We permit ourselves
also a free hand with all the apparatus of existence that man has, so to
speak, made for himself, with houses, roads, clothing, canals, machinery,
with laws, boundaries, conventions and traditions, with schools, with
literature and religious organization, with creeds and customs, with
everything, in fact, that it lies within man's power to alter.  That,
indeed, is the cardinal assumption of all Utopian speculations old and
new; the Republic and Laws of Plato, and More's Utopia, Howells' implicit
Altruria, and Bellamy's future Boston, Comte's great Western Republic,
Hertzka's Freeland, Cabet's Icaria, and Campanella's City of the Sun,
are built, just as we shall build, upon that, upon the hypothesis of
the complete emancipation of a community of men from tradition, from
habits, from legal bonds, and that subtler servitude possessions entail.
And much of the essential value of all such speculations lies in this
assumption of emancipation, lies in that regard towards human freedom,
in the undying interest of the human power of self-escape, the power
to resist the causation of the past, and to evade, initiate, endeavour,
and overcome.


SECTION 2


There are very definite artistic limitations also.

There must always be a certain effect of hardness and thinness about
Utopian speculations.  Their common fault is to be comprehensively jejune.
That which is the blood and warmth and reality of life is largely absent;
there are no individualities, but only generalised people.  In almost
every Utopia -- except, perhaps, Morris's ~News from Nowhere~ -- one
sees handsome but characterless buildings, symmetrical and perfect
cultivations, and a multitude of people, healthy, happy, beautifully
dressed, but without any personal distinction whatever.  Too often the
prospect resembles the key to one of those large pictures of coronations,
royal weddings, parliaments, conferences, and gatherings so popular
in Victorian times, in which, instead of a face, each figure bears
a neat oval with its index number legibly inscribed.  This burthens
us with an incurable effect of unreality, and I do not see how it is
altogether to be escaped.  It is a disadvantage that has to be accepted.
Whatever institution has existed or exists, however irrational, however
preposterous, has, by virtue of its contact with individualities, an
effect of realness and rightness no untried thing may share.  It has
ripened, it has been christened with blood, it has been stained and
mellowed by handling, it has been rounded and dented to the softened
contours that we associate with life; it has been salted, maybe, in a
brine of tears.  But the thing that is merely proposed, the thing that
is merely suggested, however rational, however necessary, seems strange
and inhuman in its clear, hard, uncompromising lines, its unqualified
angles and surfaces.

There is no help for it, there it is!  The Master suffers with the last
and least of his successors.  For all the humanity he wins to, through
his dramatic device of dialogue, I doubt if any one has ever been
warmed to desire himself a citizen in the Republic of Plato; I doubt
if any one could stand a month of the relentless publicity of virtue
planned by More.... No one wants to live in any community of intercourse
really, save for the sake of the individualities he would meet there.
The fertilising conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of
the personal life, and all our Utopias no more than schemes for bettering
that interplay.  At least, that is how life shapes itself more and more
to modern perceptions.  Until you bring in individualities, nothing
comes into being, and a Universe ceases when you shiver the mirror of
the least of individual minds.


SECTION 3


No less than a planet will serve the purpose of a modern Utopia.  Time was
when a mountain valley or an island seemed to promise sufficient isolation
for a polity to maintain itself intact from outward force; the Republic of
Plato stood armed ready for defensive war, and the New Atlantis and the
Utopia of More in theory, like China and Japan through many centuries of
effectual practice, held themselves isolated from intruders.  Such late
instances as Butler's satirical ~Erewhon~, and Mr. Stead's queendom
of inverted sexual conditions in Central Africa, found the Tibetan
method of slaughtering the inquiring visitor a simple, sufficient rule.
But the whole trend of modern thought is against the permanence of any
such enclosures.  We are actually aware nowadays that, however subtly
contrived a State may be, outside your boundary lines the epidemic, the
breeding barbarian of the economic power, will gather its strength to
overcome you.  The swift march of invention is all for the invader. Now,
perhaps you might still guard a rocky coast or a narrow pass; but what
of that near to-morrow when the flying machine soars overhead, free to
descend at this point of that?  A state powerful enough to keep isolated
under modern conditions would be powerful enough to rule the world,
would be, indeed, if not actively ruling, yet passively acquiescent in
all other human organisations, and so responsible for them altogether.
World-state, therefore, it must be.

That leaves no room for a modern Utopia in Central Africa, or in South
America, or round about the pole, those last refuges of ideality.
The floating isle of ~La Cit Morellyste~ no longer avails.  We need
a planet.  Lord Eskine, the author of a Utopia ("Armata") that might have
been inspired by Mr. Hewins, was the first of all Utopias to perceive this
-- he joined his twin planets pole to pole by a sort of uumbilical cord.
But the modern imagination, obsessed by physics, must travel further
than that.

Out beyond Sirius, far in the deeps of space, beyond the flight of a
cannon-ball flying for a billion years, beyond the range of unaided
vision, blazes the star that is ~our~ Utopia's sun.  To those who know
where to look, with a good opera-glass aiding good eyes, it and three
fellows that seem in a cluster with it -- though they are incredible
billions of miles nearer -- make just the faintest speck of light.
About it go planets, even as our planets, but weaving a different fate,
and in its place among them is Utopia, with its sister mate, the Moon.
It is a planet like out planet, the same continents, the same islands,
the same oceans and seas, another Fuji-Yama is beautiful there dominating
another Yokohama -- and another Matterhorn overlooks the icy disorder of
another Theodule.  It is so like our planet that a terrestrial botanist
might find his every species there, even to the meanest pond-weed or
the remotest Alpine blossom....

Only when he had gathered that last and turned about to find his inn
again, perhaps he would not find his inn!

Suppose now that two of us were actually to turn about in just that
fashion.  Two, I think, for to face a strange planet, even though it
be a wholly civilised one, without some other familiar backing, dashes
the courage overmuch.  Suppose that we were indeed so translated even as
we stood.  You figure us upon some high pass in the Alps, and though I --
being one easily made giddy by stooping -- am no botanist myself, if my
companion were to have a specimen tin under his arm -- so long as it is
not painted that abominable popular Swiss apple green -- I would make it
no occasion for quarrel! We have tramped and botanised and come to a rest,
and, sitting among rocks, we have eaten our lunch and finished our bottle
of Yvorne, and fallen into a talk of Utopias, and said such things as
I have been saying.  I could figure it myself upon that little neck of
the Lucendro Pass, upon the shoulder of the Piz Lucendro, for there once
I lunched and talked very pleasantly, and we are looking down upon the
Val Bedretto, and Villa and Fontana and Airolo try to hide from us under
the mountain side -- three-quarters of a mile they are vertically below.
(~Lantern~.)  With that absurd nearness of effect one gets in the Alps,
we see the little train a dozen miles away, running down the Biaschina
to Italy, and the Lukmanier Pass beyond Piora left of us, and the San
Giacomo right, mere footpaths under our feet....

And behold! in the twinkling of an eye we are in that other world!

We should scarcely note the change.  Not a cloud would have gone from
the sky.  It might be the remote town below would take a different air,
and my companion the botanist, with his educated observation, might almost
see as much, and the train, perhaps, would be gone out of the picture,
and the embanked straightness of the Ticino in the Ambri-Piotta meadows
-- that might be altered, but that would be all the visibble change.
Yet I have an idea that in some obscure manner we should come to feel
at once a difference in things.

The botanist's glance would, under a subtle attraction, float back
to Airolo.  "It's queer," he would say quite idly, "but I never noticed
that building there to the right before."

"Which building?"

"That to the right -- with a queer sort of thing----"

"I see now.  Yes.  Yes, it's certainly an odd-looking affair.... And big,
you know!  Handsome!  I wondered----"

That would interrupt our Utopian speculations.  We should both discover
that the little towns below had changed -- but how, we should not have
marked them well enough to know.  It would be indefinable, a change in
the quality of their grouping, a change in the quality if their remote,
small shapes.

I should flick a few crumbs from my knee, perhaps.  "It's odd," I should
say, for the tenth or eleventh time, with a motion to rise, and we
should get up and stretch ourselves, and, still a little puzzled, turn
our faces towards the path that clambers down over the tumbled rocks and
runs round by the still clear lake and down towards the Hospice of St.
Gotthard -- if perchance we could still find that path.

Long before we got to that, before even we got to the great high road,
we should have hints from the stone cabin in the nape of the pass --
it would be gone or wonderfully changed -- from the very goats upon the
rocks, from the little hut by the rough bridge of stone, that a mighty
difference had come to the world of men.

And presently, amazed and amazing, we should happen on a man -- no Swiss
-- dressed in unfamiliar clothing and speaking an unfamilliar speech....


SECTION 4


Before nightfall we should be drenched in wonders, but still we should
have wonder left for the thing my companion, with his scientific
training, would no doubt be the first to see. He would glance up, with
that proprietary eye of the man who knows his constellations down to
the little Greek letters.  I imagine his exclamation.  He would at first
doubt his eyes. I should inquire the cause of his consternation, and it
would be hard to explain.  He would ask me with a certain singularity
of manner for "Orion," and I should not find him; for the Great Bear,
and it would have vanished.  "Where?" I should ask, and "where?" seeking
among that scattered starriness, and slowly I should acquire the wonder
that possessed him.

Then, for the first time, perhaps, we should realise from this unfamiliar
heaven that not the world had changed, but ourselves -- that we had come
into the uttermost deeps of space.


SECTION  5


We need suppose no linguistic impediments to intercourse. The whole world
will surely have a common language, that is quite elementarily Utopian,
and since we are free of the trammels of convincing story-telling,
we may suppose that language to be sufficiently our own to understand.
Indeed, should we be in Utopia at all, if we could not talk to every one?
That accursed bar of language, that hostile inscription in the foreigner's
eyes, "deaf and dumb to you, sir, and so -- your enemy," is the very
first of the defects and complications one has fled the earth to escape.

But what sort of language would we have the world speak, of we were told
the miracle of Babel was presently to be reversed?

If I may take a daring image, a medival liberty, I would suppose that
in this lonely place the Spirit of Creation spoke to us on this matter.
"You are wise men," that Spirit might say -- and I, being a suspicious,
touchy, over-earnest man for all my predisposition to plumpness,
would instantly scent the irony (while my companion, I fancy, might
even plume himself), "and to beget your wisdom is chiefly why the world
was made.  You are so good as to propose an acceleration of that tedious
multitudinous evolution upon which I am engaged. I gather, a universal
tongue would serve you there.  While I sit here among these mountains --
I have been filing away at them for this last aeon or so, just to attract
your hotels, you know -- will you be so kind----?  A few hints----?"

Then the Spirit of Creation might transiently smile, a smile that would
be like the passing of a cloud.  All the mountain wilderness about us
would be radiantly lit.  (You know those swift moments, when warmth and
brightness drift by, in lonely and desolate places.)

Yet, after all, why should two men be smiled into apathy by the Infinite?
Here we are, with our knobby little heads, our eyes and hands and feet
and stout hearts, and if not us or ours, still the endless multitudes
about us and in our loins are to come at last to the World State and
a greater fellowship and the universal tongue.  Let us to the extent
of our ability, if not answer that question, at any rate try to think
ourselves within sight of the best thing possible.  That, after all,
is our purpose, to imagine our best and strive for it, and it is a worse
folly and a worse sin than presumption, to abandon striving because the
best of all our bests looks mean amidst the suns.

Now you as a botanist would, I suppose, incline to something, as they say,
"~scientific~."  You wince under that most offensive epithet -- and I am
able to give you my intelligent sympathy -- though "pseudo-scientific"
and "quasi-scientific" are worse by far for the skin.  You would
begin to talk of scientific languages, of Esperanto, La Langue Bleue,
New Latin, Volapuk, and Lord Lytton, of the philosophical language of
Archbishop Whateley, Lady Welby's work upon Significs and the like.
You would tell me of the remarkable precisions, the encyclopdic
quality of chemical terminology, and at the word terminology I should
insinuate a comment on that eminent American biologist, Professor Mark
Baldwin, who has carried the language biological to such heights of
expressive clearness as to be triumphantly and invincibly unreadable.
(Which foreshadows the line of my defence.)

You make your ideal clear, a scientific language you demand, without
ambiguity, as precise as mathematical formul, and with every term in
relations of exact logical consistency with every other.  It will be a
language with all the inflexions of verbs and nouns regular and all its
constructions inevitable, each word clearly distinguishable from every
other word in sound as well as spelling.

That, at any rate, is the sort of thing one hears demanded, and if
only because the demand rests upon implications that reach far beyond
the region of language, it is worth considering here.  It implies,
indeed, almost everything that we are endeavouring to repudiate in
this particular work.  It implies that the whole intellectual basis of
mankind is established, that the rules of logic, the systems of counting
and measurement, the general categories and schemes of resemblance
and difference, are established for the human mind for ever -- blank
Comte-ism, in fact, of the blankest description.  But, indeed, the science
of logic and the whole framework of philosophical thought men have kept
since the days of Plato and Aristotle, has no more essential permanence as
a final expression of the human mind, than the Scottish Longer Catechism.
Amidst the welter of modern thought, a philosophy long lost to men rises
again into being, like some blind and almost formless embryo, that must
presently develop sight, and form, and power, a philosophy in which
this assumption is denied. [Footnote: The serious reader may refer at
leisure to Sidgwick's ~Use of Words in Reasoning~ (particularly), and
to Bosanquet's ~Essentials of Logic~, Bradley's ~Principles of Logic~,
and Sigwart's ~Logik~; the lighter minded may read and mark the temper
of Professor Case in the ~British Encyclopdia~, article "Logic"
(vol. xxx.).  I have appended to his book a rude sketch of a philosophy
upon new lines, originally read by me to the Oxford Phil. Soc. in 1903.]

All through this Utopian excursion, I must warn you, you shall feel
the thrust and disturbance of the insurgent movement. In the reiterated
use of "Unique," you will, as it were, get the gleam of its integument;
in the insistence upon individuality, and the individual difference as
the significance of life, you will feel the texture of its shaping body.
Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a
pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal
inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being.  Being,
indeed! -- there is no being, but a universal becoming of individualities,
and Plato turned his back on truth when he turned towards his museum
of specific ideals. Heraclitus, that lost and misinterpreted giant,
may perhaps be coming into his own....

There is no abiding thing in what we know.  We change from weaker to
stronger lights, and each more powerful light pierces our hitherto opaque
foundations and reveals fresh and different opacities below.  We can
never foretell which of our seemingly assured fundamentals the next
change will not affect.  What folly, then, to dream of mapping out our
minds in however general terms, of providing for the endless mysteries of
the future a terminology and an idiom!  We follow the vein, we mine and
accumulate our treasure, but who can tell which way the vein may trend?
Language is the nourishment of the thought of man, that serves only
as it undergoes metabolism, and becomes thought and lives, and in its
very living passes away.  You scientific people, with your fancy of a
terrible exactitude in language, of indestructible foundations built,
as that Wordsworthian doggerel on the title-page of ~Nature~ says,
"for aye," are marvellously without imagination!

The language of Utopia will no doubt be one and indivisible; all mankind
will, in the measure of their individual differences in quality, be
brought into the same phase, into a common resonance of thought, but the
language they will speak will still be a living tongue, an animated system
of imperfections, which every individual man will infinitesimally modify.
Through the universal freedom of exchange and movement, the developing
change in its general spirit will be a world-wide change; that is the
quality of its universality.  I fancy it will be a coalesced language, a
synthesis of many.  Such a language as English is a coalesced language; it
is a coalescence of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French and Scholar's Latin,
welded into one speech more ample and more powerful and beautiful
than either.  The Utopian tongue might well present a more spacious
coalescence, and hold in the frame of such an uninflected or slightly
inflected idiom as English already presents, a profuse vocabulary into
which have been cast a dozen once separate tongues, superposed and then
welded together through bilingual and trilingual compromises. [Footnote:
~Vide~ an excellent article, "La Langue Franaise en l'an 2003," par
Leon Bollack, in ~La Revue~, 15 Juillet, 1903.] In the past ingenious
men have speculated on the inquiry, "Which language will survive?"
The question was badly put.  I think now that this wedding and survival
of several in a common offspring is a far more probable thing.


SECTION 6


This talk of languages, however, is a digression.  We were on our way
along the faint path that runs round the rim of the Lake of Lucendro,
and we were just upon the point of coming upon our first Utopian man.
He was, I said, no Swiss. Yet he would have been a Swiss on mother Earth,
and here he would have the same face, with some difference, maybe,
in the expression; the same physique, though a little better developed
perhaps -- the same complexion.  He would have different habits, different
traditions, different knowledge, different ideas, different clothing,
and different appliances, but, except for all that, he would be the
same man.  We very distinctly provided at the outset that the modern
Utopia must have people inherently the same as those in the world.

There is more, perhaps, in that than appears at the first suggestion.

That proposition gives one characteristic difference between a modern
Utopia and almost all its predecessors.  It is to be a world Utopia, we
have agreed, no less; and so we must needs face the fact that we are to
have differences of race. Even the lower class of Plato's Republic was not
specifically of different race.  But this is a Utopia as wide as Christian
charity, and white and black, brown, red and yellow, all tints of skin,
all types of body and character, will be there.  How we are to adjust
their differences is a master question, and the matter is not even to
be opened in this chapter.  It will need a whole chapter even to glance
at its issues.  But here we underline that stipulation; every race of
this planet earth is to be found in the strictest parallelism there,
in numbers the same -- only, as I say, with an entirely different set
of traditions, ideals, ideas, and purposes, and so moving under those
different skies to an altogether different destiny.

There follows a curious development of this to anyone clearly impressed by
the uniqueness and the unique significance of individualities. Races are
no hard and fast things, no crowd of identically similar persons, but
massed sub-races, and tribes and families, each after its kind unique,
and these again are clusterings of still smaller uniques and so down to
each several person.  So that our first convention works out to this,
that not only is every earthly mountain, river, plant, and beast in that
parallel planet beyond Sirius also, but every man, woman, and child alive
has a Utopian parallel.  From now onward, of course, the fates of these
two planets are abreast.

We must in these days make some such supposition.  The alternative is
a Utopia of dolls in the likeness of angels -- imaginary laws to fit
incredible people, an unattractive undertaking.

For example, we must assume there is a man such as I might have been,
better informed, better disciplined, better employed, thinner and more
active -- and I wonder what he is doing! -- and you, Sir or Madam, are in
duplicate also, and all the men and women that you know and I.  I doubt
if we shall meet our doubles, or if it would be pleasant for us to do so;
but as we come down from these lonely mountains to the roads and houses
and living places of the Utopian world-state, we shall certainly find,
here and there, faces that will remind us singularly of those who have
lived under our own eyes.

There are some you never wish to meet again, you say, and some, I gather,
you do.  "And One----!"

It is strange, but this figure of the botanist will not keep in place.
It sprang up between us, dear reader, as a passing illustrative invention.
I do not know what put him into my head, and for a moment, it fell in
with my humour for a space to foist the man's personality upon you as
yours and call you scientific -- that most abusive word.  But here he is,
indisputably, with me in Utopia, and lapsing from our high speculative
theme into halting but intimate confidences.  He declares he has not
come to Utopia to meet again with his sorrows.

What sorrows?

I protest, even warmly, that neither he nor his sorrows were in my
intention.

He is a man, I should think, of thirty-nine, a man whose life has been
neither tragedy nor a joyous adventure, a man with one of those faces that
have gained interest rather than force or nobility from their commerce
with life.  He is something refined, with some knowledge, perhaps, of
the minor pains and all the civil self-controls; he has read more than
he has suffered, and suffered rather than done.  He regards me with his
blue-grey eye, from which all interest in this Utopia has faded.

"It is a trouble," he says, "that has come into my life only for a month
or so -- at least acutely again.  I thought it was all over.  There was
some one----"

It is an amazing story to hear upon a mountain crest in Utopia, this
Hampstead affair, this story of a Frognal heart. "Frognal," he says,
is the place where they met, and it summons to my memory the word on a
board at the corner of a flint-dressed new road, an estate development
road, with a vista of villas up a hill.  He had known her before he got
his professorship, and neither her "people" nor his -- he speaks that
detestable middle-class dialect in which aunts and things with money and
the right of intervention are called "people!" -- approved of the affair.
"She was, I think, rather easily swayed," he says.  "But that's not
fair to her, perhaps.  She thought too much of others.  If they seemed
distressed, or if they seemed to think a course right----" ...

Have I come to Utopia to hear this sort of thing?


SECTION 7


It is necessary to turn the botanist's thoughts into a worthier channel.
It is necessary to override these modest regrets, this intrusive, petty
love story.  Does he realise this is indeed Utopia?  Turn your mind, I
insist, to this Utopia of mine, and leave these earthly troubles to their
proper planet.  Do you realise just where the propositions necessary to a
modern Utopia are taking us?  Every one on earth will have to be here ;
-- themselves, but with a difference.  Somewhere here in  this world is,
for example, Mr. Chamberlain, and the King is here (no doubt ~incognito~),
and all the Royal Academy, and Sandow, and Mr. Arnold White.

But these famous names do not appeal to him.

My mind goes from this prominent and typical personage to that, and for a
time I forget my companion.  I am distracted by the curious side issues
this general proposition trails after it.  There will be so-and-so,
and so-and-so.  The name and figure of Mr. Roosevelt jerks into focus,
and obliterates an attempt to acclimatise the Emperor of the Germans.
What, for instance, will Utopia do with Mr. Roosevelt?  There drifts
across my inner vision the image of a strenuous struggle with Utopian
constables, the voice that has thrilled terrestrial millions in eloquent
protest. The writ of arrest, drifting loose in the conflict, comes to
my feet; I impale the scrap of paper, and read -- but can it be? --
"attempted disorganisation?... incitements to disarrange?... the balance
of population?"

The trend of my logic for once has led us into a facetious alley.
One might indeed keep in this key, and write an agreeable little
Utopia, that like the holy families of the medival artists (or
Michael Angelo's "Last Judgement") should compliment one's friends in
various degrees.  Or one might embark upon a speculative treatment of
the entire ~Almanach de Gotha~, something on the lines of Epistemon's
vision of the damned great, when


    "Xerxes was a crier of mustard.
     Romulus was a salter and a patcher of patterns...."


That incomparable catalogue!  That incomparable catalogue! Inspired by
the Muse of Parody, we might go on to the pages of ~Who's Who~, and
even, with an eye to the obdurate republic, to ~Who's Who in America~,
and make the most delightful and extensive arrangements.  Now where
shall we put this most excellent man?  And this?...

But, indeed, it is doubtful if we shall meet any of these doubles during
our Utopian journey, or know them when we meet them.  I doubt if any one
will be making the best of both these worlds.  The great men in this still
unexplored Utopia may be but village Hampdens in our own, and earthly
goatherds and obscure illiterates sit here in the seats of the mighty.

That again opens agreeable vistas left of us and right.

But my botanist obtrudes his personality again.  His thoughts have
travelled by a different route.

"I know," he says, "that she will be happier here, and that they will
value her better than she has been valued upon earth."

His interruption serves to turn me back from my momentary contemplation
of those popular effigies inflated by old newspapers and windy report,
the earthly great.  He sets me thinking of more personal and intimate
applications, of the human beings one knows with a certain approximation
to real knowledge, of the actual common substance of life.  He turns
me to the thought of rivalries and tendernesses, of differences and
disappointments.  I am suddenly brought painfully against the things
that might have been.  What if instead of that Utopia of vacant ovals
we meet relinquished loves here, and opportunities lost and faces as
they might have looked to us?

I turn to my botanist almost reprovingly.  "You know, she won't be quite
the same lady here that you knew in Frognal," I say, and wrest myself
from a subject that is no longer agreeable by rising to my feet.

"And besides," I say, standing above him, "the chances against our meeting
here are a million to one....  And we loiter!  This is not the business
we have come upon, but a mere incidental kink in our larger plan.
The fact remains, these people we have come to see are people with
like infirmities to our own -- and only the conditions are changed.
Let us pursue the tenour of our inquiry."

With that I lead the way round the edge of the Lake of Lucendro towards
our Utopian world.


(~You figure him doing it~.)


Down the mountain we shall go and down the passes, and as the valleys
open the world will open, Utopia, where men and women are happy and laws
are wise, and where all that is tangled and confused in human affairs
has been unravelled and made right.



CHAPTER TWO

CONCERNING FREEDOMS


SECTION 1


Now what sort of question would first occur to two men descending upon
the planet of a Modern Utopia? Probably grave solicitude about their
personal freedom. Towards the Stranger, as I have already remarked,
the Utopias of the past displayed their least amiable aspect. Would this
new sort of Utopian State, spread to the dimensions of a world, be any
less forbidding?

We should take comfort in the thought that universal Toleration is
certainly a modern idea, and it is upon modern ideas that this World
State rests.  But even suppose we are tolerated and admitted to this
unavoidable citizenship, there will still remain a wide range of
possibility....  I think we should try to work the problem out from
an inquiry into first principles, and that we should follow the trend
of our time and kind by taking up the question as one of "Man ~versus~
the State," and discussing the compromise of Liberty.

The idea of individual liberty is one that has grown in importance
and grows with every development of modern thought.  To the classical
Utopists freedom was relatively trivial.  Clearly they considered virtue
and happiness as entirely separable from liberty, and as being altogether
more important things.  But the modern view, with its deepening insistence
upon individuality and upon the significance of its uniqueness, steadily
intensifies the value of freedom, until at last we begin to see liberty
as the very substance of life, that indeed it is life, and that only the
dead things, the choiceless things, live in absolute obedience to law.
To have free play for one's individuality is, in the modern view,
the subjective triumph of existence, as survival in creative work and
offspring is its objective triumph.  But for all men, since man is a
social creature, the play of will must fall short of absolute freedom.
Perfect human liberty is possible only to a despot who is absolutely
and universally obeyed.  Then to will would be to command and achieve,
and within the limits of natural law we could at any moment do exactly as
it pleased us to do. All other liberty is a compromise between our own
freedom of will and the wills of those with whom we come into contact.
In an organised state each one of us has a more or less elaborate code
of what he may do to others and himself, and what others may do to him.
He limits others by his rights, and is limited by the rights of others,
and by considerations affecting the welfare of the community as a whole.

Individual liberty in a community is not, as mathematicians would say,
always of the same sign.  To ignore this is the essential fallacy of
the cult called Individualism.  But in truth, a general prohibition in
a state may increase the sum of liberty, and a general permission may
diminish it.  It does not follow, as these people would have us believe,
that a man is more free where there is least law and more restricted
where there is most law.  A socialism or a communism is not necessarily
a slavery, and there is no freedom under Anarchy. Consider how much
liberty we gain by the loss of the common liberty to kill.  Thereby one
may go to and fro in all the ordered parts of the earth, unencumbered by
arms or armour, free of the fear of playful poison, whimsical barbers,
or hotel trap-doors.  Indeed, it means freedom from a thousand fears
and precautions.  Suppose there existed even the limited freedom to kill
in vendetta, and think what would happen in our suburbs.  Consider the
inconvenience not only to each other, but to the neutral pedestrian,
the practical loss of freedoms all about them.  The butcher, if he came
at all, would have to come round in an armoured cart....

It follows, therefore, in a modern Utopia, which finds the final hope
of the world in the evolving interplay of unique individualities, that
the State will have effectually chipped away just all those spendthrift
liberties that waste liberty, and not one liberty more, and so have
attained the maximum general freedom.

There are two distinct and contrasting methods of limiting liberty;
the first is Prohibition, "thou shalt not," and the second Command,
"thou shalt."  There is, however, a sort of prohibition that takes
the form of a conditional command, and this one needs to bear in mind.
It says if you do so-and-so, you must also do so-and-so; if, for example,
you go to sea with men you employ, you must go in a seaworthy vessel.
But the pure command is unconditional; it says, whatever you have done or
are doing or want to do, you are to do this, as when the social system,
working through the base necessities of base parents and bad laws, sends
a child of thirteen into a factory.  Prohibition takes one definite thing
from the indefinite liberty of a man, but it still leaves him an unbounded
choice of actions.  He remains free, and you have merely taken a bucketful
from the sea of his freedom.  But compulsion destroys freedom altogether.
In this Utopia of ours there may be many prohibitions, but no indirect
compulsions -- if one may so contrive it -- and few or no commands.
As far as I see it now, in this present discussion, I think, indeed,
there should be no positive compulsions at all in Utopia, at any rate
for the adult Utopian -- unless they fall upon him as penalties incurred.


SECTION 2


What prohibitions should we be under, we two Uitlanders in this Utopian
world?  We should certainly not be free to kill, assault, or threaten
any one we met, and in that we earth-trained men would not be likely
to offend.  And until we knew more exactly the Utopian idea of property
we should be very chary of touching anything that might conceivably
be appropriated.  If it was not the property of individuals it might be
the property of the State.  But beyond that we might have our doubts.
Are we right in wearing the strange costumes we do, in choosing the
path that pleases us athwart this rock and turf, in coming striding with
unfumigated rcksacks and snow-wet hobnails into what is conceivably an
extremely neat and orderly world?  We have passed our first Utopian now,
with an answered vague gesture, and have noted, with secret satisfaction,
there is no access of dismay; we have rounded a bend, and down the valley
in the distance we get a glimpse of what appears to be a singularly
well-kept road....

I submit that to the modern minded man it can be no sort of Utopia worth
desiring that does not give the utmost freedom of going to and fro.
Free movement is to many people one of the greatest of life's privileges
-- to go wherever the spirit moves them, to wander and seee -- and though
they have every comfort, every security, every virtuous discipline,
they will still be unhappy if that is denied them.  Short of damage to
things cherished and made, the Utopians will surely have this right,
so we may expect no unclimbable walls and fences, nor the discovery of
any laws we may transgress in coming down these mountain places.

And yet, just as civil liberty itself is a compromise defended by
prohibitions, so this particular sort of liberty must also have its
qualifications.  Carried to the absolute pitch the right of free movement
ceases to be distinguishable from the right of free intrusion.  We have
already, in a comment on More's ~Utopia~, hinted at an agreement with
Aristotle's argument against communism, that it flings people into an
intolerable continuity of contact.  Schopenhauer carried out Aristotle
in the vein of his own bitterness and with the truest of images when he
likened human society to hedgehogs clustering for warmth, and unhappy
when either too closely packed or too widely separated.  Empedocles found
no significance in life whatever except as an unsteady play of love and
hate, of attraction and repulsion, of assimilation and the assertion
of difference.  So long as we ignore difference, so long as we ignore
individuality, and that I hold has been the common sin of all Utopias
hitherto, we can make absolute statements, prescribe communisms or
individualisms, and all sorts of hard theoretic arrangements.  But in
the world of reality, which -- to modernise Heraclitus and Empedocles
-- is nothing more nor less than the world of individualiity, there are
no absolute rights and wrongs, there are no qualitative questions at
all, but only quantitative adjustments.  Equally strong in the normal
civilised man is the desire for freedom of movement and the desire for
a certain privacy, for a corner definitely his, and we have to consider
where the line of reconciliation comes.

The desire for absolute personal privacy is perhaps never a very strong
or persistent craving.  In the great majority of human beings, the
gregarious instinct is sufficiently powerful to render any but the most
temporary isolations not simply disagreeable, but painful.  The savage
has all the privacy he needs within the compass of his skull; like dogs
and timid women, he prefers ill-treatment to desertion, and it is only
a scarce and complex modern type that finds comfort and refreshment in
quite lonely places and quite solitary occupations. Yet such there are,
men who can neither sleep well nor think well, nor attain to a full
perception of beautiful objects, who do not savour the best of existence
until they are securely alone, and for the sake of these even it would
be reasonable to draw some limits to the general right of free movement.
But their particular need is only a special and exceptional aspect of
an almost universal claim to privacy among modern people, not so much
for the sake of isolation as for congenial companionship.  We want to go
apart from the great crowd, not so much to be alone as to be with those
who appeal to us particularly and to whom we particularly appeal; we want
to form households and societies with them, to give our individualities
play in intercourse with them, and in the appointments and furnishings of
that intercourse.  We want gardens and enclosures and exclusive freedoms
for our like and our choice, just as spacious as we can get them --
and it is only the multitudinous uncongenial, anxious also for similar
developments in some opposite direction, that checks this expansive
movement of personal selection and necessitates a compromise on privacy.

Glancing back from our Utopian mountain side down which this discourse
marches, to the confusions of old earth, we may remark that the need and
desire for privacies there is exceptionally great at the present time,
and it was less in the past, that in the future it may be less again, and
that under the Utopian conditions to which we shall come when presently
we strike yonder road, it may be reduced to quite manageable dimensions.
But this is to be effected not by the suppression of individualities
to some common pattern, [Footnote: More's ~Utopia~. "Whoso will may
go in, for there is nothing within the houses that is private or anie
man's owne."] but by the broadening of public charity and the general
amelioration of mind and manners.  It is not by assimilation, that is
to say, but by understanding that the modern Utopia achieves itself.
The ideal community of man's past was one with a common belief,
with common customs and common ceremonies, common manners and common
formul; men of the same society dressed in the same fashion, each
according to his defined and understood grade, behaved in the same
fashion, loved, worshipped, and died in the same fashion.  They did
or felt little that did not find a sympathetic publicity.  The natural
disposition of all peoples, white, black, or brown, a natural disposition
that education seeks to destroy, is to insist upon uniformity, to make
publicity extremely unsympathetic to even the most harmless departures
from the code. To be dressed "odd," to behave "oddly," to eat in a
different manner or of different food, to commit, indeed, any breach of
the established convention is to give offence and to incur hostility
among unsophisticated men.  But the disposition of the more original
and enterprising minds at all times has been to make such innovations.

This is particularly in evidence in this present age.  The almost
cataclysmal development of new machinery, the discovery of new materials,
and the appearance of new social possibilities through the organised
pursuit of material science, has given enormous and unprecedented
facilities to the spirit of innovation.  The old local order has been
broken up or is now being broken up all over the earth, and everywhere
societies deliquesce, everywhere men are afloat amidst the wreckage of
their flooded conventions, and still tremendously unaware of the thing
that has happened.  The old local orthodoxies of behaviour, of precedence,
the old accepted amusements and employments, the old ritual of conduct
in the important small things of the daily life and the old ritual of
thought in the things that make discussion, are smashed up and scattered
and mixed discordantly together, one use with another, and no world-wide
culture of toleration, no courteous admission of differences, no wider
understanding has yet replaced them.  And so publicity in the modern
earth has become confusedly unsympathetic for every one.  Classes are
intolerable to classes and sets to sets, contact provokes aggressions,
comparisons, persecutions and discomforts, and the subtler people are
excessively tormented by a sense of observation, unsympathetic always and
often hostile.  To live without some sort of segregation from the general
mass is impossible in exact proportion to one's individual distinction.

Of course things will be very different in Utopia.  Utopia will be
saturated with consideration.  To us, clad as we are in mountain-soiled
tweeds and with no money by British bank-notes, negotiable only at a
practically infinite distance, this must needs be a reassuring induction.
And Utopian manners will not only be tolerant, but almost universally
tolerable.  Endless things will be understood only by a scattered few;
baseness of bearing, grossness of manner, will be the distinctive mark of
no section of the community whatever. The coarser reasons for privacy,
therefore, will not exist here. And that savage sort of shyness, too,
that makes so many half-educated people on earth recluse and defensive,
that too the Utopians will have escaped by their more liberal breeding.
In the cultivated State we are assuming it will be ever so much easier
for people to eat in public, rest and amuse themselves in public, and
even work in public.  Our present need for privacy in many things marks,
indeed, a phase of transition from an ease in public in the future due
to intelligence and good breeding, and in Utopia that transition will
be complete.  We must bear that in mind throughout the consideration of
this question.

Yet, after this allowance has been made, there still remains a
considerable claim for privacy in Utopia.  The room, or apartments,
or home, or mansion, whatever it may ne a man or woman maintains, must
be private, and under his or her complete dominion; it seems harsh and
intrusive to forbid a central garden plot or peristyle, such as one
sees in Pompeii, within the house walls, and it is almost as difficult
to deny a little private territory beyond the house.  Yet if we concede
the possibility that the poorer townsman (if there are to be rich and
poor in the world) will be forced to walk through endless miles of high
fenced villa gardens before he may expand in his little scrap of reserved
open country.  Such is already the poor Londoner's miserable fate....
Our Utopia will have, of course, faultless roads and beautifully arranged
inter-urban communications, swift trains or motor services or what not,
to diffuse its population, and without some anticipatory provisions,
the prospect of the residential areas becoming a vast area of defensively
walled villa Edens is all too possible.

This is a quantitive question, be it remembered, and not to be dismissed
by any statement of principle.  Our Utopians will meet it, I presume, by
detailed regulations, very probably varying locally with local conditions.
Privacy beyond the house might be made a privilege to be paid for in
proportion to the area occupied, and the tax on these licences of privacy
might increase as the square of the area affected.  A maximum fraction of
private enclosure for each urban and suburban square mile could be fixed.
A distinction could be drawn between an absolutely private garden and
a garden private and closed only for a day or a couple of days a week,
and at other times open to the well-behaved public.  Who, in a really
civilised community, would grudge that measure of invasion? Walls could be
taxed by height and length, and the enclosure of really natural beauties,
of rapids, cascades, gorges, viewpoints, and so forth made impossible.
So a reasonable compromise between the vital and conflicting claims of
the freedom of movement and the freedom of seclusion might be attained....

And as we argue thus we draw nearer and nearer to the road that goes up
and over the Gotthard crest and down the Val Tremola towards Italy.

What sort of road would that be?


SECTION 3


Freedom of movement in a Utopia planned under modern conditions must
involve something more than unrestricted pedestrian wanderings, and the
very proposition of a world-state speaking one common tongue carries
with it the idea of a world population travelled and travelling to
an extent quite beyond anything our native earth has seen.  It is
now our terrestrial experience that whenever economic and political
developments set a class free to travel, that class at once begins to
travel; in England, for example, above the five or six hundred pounds a
year level, it is hard to find any one who is not habitually migratory,
who has not been frequently, as people say, "abroad."  In the Modern
Utopia travel must be in the common texture of life.  To go into fresh
climates and fresh scenery, to meet a different complexion of humanity
and a different type of home and food and apparatus, to mark unfamiliar
trees and plants and flowers and beasts, to climb mountains, to see the
snowy night of the North and the blaze of the tropical midday, to follow
great rivers, to taste loneliness in desert places, to traverse the gloom
of tropical forests and to cross the high seas, will be an essential part
of the reward and adventure of life, even for the commonest people....
This is a bright and pleasant particular in which a modern Utopia must
differ again, and differ diametrically, from its predecessors.

We may conclude from what has been done in places upon our earth that
the whole Utopian world will be open and accessible, and as safe for the
wayfarer as France or England is to-day.  The peace of the world will
be established for ever, and everywhere, except in remote and desolate
places, there will be convenient inns, at least as convenient and
trustworthy as those of Switzerland to-day; the touring clubs and hotel
associations that have tariffed that country and France so effectually
will have had their fine Utopia equivalents, and the whole world will be
habituated to the coming and going of strangers.  The greater part of
the world will be as secure and cheaply and easily accessible to every
one as is Zermatt or Lucerne to a Western European of the middle-class
at the present time.

On this account alone no places will be so congested as these two are now
on earth.  With freedom to go everywhere, with easy access everywhere,
with no dread of difficulties about language, coinage, custom, or law,
why should every one continue to go to just a few special places?
Such congestions are merely the measure of the general inaccessibility
and insecurity and costliness of contemporary life, an awkward transitory
phase in the first beginnings of the travel age of mankind.

No doubt the Utopian will travel in many ways.  It is unlikely there
will be any smoke-disgorging steam railway trains in Utopia, they are
already doomed on earth, already threatened with that obsolescence that
will endear them to the Ruskins of to-morrow, but a thin spider's web of
inconspicuous special routes will cover the land of the world, pierce the
mountain passes and tunnel under the seas.  These may be double railways
or monorails or what not -- we are no engineers to judge between such
devices -- but by means of the the Utopian will travel about the earth
from one chief point to another at a speed of two or three hundred
miles or more per hour.  That will abolish the greater distances....
One figures these main communications as something after the manner of
corridor trains, smooth-running and roomy, open from end to end, with cars
in which one may sit and read, cars in which one may take refreshment,
cars into which the news of the day comes printing itself from the wires
beside the track; cars in which one may have privacy and sleep if one
is so disposed, bath-room cars, library cars; a train as comfortable
as a good club.  There will be no distinction of class in such a train,
because in a civilised world there would be no offence between one kind
of man and another, and for the good of the whole world such travelling
will be as cheap as it can be, and well within the reach of any but the
almost criminally poor.

Such great tramways as this will be used when the Utopians wish to travel
fast and far; thereby you will glide all over the land surface of the
planet; and feeding them and distributing from them, innumerable minor
systems, clean little electric tramways I picture them, will spread out
over the land in finer reticulations, growing close and dense in the
urban regions and thinning as the population thins.  And running beside
these lighter railways, and spreading beyond their range, will be the
smooth minor high roads such as this one we now approach, upon which
independent vehicles, motor-cars, cycles, and what not will go.  I doubt
if we shall see any horses upon this fine, smooth, clean road; I doubt
if there will be many horses on the high roads of Utopia, and, indeed,
if they will use draught horses at all upon that planet. Why should they?
Where the world gives turf or sand, or along special tracts, the horse
will perhaps be ridden for exercise and pleasure, but that will be all
the use for him; and as for the other beasts of burthen, on the remoter
mountain tracts the mule will no doubt still be a picturesque survival,
in the desert men will still find a use for the camel, and the elephant
may linger to play a part in the pageant of the East. But the burthen of
the minor traffic, if not the whole of it, will certainly be mechanical.
This is what we shall see even while the road is still remote, swift and
shapely motor-cars going past, cyclists, and in these agreeable mountain
regions there will also be pedestrians upon their way.  Cycle tracks will
abound in Utopia, sometimes following beside the great high roads, but
oftener taking their own more agreeable line amidst woods and crops and
pastures; and there will be a rich variety of foot paths and minor ways.
There will be many footpaths in Utopia.  There will be pleasant ways
over the scented needles of the mountain pinewoods, primrose-strewn
tracks amidst the budding thickets of the lower country, paths running
beside rushing streams, paths across the wide spaces of the corn land,
and, above all, paths through the flowery garden spaces amidst which
the houses in the towns will stand.  And everywhere about the world,
on road and path, by sea and land, the happy holiday Utopians will go.

The population of Utopia will be a migratory population beyond any earthly
precedent, not simply a travelling population, but migratory.  The old
Utopias were all localised, as localised as a parish councillor; but
it is manifest that nowadays even quite ordinary people live over areas
that would have made a kingdom in those former days, would have filled
the Athenian of the ~Laws~ with incredulous astonishment. Except for
the habits of the very rich during the Roman Empire, there was never the
slightest precedent for this modern detachment from place.  It is nothing
to us that we go eighty or ninety miles from home to place of business,
or take an hour's spin of fifty miles to our week-end golf; every summer
it has become a fixed custom to travel wide and far.  Only the clumsiness
of communications limit us now, and every facilitation of locomotion
widens not only our potential, but our habitual range.  Not only this,
but we change our habitations with a growing frequency and facility; to
Sir Thomas More we should seem a breed of nomads.  That old fixity was
(if necessity and not of choice, it was a mere phase in the development of
civilisation, a trick of rooting man learnt for a time from his new-found
friends, the corn and the vine and the hearth; the untamed spirit of
the young has turned for ever to wandering and the sea.  The soul of
man has never yet in any land been willingly adscript to the glebe.
Even Mr. Belloc, who preaches the happiness of a peasant proprietary,
is so much wiser than his thoughts that he sails about the seas in a
little yacht or goes afoot from Belgium to Rome.  We are winning our
freedom again once more, a freedom renewed and enlarged, and there is now
neither necessity nor advantage in a permanent life servitude to this
place or that.  Men may settle down in our Modern Utopia for love and
the family at last, but first and most abundantly they will see the world.

And with this loosening of the fetters of locality from the feet of men,
necessarily there will be all sorts of fresh distributions of the factors
of life.  On our own poor haphazard earth, wherever men work, wherever
there are things to be grown, minerals to be won, power to be used, there,
regardless of all the joys and decencies of life, the households needs
must cluster.  But in Utopia there will be wide stretches of cheerless
or unhealthy or toilsome or dangerous land with never a household; there
will be regions of mining and smelting, black with the smoke of furnaces
and gashed and desolated by mines, with a sort (if weird inhospitable
grandeur of industrial desolation, and tile men will come thither and work
for a spell and return to civilisation again, washing and changing their
attire in the swift gliding train.  And by way of compensation there will
be beautiful regions of the earth specially set apart and favoured for
children; in them the presence of children will remit taxation, while
in other less wholesome places the presence of children will be taxed;
the lower passes and fore hills of these very Alps, for example, will
be populous with homes, serving the vast arable levels of Upper Italy.

So we shall see, as we come down by our little lake in the lap of
Lucendro, and even before we reach the road, the first scattered chalets
and households in which these migrant people live, the upper summer
homes.  With the Coming of summer, as the snows on the high Alps recede,
a tide of households and schools, teachers and doctors, and all such
attendant services will flow up the mountain masses, and ebb again when
the September snows return.  It is essential to the modern ideal of life
that the period of education and growth should be prolonged to as late
a period as possible and puberty correspondingly retarded, and by wise
regulation the statesmen of Utopia will constantly adjust and readjust
regulations and taxation to diminish the proportion of children reared
in hot and stimulating conditions.  These high mountains will, in the
bright sweet summer, be populous with youth.  Even up towards this high
place where the snow is scarce gone until July, these households will
extend, and below, the whole long valley of Urseren will be a scattered
summer town.

One figures one of the more urban high ways, one of those along which
the light railways of the second order run, such as that in the valley of
Urseren, into which we should presently come.  I figure it as one would
see it at night, a band a hundred yards perhaps in width, the footpath on
either side shaded with high trees and lit softly with orange glowlights;
while down the centre the tramway of the road will go, with sometimes
a nocturnal tram-car gliding, lit and gay but almost noiselessly past.
Lantern-lit cyclists will flit along the track like fireflies, and ever
and again some humming motor-car will hurry by, to or from the Rhoneland
or the Rhineland or Switzerland or Italy.  Away on either side the lights
of the little country homes up the mountain slopes will glow.

I figure it at night, because so it is we should see it first

We should come out from our mountain valley into the minor road that
runs down the lonely rock wilderness of the San Gotthard Pass, we should
descend that nine miles of winding route, and so arrive towards twilight
among the clustering homes and upland unenclosed gardens of Realp and
Hospenthal and Andermatt.  Between Realp and Andermatt, and down the
Schoellenen gorge, the greater road would run.  By the time we reached it,
we should be in the way of understanding our adventure a little better.
We should know already, when we saw those two familiar clusters of chalets
and hotels replaced by a great dispersed multitude of houses -- we should
see their window lights, but little else -- that we were the victims
of some strange transition in space or time, and we should come down
by dimly-seen buildings into the part that would answer to Hospenthal,
wondering and perhaps a little afraid.  We should come out into this
great main roadway -- this roadway like an urban avenue -- and look
up it and down, hesitating whether to go along the valley Furka-ward,
or down by Andermatt through the gorge that leads to Gschenen....

People would pass us in the twilight, and then more people; we should
see they walked well and wore a graceful, unfamiliar dress, but more we
should not distinguish.

"Good-night!" they would say to us in clear, fine voices. Their dim
faces would turn with a passing scrutiny towards us.

We should answer out of our perplexity: "Good-night!" -- for by the
conventions established in the beginning of this book, we are given the
freedom of their tongue.


SECTION 4


Were this a story, I should tell at length how much we were helped by
the good fortune of picking up a Utopian coin of gold, bow at last we
adventured into the Utopian inn and found it all marvellously easy.
You see us the shyest and most watchful of guests; but of the food they
put before us and the furnishings of the house, and all our entertainment,
it will be better to speak later.  We are in a migratory world, we know,
one greatly accustomed to foreigners; our mountain clothes are not
strange enough to attract acute attention, though ill-made and shabby,
no doubt, by Utopian standards; we are dealt with as we might best wish
to be dealt with, that is to say as rather untidy, inconspicuous men.
We look about us and watch for hints and examples, and, indeed, get
through with the thing.  And after our queer, yet not unpleasant, dinner,
in which we remark no meat figures, we go out of the house for a breath of
air and for quiet counsel one with another, and there it is we discover
those strange constellations overhead.  It comes to us then, clear and
full, that our imagination has realised itself; we dismiss quite finally
a Rip-Van-Winkle fancy we have entertained, all the unfamiliarities of
our descent from the mountain pass gather together into one fullness of
conviction, and we know, we know, we are in Utopia.

We wander under the trees by the main road, watching the dim passers-by
as though they were the phantoms of a dream.  We say little to one
another.  We turn aside into a little pathway and come to a bridge over
the turbulent Reuss, hurrying down towards the Devil's Bridge in the
gorge below. Far away over the Furka ridge a pallid glow preludes the
rising of the moon.

Two lovers pass us whispering, and we follow them with out eyes.
This Utopia has certainly preserved the fundamental freedom, to love.
And then a sweet-voiced bell from somewhere high up towards Oberalp
chimes two-and-twenty times.

I break the silence.  "That might mean ten o'clock," I say.

My companion leans upon the bridge and looks down into the dim river
below.  I become aware of the keen edge of the moon like a needle of
incandescent silver creeping over the crest, and suddenly the river is
alive with flashes.

He speaks, and astonishes me with the hidden course his thoughts have
taken.

"We two were boy and girl lovers like that," he says, and jerks a head
at the receding Utopians.  "I loved her first and I do not think I have
ever thought of loving any one but her."

It is a curiously human thing, and, upon my honour, not one I had
designed, that when at last I stand in the twilight in the midst
of a Utopian township, when my whole being should be taken up with
speculative wonder, this man should be standing by my side, and lugging my
attention persistently towards himself, towards his limited futile self.
This thing perpetually happens to me, this intrusion of something small
and irrelevant and alive, upon my great impressions.  The time I first
saw the Matterhorn, that Queen among the Alpine summits, I was distracted
beyond appreciation by the tale of a man who could not eat sardines --
always sardines did this with him and that; and my first wanderings
along the brown streets of Pompeii, an experience I had anticipated
with a strange intensity, was shot with the most stupidly intelligent
discourse on vehicular tariffs in the chief capitals of Europe that it
is possible to imagine.  And now this man, on my first night in Utopia,
talks and talks and talks of his poor little love affair.

It shapes itself as the most trite and feeble of tragedies, one of
those stories of effortless submission to chance and custom in which Mr.
Hardy or George Gissing might have found a theme.  I do but half listen
at first -- watching the black figures in the moonlit roadway pacing to
and fro.  Yet -- I cannot trace how he conveys the subtle conviction to
my mind -- the woman he loves is beautiful.

They were boy and girl together, and afterwards they met again as fellow
students in a world of comfortable discretions. He seems to have taken
the decorums of life with a confiding good faith, to have been shy and
innocent in a suppressed sort of way, and of a mental type not made for
worldly successes; but he must have dreamt about her and loved her well
enough.  How she felt for him I could never gather; it seemed to be all of
that fleshless friendliness into which we train our girls.  Then abruptly
happened stresses.  The man who became her husband appeared, with a
very evident passion.  He was a year or so older than either of them,
and he had the habit and quality of achieving his ends; he was already
successful, and with the promise of wealth, and I, at least, perceived,
from my botanist's phrasing, that his desire was for her beauty.

As my botanist talked I seemed to see the whole little drama, rather
clearer than his words gave it me, the actors all absurdly in Hampstead
middle-class raiment, meetings of a Sunday after church (the men in
silk hats, frock coats, and tightly-rolled umbrellas), rare excursions
into evening dress, the decorously vulgar fiction read in their homes,
its ambling sentimentalities of thought, the amiably worldly mothers,
the respectable fathers, the aunts, the "people" -- his "people" and her
"people" -- the piano music and the song, and in this setting our friend,
"quite clever" at botany and "going in" for it "as a profession," and
the girl, gratuitously beautiful; so I figured the arranged and orderly
environment into which this claw of an elemental force had thrust itself
to grip.

The stranger who had come in got what he wanted; the girl considered that
she thought she had never loved the botanist, had had only friendship
for him -- though little she knew of the meaning of those fine words --
they parted a little incoherently and in tears, and it had not occurred
to the young man to imagine she was not going off to conventional life
in some other of the endless Frognals he imagined as the cellular tissue
of the world.

But she wasn't.

He had kept her photograph and her memory sweet, and if ever he had
strayed fro in the severest constancy, it seemed only in the end to
strengthen with the stuff of experience, to enhance by comparative
disappointment his imagination of what she might have meant to hint....
Then eight years afterwards they met again.

By the time lie gets to this part of his story we have, at my initiative,
left the bridge and are walking towards the Utopian guest house.
The Utopian guest house!  His voice rises and falls, and sometimes
he holds my arm.  My attention comes and goes. "Good-night," two
sweet-voiced Utopians cry to us in their universal tongue, and I answer
them "Good-night."

"You see," he persists, "I saw her only a week ago.  It was in Lucerne,
while I was waiting for you to come on from England.  I talked to her
three or four times altogether. And her face -- the change in her! I can't
get it out of my head -- night or day.  The miserable waste of her...."

Before us, through the tall pine stems, shine the lights of our Utopian
inn.

He talks vainly of ill-usage.  "The husband is vain, boastful, dishonest
to the very confines of the law, and a drunkard. There are scenes and
insults----"

"She told you?"

"Not much, but some one else did.  He brings other women almost into
her presence to spite her."

"And it's going on?" I interrupt.

"Yes.  ~Now~."

"Need it go on?"

"What do you mean?"

"Lady in trouble," I say.  "Knight at hand.  Why not stop this dismal
grizzling and carry her off?"  (~You figure the heroic sweep of the arm
that belongs to the Voice~.)  I positively forget for the moment that
we are in Utopia at all.

"You mean?"

"Take her away from him!  What's all this emotion of yours worth if it
isn't equal to that!"

Positively he seems aghast at me.

"Do you mean elope with her?"

"It seems a most suitable case."

For a space he is silent, and we go on through the trees.  A Utopian
tram-car passes and I see his face, poor bitted wretch looking pinched
and scared in its trailing glow of light.

"That's all very well in a novel," he says.  "But how could I go back
to my laboratory, mixed classes with young ladies, you know, after a
thing like that?  How could we live and where could we live?  We might
have a house in London, but who would call upon us?...  Besides, you
don't know her.  She is not the sort of woman....  Don't think I'm timid
or conventional.  Don't think I don't feel....  Feel!  ~You~ don't know
what it is to feel in a case of this sort...."

He halts and then flies out viciously: "Ugh!  There are times when I
could strangle him with my hands."

Which is nonsense.

He flings out his lean botanising hands in an impotent gesture.

"My dear Man!" I say, and say no more.

For a moment I forget we are in Utopia altogether.


SECTION 5


Let us come back to Utopia.  We were speaking of travel.

Besides road ways and railways and tramways, for those who go to and
fro in the earth the Modern Utopians will have very many other ways
of travelling.  There will be rivers, for example, with a vast variety
of boats; canals with diverse sorts of haulage; there will be lakes
and lagoons; and when one comes at last to the borders of the land,
the pleasure craft will be there, coming and going, and the swift great
passenger vessels, very big and steady, doing thirty knots an hour or
more, will trace long wakes as they go dwindling out athwart the restless
vastness of the sea.

They will be just beginning to fly in Utopia.  We owe much to M. Santos
Dumont; the world is immeasurably more disposed to believe this wonder
is coming, and coming nearly, than it was five years ago.  But unless
we are to suppose Utopian scientific knowledge far in advance of ours --
and though that supposition was not proscribed in our initial undertaking,
it would be inconvenient for us and not quite in the vein of the rest of
our premises -- they, too, will only be in the same experimental stage
as ourselves.  In Utopia, however, they will conduct research by the army
corps while we conduct it -- we don't conduct it!  We let it happen Fools
make researches and wise men exploit them -- that is our earthly way of
dealing with the question, and we thank Heaven for an assumed abundance
of financially impotent and sufficiently ingenious fools.

In Utopia, a great multitude of selected men, chosen volunteers, will be
collaborating upon this new step in man's struggle with the elements.
Bacon's visionary House of Saloman [Footnote: In ~The New Atlantis~.]
will be a thing realised, and it will be humming with this business.
Every university in the world will be urgently working for priority
in this aspect of the problem or that. Reports of experiments, as full
and as prompt as the telegraphic reports of cricket in our more sportive
atmosphere, will go about the world  All this will be passing, as it were,
behind the act drop of our first experience, behind this first picture
of the urbanised Urseren valley.  The literature of the subject will be
growing and developing with the easy swiftness of an eagle's swoop as
we come down the hillside; unseen in that twilight, unthought of by us
until this moment, a thousand men at a thousand glowing desks, a busy
specialist press, will be perpetually sifting, criticising, condensing,
and clearing the ground for further speculation.  Those who are concerned
with the problems of public locomotion will be following these aeronautic
investigations with a keen and enterprising interest, and so will the
physiologist and the sociologist.  That Utopian research will, I say,
go like an eagle's swoop in comparison with the blind-man's fumbling of
our terrestrial way.  Even before our own brief Utopian journey is out,
we may get a glimpse of the swift ripening of all this activity that
will be in progress at our coming. To-morrow, perhaps, or in a day or so,
some silent, distant thing will come gliding into view over the mountains,
will turn and soar and pass again beyond our astonished sight....


SECTION 6


But my friend and his great trouble turn my mind from these questions of
locomotion and the freedoms that cluster about them.  In spite of myself
I find myself framing his case.  He is a lover, the most conventional of
Anglican lovers, with a heart that has had its training, I should think,
in the clean but limited schoolroom of Mrs. Henry Wood....

In Utopia I think they will fly with stronger pin ions, it will not be
in the superficialities of life merely that movement will be wide and
free, they will mount higher and swoop more steeply than he in his cage
can believe.  What will their range be, their prohibitions? what jars
to our preconceptions will he and I receive here?

My mind flows with the free, thin flow that it has at the end of an
eventful day, and as we walk along in silence towards our inn I rove
from issue to issue, I find myself ranging amidst the fundamental things
of the individual life and all the perplexity of desires and passions.
I turn my questionings to the most difficult of all sets of compromises,
those mitigations of spontaneous freedom that constitute the marriage
laws, the mystery of balancing justice against the good of the future,
amidst these violent and elusive passions.  Where falls the balance of
freedoms here?  I pass for a time from Utopianising altogether, to ask
the question that, after all, Schopenhauer failed completely to answer,
why sometimes in the case of hurtful, pointless, and destructive things
we want so vehemently....

I come back from this unavailing glance into the deeps to the general
question of freedoms in this new relation.  I find myself far adrift
from the case of the Frognal botanist, and asking how far a modern Utopia
will deal with personal morals.

As Plato demonstrated long ago, the principles of the relation of
State control to personal morals may be best discussed in the case
of intoxication, the most isolated and least complicated of all this
group of problems.  But Plato's treatment of this issue as a question
of who may or may not have the use of wine, though suitable enough in
considering a small State in which everybody was the effectual inspector
of everybody, is entirely beside the mark under modern conditions, in
which we are to have an extraordinarily higher standard of individual
privacy and an amplitude and quantity of migration inconceivable to
the Academic imagination.  We may accept this principle and put this
particular freedom (of the use of wine) among the distinctive privileges
of maturity, and still find all that a modern would think of as the
Drink Question untouched.

That question in Utopia will differ perhaps in the proportion of
its factors, but in no other respect, from what it is upon earth.
The same desirable ends will be sought, the maintenance of public order
and decency, the reduction of inducements to form this bad and wasteful
habit to their lowest possible minimum, and the complete protection of the
immature.  But the modern Utopians, having systematised their sociology,
will have given some attention to the psychology of minor officials,
a matter altogether too much neglected by the social reformer on earth.
They will not put into the hands of a common policeman powers direct and
indirect that would be dangerous to the public in the hands of a judge.
And they will have avoided the immeasurable error of making their control
of the drink traffic a source of public revenue.  Privacies they will
not invade, but they will certainly restrict the public consumption
of intoxicants to specified licensed places and the sale of them to
unmistakable adults, and they will make the temptation of the young
a grave offence.  In so migratory a population as the Modern Utopian,
the licensing of inns and bars would be under the same control as the
railways and high roads.  Inns exist for the stranger and not for the
locality, and we shall meet with nothing there to correspond with our
terrestrial absurdity of Local Option.

The Utopians will certainly control this trade, and as certainly  punish
personal  excesses.  Public  drunkenness (as distinguished from the
mere elation that follows a generous but controlled use of wine) will
be an offence against public decency, and will be dealt with in some
very drastic manner. It will, of course, be an aggravation of, and not
an excuse for, crime.

But I doubt whether the State will go beyond that.  Whether an adult
shall use wine or beer or spirits, or not, seems to me entirely a matter
for his doctor and his own private conscience. I doubt if we explorers
shall meet any drunken men, and I doubt not we shall meet many who
have never availed themselves of their adult freedom in this respect.
The conditions of physical happiness will be better understood in Utopia,
it will be worth while to be well there, and the intelligent citizen will
watch himself closely.  Half and more of the drunkenness of earth is an
attempt to lighten dull days and hopelessly sordid and disagreeable lives,
and in Utopia they do not suffer these things.  Assuredly Utopia will be
temperate, not only drinking, but eating with the soundest discretion.
Yet I do not think wine and good ale will be altogether wanting there,
nor good, mellow whisky, nor, upon occasion, the engaging various liqueur.
I do not think so. My botanist, who abstains altogether, is of another
opinion. We differ here and leave the question to the earnest reader.
I have the utmost respect for all Teetotalers, Prohibitionists, and
Haters and Persecutors of Innkeepers, their energy of reform awakens
responsive notes in me, and to their species I look for a large part of
the urgent repair of our earth; yet for all that----

There is Burgundy, for example, a bottle of soft and kindly Burgundy,
taken to make a sunshine on one's lunch when four strenuous hours of
toil have left one on the further side of appetite.  Or ale, a foaming
tankard of ale, ten miles of sturdy tramping in the sleet and slush as a
prelude, and then good bread and good butter and a ripe hollow Stilton
and celery and ale -- ale with a certain quantitative freedom.  Or,
again, where is the sin in a glass of tawny port three or four times,
or it may be five, a year, when the walnuts come round in their season?
If you drink no port, then what are walnuts for?  Such things I hold
for the reward of vast intervals of abstinence;  they justify your wide,
immaculate margin, which is else a mere unmeaning blankness on the page
of palate God has given you!  I write of these things as a fleshly man,
confessedly and knowingly fleshly, and more than usually aware of my
liability to err; I know myself for a gross creature more given to
sedentary world-mending than to brisk activities, and not one-tenth as
active as the dullest newspaper boy in London.  Yet still I have my uses,
uses that vanish in monotony, and still I must ask why should we bury the
talent of these bright sensations altogether?  Under no circumstances can
I think of my Utopians maintaining their fine order of life on ginger ale
and lemonade and the ale that is Kops'. Those terrible Temperance Drinks,
solutions of qualified sugar mixed with vast volumes of gas, as, for
example, soda, seltzer, lemonade, and ~fire-extincteurs~ hand grenades --
~minerals~, they call such stuff in England -- fill a man with wind and
self-righteousness.  Indeed they do!  Coffee destroys brain and kidney,
a fact now universally recognised and advertised throughout America;
and tea, except for a kind of green tea best used with discretion in
punch, tans the entrails and turns honest stomachs into leather bags.
Rather would I be Metchnikoffed [Footnote: See ~The Nature of Man~,
by Professor Elie Metchnikoff.] at once and have a clean, good stomach
of German silver.  No!  If we are to have no ale in Utopia, give me the
one clean temperance drink that is worthy to set beside wine, and that
is simple water.  Best it is when not quite pure and with a trace of
organic matter, for then it tastes and sparkles....

My botanist would still argue.

Thank Heaven this is my book, and that the ultimate decision rests
with me.  It is open to him to write his own Utopia and arrange that
everybody shall do nothing except by the consent of the savants of
the Republic, either in his eating, drinking, dressing or lodging,
even as Cabet proposed. It is open to him to try a ~News from Nowhere~
Utopia with the wine left out.  I have my short way with him here quite
effectually.  I turn in the entrance of our inn to the civil but by no
means obsequious landlord, and with a careful ambiguity of manner for
the thing may be considered an outrage, and I try to make it possible
the idea is a jest -- put my test demand....

"You see, my dear Teetotaler? -- he sets before me tray and glass and..."
Here follows the necessary experiment and a deep sigh.... "Yes, a bottle
of quite ~excellent~ light beer!  So there are also cakes and ale in
Utopia!  Let us in this saner and more beautiful world drink perdition
to all earthly excesses.  Let us drink more particularly to the coming
of the day when men beyond there will learn to distinguish between
qualitative and quantitative questions, to temper good intentions with
good intelligence, and righteousness with wisdom.  One of the darkest
evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good."


SECTION 7


So presently to bed and to sleep, but not at once to sleep. At first my
brain, like a dog in unfamiliar quarters, must turn itself round for
a time or so before it lies down.  This strange mystery of a world of
which I have seen so little as yet -- a mountain slope, a twilit road,
a traffic of ambiguous vehicles and dim shapes, the window lights of many
homes -- fills me with curiosities.  Figures and incidents come and go,
the people we have passed, our landlord, quietly attentive and yet, I
feel, with the keenest curiosity peeping from his eyes, the unfamiliar
forms of the house parts and furnishings, the unfamiliar courses of the
meal.  Outside this little bedroom is a world, a whole unimagined world.
A thousand million things lie outside in the darkness beyond this lit
inn of ours, unthought-of possibilities, overlooked considerations,
surprises, riddles, incommensurables,  a whole monstrous intricate
universe of consequences that I have to do my best to unravel. I attempt
impossible recapitulations and mingle the weird quality of dream stuff
with my thoughts.

Athwart all this tumult of my memory goes this queer figure of my
unanticipated companion, so obsessed by himself and his own egotistical
love that this sudden change to another world seems only a change of scene
for his gnawing, uninvigorating passion.  It occurs to me that she also
must have an equivalent in Utopia, and then that idea and all ideas grow
thin and vague, and are dissolved at last in the rising tide of sleep....



CHAPTER THREE

UTOPIAN ECONOMICS


SECTION 1


These modern Utopians with the universally diffused good manners, the
universal education, the fine freedoms we shall ascribe to them, their
world unity, world language, world-wide travellings, world-wide freedom
of sale and purchase, will remain mere dreamstuff, incredible even by
twilight, until we have shown that at that level the community will still
sustain itself.  At any rate, the common liberty of the Utopians will
not embrace the common liberty to be unserviceable, the most perfect
economy of organisation still leaves the fact untouched that all order
and security in a State rests on the certainty of getting work done?
How will the work of this planet be done?  What will be the economics
of a modern Utopia?

Now in the first place, a state so vast and complex as this world Utopia,
and with so migratory a people, will need some handy symbol to check the
distribution of services and commodities.  Almost certainly they will need
to have money. They will have money, and it is not inconceivable that, for
all his sorrowful thoughts, our botanist, with his trained observation,
his habit of looking at little things upon the ground, would be the one
to see and pick up the coin that has fallen from some wayfarer's pocket.
(This, in our first hour or so before we reach the inn in the Urseren
Thal.)  You figure us upon the high Gotthard road, heads together over
the little disk that contrives to tell us so much of this strange world.

It is, I imagine, of gold, and it will be a convenient accident if it is
sufficient to make us solvent for a day or so, until we are a little more
informed of the economic system into which we have come.  It is, moreover,
of a fair round size, and the inscription declares it one Lion, equal to
"twaindy" bronze Crosses.  Unless the ratio of metals is very different
here, this latter must be a token coin, and therefore legal tender for
but a small amount.  (That would be pain and pleasure to Mr. Wordsworth
Donisthorpe if he were to chance to join us, for once he planned a Utopian
coinage, [Footnote: ~A System of Measures~, by Wordsworth Donisthorpe.]
and the words Lion and Cross are his.  But a token coinage and "legal
tender" he cannot abide.  They make him argue.)  And being in Utopia,
that unfamiliar "twaindy" suggests at once we have come upon that most
Utopian of all things, a duodecimal system of counting.

My author's privilege of details serves me here.  This Lion is distinctly
a beautiful coin, admirably made, with its value in fine, clear letters
circling the obverse side, and a head thereon -- of Newton, as I live!
One detects American influence here.  Each year, as we shall find, each
denomination of coins celebrates a centenary.  The reverse shows the
universal goddess of the Utopian coinage -- Peace, as a beautiful woman,
reading with a child out of a great book, and behind them are stars,
and an hour-glass, halfway run.  Very human these Utopians, after all,
and not by any means above the obvious in their symbolism!

So for the first time we learn definitely of the World State, and we get
our first clear hint, too, that there is an end to Kings.  But our coin
raises other issues also.  It would seem that this Utopia has no simple
community of goods, that there is, at any rate, a restriction upon what
one may take, a need for evidences of equivalent value, a limitation to
human credit.

It dates -- so much of this present Utopia of ours dates. Those former
Utopists were bitterly against gold.  You will recall the undignified use
Sir Thomas More would have us put it to, and how there was no money at all
in the Republic of Plato, and in that later community for which he wrote
his Laws an iron coinage of austere appearance and doubtful efficacy....
It may be these great gentlemen were a little hasty with a complicated
difficulty, and not a little unjust to a highly respectable element.

Gold is abused and made into vessels of dishonour, and abolished from
ideal society as though it were the cause instead of the instrument of
human baseness; but, indeed, there is nothing bad in gold.  Making gold
into vessels of dishonour and banishing it from the State is punishing
the hatchet for the murderer's crime.  Money, did you but use it right,
is a good thing in life, a necessary thing in civilised human life, as
complicated, indeed, for its purposes, but as natural a growth as the
bones in a man's wrist, and I do not see how one can imagine anything
at all worthy of being called a civilisation without it.  It is the
water of the body social, it distributes and receives, and renders
growth and assimilation and movement and recovery possible.  It is the
reconciliation of human interdependence with liberty.  What other device
will give a man so great a freedom with so strong an inducement to effort?
The economic history of the world, where it is not the history of the
theory of property, is very largely the record of the abuse, not so
much of money as (if credit devices to supplement money, to amplify the
scope of this most precious invention; and no device of labour credits
[Footnote: Edward Bellamy's ~Looking Backward~, ch. ix.] or free demand
of commodities from a central store [Footnote: More's ~Utopia~ and
Cabet's ~Icaria~.] or the like has ever been suggested that does not
give ten thousand times more scope for that inherent moral dross in man
that must be reckoned with in any sane Utopia we may design and plan....
Heaven knows where progress may not end, but at any rate this developing
State, into which we two men have fallen, this Twentieth Century Utopia,
has still not passed beyond money and the use of coins.


SECTION 2


Now if this Utopian world is to be in some degree parallel to contemporary
thought, it must have been concerned, it may be still concerned, with
many unsettled problems of currency, and with the problems that centre
about a standard of value. Gold is perhaps of all material substances
the best adapted to the monetary purpose, but even at that best it
falls far short of an imaginable ideal.  It undergoes spasmodic and
irregular cheapening through new discoveries of gold, and at any time
it may undergo very extensive and sudden and disastrous depreciation
through the discovery of some way of transmuting less valuable elements.
The liability to such depreciations introduces an undesirable speculative
element into the relations of debtor and creditor.  When, on the one
hand, there is for a time a check in the increase of the available stores
of gold, or an increase in the energy applied to social purposes, or a
checking of the public security that would impede the free exchange of
credit and necessitate a more frequent production of gold in evidence,
then there comes an undue appreciation of money as against the general
commodities of life, and an automatic impoverishment of the citizens in
general as against the creditor class.  The common people are mortgaged
into the bondage of debt.  And on the other hand an unexpected spate of
gold production, the discovery of a single nugget as big as St. Paul's,
let us say -- a quite possible thing -- would result in a sort of jail
delivery of debtors and a financial earthquake.

It has been suggested by an ingenious thinker that it is possible to
use as a standard of monetary value no substance whatever, but instead,
force, and that value might be measured in units of energy.  An excellent
development this, in theory, at any rate, of the general idea of the
modern State as kinetic and not static; it throws the old idea of the
social order and the new into the sharpest antithesis.  The old order
is presented as a system of institutions and classes ruled by men of
substance; the new, of enterprises and interests led by men of power.

Now I glance at this matter in the most incidental manner, as a man
may skim through a specialist's exposition in a popular magazine.
You must figure me, therefore, finding from a casual periodical paper
in our inn, with a certain surprise at not having anticipated as much,
the Utopian self of that same ingenious person quite conspicuously
a leader of thought, and engaged in organising the discussion of the
currency changes Utopia has under consideration.  The article, as it
presents itself to me, contains a complete and lucid, though occasionally
rather technical, explanation of his newest proposals.  They have been
published, it seems, for general criticism, and one gathers that in the
modern Utopia the administration presents the most elaborately detailed
schemes of any proposed alteration in law or custom, some time before any
measure is taken to carry it into effect, and the possibilities of every
detail are acutely criticised, flaws anticipated, side issues raised,
and the whole minutely tested and fined down by a planetful of critics,
before the actual process of legislation begins.

The explanation of these proposals involves an anticipatory glance at
the local administration of a Modern Utopia.  To any one who has watched
the development of technical science during the last decade or so, there
will be no shock in the idea that a general consolidation of a great
number of common public services over areas of considerable size is now
not only practicable, but very desirable.  In a little while heating and
lighting and the supply of power for domestic and industrial purposes and
for urban and inter-urban communications will all be managed electrically
from common generating stations. And the trend of political and social
speculation points decidedly to the conclusion that so soon as it passes
out of the experimental stage, the supply of electrical energy, just
like drainage and the supply of water, will fall to the local authority.
Moreover, the local authority will be the universal landowner. Upon that
point so extreme an individualist as Herbert Spencer was in agreement
with the Socialist.  In Utopia we conclude that, whatever other types of
property may exist, all natural sources of force, and indeed all strictly
natural products coal, water power, and the like, are inalienably vested
in the local authorities (which, in order to secure the maximum of
convenience and administrative efficiency, will probably control areas
as large sometimes as half England) they will generate electricity by
water power, by combustion, by wind or tide or whatever other natural
force is available, and this electricity will be devoted, some of it
to the authority's lighting and other public works, some of it, as a
subsidy, to the World-State authority which controls the high roads,
the great railways, the inns and other apparatus of world communication,
and the rest will pass on to private individuals or to distributing
companies at a uniform fixed rate for private lighting and heating, for
machinery and industrial applications of all sorts.  Such an arrangement
of affairs will necessarily involve a vast amount of book-keeping between
the various authorities, the World-State government and the customers,
and this book-keeping will naturally be done most conveniently in units
of physical energy.

It is not incredible that the assessment of the various local
administrations for the central world government would be already
calculated upon the estimated total of energy, periodically available
in each locality, and booked and spoken of in these physical units.
Accounts between central and local governments could be kept in these
terms.  Moreover, one may imagine Utopian local authorities making
contracts in which payment would be no longer in coinage upon the gold
basis, but in notes good for so many thousand or millions of units of
energy at one or other of the generating stations.

Now the problems of economic theory will have undergone an enormous
clarification if, instead of measuring in fluctuating money values,
the same scale of energy units can be extended to their discussion, if,
in fact, the idea of trading could be entirely eliminated.  In my Utopia,
at any rate, this has been done, the production and distribution of common
commodities have been expressed as a problem in the conversion of energy,
and the scheme that Utopia was now discussing was the application of this
idea of energy as the standard of value to the entire Utopian coinage.
Every one of those giant local authorities was to be free to issue energy
notes against the security of its surplus of saleable available energy,
and to make all its contracts for payment in those notes up to a certain
maximum defined by the amount of energy produced and disposed of in that
locality in the previous year.  This power of issue was to be renewed
just as rapidly as the notes came in for redemption.  In a world without
boundaries, with a population largely migratory and emancipated from
locality, the price of the energy notes of these various local bodies
would constantly tend to be uniform, because employment would constantly
shift into the areas where energy was cheap. Accordingly, the price of
so many millions of units of energy at any particular moment in coins of
the gold currency would be approximately the same throughout the world.
It was proposed to select some particular day when the economic atmosphere
was distinctly equable, and to declare a fixed ratio between the gold
coinage and the energy notes; each gold Lion and each Lion of credit
representing exactly the number of energy units it could buy on that day.
The old gold coinage was at once to cease to be legal tender beyond
certain defined limits, except to the central government, which would
not re-issue it as it came in.  It was, in fact, to become a temporary
token coinage, a token coinage of full value for the day of conversion
at any rate, if not afterwards, under the new standard of energy, and to
be replaceable by an ordinary token coinage as time went on.  The old
computation by Lions and the values of the small change of daily life
were therefore to suffer no disturbance whatever.

The economists of Utopia, as I apprehended them, had a different
method and a very different system of theories from those I have read
on earth, and this makes my exposition considerably more difficult.
This article upon which I base my account floated before me in an
unfamiliar, perplexing, and dream-like phraseology.  Yet I brought away
an impression that here was a rightness that earthly economists have
failed to grasp.  Few earthly economists have been able to disentangle
themselves from patriotisms and politics, and their obsession has always
been international trade.  Here in Utopia the World State cuts that away
from beneath their feet; there are no imports but meteorites, and no
exports at all.  Trading is the earthly economists' initial notion, and
they start from perplexing and insoluble riddles about exchange value,
insoluble because all trading finally involves individual preferences
which are incalculable and unique. Nowhere do they seem to be handling
really defined standards, every economic dissertation and discussion
reminds one more strongly than the last of the game of croquet Alice
played in Wonderland, when the mallets were flamingoes and the balls were
hedgehogs and crawled away, and the hoops were soldiers and kept getting
up and walking about.  But economics in Utopia must be, it seems to me,
not a theory of trading based on bad psychology but physics applied to
problems in the theory of sociology.  The general problem of Utopian
economics is to state the conditions of the most efficient application
of the steadily increasing quantities of material energy the progress
of science makes available for human service, to the general needs of
mankind.  Human labour and existing material are dealt with in relation
to that.  Trading and relative wealth are merely episodical in such
a scheme. The trend of the article I read, as I understood it, was
that a monetary system based upon a relatively small amount of gold,
upon which the business of the whole world had hitherto been done,
fluctuated unreasonably and supplied no real criterion of well-being,
that the nominal values of things and enterprises had no clear and simple
relation to the real physical prosperity of the community, that the
nominal wealth of a community in millions of pounds or dollars or Lions,
measured nothing but the quantity of hope in the air, and in increase
of confidence meant an inflation of credit and a pessimistic phase a
collapse of this hallucination of possessions.  The new standards, this
advocate reasoned, were to alter all that, and it seemed to me they would.

I have tried to indicate the drift of these remarkable proposals, but
about them clustered an elaborate mass of keen and temperate discussion.
Into the details of that discussion I will not enter now, nor am I sure
I am qualified to render the multitudinous aspect of this complicated
question at all precisely.  I read the whole thing in the course of an
hour or two of rest after lunch -- it was either the second or third day
of my stay in Utopia -- and we were sitting in a little inn at the end of
the Lake of Uri.  We had loitered there, and I had fallen reading because
of a shower of rain....  But certainly as I read it the proposition
struck me as a singularly simple and attractive one, and its exposition
opened out to me for the first time clearly, in a comprehensive outline,
the general conception of the economic nature of the Utopian State.


SECTION 3


The difference between the social and economic sciences as they exist
in our world [Footnote: But see Gidding's ~Principles of Sociology~,
a modern and richly suggestive American work, imperfectly appreciated
by the British student.  See also Walter Bagehot's ~Economic Studies~.]
and in this Utopia deserves perhaps a word or so more. I write with the
utmost diffidence, because upon earth economic science has been raised
to a very high level of tortuous abstraction by the industry of its
professors, and I can claim neither a patient student's intimacy with
their productions nor -- what is more serious -- anything but the most
generalised knowledge of what their Utopian equivalents have achieved.
The vital nature of economic issues to a Utopia necessitates, however,
some attempt at interpretation between the two.

In Utopia there is no distinct and separate science of economics.
Many problems that we should regard as economic come within the scope
of Utopian psychology.  My Utopians make two divisions of the science of
psychology, first, the general psychology of individuals, a sort of mental
physiology separated by no definite line from physiology proper, and
secondly, the psychology of relationship between individuals. This second
is an exhaustive study of the reaction of people upon each other and
of all possible relationships.  It is a science of human aggregations,
of all possible family groupings, of neighbours and neighbourhood, of
companies, associations unions, secret and public societies, religious
groupings, of common ends and intercourse, and of the methods of
intercourse and collective decision that bold human groups together,
and finally of government and the State.  The elucidation of economic
relationships, depending as it does on the nature of the hypothesis
of human aggregation actually in operation at any time is considered
to be subordinate and subsequent to this general science of Sociology.
Political economy and economics, in our world now, consist of a hopeless
muddle of social assumptions and preposterous psychology, and a few
geographical and physical generalisations.  Its ingredients will be
classified out and widely separated in Utopian thought. On the one hand
there will be the study of physical economies, ending in the descriptive
treatment of society as an organisation for the conversion of all the
available energy in nature to the material ends of mankind -- a physical
sociology which will be already at such a stage of practical development
as to be giving the world this token coinage representing energy -- and
on the other there will be the study of economic problems as problems
in the division of labour, having regard to a social organisation whose
main ends are reproduction and education in an atmosphere of personal
freedom.  Each of these inquiries, working unencumbered by the other,
will be continually contributing fresh valid conclusions for the use of
the practical administrator.

In no region of intellectual activity will our hypothesis of freedom
from tradition be of more value in devising a Utopia from here.  From its
beginning the earthly study of economics has been infertile and unhelpful,
because of the mass of unanalysed and scarcely suspected assumptions upon
which it rested.  The facts were ignored that trade is a by-product and
not an essential factor in social life, that property is a plastic and
fluctuating convention, that value is capable of impersonal treatment
only in the case of the most generalised requirements.  Wealth was
measured by the standards of exchange.  Society was regarded as a
practically unlimited number of avaricious adult units incapable of
any other subordinate groupings than business partnerships, and the
sources of competition were assumed to be inexhaustible.  Upon such
quicksands rose an edifice that aped the securities of material science,
developed a technical jargon and professed the discovery of "laws."
Our liberation from these false presumptions through the rhetoric of
Carlyle and Ruskin and the activities of the Socialists, is more apparent
than real.  The old edifice oppresses us still, repaired and altered by
indifferent builders, underpinned in places, and with a slight change
of name.  "Political Economy" has been painted out, and instead we read
"Economics -- under entirely new management." Modern Economics differs
mainly from old Political Economy in having produced no Adam Smith.
The old "Political Economy" made certain generalisations, and they were
mostly wrong; new Economics evades generalisations. and seems to lack the
intellectual power to make them.  The science hangs like a gathering fog
in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental,
unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by.  Its most typical exponents
display a disposition to disavow generalisations altogether, to claim
consideration as "experts," and to make immediate political application of
that conceded claim.  Now Newton, Darwin, Dalton, Davy, Joule, and Adam
Smith did not affect this "expert" hankey-pankey, becoming enough in a
hairdresser or a fashionable physician, but indecent in a philosopher or
a man of science.  In this state of impotent expertness, however, or in
some equally unsound state, economics must struggle on -- a science that
is no science, a floundering lore wallowing in a mud of statistics until
either the study of the material organisation of production on the one
hand as a development of physics and geography, or the study of social
aggregation on the other, renders enduring foundations possible.


SECTION 4


The older Utopias were all relatively small states; Plato's Republic,
for example, was to be smaller than the average English borough,
and no distinction was made between the Family, the Local Government,
and the State.  Plato and Campanella -- for all that the latter was a
Christian priest carried communism to its final point and prescribed even
a community of husbands and wives, an idea that was brought at last to
the test of effectual experiment in the Oneida Community of New York State
(1848-1879).  This latter body did not long survive its founder, at least
as a veritable communism, by reason of the insurgent individualism of its
vigorous sons. More, too, denied privacy and ruled an absolute community
of goods, at any rate, and so, coming to the Victorian Utopias, did Cabet.
But Cabet's communism was one of the "free store" type, and the goods were
yours only after you had requisitioned them.  That seems the case in the
"Nowhere" of Morris also.  Compared with the older writers Bellamy and
Morris have a vivid sense of individual separation, and their departure,
from the old homogeneity is sufficiently marked to justify a doubt
whether there will be any more thoroughly communistic Utopias for ever.

A Utopia such as this present one, written in the opening of the
Twentieth Century, and after the most exhaustive discussion -- nearly
a century long -- between Communistic and Socialistic ideas on the one
hand, and Individualism on the other, emerges upon a sort of effectual
conclusion to those controversies.  The two parties have so chipped and
amended each other's initial propositions that, indeed, except for the
labels still flutteringly adhesive to the implicated men, it is hard to
choose between them.  Each side established a good many propositions,
and we profit by them all.  We of the succeeding generation can see quite
clearly that for the most part the heat and zeal of these discussions
arose in the confusion of a quantitative for a qualitative question.
To the onlooker, both Individualism and Socialism are, in the absolute,
absurdities; the one would make men the slaves of the violent or rich,
the other the slaves of the State official, and the way of sanity runs,
perhaps even sinuously, down the intervening valley.  Happily the dead
past buries its dead, and it is not our function now to adjudicate the
preponderance of victory.  In the very days when our political and
economic order is becoming steadily more Socialistic, our ideals of
intercourse turn more and more to a fuller recognition of the claims
of individuality.  The State is to be progressive, it is no longer to
be static, and this alters the general condition of the Utopian problem
profoundly; we have to provide not only for food and clothing, for
order and health, but for initiative. The factor that leads the World
State on from one phase of development to the next is the interplay of
individualities; to speak teleologically, the world exists for the sake
of and through initiative, and individuality is the method of initiative,
Each man and woman, to the extent that his or her individuality is marked,
breaks the law of precedent, transgresses the general formula, and makes
a new experiment for the direction of the life force.  It is impossible,
therefore, for the State, which represents all and is preoccupied by
the average to make effectual experiments and intelligent innovations,
and so supply the essential substance of life.  As against the individual
the state represents the species, in the case of the Utopian World State
it absolutely represents the species.  The individual emerges from the
species, makes his experiment, and either fails, dies, and comes to an
end, or succeeds and impresses himself in offspring, in consequences
and results, intellectual, material and moral, upon the world.

Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all
its successful individuals since the beginning, and the World State
of the Modern Utopist will, in its economic aspect, be a compendium of
established economic experience, about which individual enterprise will
be continually experimenting, either to fail and pass, or to succeed and
at last become incorporated with the undying organism of the World State.
This organism is the universal rule, the common restriction, the rising
level platform on which individualities stand.

The World State in this ideal presents itself as the sole landowner of
the earth, with the great local governments I have adumbrated, the local
municipalities, holding, as it were, feud ally under it as landlords.
The State or these subordinates holds all the sources of energy, and
either directly or through its tenants, farmers and  agents, develops
these sources, and renders the energy available for the work of life.
It or its tenants will produce food, and so human energy, and the
exploitation of coal and electric power, and the powers of wind and wave
and water will be within its right.  It will pour out this energy by
assignment and lease and acquiescence and what not upon its individual
citizens.  It will maintain order, maintain roads, maintain a cheap and
efficient administration of justice, maintain cheap and rapid locomotion
and be the common carrier of the planet, convey and distribute labour,
control, let, or administer all natural productions, pay for and secure
healthy births and a healthy and vigorous new generation, maintain the
public health, coin money and sustain standards of measurement, subsidise
research, and reward  such  commercially unprofitable  undertakings
as benefit the community as a whole; subsidise when needful chairs
of criticism and authors and publications, and collect and distribute
in formation.  The energy developed and the employment afforded by the
State will descend like water that the sun has sucked out of the sea
to fall upon a mountain range, and hack to the sea again it will come
at last, debouching in ground rent and royalty and licence fees, in the
fees of travellers and profits upon carrying and coinage and the like,
in death duty, transfer tax, legacy and forfeiture, returning to the sea.
Between the clouds and the sea it will run, as a river system runs,
down through a great region of individual enterprise and interplay,
whose freedom it will sustain.  In that intermediate region between
the kindred heights and deeps those beginnings and promises will arise
that are the essential significance, the essential substance, of life.
From our human point of view the mountains and sea are for the habitable
lands that lie between.  So likewise the State is for Individualities.
The State is for Individuals, the law is for freedoms, the world is for
experiment, experience, and change: these are the fundamental beliefs
upon which a modern Utopia must go.


SECTION 5


Within this scheme, which makes the State the source of all energy,
and the final legatee, what will be the nature of the property a man
may own?  Under modern conditions -- indeed, under any conditions --
a man without some negotiable property is a man without freedom, and
the extent of his property is very largely the measure of his freedom.
Without any property, without even shelter or food, a man has no choice
but to set about getting these things; he is in servitude to his needs
until he has secured property to satisfy them.  But with a certain
small property a man is free to do many things, to take a fortnight's
holiday when he chooses, for example, and to try this new departure
from his work or that; with so much more, he may take a year of freedom
and go to the ends of the earth; with so much more, he may obtain
elaborate apparatus and try curious novelties, build himself houses
and make gardens, establish businesses and make experiments at large.
Very speedily, under terrestrial conditions, the property of a man may
reach such proportions that his freedom oppresses the freedom of others.
Here, again, is a quantitative question, an adjustment of conflicting
freedoms, a quantitative question that too many people insist on making
a qualitative one.

The object sought in the code of property laws that one would find in
operation in Utopia would be the same object that pervades the whole
Utopian organisation, namely, a universal maximum of individual freedom.
Whatever far-reaching movements the State or great rich men or private
corporations may make, the starvation by any complication of employment,
the unwilling deportation, the destruction of alternatives to servile
submissions, must not ensue.  Beyond such qualifications, the object of
Modern Utopian statesmanship will be to secure to a man the freedom given
by all his legitimate property, that is to say, by all the values his toil
or skill or foresight and courage have brought into being.  Whatever he
has justly made he has a right to keep, that is obvious enough; but he
will also have a right to sell and exchange, and so this question of what
may be property takes really the form of what may a man buy in Utopia?

A modern Utopian most assuredly must have a practically unqualified
property in all those things that become, as it were, by possession,
extensions and expressions of his personality; his clothing, his jewels,
the tools of his employment, his books, the objects of art he may
have bought or made, his personal weapons (if Utopia have need of such
things), insignia, and so forth.  All such things that he has bought with
his money or acquired -- provided he is not a professional or habitual
dealer in such property -- will he inalienably his, his to give or lend
or keep, free even from taxation. So intimate is this sort of property
that I have no doubt Utopia will give a man posthumous rights over it
-- will permit him to assign it to a successor with at thhe utmost the
payment of a small redemption.  A horse, perhaps, in certain districts,
or a bicycle, or any such mechanical conveyance personally used, the
Utopians might find it well to rank with these possessions. No doubt,
too, a house and privacy owned and occupied by a man, and even a man's
own household furniture, might be held to stand as high or almost as
high in the property scale, might be taxed as lightly and transferred
under only a slightly heavier redemption, provided he had not let these
things on hire, or otherwise alienated them from his intimate self.
A thoroughgoing, Democratic Socialist will no doubt be inclined at first
to object that if the Utopians make these things a specially free sort
of property in this way, men would spend much more upon them than they
would otherwise do, but indeed that will be an excellent thing.  We are
too much affected by the needy atmosphere of our own mismanaged world.
In Utopia no one will have to hunger because some love to make and have
made and own and cherish beautiful things.  To give this much property
to individuals will tend to make clothing, ornamentation, implements,
books, and all the arts finer and more beautiful, because by buying such
things a man will secure something inalienable -- save in the case of
bankruptcy -- for himself and for those who belong to him.  Moreover,
a man may in his lifetime set aside sums to ensure special advantages
of education and care for the immature children of himself and others,
and in this manner also exercise a posthumous right. [Footnote: But a
Statute of Mortmain will set a distinct time limit to the continuance
of such benefactions.  A periodic revision of endowments is a necessary
feature in any modern Utopia.]

For all other property, the Utopians will have a scantier respect;
even money unspent by a man, and debts to him that bear no interest,
will at his death stand upon a lower level than these things.  What he
did not choose to gather and assimilate to himself, or assign for the
special education of his children, the State will share in the lion's
proportion with heir and legatee.

This applies, for example, to the property that a man creates and acquires
in business enterprises, which are presumably undertaken for gain, and
as a means of living rather than for themselves.  All new machinery, all
new methods, all uncertain and variable and non-universal undertakings,
are no business for the State; they commence always as experiments of
unascertained value, and next after the invention of money, there is no
invention has so facilitated freedom and progress as the invention of
the limited liability company to do this work of trial and adventure.
The abuses, the necessary reforms of company law on earth are no concern
of ours here and now, suffice it that in a Modern Utopia such laws
must be supposed to be as perfect as mortal laws can possibly be made.
~Caveat vendor~ will be a sound qualification of ~Caveat emptor~ in the
beautifully codified Utopian law. Whether the Utopian company will be
allowed to prefer this class of share to that or to issue debentures,
whether indeed usury, that is to say lending money at fixed rates of
interest, will be permitted at all in Utopia, one may venture to doubt.
But whatever the nature of the shares a man may hold, they will all be
sold at his death, and whatever he has not clearly assigned for special
educational purposes will -- with possibly some fractional concession
to near survivors -- lapse to the State.  The "safe investment,"
that permanent, undying claim upon the community, is just one of those
things Utopia will discourage;  which indeed the developing security of
civilisation quite automatically discourages through the fall in the rate
of interest.  As we shall see at a later stage, the State will insure
the children of every citizen, and those legitimately dependent upon him,
against the inconvenience of his death; it will carry out all reasonable
additional dispositions he may have made for them in the same event,
and it will insure him against old age and infirmity; and the object
of Utopian economics will be to give a man every inducement to spend
his surplus money in intensifying the quality of his surroundings,
either by economic adventures and experiments, which may yield either
losses or large profits, or in increasing the beauty, the pleasure,
the abundance and promise of life.

Besides strictly personal possessions and shares in business adventures,
Utopia will no doubt permit associations of its citizens to have a
property in various sorts of contracts and concessions, in leases
of agricultural and other land, for example;  in houses they may
have built, factories and machinery they may have made, and the like.
And if a citizen prefer to adventure into business single-handed, he will
have all the freedoms of enterprise enjoyed by a company; in business
affairs he will be a company of one, and his single share will be dealt
with at his death like any other shares.... So much for the second kind
of property.  And these two kinds of property will probably exhaust the
sorts of property a Utopian may possess.

The trend of modern thought is entirely against private property in land
or natural objects or products, and in Utopia these things will be the
inalienable property of the World State.  Subject to the rights of free
locomotion, land will be leased out to companies or individuals, but --
in view of the unknown necessities of the future -- never for a longer
period than, let us say, fifty years.

The property of a parent in his children, and of a husband in his wife,
seems to be undergoing a steadily increasing qualification in the world of
to-day, but the discussion of the Utopian state of affairs in regard to
such property may be better reserved until marriage becomes our topic.
Suffice it here to remark, that the increasing control of a child's
welfare and upbringing by the community, and the growing disposition
to limit and tax inheritance are complementary aspects of the general
tendency to regard the welfare and free intra-play of future generations
no longer as the concern of parents and altruistic individuals, but as
the predominant issue of statesmanship, and the duty and moral meaning
of the world community as a whole.


SECTION 6


From the conception of mechanical force as coming in from Nature to the
service of man, a conception the Utopian proposal of a coinage based on
energy units would emphasise, arise profound contrasts between the modern
and the classical Utopias.  Except for a meagre use of water power for
milling, and the wind for sailing -- so meagre in the latter case that
the classical world never contrived to do without the galley slave and
a certain restricted help from oxen in ploughing, and from horses in
locomotion, all the energy that sustained the old-fashioned State was
derived from the muscular exertion of toiling men.  They ran their world
by hand.  Continual bodily labour was a condition of social existence.
It is only with the coming of coal burning, of abundant iron and steel,
and of scientific knowledge that this condition has been changed.  To-day,
I suppose, if it were possible to indicate, in units of energy, the grand
total of work upon which the social fabric of the United States or England
rests, it would be found that a vastly preponderating moiety is derived
from non-human sources, from coal and liquid fuel, and explosives and
wind and water.  There is every indication of a steady increase in this
proportion of mechanical energy, in this emancipation of men from the
necessity of physical labour.  There appears no limit to the invasion
of life by the machine.

Now it is only in the last three hundred years that any human being seems
to have anticipated this.  It stimulates the imagination to remark how
entirely it was overlooked as a modifying cause in human development.
[Footnote: It is interesting to note how little even Bacon seems to see of
this in his ~New Atlantis~.]  Plato clearly had no ideas about machines
at all as a force affecting social organisation.  There was nothing in
his world to suggest them to him.  I suppose there arose no invention,
no new mechanical appliance or method of the slightest social importance
through all his length of years.  He never thought of a State that did not
rely for its force upon human muscle, just as he never thought of a State
that was not primarily organised for warfare hand to hand. Political and
moral inventions he saw enough of and to spare, and in that direction
lie still stimulates the imagination.  But in regard to all material
possibilities he deadens rather than stimulates. [Footnote: The lost
Utopia of Hippodamus provided rewards for inventors, but unless Aristotle
misunderstood him, and it is certainly the fate of all Utopias to be more
or less misread, the inventions contemplated were political devices.]
An infinitude of nonsense about the Greek mind would never have been
written if the distinctive intellectual and artistic quality of Plato's
time, its extraordinarily clear definition of certain material conditions
as absolutely permanent, coupled with its politico-social instability,
had been borne in mind.  The food of the Greek imagination was the very
antithesis of our own nourishment. We are educated by our circumstances to
think no revolution in appliances and economic organisation in credible,
our minds play freely about possibilities that would have struck the
men of the Academy as outrageous extravagance, and it is in regard to
politico-social expedients that our imaginations fail. Sparta, for all
the evidence of history, is scarcely more credible to us than a motor-car
throbbing in the agora would have been to Socrates.

By sheer inadvertence, therefore, Plato commenced the tradition of
Utopias without machinery, a tradition we find Morris still loyally
following, except for certain mechanical barges and such-like toys, in
his ~News from Nowhere~.  There are some foreshadowings of mechanical
possibilities in the ~New Atlantis~, but it is only in the nineteenth
century that Utopias appeared in which the fact is clearly recognised that
the social fabric rests no longer upon human labour.  It was, I believe,
Cabet [Footnote: Cabet, ~Voyage en Icarie~, 1848.] who first in a Utopian
work insisted upon the escape of man from irksome labours through the use
of machinery.  He is the great primitive of modern Utopias, and Bellamy
is his American equivalent.  Hitherto, either slave labour (Phaleas),
[Footnote: Aristotle's ~Politics~, bk. ii., ch. viii.] or at least
class distinctions involving unavoidable labour in the lower class,
have been assumed -- as Plato does, and as Bacon in the ~New Atlantis~
probably intended to do (More gave his Utopians bonds men ~sans phrase~
for their most disagreeable toil); or there is -- as in Morris and the
outright Return-to-Nature Utopians -- a bold make-believe that all toil
may be made a joy, and with that a levelling down of all society to
an equal participation in labour. But indeed this is against all the
observed behaviour of mankind.  It needed the Olympian unworldliness
of an irresponsible rich man of the shareholding type, a Ruskin or
a Morris playing at life, to imagine as much.  Road-making under Mr.
Ruskin's auspices was a joy at Oxford no doubt, and a distinction, and it
still remains a distinction; it proved the least contagious of practices.
And Hawthorne did not find bodily toil anything more than the curse the
Bible says it is, at Brook Farm. [Footnote: ~The Blythedale Experiment~,
and see also his Notebook.]

If toil is a blessing, never was blessing so effectually disguised,
and the very people who tell us that, hesitate to suggest more than
a beautiful ease in the endless day of Heaven.  A certain amount
of bodily or mental exercise, a considerable amount of doing things
under the direction of one's free imagination is quite another matter.
Artistic production, for example, when it is at its best, when a man is
freely obeying himself, and not troubling to please others, is really not
toil at all.  It is quite a different thing digging potatoes, as boys say,
"for a lark," and digging them because otherwise you will starve, digging
them day after day as a dull, unavoidable imperative.  The essence of toil
is that imperative, and the fact that the attention ~must~ cramp itself
to the work in hand -- that it excludes freedom, and not that it involves
fatigue. So long as anything but a quasi-savage life depended upon toil,
so long was it hopeless to expect mankind to do anything but struggle
to confer just as much of this blessing as possible upon one another.
But now that the new conditions physical science is bringing about, not
only dispense with man as a source of energy but supply the hope that
all routine work may be made automatic, it is becoming conceivable that
presently there may be no need for any one to toil habitually at all;
that a labouring class -- that is to say, a class of workers without
personal initiative -- will become unnecessary to the world of men.

The plain message physical science has for the world at large is this,
that were our political and social and moral devices only as well
contrived to their ends as a linotype machine, an antiseptic operating
plant, or an electric tram-car, there need now at the present moment be
no appreciable toil in the world, and only the smallest fraction of the
pain, the fear, and the anxiety that now makes human life so doubtful
in its value.  There is more than enough for every one alive.  Science
stands, a too competent servant, behind her wrangling underbred masters,
holding out resources, devices, and remedies they are too stupid to use.
[Footnote: See that most suggestive little book, ~Twentieth Century
Inventions~, by Mr. George Sutherland.]  And on its material side a
modern Utopia must needs present these gifts as taken, and show a world
that is really abolishing the need of labour, abolishing the last base
reason for any one's servitude or inferiority.


SECTION 7


The effectual abolition of a labouring and servile class will make
itself felt in every detail of the inn that will shelter us, of the
bedrooms we shall occupy.  You conceive my awakening to all these things
on the morning after our arrival. I shall lie for a minute or so with
my nose peeping over the coverlet, agreeably and gently coming awake,
and with some vague nightmare of sitting at a common table with an
unavoidable dustman in green and gold called Boffin, [Footnote: ~Vide~
William Morris's ~News from Nowhere~.] fading out of my mind. Then I
should start up.  You figure my apprehension, startled inspection of
my chamber. "Where am I?" that classic phrase, recurs.  Then I perceive
quite clearly that I am in bed in Utopia.

Utopia!  The word is enough to bring any one out of bed to the nearest
window, but thence I see no more than the great mountain mass behind
the inn, a very terrestrial looking mountain mass.  I return to the
contrivances about me, and make my examination as I dress, pausing
garment in hand to hover over first this thing of interest and then that.

The room is, of course, very clear and clean and simple; not by any means
cheaply equipped, but designed to economise the labour of redding and
repair just as much as is possible. It is beautifully proportioned and
rather lower than most rooms I know on earth.  There is no fireplace,
and I am perplexed by that until I find a thermometer beside six switches
on the wall.  Above this switch-board is a brief instruction: one switch
warms the floor, which is not carpeted, but covered by a substance like
soft oilcloth; one warms the mattress (which is of metal with resistance
coils threaded to and fro in it); and the others warm the wall in various
degrees, each directing current through a separate system of resistances.
The casement does not open, but above, flush with the ceiling, a noiseless
rapid fan pumps air out of the room.  The air enters by a Tobin shaft.
There is a recess dressing-room, equipped with a bath and all that
is necessary to one's toilet, and the water, one remarks, is warmed,
if one desires it warm, by passing it through an electrically heated
spiral of tubing. A cake of soap drops out of a store machine on the
turn of a handle, and when you have done with it, you drop that and your
soiled towels and so forth, which also are given you by machines, into
a little box, through the bottom of which they drop at once, and sail
down a smooth shaft.  A little notice tells you the price of your room,
and you gather the price is doubled if you do not leave the toilet as you
found it.  Beside the bed, and to be lit at night by a handy switch over
the pillow, is a little clock, its face flush with the wall.  The room
has no corners to gather dirt, wall meets floor with a gentle curve,
and the apartment could be swept out effectually by a few strokes of
a mechanical sweeper.  The door frames and window frames are of metal,
rounded and impervious to draught.  You are politely requested to turn a
handle at the foot of your bed before leaving the room, and forthwith the
frame turns up into a vertical position, and the bedclothes hang airing.
You stand at the doorway and realise that there remains not a minute's
work for any one to do.  Memories of the ftid disorder of many an
earthly bedroom after a night's use float across your mind.

And you must not imagine this dustless, spotless, sweet apartment as
anything but beautiful.  Its appearance is a little unfamiliar of course,
but all the muddle of dust-collecting hangings and witless ornament that
cover the earthly bedroom, the valances, the curtains to check the draught
from the ill-fitting wood windows, the worthless irrelevant pictures,
usually a little askew, the dusty carpets, and all the paraphernalia
about the dirty, black-leaded fireplace are gone.  But the faintly
tinted walls are framed with just one clear coloured line, as finely
placed as the member of a Greek capital; the door handles and the lines
of the panels of the door, the two chairs, the framework of the bed, the
writing table, have all that final simplicity, that exquisite finish of
contour that is begotten of sustained artistic effort.  The graciously
shaped windows each frame a picture -- since they are draughtless the
window seats are no mere mockeries as are the window seats of earth --
and on the sill, the sole thing to need attention in the room, is one
little bowl of blue Alpine flowers.

The same exquisite simplicity meets one downstairs.

Our landlord sits down at table with us for a moment, and seeing we
do not understand the electrically heated coffee-pot before us, shows
us what to do.  Coffee and milk we have, in the Continental fashion,
and some excellent rolls and butter.

He is a swarthy little man, our land lord, and overnight we saw him
preoccupied with other guests.  But we have risen either late or early
by Utopian standards, we know not which, and this morning he has us to
himself.  His bearing is kindly and inoffensive, but he cannot conceal the
curiosity that possesses him.  His eye meets ours with a mute inquiry, and
then as we fall to, we catch him scrutinising our cuffs, our garments,
our boots, our faces, our table manners  He asks nothing at first,
but says a word or so about our night's comfort and the day's weather,
phrases that have an air of being customary.  Then comes a silence that
is interrogative.

"Excellent coffee," I say to fill the gap.

"And excellent rolls," says my botanist.

Our landlord indicates his sense of our approval.

A momentary diversion is caused by the entry of an elfin-tressed little
girl, who stares at us half impudently, half shyly, with bright black
eyes, hesitates at the botanist's clumsy smile and nod, and then goes
and stands by her father and surveys us steadfastly.

"You have come far?" ventures our landlord, patting his daughter's
shoulder.

I glance at the botanist.  "Yes," I say, "we have."

I expand.  "We have come so far that this country of yours seems very
strange indeed to us."

"The mountains?"

"Not only the mountains."

"You came up out of the Ticino valley?"

"No -- not that way."

"By the Oberalp?"

"No."

"The Furka?"

"No."

"Not up from the lake?"

"No."

He looks puzzled.

"We came," I say, "from another world."

He seems trying to understand.  Then a thought strikes him, and he sends
away his little girl with a needless message to her mother.

"Ah!" he says.  "Another world -- eh?  Meaning----?"

"Another world -- far in the deeps of space."

Then at the expression of his face one realises that a Modern Utopia
will probably keep its more intelligent citizens for better work
than inn-tending.  He is evidently inaccessible to the idea we think
of putting before him.  He stares at us a moment, and then remarks,
"There's the book to sign."

We find ourselves confronted with a book, a little after the fashion
of the familiar hotel visitors' book of earth.  He places this before
us, and beside it puts pen and ink and a slab, upon which ink has been
freshly smeared.

"Thumbmarks," says my scientific friend hastily in English.

"You show me how to do it," I say as quickly.

He signs first, and I look over his shoulder.

He is displaying more readiness than I should have expected. The book
is ruled in broad transverse lines, and has a space for a name, for
a number, and a thumbmark.  He puts his thumb upon the slab and makes
the thumbmark first with the utmost deliberation.  Meanwhile he studies
the other two entries.  The "numbers" of the previous guests above are
complex muddles of letters and figures.  He writes his name, then with a
calm assurance writes down his number, A.M.a.1607.2.+.  I am
wrung with momentary admiration. I follow his example, and fabricate an
equally imposing signature. We think ourselves very clever.  The landlord
proffers finger bowls for our thumbs, and his eye goes, just a little
curiously, to our entries.

I decide it is advisable to pay and go before any conversation about
our formul arises.

As we emerge into the corridor, and the morning sunlight of the Utopian
world, I see the landlord bending over the book.

"Come on," I say.  "The most tiresome thing in the world is explanations,
and I perceive that if we do not get along, they will fall upon us now."

I glance back to discover the landlord and a gracefully robed woman
standing outside the pretty simplicity of the Utopian inn, watching us
doubtfully as we recede.

"Come on," I insist.


SECTION 8


We should go towards the Schoellenen gorge, and as we went, our
fresh morning senses would gather together a thousand factors for our
impression of this more civilised world.  A Modern Utopia will have
done with yapping about nationality, and so the ugly fortifications,
the barracks and military defilements of the earthly vale of Urseren will
be wanting.  Instead there will be a great multitude of gracious little
houses clustering in college-like groups, no doubt about their common
kitchens and halls, down and about the valley slopes.  And there will be
many more trees, and a great variety of trees -- all the world will have
been ransacked for winter conifers.  Despite the height of the valley
there will be a double avenue along the road.  This high road with its
tramway would turn with us to descend the gorge, and we should hesitate
upon the adventure of boarding the train.  But now we should have the
memory of our landlord's curious eye upon us, and we should decide at last
to defer the risk of explanations such an enterprise might precipitate.

We should go by the great road for a time, and note something of the
difference between Utopian and terrestrial engineering.

The tramway, the train road, the culverts, and bridges, the Urnerloch
tunnel, into which the road plunges, will all be beautiful things.

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and
railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to
be ugly.  Ugliness is the measure of imperfection; a thing of human
making is for the most part ugly in proportion to the poverty of its
constructive thought, to the failure of its producer fully to grasp
the purpose of its being.  Everything to which men continue to give
thought and attention, which they make and remake in the same direction,
and with a continuing desire to do as well as they can, grows beautiful
inevitably.  Things made by mankind under modern conditions are ugly,
primarily because our social organisation is ugly, because we live in an
atmosphere of snatch and uncertainty, and do everything in an underbred
strenuous manner. This is the misfortune of machinery, and not its fault.
Art, like some beautiful plant, lives on its atmosphere, and when the
atmosphere is good, it will grow everywhere, and when it is bad nowhere.
If we smashed and buried every machine, every furnace, every factory
in the world, and without any further change set ourselves to home
industries, hand labour, spade husbandry, sheep-folding and pig-minding,
we should still do things in the same haste, and achieve nothing but
dirtiness, inconvenience, bad air, and another gaunt and gawky reflection
of our intellectual and moral disorder.  We should mend nothing.

But in Utopia a man who designs a tram road will be a cultivated man, an
artist craftsman; he will strive, as a good writer, or a painter strives,
to achieve the simplicity of perfection.  He will make his girders and
rails and parts as gracious as that first engineer, Nature, has made the
stems of her plants and the joints and gestures of her animals.  To esteem
him a sort of anti-artist, to count every man who makes things with his
unaided thumbs an artist, and every man who uses machinery as a brute,
is merely a passing phase of human stupidity.  This tram road beside
us will be a triumph of design.  The idea will be so unfamiliar to us
that for a time it will not occur to us that it is a system of beautiful
objects at all.  We shall ad mire its ingenious adaptation to the need
of a district that is buried half the year in snow, the hard bed below,
curved and guttered to do its own clearing, the great arched sleeper
masses, raising the rails a good two yards above the ground, the easy,
simple standards and insulators. Then it will creep in upon our minds,
"But, by Jove!  ~This is designed!~"

Indeed the whole thing will be designed.

Later on, perhaps, we may find students in an art school working in
competition to design an electric tram, students who know something of
modern metallurgy, and something of electrical engineering, and we shall
find people as keenly critical of a signal box or an iron bridge as they
are on earth of----!  Heavens! what ~are~ they critical about on earth?

The quality and condition of a dress tie!

We should make some unpatriotic comparisons with our own planet, no doubt.



CHAPTER FOUR

THE VOICE OF NATURE


SECTION 1


Presently we recognise the fellow of the earthly Devil's Bridge, still
intact as a footway, spanning the gorge, and old memories turn us
off the road down the steep ruin of an ancient mule track towards it.
It is our first reminder that Utopia too must have a history.  We cross
it and find the Reuss, for all that it has already lit and warmed and
ventilated and cleaned several thousands of houses in the dale above,
and for all that it drives those easy trams in the gallery overhead, is
yet capable of as fine a cascade as ever it flung on earth.  So we come
to a rocky path, wild as one could wish, and descend, discoursing how
good and fair an ordered world may be, but with a certain unformulated
qualification in our minds about those thumbmarks we have left behind.

"Do you recall the Zermatt valley?" says my friend, "and how on earth
it reeks and stinks with smoke?"

"People make that an argument for obstructing change, instead of helping
it forward!"

And here perforce an episode intrudes.  We are invaded by a talkative
person.

He overtakes us and begins talking forthwith in a fluty, but not
unamiable, tenor.  He is a great talker, this man, and a fairly
respectable gesticulator, and to him it is we make our first ineffectual
tentatives at explaining who indeed we are; but his flow of talk washes
that all away again.  He has a face of that rubicund, knobby type I have
heard an indignant mineralogist speak of as botryoidal, and about it waves
a quantity of disorderly blond hair.  He is dressed in leather doublet and
knee breeches, and he wears over these a streaming woollen cloak of faded
crimson that give him a fine dramatic outline as he comes down towards
us over the rocks.  His feet, which are large and handsome, but bright
pink with the keen morning air, are bare, except for sandals of leather.
(It was the only time that we saw any one in Utopia with bare feet.)
He salutes us with a scroll-like waving of his stick, and falls in with
our slower paces.

"Climbers, I presume?" he says, "and you scorn these trams of theirs?
I like you.  So do I!  Why a man should consent to be dealt with as a
bale of goods holding an indistinctive ticket  when God gave him legs
and a face -- passes my understanding."

As he speaks, his staff indicates the great mechanical road that runs
across the gorge and high overhead through a gallery in the rock, follows
it along until it turns the corner, picks it up as a viaduct far below,
traces it until it plunges into an arcade through a jutting crag, and
there dismisses it with a spiral whirl.  "~No!~" he says.

He seems sent by Providence, for just now we had been discussing how
we should broach our remarkable situation to these Utopians before our
money is spent.

Our eyes meet, and I gather from the botanist that I am to open our case.

I do my best.

"You came from the other side of space!" says the man in the crimson
cloak, interrupting me.  "Precisely!  I like that -- it's exactly
my note!  So do I!  And you find this world strange!  Exactly my case!
We are brothers!  We shall be in sympathy.  I am amazed, I have been
amazed as long as I can remember, and I shall die, most certainly,
in a state of incredulous amazement, at this remarkable world. Eh?...
You found yourselves suddenly upon a mountain top!  Fortunate men!"
He chuckled.  "For my part I found myself in the still stranger position
of infant to two parents of the most intractable dispositions!"

"The fact remains," I protest.

"A position, I can assure you, demanding Tact of an altogether superhuman
quality!"

We desist for a space from the attempt to explain our remarkable selves,
and for the rest of the time this picturesque and exceptional Utopian
takes the talk entirely under his control....


SECTION 2


An agreeable person, though a little distracting, he was, and he talked,
we recall, of many things.  He impressed us, we found afterwards, as a
~poseur~ beyond question, a conscious Ishmaelite in the world of wit,
and in some subtly inexplicable way as a most consummate ass. He talked
first of the excellent and commodious trams that came from over the
passes, and ran down the long valley towards middle Switzerland, and of
all the growth of pleasant homes and chlets amidst the heights that
made the opening gorge so different from its earthly parallel, with a
fine disrespect.  "But they are beautiful," I protested.  "They are
graciously proportioned, they are placed in well-chosen positions;
they give no offence to the eye."

"What do we know of the beauty they replace?  They are a mere rash.
Why should we men play the part of bacteria upon the face of our Mother?"

"All life is that!"

"No!  not natural life, not the plants and the gentle creatures that
live their wild shy lives in forest and jungle. That is a part of her.
That is the natural bloom of her complexion.  But these houses and
tramways and things, all made from ore and stuff torn from her veins----!
You can't better my image of the rash.  It's a morbid breaking out!
I'd give it all for one -- what is it? -- free and natural chamois."

"You live at times in a house?" I asked.

He ignored my question.  For him, untroubled Nature was the best, he said,
and, with a glance at his feet, the most beautiful.  He professed himself
a Nazarite, and shook back his Teutonic poet's shock of hair.  So he
came to himself, and for the rest of our walk he kept to himself as the
thread of his discourse, and went over himself from top to toe, and strung
thereon all topics under the sun by way of illustrating his splendours.
But especially his foil was the relative folly, the unnaturalness and
want of logic in his fellow-men.  He held strong views about the extreme
simplicity of everything, only that men, in their muddle-headedness, had
confounded it all.  "Hence, for example, these trams!  They are always
running up and down as though they were looking for the lost simplicity
of nature.  `We dropped it here!'"  He earned a living, we gathered,
"some considerable way above the minimum wage," which threw a chance
light on the labour problem -- by perforating records for automatic
musical machines -- no doubt of the Pianotist and Pianola kind -- and
he spent all the leisure he could gain in going to and fro in the earth
lecturing on "The Need of a Return to Nature," and on "Simple Foods and
Simple Ways."  He did it for the love of it.  It was very clear to us he
had an inordinate impulse to lecture, and esteemed us fair game.  He had
been lecturing on these topics in Italy, and he was now going back through
the mountains to lecture in Saxony, lecturing on the way, to perforate a
lot more records, lecturing the while, and so start out lecturing again.
He was undisguisedly glad to have us to lecture to by the way.

He called out attention to his costume at an early stage. It was
the embodiment of his ideal of Nature-clothing, and it had been made
especially for him at very great cost. "Simply because naturalness
has fled the earth, and has to be sought now, and washed out from your
crushed complexities like gold."

"I should have thought," said I, "that any clothing whatever was something
of a slight upon the natural man."

"Not at all," said he, "not at all!  You forget his natural vanity!"

He was particularly severe on our artificial hoofs, as he called our
boots, and our hats or hair destructors.  "Man is the real King of
Beasts and should wear a mane.  The lion only wears it by consent and
in captivity."  He tossed his head.

Subsequently while we lunched and he waited for the specific natural
dishes he ordered -- they taxed the culinary resources of the inn to
the utmost -- he broached a comprehensive generalisation.  "The animal
kingdom and the vegetable kingdom are easily distinguished, and for
the life of me I see no reason for confusing them.  It is, I hold,
a sin against Nature.  I keep them distinct in my mind and I keep them
distinct in my person.  No animal substance inside, no vegetable without;
-- what could be simpler or more logical? Nothing upon mee but leather and
all-wool garments, within, cereals, fruit, nuts, herbs, and the like.
Classification -- order -- man's function.  He is here to observe and
accentuate Nature's simplicity.  These people" -- he swept an arm that
tried not too personally to include us -- "are filled and covered with
confusion."

He ate great quantities of grapes and finished with a cigarette.
He demanded and drank a great horn of unfermented grape juice, and it
seemed to suit him well.

We three sat about the board -- it was in an agreeable little arbour on
a hill hard by the place where Wassen stands on earth, and it looked down
the valley to the Uri Rothstock, and ever and again we sought to turn his
undeniable gift of exposition to the elucidation of our own difficulties.

But we seemed to get little, his style was so elusive. Afterwards, indeed,
we found much information and many persuasions had soaked into us, but
at the time it seemed to us he told us nothing.  He indicated things by
dots and dashes, instead of by good hard assertive lines. He would not
pause to see how little we knew.  Sometimes his wit rose so high that
he would lose sight of it himself, and then he would pause, purse his
lips as if he whistled, and then till the bird came back to the lure,
fill his void mouth with grapes.  He talked of he relations of the sexes,
and love -- a passion he held in great contempt as being in its essence
complex and disingenuous and afterwards we found we had learnt much of
what the marriage laws of Utopia allow and forbid.

"A simple natural freedom," he said, waving a grape in an illustrative
manner, and so we gathered the Modern Utopia did not at any rate go
to that.  He spoke, too, of the regulation of unions, of people who were
not allowed to have children, of complicated rules and interventions.
"Man," he said, "had ceased to be a natural product!"

We tried to check him with questions at this most illuminating point,
but he drove on like a torrent, and carried his topic out of sight.
The world, he held, was overmanaged, and that was the root of all evil.
He talked of the overmanagement of the world, and among other things
of the laws that would not let a poor simple idiot, a "natural," go
at large.  And so we had our first glimpse of what Utopia did with the
feeble and insane.  "We make all these distinctions between man and man,
we exalt this and favour that, and degrade and seclude that; we make
birth artificial, life artificial, death artificial."

"You say ~We~," said I, with the first glimmering of a new idea, "but
~you~ don't participate?"

"Not I!  I'm not one of your ~samurai~, your voluntary noblemen who have
taken the world in hand.  I might be, of course, but I'm not."

"~Samurai!~" I repeated, "voluntary noblemen!" and for the moment could
not frame a question.

He whirled on to an attack on science, that stirred the botanist
to controversy.  He denounced with great bitterness all specialists
whatever, and particularly doctors and engineers.

"Voluntary noblemen!" he said, "voluntary Gods I fancy they think
themselves," and I was left behind for a space in the perplexed
examination of this parenthesis, while he and the botanist -- who is
sedulous to keep his digestion up to date with all the newest devices --
argued about the good of medicine men.

"The natural human constitution," said the blond-haired man, "is perfectly
simple, with one simple condition -- you must leave it to Nature.  But if
you mix up things so distinctly and essentially separated as the animal
and vegetable kingdoms, for example, and ram ~that~ in for it to digest,
what can you expect?"

"Ill health!  There isn't such a thing -- in the course of Nature.
But you shelter from Nature in houses, you protect yourselves by
clothes that are useful instead of being ornamental, you wash -- with
such abstersive chemicals as soap, for example -- and above all you
consult doctors."  He approved himself with a chuckle.  "Have you ever
found any one seriously ill without doctors and medicine about?  Never!
You say a lot of people would die without shelter and medical attendance!
No doubt -- but a natural death.  A natural death is better than an
artificial life, surely?  That's -- to be frank with you -- the very
citadel of my position."

That led him, and rather promptly, before the botanist could rally to
reply, to a great tirade against the laws that forbade "sleeping out."
He denounced them with great vigour, and alleged that for his own part
he broke that law whenever he could, found some corner of moss, shaded
from an excess of dew, and there sat up to sleep.  He slept, he said,
always in a sitting position, with his head on his wrists, and his
wrists on his knees the simple natural position for sleep in man....
He said it would be far better if all the world slept out, and all the
houses were pulled down.

You will understand, perhaps, the subdued irritation I felt, as I sat
and listened to the botanist entangling himself in the logical net of
this wild nonsense.  It impressed me as being irrelevant.  When one
comes to a Utopia one expects a Cicerone, one expects a person as
precise and insistent and instructive as an American advertisement --
the advertisement of one of those land agents, for example, who print
their own engaging photographs to instil confidence and begin, "You
want to buy real estate."  One expects to find all Utopians absolutely
convinced of the perfection of their Utopia, and incapable of receiving
a hint against its order.  And here was this purveyor of absurdities!

And yet now that I come to think it over, is not this too one of the
necessary differences between a Modern Utopia and those finite compact
settlements of the older school of dreamers?  It is not to be a unanimous
world any more, it is to have all and more of the mental contrariety we
find in the world of the real; it is no longer to be perfectly explicable,
it is just our own vast mysterious welter, with some of the blackest
shadows gone, with a clearer illumination, and a more conscious and
intelligent will.  Irrelevance is not irrelevant to such a scheme,
and our blond-haired friend is exactly just where he ought to be here.

Still----


SECTION 3


I ceased to listen to the argumentation of my botanist with this
apostle of Nature.  The botanist, in his scientific way, was, I believe,
defending the learned professions.  (He thinks and argues like drawing
on squared paper.)  It struck me as transiently remarkable that a man
who could not be induced to forget himself and his personal troubles
on coming into a whole new world, who could waste our first evening in
Utopia upon a paltry egotistical love story, should presently become quite
heated and impersonal in the discussion of scientific professionalism.
He was -- absorbed.  I can't attempt to explain these vivid spots and
blind spots in the imaginations of sane men; there they are!

"You say," said the botanist, with a prevalent index finger, and the
resolute deliberation of a big siege gun being lugged into action over
rough ground by a number of inexperienced men, "you prefer a natural
death to an artificial life. But what is your ~definition~ (stress)
of artificial?..."

And after lunch too!  I ceased to listen, flicked the end of my cigarette
ash over the green trellis of the arbour, stretched my legs with a fine
restfulness, leant back, and gave my mind to the fields and houses that
lay adown the valley.

What I saw interwove with fragmentary things our garrulous friend had
said, and with the trend of my own speculations....

The high road, with its tramways and its avenues on either side, ran
in a bold curve, and with one great loop of descent, down the opposite
side of the valley, and below crossed again on a beautiful viaduct, and
dipped into an arcade in the side of the Bristenstock.  Our inn stood
out boldly, high above the level this took.  The houses clustered in
their collegiate groups over by the high road, and near the subordinate
way that ran almost vertically below us and past us and up towards the
valley of the Meien Reuss.  There were one or two Utopians cutting and
packing the flowery mountain grass in the carefully levelled and irrigated
meadows by means of swift, light machines that ran on things like feet
and seemed to devour the herbage, and there were many children and a
woman or so, going to and fro among the houses near at hand.  I guessed
a central building towards the high road must be the school from which
these children were coming.  I noted the health and cleanliness of these
young heirs of Utopia as they passed below.

The pervading quality of the whole scene was a sane order, the deliberate
solution of problems, a progressive intention steadily achieving itself,
and the aspect that particularly occupied me was the incongruity of this
with our blond-haired friend.

On the one hand here was a state of affairs that implied a power of
will, an organising and controlling force, the co-operation of a great
number of vigorous people to establish and sustain its progress, and
on the other this creature of pose and vanity, with his restless wit,
his perpetual giggle at his own cleverness, his manifest incapacity for
comprehensive co-operation.

Now, had I come upon a hopeless incompatibility?  Was this the ~reductio
ad absurdum~ of my vision, and must it even as I sat there fade, dissolve,
and vanish before my eyes?

There was no denying our blond friend.  If this Utopia is indeed to
parallel our earth, man for man -- and I see no other reasonable choice
to that -- there must be this sort of person and kindred sorts of persons
in great abundance.  The desire and gift to see life whole is not the lot
of the great majority of men, the service of truth is the privilege of
the elect, and these clever fools who choke the avenues of the world of
thought, who stick at no inconsistency, who oppose, obstruct, confuse,
will find only the freer scope amidst Utopian freedoms.

(They argued on, these two, as I worried my brains with riddles.  It was
like a fight between a cock sparrow and a tortoise; they both went on in
their own way, regardless of each other's proceedings.  The encounter had
an air of being extremely lively, and the moments of contact were few.
"But you mistake my point," the blond man was saying, disordering his
hair -- which had become unruffled in the preoccupation of dispute --
with a hasty movement of his hand, "you don't appreciate the position
I take up.")

"Ugh!" said I privately, and lighted another cigarette and went away
into my own thoughts with that.

The position he takes up!  That's the way of your intellectual fool,
the Universe over.  He takes up a position, and he's going to be the most
brilliant, delightful, engaging and invincible of gay delicious creatures
defending that position you can possibly imagine.  And even when the case
is not so bad as that, there still remains the quality.  We "take up our
positions," silly little contentious creatures that we are, we will not
see the right in one another, we will not patiently state and restate,
and honestly accommodate and plan, and so we remain at sixes and sevens.
We've all a touch of Gladstone in us, and try to the last moment to deny
we have made a turn.  And so our poor broken-springed world jolts athwart
its trackless destiny.  Try to win into line with some fellow weakling,
and see the little host of suspicions, aggressions, misrepresentations,
your approach will stir -- like summer flies on a high road -- the way
he will try to score a point and claim you as a convert to what he has
always said, his fear lest the point should be scored to you.

It is not only such gross and palpable cases as our blond and tenoring
friend.  I could find the thing negligible were it only that.  But when
one sees the same thread woven into men who are leaders, men who sway
vast multitudes, who are indeed great and powerful men; when one sees how
unfair they can be, how unteachable, the great blind areas in their eyes
also, their want of generosity, then one's doubts gather like mists across
this Utopian valley, its vistas pale, its people become unsubstantial
phantoms, all its orders and its happiness dim and recede....

If we are to have any Utopia at all, we must have a clear common purpose,
and a great and steadfast movement of will to override all these incurably
egotistical dissentients. Something is needed wide and deep enough to
float the worst of egotisms away.  The world is not to be made right by
acclamation and in a day, and then for ever more trusted to run alone.
It is manifest this Utopia could not come about by chance and anarchy,
but by co-ordinated effort and a community of design, and to tell of
just land laws and wise government, a wisely balanced economic system,
and wise social arrangements without telling how it was brought about,
and how it is sustained against the vanity and self-indulgence, the
moody fluctuations and uncertain imaginations, the heat and aptitude for
partisanship that lurk, even when they do not flourish, in the texture
of every man alive, is to build a palace without either door or staircase.

I had not this in mind when I began.

Somewhere in the Modern Utopia there must be adequate men, men the very
antithesis of our friend, capable of self-devotion, of intentional
courage, of honest thought, and steady endeavour.  There must be a
literature to embody their common idea, of which this Modern Utopia is
merely the material form; there must be some organisation, however slight,
to keep them in touch one with the other.

Who will these men be?  Will they be a caste? a race? an organisation
in the nature of a Church?..  And there came into my mind the words of
our acquaintance, that he was not one of these "voluntary noblemen."

At first that phrase struck me as being merely queer, and then I began
to realise certain possibilities that were wrapped up in it.

The animus of our chance friend, at any rate, went to suggest that here
was his antithesis.  Evidently what he is not, will be the class to
contain what is needed here.  Evidently.


SECTION 4


I was recalled from my meditations by the hand of the blond-haired man
upon my arm.

I looked up to discover the botanist had gone into the inn.

The blond-haired man was for a moment almost stripped of pose.

"I say," he said.  "Weren't you listening to me?"

"No," I said bluntly.

His surprise was manifest.  But by an effort he recalled what he had
meant to say.

"Your friend," he said, "has been telling me, in spite of my sustained
interruptions, a most incredible story."

I wondered how the botanist managed to get it in. "About that woman?"
I said.

"About a man and a woman who hate each other and can't get away from
each other."

"I know," I said.

"It sounds absurd."

"It is."

"Why can't they get away?  What is there to keep them together?
It's ridiculous.  I----"

"Quite."

"He ~would~ tell it to me."

"It's his way."

"He interrupted me.  And there's no point in it.  Is he----" he hesitated,
"mad?"

"There's a whole world of people mad with him," I answered after a pause.

The perplexed expression of the blond-haired man intensified. It is
vain to deny that he enlarged the scope of his inquiry, visibly if
not verbally.  "Dear me!" he said, and took up something he had nearly
forgotten.  "And you found yourselves suddenly on a mountain side?...
I thought you were joking."

I turned round upon him with a sudden access of earnestness. At least
I meant my manner to be earnest, but to him it may have seemed wild.

"You," I said, "are an original sort of man.  Do not be alarmed.
Perhaps you will understand....  We were not joking."

"But, my dear fellow!"

"I mean it!  We come from an inferior world!  Like this, but out of
order."

"No world could be more out of order----"

"You play at that and have your fun.  But there's no limit to the extent
to which a world of men may get out of gear.  In our world----"

He nodded, but his eye had ceased to be friendly.

"Men die of starvation; people die by the hundred thousand needlessly
and painfully; men and women are lashed together to make hell for each
other; children are born -- abominably, and reared in cruelty and folly;
there is a thing called war, a horror of blood and vileness.  The whole
thing seems to me at times a cruel and wasteful wilderness of muddle.
You in this decent world have no means of understanding----"

"No?" he said, and would have begun, but I went on too quickly.

"No!  When I see you dandering through this excellent and hopeful world,
objecting, obstructing, and breaking the law, displaying your wit on
science and order, on the men who toil so ingloriously to swell and
use the knowledge that is salvation, this salvation for which ~our~
poor world cries to heaven----"

"You don't mean to say," he said, "that you really come from some other
world where things are different and worse?"

"I do."

"And you want to talk to me about it instead of listening to me?"

"Yes."

"Oh, nonsense!" he said abruptly.  "You can't do it -- really.  I can
assure you this present world touches the nadir of imbecility.  You and
your friend, with his love for the lady who's so mysteriously tied --
you're romancing!  People could not possibly do such things.  It's --
if you'll excuse me -- ridiculous.  ~He~ began -- he would begin.
A most tiresome story -- simply bore me down.  We'd been talking very
agreeably before that, or rather I had, about the absurdity of marriage
laws, the interference with a free and natural life, and so on, and
suddenly he burst like a dam.  No!"  He paused.  "It's really impossible.
You behave perfectly well for a time, and then you begin to interrupt....
And such a childish story, too!"

He spun round upon his chair, got up, glanced at me over his shoulder,
and walked out of the arbour.  He stepped aside hastily to avoid too
close an approach to the returning botanist. "Impossible," I heard
him say.  He was evidently deeply aggrieved by us.  I saw him presently
a little way off in the garden, talking to the landlord of our inn,
and looking towards us as he talked -- they both looked towards us --
and after that, without the ceremony of a farewell, he disappeared,
and we saw him no more.  We waited for him a little while, and then I
expounded the situation to the botanist....

"We are going to have a very considerable amount of trouble explaining
ourselves," I said in conclusion.  "We are here by an act of the
imagination, and that is just one of those metaphysical operations that
are so difficult to make credible.  We are, by the standard of bearing
and clothing I remark about us, unattractive in dress and deportment.
We have nothing to produce to explain our presence here, no bit of
a flying machine or a space travelling sphere or any of the apparatus
customary on these occasions.  We have no means beyond a dwindling amount
of small change out of a gold coin, upon which I suppose in ethics and
the law some native Utopian had a better claim.  We may already have got
ourselves into trouble with the authorities with that confounded number
of yours!"

"You did one too!"

"All the more bother, perhaps, when the thing is brought home to us.
There's no need for recriminations.  The thing of moment is that we find
ourselves in the position -- not to put too fine a point upon it -- of
tramps in this admirable world.  The question of all others of importance
to us at present is what do they do with their tramps?  Because sooner
or later, and the balance of probability seems to incline to sooner,
whatever they do with their tramps that they will do with us."

"Unless we can get some work."

"Exactly -- unless we can get some work."

"Get work!"

The botanist leant forward on his arms and looked out of the arbour
with an expression of despondent discovery. "I say," he remarked; "this
is a strange world -- quite strange and new.  I'm only beginning to
realise just what it means for us.  The mountains there are the same,
the old Bristenstock and all the rest of it; but these houses, you know,
and that roadway, and the costumes, and that machine that is licking up
the grass there -- only...."

He sought expression.  "Who knows what will come in sight round the
bend of the valley there?  Who knows what may happen to us anywhere?
We don't know who rules over us even... we don't know that!"

"No," I echoed, "we don't know ~that~."



CHAPTER FIVE

FAILURE IN A MODERN UTOPIA


SECTION 1


The old Utopias -- save for the breeding schemes of Plato and Campanella
-- ignored that reproductive competition among individuallities which
is the substance of life, and dealt essentially with its incidentals.
The endless variety of men, their endless gradation of quality, over
which the hand of selection plays, and to which we owe the unmanageable
complication of real life, is tacitly set aside. The real world is a
vast disorder of accidents and incalculable forces in which men survive
or fail.  A Modern Utopia, unlike its predecessors, dare not pretend
to change the last condition; it may order and humanise the conflict,
but men must still survive or fail.

Most Utopias present themselves as going concerns, as happiness in being;
they make it an essential condition that a happy land can have no history,
and all the citizens one is permitted to see are well looking and upright
and mentally and morally in tune.  But we are under the dominion of a
logic that obliges us to take over the actual population of the world
with only such moral and mental and physical improvements as lie within
their inherent possibilities, and it is our business to ask what Utopia
will do with its congenital invalids, its idiots and madmen, its drunkards
and men of vicious mind, its cruel and furtive souls, its stupid people,
too stupid to be of use to the community, its lumpish, unteachable and
unimaginative people?  And what will it do with the man who is "poor"
all round, the rather spiritless, rather incompetent low-grade man who on
earth sits in the den of the sweater, tramps the streets under the banner
of the unemployed, or trembles -- in another man's cast-off clothing,
and with an infinity of hat-touching -- on the verge of rural employment?

These people will have to be in the descendant phase, the species must be
engaged in eliminating them; there is no escape from that, and conversely
the people of exceptional quality must be ascendant.  The better sort
of people, so far as they can be distinguished, must have the fullest
freedom of public service, and the fullest opportunity of parentage.
And it must be open to every man to approve himself worthy of ascendancy.

The way of Nature in this process is to kill the weaker and the sillier,
to crush them, to starve them, to overwhelm them, using the stronger and
more cunning as her weapon.  But man is the unnatural animal, the rebel
child of Nature and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh
and fitful hand that reared him.  He sees with a growing resentment the
multitude of suffering ineffectual lives over which his species tramples
in its ascent.  In the Modern Utopia he will have set himself to change
the ancient law.  No longer will it be that failures must suffer and
perish lest their breed increase, but the breed of failure must not
increase, lest they suffer and perish, and the race with them.

Now we need not argue here to prove that the resources of the world and
the energy of mankind, were they organised sanely, are am ply sufficient
to supply every material need of every living human being.  And if it can
be so contrived that every human being shall live in a state of reasonable
physical and mental comfort, without the reproduction of inferior types,
there is no reason whatever why that should not be secured.  But there
must be a competition in life of some sort to determine who are to be
pushed to the edge, and who are to prevail and multiply.  Whatever we do,
man will remain a competitive creature, and though moral and intellectual
training may vary and enlarge his conception of success and fortify him
with refinements and consolations, no Utopia will ever save him completely
from the emotional drama of struggle, from exultations and humiliations,
from pride and prostration and shame.  He lives in success and failure
just as inevitably as he lives in space and time.

But we may do much to make the margin of failure endurable. On earth,
for all the extravagance of charity, the struggle for the mass of men
at the bottom resolves itself into a struggle, and often a very foul
and ugly struggle, for food, shelter, and clothing.  Deaths outright
from exposure and starvation are now perhaps uncommon, but for the
multitude there are only miserable houses, uncomfortable clothes, and
bad and insufficient food; fractional starvation and exposure, that is
to say.  A Utopia planned upon modern lines will certainly have put
an end to that.  It will insist upon every citizen be being properly
housed, well nourished, and in good health, reasonably clean and clothed
healthily, and upon that insistence its labour laws will be founded. In a
phrasing that will be familiar to every one interested in social reform,
it will maintain a standard of life.  Any house, unless it be a public
monument, that does not come up to its rising standard of healthiness and
convenience, the Utopian State will incontinently pull down, and pile the
material and charge the owner for the labour; any house unduly crowded
or dirty, it must in some effectual manner, directly or indirectly,
confiscate and clear and clean.  And any citizen indecently dressed,
or ragged and dirty, or publicly unhealthy, or sleeping abroad homeless,
or in any way neglected or derelict, must come under its care. It will
find him work if he can and will work, it will take him to it, it will
register him and lend him the money wherewith to lead a comely life until
work can be found or made for him, and it will give him credit and shelter
him and strengthen him if he is ill.  In default of private enterprises
it will provide inns for him and food, and it will -- by itself acting
as the reserve employer -- maintain a minimum wage which will cover the
cost of a decent life.  The State will stand at the back of the economic
struggle as the reserve employer of labour. This most excellent idea does,
as a matter of fact, underlie the British institution of the workhouse,
but it is jumbled up with the relief of old age and infirmity, it is
administered parochially and on the supposition that all population is
static and localised whereas every year it becomes more migratory; it
is administered without any regard to the rising standards of comfort
and self-respect in a progressive civilisation, and it is administered
grudgingly.  The thing that is done is done as unwilling charity by
administrators who are often, in the rural districts at least, competing
for low-priced labour, and who regard want of employment as a crime.
But if it were possible for any citizen in need of money to resort to a
place of public employment as a right, and there work for a week or month
without degradation upon certain minimum terms, it seems fairly certain
that no one would work, except as the victim of some quite exceptional
and temporary accident, for less.

The work publicly provided would have to be toilsome, but not cruel
or incapacitating.  A choice of occupations would need to be afforded,
occupations adapted to different types of training and capacity, with
some residual employment of a purely laborious and mechanical sort for
those who were incapable of doing the things that required intelligence.
Necessarily this employment by the State would be a relief of economic
pressure, but it would not be considered a charity done to the individual,
but a public service.  It need not pay, any more than the police need
pay, but it could probably be done at a small margin of loss.  There is
a number of durable things bound finally to be useful that could be made
and stored whenever the tide of more highly paid employment ebbed and
labour sank to its minimum, bricks, iron from inferior ores, shaped and
preserved timber, pins, nails, plain fabrics of cotton and linen, paper,
sheet glass, artificial fuel, and so on; new roads could be made and
public buildings reconstructed, inconveniences of all sorts removed, until
under the stimulus of accumulating material, accumulating investments
or other circumstances, the tide of private enterprise flowed again.

The State would provide these things for its citizen as though it
was his right to require them; he would receive as a shareholder in
the common enterprise and not with any insult of charity.  But on the
other hand it will require that the citizen who renders the minimum
of service for these concessions shall not become a parent until he is
established in work at a rate above the minimum, and free of any debt he
may have incurred.  The State will never press for its debt, nor put a
limit to its accumulation so long as a man or woman remains childless;
it will not even grudge them temporary spells of good fortune when they
may lift their earnings above the minimum wage.  It will pension the age
of every one who cares to take a pension, and it will maintain special
guest homes for the very old to which they may come as paying guests,
spending their pensions there.  By such obvious devices it will achieve
the maximum elimination of its feeble and spiritless folk in every
generation with the minimum of suffering and public disorder.


SECTION 2


But the mildly incompetent, the spiritless and dull, the poorer sort who
are ill, do not exhaust our Utopian problem. There remains idiots and
lunatics, there remain perverse and incompetent persons, there are people
of weak character who become drunkards, drug takers, and the like.  Then
there are persons tainted with certain foul and transmissible diseases.
All these people spoil the world for others.  They may become parents,
and with most of them there is manifestly nothing to be done but to
seclude them from the great body of the population.  You must resort to
a kind of social surgery. You cannot have social freedom in your public
ways, your children cannot speak to whom they will, your girls and gentle
women cannot go abroad while some sorts of people go free. And there are
violent people, and those who will not respect the property of others,
thieves and cheats, they, too, so soon as their nature is confirmed,
must pass out of the free life of our ordered world.  So soon as there
can be no doubt of the disease or baseness of the individual, so soon
as the insanity or other disease is assured, or the crime repeated a
third time, or the drunkenness or misdemeanour past its seventh occasion
(let us say), so soon must he or she pass out of the common ways of men.

The dreadfulness of all such proposals as this lies in the possibility
of their execution falling into the hands of hard, dull, and cruel
administrators.  But in the case of a Utopia one assumes the best possible
government, a government as merciful and deliberate as it is powerful
and decisive.  You must not too hastily imagine these things being done
-- as they would be done on earth at present -- by a numbber of zealous
half-educated people in a state of panic at a quite imaginary "Rapid
Multiplication of the Unfit."

No doubt for first offenders, and for all offenders under five-and-twenty,
the Modern Utopia will attempt cautionary and remedial treatment.
There will be disciplinary schools and colleges for the young, fair and
happy places, but with less confidence and more restraint than the schools
and colleges of the ordinary world.  In remote and solitary regions these
enclosures will lie, they will be fenced in and forbidden to the common
run of men, and there, remote from all temptation, the defective citizen
will be schooled.  There will be no masking of the lesson; "which do
you value most, the wide world of humanity, or this evil trend in you?"
From that discipline at last the prisoners will return.

But the others; what would a saner world do with them?

Our world is still vindictive, but the all-reaching State of Utopia will
have the strength that begets mercy.  Quietly the outcast will go from
among his fellow-men.  There will be no drumming of him out of the ranks,
no tearing off of epaulettes, no smiting in the face.  The thing must
be just public enough to obviate secret tyrannies, and that is all.

There would be no killing, no lethal chambers.  No doubt Utopia will kill
all deformed and monstrous and evilly diseased births, but for the rest,
the State will hold itself accountable for their being.  There is no
justice in Nature perhaps, but the idea of justice must be sacred in
any good society.  Lives that statesmanship has permitted, errors it
has not foreseen and educated against, must not be punished by death.
If the State does not keep faith, no one will keep faith.  Crime and bad
lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the
crime of the community.  Even for murder Utopia will not, I think, kill.

I doubt even if there will be jails.  No men are quite wise enough, good
enough and cheap enough to staff jails as a jail ought to be staffed.
Perhaps islands will be chosen, islands lying apart from the highways
of the sea, and to these the State will send its exiles, most of them
thanking Heaven, no doubt, to be quit of a world of prigs.  The State
will, of course, secure itself against any children from those people,
that is the primary object in their seclusion, and perhaps it may even
be necessary to make these island prisons a system of island monasteries
and island nunneries.  Upon that I am not competent to speak, but if I
may believe the literature of the subject -- unhappily a not very well
criticised literature -- it is not necessary to enforce this separation.
[Footnote: See, for example, Dr. W. A. Chapple's ~The Fertility of
the Unfit~.]

About such islands patrol boats will go, there will be no freedoms of
boat-building, and it may be necessary to have armed guards at the
creeks and quays.  Beyond that the State will give these segregated
failures just as full a liberty as they can have.  If it interferes any
further it will be simply to police the islands against the organisation
of serious cruelty, to maintain the freedom of any of the detained who
wish it to transfer themselves to other islands, and so to keep a check
upon tyranny.  The insane, of course, will demand care and control, but
there is no reason why the islands of the hopeless drunkard, for example,
should not each have a virtual autonomy, have at the most a Resident and
a guard.  I believe that a community of drunkards might be capable of
organising even its own bad habit to the pitch of tolerable existence.
I do not see why such an island should not build and order for itself
and manufacture and trade.  "Your ways are not our ways," the World
State will say; "but here is freedom and a company of kindred souls.
Elect your jolly rulers, brew if you will, and distil; here are vine
cuttings and barley fields; do as it pleases you to do.  We will take
care of the knives, but for the rest -- deal yourselves with God!"

And you see the big convict steamship standing in to the Island of
Incurable Cheats.  The crew are respectfully at their quarters, ready to
lend a hand overboard, but wide awake, and the captain is hospitably on
the bridge to bid his guests good-bye and keep an eye on the movables.
The new citizens for this particular Alsatia, each no doubt with his
personal belongings securely packed and at hand, crowd the deck and study
the nearing coast.  Bright, keen faces would be there, and we, were we
by any chance to find ourselves beside the captain, might recognise the
double of this great earthly magnate or that, Petticoat Lane and Park Lane
cheek by jowl.  The landing part of the jetty is clear of people, only a
government man or so stands there to receive the boat and prevent a rush,
but beyond the gates a number of engagingly smart-looking individuals
loiter speculatively.  One figures a remarkable building labelled Custom
House, an interesting fiscal revival this population has made, and beyond,
crowding up the hill, the painted walls of a number of comfortable inns
clamour loudly.  One or two inhabitants in reduced circumstances would
act as hotel touts, there are several hotel omnibuses and a Bureau de
Change, certainly a Bureau de Change. And a small house with a large
board, aimed point-blank seaward, declares itself a Gratis Information
Office, and next to it rises the graceful dome of a small Casino.  Beyond,
great hoardings proclaim the advantages of many island specialities, a
hustling commerce, and the opening of a Public Lottery. There is a large
cheap-looking barrack, the school of Commercial Science for gentlemen
of inadequate training....

Altogether a very go-ahead looking little port it would be, and though
this disembarkation would have none of the flow of hilarious good
fellowship that would throw a halo of genial noise about the Islands of
Drink, it is doubtful if the new arrivals would feel anything very tragic
in the moment.  Here at last was scope for adventure after their hearts.

This sounds more fantastic than it is.  But what else is there to do,
unless you kill?  You must seclude, but why should you torment? All modern
prisons are places of torture by restraint, and the habitual criminal
plays the part of a damaged mouse at the mercy of the cat of our law.
He has his little painful run, and back he comes again to a state more
horrible even than destitution.  There are no Alsatias left in the world.
For my own part I can think of no crime, unless it is reckless begetting
or the wilful transmission of contagious disease, for which the bleak
terrors, the solitudes and ignominies of the modern prison do not see in
outrageously cruel.  If you want to go so far as that then kill. Why, once
you are rid of them, should you pester criminals to respect an uncongenial
standard of conduct?  Into such islands of exile as this a modern Utopia
will have to purge itself.  There is no alternative that I can contrive.


SECTION 3


Will a Utopian be free to be idle?

Work has to be done, every day humanity is sustained by its collective
effort, and without a constant recurrence of effort in the single
man as in the race as a whole, there is neither health nor happiness.
The permanent idleness of a human being is not only burthensome to the
world, but his own secure misery.  But unprofitable occupation is also
intended by idleness, and it may be considered whether that freedom
also will be open to the Utopian.  Conceivably it will, like privacy,
locomotion, and almost all the freedoms of life, and on the same terms --
if he possess the money to pay for it.

The last condition may produce a shock in minds accustomed to the
proposition that money is the root of all evil, and to the idea that
Utopia necessarily implies something rather oaken and hand-made and
primitive in all these relations. Of course, money is not the root of any
evil in the world; the root of all evil in the world, and the root of
all good too, is the Will to Live, and money becomes harmful only when
by bad laws and bad economic organisation it is more easily attained by
bad men than good.  It is as reasonable to say food is the root of all
disease, because so many people suffer from excessive and unwise eating.
The sane economic ideal is to make the possession of money the clear
indication of public serviceableness, and the more nearly that ideal
is attained, the smaller is the justification of poverty and the less
the hardship of being poor.  In barbaric and disorderly countries it
is almost honourable to be indigent and unquestionably virtuous to give
to a beggar, and even in the more or less civilised societies of earth,
so many children come into life hopelessly handicapped, that austerity
to the poor is regarded as the meanest of mean virtues.  But in Utopia
every one will have had an education and a certain minimum of nutrition
and training; every one will be insured against ill-health and accidents;
there will be the most efficient organisation for balancing the pressure
of employment and the presence of disengaged labour, and so to be
moneyless will be clear evidence of unworthiness.  In Utopia, no one
will dream of giving to a casual beggar, and no one will dream of begging.

There will need to be, in the place of the British casual wards, simple
but comfortable inns with a low tariff -- controlled to a certain extent
no doubt, and even in some cases maintained, by the State.  This tariff
will have such a definite relation to the minimum permissible wage,
that a man who has incurred no liabilities through marriage or the
like relationship, will be able to live in comfort and decency upon
that minimum wage, pay his small insurance premium against disease,
death, disablement, or ripening years, and have a margin for clothing
and other personal expenses.  But he will get neither shelter nor food,
except at the price of his freedom, unless he can produce money.

But suppose a man without money in a district where employment is not to
be found for him; suppose the amount of employment to have diminished
in the district with such suddenness as to have stranded him there.
Or suppose he has quarrelled with the only possible employer, or that
he does not like his particular work.  Then no doubt the Utopian State,
which wants every one to be just as happy as the future welfare of the
race permits, will come to his assistance.  One imagines him resorting to
a neat and business-like post office, and stating his case to a civil and
intelligent official.  In any sane State the economic conditions of every
quarter of the earth will be watched as constantly as its meteorological
phases, and a daily map of the country within a radius of three or four
hundred miles showing all the places where labour is needed will hang
upon the post office wall.  To this his attention will be directed.
The man out of work will decide to try his luck in this place or that,
and the public servant, the official, will make a note of his name,
verify his identity -- the freedom of Utopia will not be incompatible
with the universal registration of thumb-marks -- and issue passes for
travel and coupons for any necessary inn accommodation on his way to
the chosen destination.  There he will seek a new employer.

Such a free change of locality once or twice a year from a region of
restricted employment to a region of labour shortage will be among the
general privileges of the Utopian citizen.

But suppose that in no district in the world is there work within the
capacity of this particular man?

Before we suppose that, we must take into consideration the general
assumption one is permitted to make in all Utopian speculations.
All Utopians will be reasonably well educated upon Utopian lines;
there will be no illiterates unless they are unteachable imbeciles,
no rule-of-thumb toilers as inadaptable as trained beasts.  The Utopian
worker will be as versatile as any well-educated man is on earth to-day,
and no Trade Union will impose a limit to his activities.  The world
will be his Union.  If the work he does best and likes best is not to
be found, there is still the work he likes second best.  Lacking his
proper employment, he will turn to some kindred trade.

But even with that adaptability, it may be that sometimes he will not
find work.  Such a disproportion between the work to be done and the
people to do it may arise as to present a surplus of labour everywhere.
This disproportion may be due to two causes: to an increase of population
without a corresponding increase of enterprises, or to a diminution
of employment throughout the world due to the completion of great
enterprises, to economies achieved, or to the operation of new and more
efficient labour-saving appliances.  Through either cause, a World State
may find itself doing well except for an excess of citizens of mediocre
and lower quality.

But the first cause may be anticipated by wise marriage laws....
The full discussion of these laws will come later, but here one
may insist that Utopia will control the increase of its population.
Without the determination and ability to limit that increase as well
as to stimulate it whenever it is necessary, no Utopia is possible.
That was clearly demonstrated by Malthus for all time.

The second cause is not so easily anticipated, but then, though
its immediate result in glutting the labour market is similar, its
final consequences are entirely different from those of the first.
The whole trend of a scientific mechanical civilisation is continually to
replace labour by machinery and to increase it in its effectiveness by
organisation, and so quite independently of any increase in population
labour must either fall in value until it can compete against and check
the cheapening process, or if that is prevented, as it will be in Utopia,
by a minimum wage, come out of employment. There is no apparent limit to
this process.  But a surplus of efficient labour at the minimum wage is
exactly the condition that should stimulate new enterprises, and that in
a State saturated with science and prolific in invention will stimulate
new enterprises.  An increasing surplus of available labour without an
absolute increase of population, an increasing surplus of labour due
to increasing economy and not to proliferation, and which, therefore,
does not press on and disarrange the food supply, is surely the ideal
condition for a progressive civilisation.  I am inclined to think that,
since labour will be regarded as a delocalised and fluid force, it will
be the World State and not the big municipalities ruling the force areas
that will be the reserve employer of labour.  Very probably it will be
convenient for the State to hand over the surplus labour for municipal
purposes, but that is another question.  All over the world the labour
exchanges will be reporting the fluctuating pressure of economic demand
and transferring workers from this region of excess to that of scarcity;
and whenever the excess is universal, the World State -- failing an
adequate development of private enterprise -- will either reduce the
working day and so absorb the excess, or set on foot some permanent
special works of its own, paying the minimum wage and allowing them
to progress just as slowly or just as rapidly as the ebb and flow of
labour dictated.  But with sane marriage and birth laws there is no
reason to suppose such calls upon the resources and initiative of the
world more than temporary and exceptional occasions.


SECTION 4


The existence of our blond bare-footed friend was evidence enough that in
a modern Utopia a man will be free to be just as idle or uselessly busy as
it pleases him, after he has earned the minimum wage.  He must do that, of
course, to pay for his keep, to pay his assurance tax against ill health
or old age, and any charge or debt paternity may have brought upon him.
The World State of the modern Utopist is no state of moral compulsions.
If, for example, under the restricted Utopian scheme of inheritance,
a man inherited sufficient money to release him from the need to
toil, he would be free to go where he pleased and do what he liked.
A certain proportion of men at ease is good for the world; work as a
moral obligation is the morality of slaves, and so long as no one is
overworked there is no need to worry because some few are underworked.
Utopia does not exist as a solace for envy.  From leisure, in a good
moral and intellectual atmosphere, come experiments, come philosophy
and the new departures.

In any modern Utopia there must be many leisurely people. We are all too
obsessed in the real world by the strenuous ideal, by the idea that the
vehement incessant fool is the only righteous man.  Nothing done in a
hurry, nothing done under strain, is really well done.  A State where
all are working hard, where none go to and fro, easily and freely,
loses touch with the purpose of freedom.

But inherited independence will be the rarest and least permanent of
Utopian facts; for the most part that wider freedom will have to be
earned, and the inducements to men and women to raise their personal value
far above the minimum wage will be very great indeed.  Thereby will come
privacies, more space in which to live, liberty to go everywhere and do no
end of things, the power and freedom to initiate interesting enterprises
and assist and co-operate with interesting people, and indeed all the best
things of life.  The modern Utopia will give a universal security indeed,
and exercise the minimum of compulsions to toil, but it will offer some
acutely desirable prizes.  The aim of all these devices, the minimum wage,
the standard of life, provision for all the feeble and unemployed and
so forth, is not to rob life of incentives but to change their nature,
to make life not less energetic, but less panic-stricken and violent
and base, to shift the incidence of the struggle for existence fro in
our lower to our higher emotions, so to anticipate and neutralise the
motives of the cowardly and bestial, that the ambitious and energetic
imagination which is man's finest quality may become the incentive and
determining factor in survival.


SECTION 5


After we have paid for our lunch in the little inn that corresponds
to Wassen, the botanist and I would no doubt spend the rest of the
forenoon in the discussion of various aspects and possibilities of
Utopian labour laws.  We should examine our remaining change, copper
coins of an appearance ornamental rather than reassuring, and we should
decide that after what we had gathered from the man with the blond hair,
it would, on the whole, be advisable to come to the point with the labour
question forthwith.  At last we should draw the deep breath of resolution
and arise and ask for the Public Office.  We should know by this time
that the labour bureau sheltered with the post office and other public
services in one building.

The public office of Utopia would of course contain a few surprises for
two men from terrestrial England.  You imagine us entering, the botanist
lagging a little behind me, and my first attempts to be off-hand and
commonplace in a demand for work.

The office is in charge of a quick-eyed little woman of six-and-thirty
perhaps, and she regards us with a certain keenness of scrutiny.

"Where are your papers?" she asks.

I think for a moment of the documents in my pocket, my passport chequered
with visas and addressed in my commendation and in the name of her
late Majesty by ~We, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoigne Cecil, Marquess of
Salisbury, Earl of Salisbury, Viscount Cranborne, Baron Cecil~, and so
forth, to all whom it may concern, my ~Carte d'Identit~ (useful on
minor occasions) of the Touring Club de France, my green ticket to the
Reading Room of the British Museum, and my Letter d'Indication from the
London and County Bank.  A foolish humour prompts me to unfold all these,
hand them to her and take the consequences, but I resist.

"Lost," I say briefly.

"Both lost?" she asks, looking at my friend.

"Both," I answer.

"How?"

I astonish myself by the readiness of my answer.

"I fell down a snow slope and they came out of my pocket."

"And exactly the same thing happened to both of you?"

"No.  He'd given me his to put with my own."  She raised her eyebrows.
"His pocket is defective," I add, a little hastily.

Her manners are too Utopian for her to follow that up. She seems to
reflect on procedure.

"What are your numbers?" she asks abruptly.

A vision of that confounded visitors' book at the inn above comes
into my mind.  "Let me ~see~," I say, and pat my forehead and reflect,
refraining from the official eye before me. "Let me ~see~."

"What is yours?" she asks the botanist.

"A. B.," he says slowly, "little ~a~, nine four seven, I ~think~----"

"Don't you know?"

"Not exactly," says the botanist, very agreeably.  "No."

"Do you mean to say neither of you know your own numbers?" says the
little postmistress, with a rising note.

"Yes," I say, with an engaging smile and trying to keep up a good
social tone.  "It's queer, isn't it?  We've both forgotten."

"You're joking," she suggests.

"Well," I temporise.

"I suppose you've got your thumbs?"

"The fact is----" I say and hesitate.  "We've got our thumbs, of course."

"Then I shall have to send a thumb-print down to the office and get your
number from that.  But are you sure you haven't your papers or numbers?
It's very queer."

We admit rather sheepishly that it's queer, and question one another
silently.

She turns thoughtfully for the thumb-marking slab, and as she does so,
a man enters the office.  At the sight of him she asks with a note of
relief, "What am I to do, sir, here?"

He looks from her to us gravely, and his eye lights to curiosity at
our dress.  "What is the matter, madam?" he asks, in a courteous voice.

She explains.

So far the impression we have had of our Utopia is one of a quite
unearthly sanity, of good management and comprehensive design in every
material thing, and it has seemed to us a little incongruous that all the
Utopians we have talked to, our host of last night, the postmistress and
our garrulous tramp, have been of the most commonplace type.  But suddenly
there looks out from this man's pose and regard a different quality,
a quality altogether nearer that of the beautiful tramway and of the
gracious order of the mountain houses.  Here is a well-built man of
perhaps five-and-thirty. with the easy movement that comes with perfect
physical condition, his face is clean shaven and shows the firm mouth
of a disciplined man, and his grey eyes are clear and steady. His legs
are clad in some woven stuff deep-red in colour, and over this he wears
a white shirt fitting pretty closely, and with a woven purple hem.
His general effect reminds me somehow of the Knights Templars.  On his
head is a cap of thin leather and still thinner steel, and with the
vestiges of ear-guards -- rather like an attenuated version of the clips
that were worn by Cromwell's Ironsides.

He looks at us, and we interpolate a word or so as she explains, and
feel a good deal of embarrassment at the foolish position we have made
for ourselves.  I determine to cut my way out of this entanglement before
it complicates itself further

"The fact is----" I say.

"Yes?" he says, with a faint smile.

"We've perhaps been disingenuous.  Our position is so entirely
exceptional, so difficult to explain----"

"What have you been doing?"

"No," I say, with decision; "it can't be explained like that."

He looks down at his feet.  "Go on," he says.

I try to give the thing a quiet, matter-of-fact air.  "You see," I
say, in the tone one adopts for really lucid explanations, "we come
from another world.  Consequently, whatever thumb-mark registration
or numbering you have in this planet doesn't apply to us, and we don't
know our numbers because we haven't got any.  We are really, you know,
explorers, strangers----"

"But what world do you mean?"

"It's a different planet -- a long way away.  Practically at an infinite
distance."

He looks up in my face with the patient expression of a man who listens
to nonsense.

"I know it sounds impossible," I say, "but here is the simple fact -- we
~appear~ in your world.  We appeared suddenly upon the neck of Lucendro
-- the Passo Lucendro -- yesterday afternoon, and I defy  you to discover
the faintest trace of us before that time.  Down we marched into the San
Gotthard road and here we are!  That's our fact.  And as for papers----!
Where in your world have you seen papers like this?"

I produce my pocket-book, extract my passport, and present it to him.

His expression has changed.  He takes the document and examines it,
turns it over, looks at me, and smiles that faint smile of his again.

"Have some more," I say, and proffer the card of the T.C.F.

I follow up that blow with my green British Museum ticket, as tattered
as a flag in a knight's chapel.

"You'll get found out," he says, with my documents in his hand.
"You've got your thumbs.  You'll be measured. They'll refer to the
central registers, and there you'll be!"

"That's just it," I say. "we shan't be."

He reflects.  "It's a queer sort of joke for you two men to play,"
he decides, handing me back my documents.

"It's no joke at all," I say, replacing them in my pocket-book.

The postmistress intervenes.  "What would you advise me to do?"

"No money?" he asks.

"No."

He makes some suggestions.  "Frankly," he says, "I think you have escaped
from some island.  How you got so far as here I can't imagine, or what
you think you'll do....  But anyhow, there's the stuff for your thumbs."

He points to the thumb-marking apparatus and turns to attend to his
own business.

Presently we emerge from the office in a state between discomfiture and
amusement, each with a tramway ticket for Lucerne in his hand and with
sufficient money to pay our expenses until the morrow.  We are to go
to Lucerne because there there is a demand for comparatively unskilled
labour in carving wood, which seems to us a sort of work within our
range and a sort that will not compel our separation.


SECTION 6


The old Utopias are sessile organisations; the new must square itself
to the needs of a migratory population, to an endless coming and going,
to a people as fluid and tidal as the sea.  It does not enter into the
scheme of earthly statesmanship, but indeed all local establishments, all
definitions of place, are even now melting under our eyes.  Presently all
the world will be awash with anonymous stranger men.

Now the simple laws of custom, the homely methods of identification that
served in the little communities of the past when every one knew every
one, fail in the face of this liquefaction. If the modern Utopia is
indeed to be a world of responsible citizens, it must have devised some
scheme by which every person in the world can be promptly and certainly
recognised, and by which any one missing can be traced and found.

This is by no means an impossible demand.  The total population of the
world is, on the most generous estimate, not more than 1,500,000,000,
and the effectual indexing of this number of people, the record of their
movement hither and thither, the entry of various material facts, such as
marriage, parentage, criminal convictions and the like, the entry of the
new-born and the elimination of the dead, colossal task though it would
be, is still not so great as to be immeasurably beyond comparison with
the work of the post offices in the world of to-day, or the cataloguing
of such libraries as that of the British Museum, or such collections as
that of the insects in Cromwell Road.  Such an index could be housed
quite comfortably on one side of Northumberland Avenue, for example.
It is only a reasonable tribute to the distinctive lucidity of the French
mind to suppose the central index housed in a vast series of buildings
at or near Paris.  The index would be classified primarily by some
unchanging physical characteristic, such as we are told the thumb-mark
and finger-mark afford, and to these would be added any other physical
traits that were of material value.  The classification of thumb-marks
and of inalterable physical characteristics goes on steadily, and there
is every reason for assuming it possible that each human being could be
given a distinct formula, a number or "scientific name," under which he
or she could be docketed. [Footnote: It is quite possible that the actual
thumbmark may play only a small part in the work of identification, but
it is an obvious convenience to our thread of story to assume that it is
the one sufficient feature.] About the buildings in which this great main
index would be gathered, would be a system of other indices with cross
references to the main one, arranged under names, under professional
qualifications, under diseases, crimes and the like.

These index cards might conceivably be transparent and so contrived as
to give a photographic copy promptly whenever it was needed, and they
could have an attachment into which would slip a ticket bearing the name
of the locality in which the individual was last reported.  A little
army of attendants would be at work upon this index day and night.
From substations constantly engaged in checking back thumb-marks and
numbers, an incessant stream of information would come, of births, of
deaths, of arrivals at inns, of applications to post offices for letters,
of tickets taken for long journeys, of criminal convictions, marriages,
applications for public doles and the like.  A filter of offices would
sort the stream, and all day and all night for ever a swarm of clerks
would go to and fro correcting this central register, and photographing
copies of its entries for transmission to the subordinate local stations,
in response to their inquiries.  So the inventory of -- the State would
watch its every man and the wide world write its history as the fabric of
its destiny flowed on.  At last, when the citizen died, would come the
last entry of all, his age and the cause of his death and the date and
place of his cremation, and his card would be taken out and passed on to
the universal pedigree, to a place of greater quiet, to the ever-growing
galleries of the records of the dead.

Such a record is inevitable if a Modern Utopia is to be achieved.

Yet at this, too, our blond-haired friend would no doubt rebel.
One of the many things to which some will make claim as a right, is
that of going unrecognised and secret whither one will.  But that, so
far as one's fellow wayfarers were concerned, would still be possible.
Only the State would share the secret of one's little concealment.  To the
eighteenth-century Liberal, to the old-fashioned nineteenth-century
Liberal, that is to say to all professed Liberals, brought up to be
against the Government on principle, this organised clairvoyance will be
the most hateful of dreams.  Perhaps, too, the Individualist would see it
in that light.  But these are only the mental habits acquired in an evil
time.  The old Liberalism assumed bad government, the more powerful the
government the worse it was, just as it assumed the natural righteousness
of the free individual.  Darkness and secrecy were, indeed, the natural
refuges of liberty when every government had in it the near possibility of
tyranny, and the Englishman or American looked at the papers of a Russian
or a German as one might look at the chains of a slave.  You imagine that
father of the old Liberalism, Rousseau, slinking off from his offspring at
the door of the Foundling Hospital, and you can understand what a crime
against natural virtue this quiet eye of the State would have seemed
to him.  But suppose we do not assume that government is necessarily bad,
and the individual necessarily good -- and the hypothesis upon which we
are working practically abolishes either alternative -- then we alter the
case altogether.  The government of a modern Utopia will be no perfection
of intentions ignorantly ruling the world.... [Footnote: In the typical
modern State of our own world, with its population of many millions and
its extreme facility of movement, undistinguished men who adopt an alias
can make themselves untraceable with the utmost ease.  The temptation of
the opportunities thus offered has developed a new type of criminality,
the Deeming or Crossman type, base men who subsist and feed their heavy
imaginations in the wooing, betrayal, ill-treatment, and sometimes even
the murder of undistinguished women.  This is a large, a growing, and,
what is gravest, a prolific class, fostered by the practical anonymity
of the common man.  It is only the murderers who attract much public
attention, but the supply of low-class prostitutes is also largely due
to these free adventures of the base.  It is one of the by-products of
State Liberalism, and at present it is very probably drawing ahead in
the race against the development of police organisation.]

Such is the eye of the State that is now slowly beginning to apprehend
our existence as two queer and inexplicable parties disturbing the fine
order of its field of vision, the eye that will presently be focusing
itself upon us with a growing astonishment and interrogation.  "Who in the
name of Galton and Bertillon," one fancies Utopia exclaiming, "are ~you~?"

I perceive I shall cut a queer figure in that focus.  I shall affect
a certain spurious ease of carriage no doubt.  "The fact is, I shall
begin...."


SECTION 7


And now see how an initial hypothesis may pursue and overtake its maker.
Our thumb-marks have been taken, they have travelled by pneumatic tube to
the central office of the municipality hard by Lucerne, and have gone on
thence to the headquarters of the index at Paris.  There, after a rough
preliminary classification, I imagined them photographed on glass, and
flung by means of a lantern in colossal images upon a screen, all finely
squared, and the careful experts marking and measuring their several
convolutions. And then off goes a brisk clerk to the long galleries of
the index building.

I have told them they will find no sign of us, but you see him going
from gallery to gallery, from bay to bay, from drawer to drawer, and
from card to card.  "Here he is!" he mutters to himself, and he whips
out a card and reads.  "But that is impossible!" he says....

You figure us returning after a day or so of such Utopian experiences
as I must presently describe, to the central office in Lucerne, even as
we have been told to do.

I make my way to the desk of the man who has dealt with us before. "Well?"
I say, cheerfully, "have you heard!"

His expression dashes me a little.  "We've heard," he says, and adds,
"it's very peculiar."

"I told you you wouldn't find out about us," I say triumphantly.

"But we have," he says; "but that makes your freak none the less
remarkable."

"You've heard!  You know who we are!  Well -- tell us!  We had an idea,
but we're beginning to doubt."

"You," says the official, addressing the botanist, "are----!"

And he breathes his name.  Then he turns to me and gives me mine.

For a moment I am dumbfounded.  Then I think of the entries we made
at the inn in the Urserenthal, and then in a flash I have the truth.
I rap the desk smartly with my finger-tips and shake my index-finger in
my friend's face.

"By Jove!" I say in English. "They've got our doubles!"

The botanist snaps his fingers.  "Of course!  I didn't think of that."

"Do you mind," I say to this official, "telling us some more about
ourselves?"

"I can't think why you keep it up," he remarks, and then almost wearily
tells me the facts about my Utopian self. They are a little difficult
to understand.  He says I am one of the ~samurai~, which sounds Japanese,
"but you will be degraded," he says, with a gesture almost of despair.
He describes my position in this world in phrases that convey very little.

"The queer thing," he remarks, "is that you were in Norway only three
days ago."

"I am there still.  At least----  I'm sorry to be so much trouble to you,
but do you mind following up that last clue and inquiring if the person
to whom the thumb-mark really belongs isn't in Norway still?"

The idea needs explanation.  He says something incomprehensible about
a pilgrimage.  "Sooner or later," I say, "you will have to believe there
are two of us with the same thumb-mark.  I won't trouble you with any
apparent nonsense about other planets and so forth again.  Here I am.
If I was in Norway a few days ago, you ought to be able to trace my
journey hither.  And my friend?"

"He was in India."  The official is beginning to look perplexed.

"It seems to me," I say, "that the difficulties in this case are only
just beginning.  How did I get from Norway hither? Does my friend look
like hopping from India to the Saint Gotthard at one hop?  The situation
is a little more difficult than that----"

"But here!" says the official, and waves what are no doubt photographic
copies of the index cards.

"But we are not those individuals!"

"You ~are~ those individuals."

"You will see," I say.

He dabs his finger argumentatively upon the thumb-marks. "I see now,"
he says.

"There is a mistake," I maintain, "an unprecedented mistake.  There's the
difficulty.  If you inquire you will find it begin to unravel. What reason
is there for us to remain casual workmen here, when you allege we are
men of position in the world, if there isn't something wrong? We shall
stick to this wood-carving work you have found us here, and meanwhile
I think you ought to inquire again.  That's how the thing shapes to me."

"Your case will certainly have to be considered further," he says, with
the faintest of threatening notes in his tone. "But at the same time"
-- hand out to those copies from the index again -- "therre you are,
you know!"


SECTION 8


When my botanist and I have talked over and exhausted every possibility
of our immediate position, we should turn, I think, to more general
questions.

I should tell him the thing that was becoming more and more apparent
in my own mind.  Here, I should say, is a world, obviously on the face
of it well organised.  Compared with our world, it is like a well-oiled
engine beside a scrap-heap. It has even got this confounded visual organ
swivelling about in the most alert and lively fashion.  But that's by
the way....  You have only to look at all these houses below. (We should
be sitting on a seat on the Gtsch and looking down on the Lucerne
of Utopia, a Lucerne that would, I insist, quite arbitrarily, still
keep the Wasserthurm and the Kapellbrucke.) You have only to mark the
beauty, the simple cleanliness and balance of this world, you have only
to see the free carriage, the unaffected graciousness of even the common
people, to understand how fine and complete the arrangements of this
world must be.  How are they made so?  We of the twentieth century are
not going to accept the sweetish, faintly nasty slopes of Rousseauism
that so gratified our great-great-grandparents in the eighteenth.
We know that order and justice do not come by Nature -- "if only the
policeman would go away."  These things mean intention, will, carried to
a scale that our poor vacillating, hot and cold earth has never known.
What I am really seeing more and more clearly is the will beneath this
visible Utopia.  Convenient houses, admirable engineering that is no
offence amidst natural beauties, beautiful bodies, and a universally
gracious carriage, these are only the outward and visible signs of an
inward and spiritual grace.  Such an order means discipline.  It means
triumph over the petty egotisms and vanities that keep men on our earth
apart; it means devotion and a nobler hope; it cannot exist without
a gigantic process of inquiry, trial, forethought and patience in an
atmosphere of mutual trust and concession.  Such a world as this Utopia
is not made by the chance occasional co-operations of self-indulgent men,
by autocratic rulers or by the bawling wisdom of the democratic leader.
And an unrestricted competition for gain, an enlightened selfishness,
that too fails us....

I have compared the system of indexing humanity we have come upon to
an eye, an eye so sensitive and alert that two strangers cannot appear
anywhere upon the planet without discovery.  Now an eye does not see
without a brain, an eye does not run round and look without a will and
purpose.  A Utopia that deals only with appliances and arrangements is a
dream of superficialities; the essential problem here, the body within
these garments, is a moral and an intellectual problem. Behind all
this material order, these perfected communications, perfected public
services and economic organisations, there must be men and women willing
these things.  There must be a considerable number and a succession of
these men and women of will.  No single person, no transitory group of
people, could order and sustain this vast complexity. They must have a
collective if not a common width of aim, and that involves a spoken or
written literature, a living literature to sustain the harmony of their
general activity.  In some way they must have put the more immediate
objects of desire into a secondary place, and that means renunciation.
They must be effectual in action and persistent in will, and that means
discipline.  But in the modern world in which progress advances without
limits, it will be evident that whatever common creed or formula they have
must be of the simplest sort;  that whatever organisation they have must
be as mobile and flexible as a thing alive.  All this follows inevitably
from the general propositions of our Utopian dream. When we made those,
we bound ourselves helplessly to come to this....

The botanist would nod an abstracted assent.

I should cease to talk.  I should direct my mind to the confused mass
of memories three days in Utopia will have given us.  Besides the
personalities with whom we have come into actual contact, our various
hosts, our foreman and workfellows, the blond man, the public officials,
and so on, there will be a great multitude of other impressions.
There will be many bright snapshots of little children, for example,
of girls and women and men, seen in shops and offices and streets,
on quays, at windows and by the wayside, people riding hither and
thither and walking to and fro.  A very human crowd it has seemed to me.
But among them were there any who might be thought of as having a wider
interest than the others, who seemed in any way detached from the rest
by a purpose that passed beyond the seen?

Then suddenly I recall that clean-shaven man who talked with us for a
little while in the public office at Wassen, the man who reminded me of
my boyish conception of a Knight Templar, and with him come momentary
impressions of other lithe and serious-looking people dressed after the
same manner, words and phrases we have read in such scraps of Utopian
reading as have come our way, and expressions that fell from the loose
mouth of the man with the blond hair....



CHAPTER SIX

WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA


SECTION 1


But though I have come to a point where the problem of a Utopia has
resolved itself very simply into the problem of government and direction,
I find I have not brought the botanist with me.  Frankly he cannot think
so steadily onward as I can.  I feel to think, he thinks to feel. It is
I and my kind that have the wider range, because we can be impersonal as
well as personal.  We can escape ourselves. In general terms, at least,
I understand him, but he does not understand me in any way at all.
He thinks me an incomprehensive brute because his obsession is merely
one of my incidental interests, and wherever my reasoning ceases to
be explicit and full, the slightest ellipsis, the most transitory
digression, he evades me and is back at himself again.  He may have a
personal liking for me, though I doubt it, but also he hates me pretty
distinctly, because of this bias he cannot understand.  My philosophical
insistence that things shall be reasonable and bang together, that
what can be explained shall be explained, and that what can be done by
calculation and certain methods shall not be left to chance, he loathes.
He just wants adventurously to feel.  He wants to feel the sunset, and
he thinks that on the whole he would feel it better if he had not been
taught the sun was about ninety-two million miles away.  He wants to
feel free and strong, and he would rather feel so than be so.  He does
not want to accomplish great things, but to have dazzling things occur
to him. He does not know that there are feelings also up in the clear air
of the philosophic mountains, in the long ascents of effort and design.
He does not know that thought itself is only a finer sort of feeling than
his -- good hock to the mixed gin, porter, and treacle of his emotions,
a perception of similitudes and oppositions that carries even thrills.
And naturally he broods on the source of all his most copious feelings
and emotions, women, and particularly upon the woman who has most made
him feel.  He forces me also to that.

Our position is unfortunate for me.  Our return to the Utopian
equivalent of Lucerne revives in him all the melancholy distresses that
so preoccupied him when first we were transferred to this better planet.
One day, while we are still waiting there for the public office to
decide about us, he broaches the matter.  It is early evening, and we
are walking beside the lake after our simple dinner.  "About here," he
says, "the quays would run and all those big hotels would be along here,
looking out on the lake.  It's so strange to have seen them so recently,
and now not to see them at all.... Where have they gone?"

"Vanished by hypothesis."

"What?"

"Oh! They're there still.  It's we that have come hither."

"Of course.  I forgot.  But still----  You know, there was an avenue
of little trees along this quay with seats, and she was sitting looking
out upon the lake....  I hadn't seen her for ten years."

He looks about him still a little perplexed.  "Now we are here," he
says, "it seems as though that meeting and the talk we had must have
been a dream."

He falls musing.

Presently he says: "I knew her at once.  I saw her in profile.  But, you
know, I didn't speak to her directly.  I walked past her seat and on for
a little way, trying to control myself....  Then I turned back and sat
down beside her, very quietly.  She looked up at me.  Everything came
back -- everything.  For a moment or so I felt I was going to cry...."

That seems to give him a sort of satisfaction even in the reminiscence.

"We talked for a time just like casual acquaintances -- about the view
and the weather, and things like that."

He muses again.

"In Utopia everything would have been different," I say.

"I suppose it would."

He goes on before I can say anything more.

"Then, you know, there was a pause.  I had a sort of intuition that
the moment was coming.  So I think had she. You may scoff, of course,
at these intuitions----"

I don't as a matter of fact.  Instead, I swear secretly. Always this
sort of man keeps up the pretence of highly distinguished and remarkable
mental processes, whereas -- have not I, in my own composition, the
whole diapason of emotional fool?  Is not the suppression of these notes
my perpetual effort, my undying despair?  And then, am I to be accused
of poverty?

But to his story.

"She said, quite abruptly, `I am not happy,' and I told her, `I knew
that the instant I saw you.  Then, you know, she began to talk to me
very quietly, very frankly, about everything.  It was only afterwards
I began to feel just what it meant, her talking to me like that."

I cannot listen to this!

"Don't you understand," I cry, "that we are in Utopia. She may be bound
unhappily upon earth and you may be bound, but not here.  Here I think
it will be different.  Here the laws that control all these things will
be humane and just. So that all you said and did, over there, does not
signify here -- does not signify here!"

He looks up for a moment at my face, and then carelessly at my wonderful
new world.

"Yes," he says, without interest, with something of the tone of an
abstracted elder speaking to a child, "I dare say it will be all very
fine here."  And he lapses, thwarted from his confidences, into musing.

There is something almost dignified in this withdrawal into himself.
For a moment I entertain an illusion that really I am unworthy to hear
the impalpable inconclusiveness of what he said to her and of what she
said to him.

I am snubbed.  I am also amazed to find myself snubbed. I become
breathless with indignation.  We walk along side by side, but now
profoundly estranged.

I regard the faade of the Utopian public offices of Lucerne -- I
had meant to call his attention to some of the architectural features of
these -- with a changed eye, with all the spirit gone out of my vision.
I wish I had never brought this introspective carcass, this mental
ingrate, with me.

I incline to fatalistic submission.  I suppose I had no power to leave
him behind....  I wonder and I wonder. The old Utopists never had to
encumber themselves with this sort of man.


SECTION 2


How would things be "different" in the Modern Utopia? After all it is
time we faced the riddle of the problems of marriage and motherhood.

The Modern Utopia is not only to be a sound and happy World State,
but it is to be one progressing from good to better.  But as Malthus
[Footnote: ~Essay on the Principles of Population~.] demonstrated for
all time, a State whose population continues to increase in obedience
to unchecked instinct, can progress only from bad to worse.  From the
view of human comfort and happiness, the increase of population that
occurs at each advance in human security is the greatest evil of life.
The way of Nature is for every species to increase nearly to its possible
maximum of numbers, and then to improve through the pressure of that
maximum against its limiting conditions by the crushing and killing of
all the feebler individuals.  The way of Nature has also been the way
of humanity so far, and except when a temporary alleviation is obtained
through an expansion of the general stock of sustenance by invention
or discovery, the amount of starvation and of the physical misery of
privation in the world, must vary almost exactly with the excess of the
actual birth-rate over that required to sustain population at a number
compatible with a universal contentment.  Neither has Nature evolved, nor
has man so far put into operation, any device by which paying this price
of progress, this misery of a multitude of starved and unsuccessful lives
can be evaded. A mere indiscriminating restriction of the birth-rate --
an end practically attained in the homely, old-fashioned civilisation
of China by female infanticide, involves not only the cessation of
distresses but stagnation, and the minor good of a sort of comfort
and social stability is won at too great a sacrifice. Progress depends
essentially on competitive selection, and that we may not escape.

But it is a conceivable and possible thing that this margin of futile
struggling, pain and discomfort and death might be reduced to nearly
nothing without checking physical and mental evolution, with indeed an
acceleration of physical and mental evolution, by preventing the birth
of those who would in the unrestricted interplay of natural forces be
born to suffer and fail.  The method of Nature "red in tooth and claw"
is to degrade, thwart, torture, and kill the weakest and least adapted
members of every species in existence in each generation, and so keep
the specific average rising the ideal of a scientific civilisation is
to prevent those weaklings being born. There is no other way of evading
Nature's punishment of sorrow.  The struggle for life among the beasts
and uncivilised men means misery and death for the inferior individuals,
misery and death in order that they may not increase and multiply; in
the civilised State it is now clearly possible to make the conditions
of life tolerable for every living creature, provided the inferiors can
be prevented from increasing and multiplying.  But this latter condition
must be respected. Instead of competing to escape death and wretchedness,
we may compete to give birth, and we may heap every sort of consolation
prize upon the losers in that competition.  The modern State tends to
qualify inheritance, to insist upon education and nurture for children,
to come in more and more in the interests of the future between father
and child.  It is taking over the responsibility of the general welfare
of the children more and more, and as it does so, its right to decide
which children it will shelter becomes more and more reasonable.

How far will such conditions be prescribed? how far can they be prescribed
in a Modern Utopia?

Let us set aside at once all nonsense of the sort one hears in certain
quarters about the human stud farm. [Footnote: See ~Mankind in the
Making~, ch. ii.]  State breeding of the population was a reasonable
proposal for Plato to make, in view of the biological knowledge of his
time and the purely tentative nature of his metaphysics; but from any
one in the days after Darwin, it is preposterous.  Yet we have it given
to us as the most brilliant of modern discoveries by a certain school of
sociological writers, who seem totally unable to grasp the modification
of meaning "species" and "individual" have undergone in the last fifty
years.  They do not seem capable of the suspicion that the boundaries of
species have vanished, and that individuality now carries with it the
quality of the unique!  To them individuals are still defective copies
of a Platonic ideal of the species, and the purpose of breeding no more
than an approximation to that perfection.  Individuality is indeed a
negligible difference to them, an impertinence, and the whole flow of
modern biological ideas has washed over them in vain.

But to the modern thinker individuality is the significant fact of life,
and the idea of the State, which is necessarily concerned with the average
and general, selecting individualities in order to pair them and improve
the race, an absurdity. It is like fixing a crane on the plain in order
to raise the hill-tops.  In the initiative of the individual above the
average, lies the reality of the future, which the State, presenting
the average, may subserve but cannot control.  And the natural centre
of the emotional life, the cardinal will, the supreme and significant
expression of individuality, should lie in the selection of a partner
for procreation.

But compulsory pairing is one thing, and the maintenance of general
limiting conditions is another, and one well within the scope of State
activity.  The State is justified in saying, before you may add children
to the community for the community to educate and in part to support,
you must be above a certain minimum of personal efficiency, and this
you must show by holding a position of solvency and independence in the
world; you must be above a certain age, and a certain minimum of physical
development, and free of any transmissible disease.  You must not be a
criminal unless you have expiated your offence.  Failing these simple
qualifications, if you and some person conspire and add to the population
of the State, we will, for the sake of humanity, take over the innocent
victim of your passions, but we shall insist that you are under a debt to
the State of a peculiarly urgent sort, and one you will certainly pay,
even if it is necessary to use restraint to get the payment out of you;
it is a debt that has in the last resort your liberty as a security,
and, moreover, if this thing happens a second time, or if it is disease
or imbecility you have multiplied, we will take an absolutely effectual
guarantee that neither you nor your partner offend again in this matter.

"Harsh!" you say, and "Poor Humanity!"

You have the gentler alternative to study in your terrestrial slums
and asylums.

It may be urged that to permit conspicuously inferior people to have
one or two children in this way would be to fail to attain the desired
end, but, indeed, this is not so.  A suitably qualified permission, as
every statesman knows, may produce the social effects without producing
the irksome pressure of an absolute prohibition.  Amidst bright and
comfortable circumstances, and with an easy and practicable alternative,
people will exercise foresight and self-restraint to escape even the
possibilities of hardship and discomfort; and free life in Utopia is to
be well worth this trouble even for inferior people. The growing comfort,
self-respect, and intelligence of the English is shown, for example,
in the fall in the proportion of illegitimate births from 2.2 per 1000
in 1846-50 to 1.2 per 1000 in 1890-1900, and this without any positive
preventive laws whatever.  This most desirable result is pretty certainly
not the consequence of any great exaltation of our moral tone, but simply
of a rising standard of comfort and a livelier sense of consequences and
responsibilities.  If so marked a change is possible in response to such
progress as England has achieved in the past fifty years, if discreet
restraint can be so effectual as this, it seems reasonable to suppose
that in the ampler knowledge and the cleaner, franker atmosphere of our
Utopian planet the birth of a child to diseased or inferior parents, and
contrary to the sanctions of the State, will be the rarest of disasters.

And the death of a child, too, that most tragic event, Utopia will rarely
know.  Children are not born to die in childhood. But in our world, at
present, through the defects of our medical science and nursing methods,
through defects in our organisation, through poverty and carelessness,
and through the birth of children that never ought to have been born,
one out of every five children born dies within five years.  It may be
the reader has witnessed this most distressful of all human tragedies.
It is sheer waste of suffering.  There is no reason why ninety-nine out of
every hundred children born should not live to a ripe age.  Accordingly,
in any Modern Utopia, it must be insisted they will.


SECTION 3


All former Utopias have, by modern standards, erred on the side of over
regulation in these matters.  The amount of State interference with the
marriage and birth of the citizens of a modern Utopia will be much less
than in any terrestrial State.  Here, just as in relation to property
and enterprise, the law will regulate only in order to secure the utmost
freedom and initiative.

Up to the beginning of this chapter, our Utopian speculations, like many
Acts of Parliament, have ignored the difference of sex.  "He" indeed
is to be read as "He and She" in all that goes before.  But we may now
come to the sexual aspects of the modern ideal of a constitution of
society in which, for all purposes of the individual, women are to be
as free as men. This will certainly be realised in the Modern Utopia,
if it can be realised at all -- not only for woman's sake, but for man's.

But women may be free in theory and not in practice, and as long as
they suffer from their economic inferiority, from the inability to
produce as much value as a man for the same amount of work -- and there
can be no doubt of this inferiority -- so long will their legal and
technical equality be a mockery.  It is a fact that almost every point
in which a woman differs from a man is an economic disadvantage to her,
her incapacity for great stresses of exertion, her frequent liability
to slight illnesses, her weaker initiative, her inferior invention
and resourcefulness, her relative incapacity for organisation and
combination, and the possibilities of emotional complications whenever
she is in economic dependence on men.  So long as women are compared
economically with men and boys they will be inferior in precisely
the measure in which they differ from men.  All that constitutes this
difference they are supposed not to trade upon except in one way, and
that is by winning or luring a man to marry, selling themselves in an
almost irrevocable bargain, and then following and sharing his fortunes
for "better or worse."

But -- do not let the proposition in its first crudity alarm you --
suppose the Modern Utopia equalises things between the sexes in the only
possible way, by insisting that motherhood is a service to the State and
a legitimate claim to a living; and that, since the State is to exercise
the right of forbidding or sanctioning motherhood, a woman who is, or
is becoming, a mother, is as much entitled to wages above the minimum
wage, to support, to freedom, and to respect and dignity as a policeman,
a solicitor-general, a king, a bishop in the State Church, a Government
professor, or any one else the State sustains.  Suppose the State secures
to every woman who is, under legitimate sanctions, becoming or likely
to become a mother, that is to say who is duly married, a certain wage
from her husband to secure her against the need of toil and anxiety,
suppose it pays her a certain gratuity upon the birth of a child,
and continues to pay at regular intervals sums sufficient to keep her
and her child in independent freedom, so long as the child keeps up
to the minimum standard of health and physical and mental development.
Suppose it pays more upon the child when it rises markedly above certain
minimum qualifications, physical or mental, and, in fact, does its best
to make thoroughly efficient motherhood a profession worth following.
And suppose in correlation with this it forbids the industrial employment
of married women and of mothers who have children needing care, unless
they are in a position to employ qualified efficient substitutes to take
care of their offspring. What differences from terrestrial conditions
will ensue?

This extent of intervention will at least abolish two or three salient
hardships and evils of the civilised life.  It will abolish the hardship
of the majority of widows, who on earth are poor and encumbered exactly
in proportion as they have discharged the chief distinctive duty of a
woman, and miserable, just in proportion as their standard of life and
of education is high.  It will abolish the hardship of those who do not
now marry on account of poverty, or who do not dare to have children.
The fear that often turns a woman from a beautiful to a mercenary marriage
will vanish from life.  In Utopia a career of wholesome motherhood
would be, under such conditions as I have suggested, the normal and
remunerative calling for a woman, and a capable woman who has borne,
bred, and begun the education of eight or nine well-built, intelligent,
and successful sons and daughters would be an extremely prosperous woman,
quite irrespective of the economic fortunes of the man she has married.
She would need to be an exceptional woman, and she would need to have
chosen a man at least a little above the average as her partner in life.
But his death, or misbehaviour, or misfortunes would not ruin her.

Now such an arrangement is merely the completed induction from the
starting propositions that make some measure of education free and
compulsory for every child in the State. If you prevent people making
profit out of their children -- and every civilised State -- even that
compendium of old-fashioned Individualism, the United States of America
-- is now disposed to admit the necessity of that prohibiition -- and
if you provide for the aged instead of leaving them to their children's
sense of duty, the practical inducements to parentage, except among very
wealthy people, are greatly reduced. The sentimental factor in the case
rarely leads to more than a solitary child or at most two to a marriage,
and with a high and rising standard of comfort and circumspection it
is unlikely that the birth-rate will ever rise very greatly again.
The Utopians will hold that if you keep the children from profitable
employment for the sake of the future, then, if you want any but the
exceptionally rich, secure, pious, unselfish, or reckless to bear children
freely, you must be prepared to throw the cost of their maintenance upon
the general community.

In short, Utopia will hold that sound childbearing and rearing is a
service done, not to a particular man, but to the whole community, and all
its legal arrangements for motherhood will be based on that conception.


SECTION 4


And after these preliminaries we must proceed to ask, first, what will
be the Utopian marriage law, and then what sort of customs and opinions
are likely to be superadded to that law?

The trend of our reasoning has brought us to the conclusion that the
Utopian State will feel justified in intervening between men and women
on two accounts, first on account of paternity, and secondly on account
of the clash of freedoms that may otherwise arise.  The Utopian State
will effectually interfere with and prescribe conditions for all sorts
of contract, and for this sort of contract in particular it will be in
agreement with almost every earthly State, in defining in the completest
fashion what things a man or woman may be bound to do, and what they
cannot be bound to do.  From the point of view of a statesman, marriage
is the union of a man and woman in a manner so intimate as to involve the
probability of offspring, and it is of primary importance to the State,
first in order to secure good births, and secondly good home conditions,
that these unions should not be free, nor promiscuous, nor practically
universal throughout the adult population.

Prolific marriage must be a profitable privilege.  It must occur only
under certain obvious conditions, the contracting parties must be in
health and condition, free from specific transmissible taints, above a
certain minimum age, and sufficiently intelligent and energetic to have
acquired a minimum education.  The man at least must be in receipt of a
net income above the minimum wage, after any outstanding charges against
him have been paid.  All this much it is surely reasonable to insist upon
before the State becomes responsible for the prospective children. The age
at which men and women may contract to marry is difficult to determine.
But if we are, as far as possible, to put women on an equality with men,
if we are to insist upon a universally educated population, and if we
are seeking to reduce the infantile death-rate to zero, it must be much
higher than it is in any terrestrial State.  The woman should be at
least one-and-twenty; the man twenty-six or twenty-seven.

One imagines the parties to a projected marriage first obtaining licences
which will testify that these conditions are satisfied.  From the point
of view of the theoretical Utopian State, these licences are the feature
of primary importance.  Then, no doubt, that universal register at Paris
would come into play.  As a matter of justice, there must be no deception
between the two people, and the State will ensure that in certain broad
essentials this is so.  They would have to communicate their joint
intention to a public office after their personal licences were granted,
and each would be supplied with a copy of the index card of the projected
mate, on which would be recorded his or her age, previous marriages,
legally important diseases, offspring, domiciles, public appointments,
criminal convictions, registered assignments of property, and so forth.
Possibly it might be advisable to have a little ceremony for each party,
for each in the absence of the other, in which this record could be read
over in the presence of witnesses, together with some prescribed form
of address of counsel in the matter.  There would then be a reasonable
interval for consideration and withdrawal on the part of either spouse.
In the event of the two people persisting in their resolution, they would
after this minimum interval signify as much to the local official and
the necessary entry would be made in the registers.  These formalities
would be quite independent of any religious ceremonial the contracting
parties might choose, for with religious belief and procedure the modern
State has no concern.

So much for the preliminary conditions of matrimony. For those men and
women who chose to ignore these conditions and to achieve any sort of
union they liked, the State would have no concern, unless offspring
were born illegitimately. In that case, as we have already , it would
be only reasonable to make the parents chargeable with every duty,
with maintenance, education, and so forth, that in the normal course
of things would fall to the State.  It would be necessary to impose
a life-assurance payment upon these parents, and to exact effectual
guarantees against every possible evasion of the responsibility they
had incurred.  But the further control of private morality, beyond the
protection of the immature from corruption and evil example, will be no
concern of the State's.  When a child comes in, the future of the species
comes in; and the State comes in as the guardian of interests wider than
the individual's; but the adult's private life is the entirely private
life into which the State may not intrude.

Now what will be the nature of the Utopian contract of matrimony?

From the first of the two points of view named above, that of parentage,
it is obvious that one unavoidable condition will be the chastity of
the wife.  Her infidelity being demonstrated, must at once terminate the
marriage, and release both her husband and the State from any liability
for the support of her illegitimate offspring.  That, at any rate,
is beyond controversy; a marriage contract that does not involve that,
is a triumph of metaphysics over common sense. It will be obvious that
under Utopian conditions it is the State that will suffer injury by a
wife's misconduct, and that a husband who condones anything of the sort
will participate in her offence.  A woman, therefore, who is divorced on
this account will be divorced as a public offender, and not in the key of
a personal quarrel; not as one who has inflicted a private and personal
wrong.  This, too, lies within the primary implications of marriage.

Beyond that, what conditions should a marriage contract in Utopia involve?

A reciprocal restraint on the part of the husband is clearly of no
importance whatever, so far as the first end of matrimony goes, the
protection of the community from inferior births.  It is no wrong to the
State.  But it does carry with it a variable amount of emotional offence
to the wife; it may wound her pride and cause her violent perturbations of
jealousy; it may lead to her neglect, her solitude and unhappiness, and
it may even work to her physical injury.  There should be an implication
that it is not to occur.  She has bound herself to the man for the good
of the State, and clearly it is reasonable that she should look to the
State for relief if it does occur.  The extent of the offence given her
is the exact measure of her injury; if she does not mind nobody minds,
and if her self-respect does not suffer nothing whatever is lost to the
world; and so it should rest with her to establish his misconduct, and,
if she thinks fit, to terminate the marriage.

A failure on either side to perform the elementary duties of
companionship, desertion, for example, should obviously give the other
mate the right to relief, and clearly the development of any disqualifying
habit, drunkenness, or drug-taking, or the like, or any serious crime or
acts of violence, should give grounds for a final release.  Moreover,
the modern Utopian State intervenes between the sexes only because of
the coming generation, and for it to sustain restrictions upon conduct
in a continually fruitless marriage is obviously to lapse into purely
moral intervention.  It seems reasonable, therefore, to set a term to
a marriage that remains childless, to let it expire at the end of three
or four or five unfruitful years, but with no restriction upon the right
of the husband and wife to marry each other again.

These are the fairly easy primaries of this question.  We now come to the
more difficult issues of the matter.  The first of these is the question
of the economic relationships of husband and wife, having regard to the
fact that even in Utopia women, at least until they become mothers, are
likely to be on the average poorer than men.  The second is the question
of the duration of a marriage.  But the two interlock, and are, perhaps,
best treated together in one common section.  And they both ramify in
the most complicated manner into the consideration of the general morale
of the community.


SECTION 5


This question of marriage is the most complicated and difficult in the
whole range of Utopian problems.  But it is happily not the most urgent
necessity that it should be absolutely solved.  The urgent and necessary
problem is the ruler. With rulers rightly contrived and a provisional
defective marriage law a Utopia may be conceived as existing and studying
to perfect itself, but without rulers a Utopia is impossible though
the theory of its matrimony be complete.  And the difficulty in this
question is not simply the difficulty of a complicated chess problem,
for example, in which the whole tangle of considerations does at least
lie in one plane, but a series of problems upon different levels and
containing incommensurable factors.

It is very easy to repeat our initial propositions, to recall that we are
on another planet, and that all the customs and traditions of the earth
are set aside, but the faintest realisation of that demands a feat of
psychological insight.  We have all grown up into an invincible mould of
suggestion about sexual things; we regard this with approval, that with
horror, and this again with contempt, very largely because the thing
has always been put to us in this light or that.  The more emancipated
we think ourselves the more subtle are our bonds. The disentanglement
of what is inherent in these feelings from what is acquired is an
extraordinary complex undertaking. Probably all men and women have a
more or less powerful disposition to jealousy, but what exactly they
will be jealous about and what exactly they will suffer seems part of
the superposed factor.  Probably all men and women are capable of ideal
emotions and wishes beyond merely physical desires, but the shape these
take are almost entirely a reaction to external images.  And you really
cannot strip the external off; you cannot get your stark natural man,
jealous, but not jealous about anything in particular, imaginative
without any imaginings, proud at large.  Emotional dispositions can no
more exist without form than a man without air.  Only a very observant
man who had lived all over the planet Earth, in all sorts of social
strata, and with every race and tongue, and who was endowed with great
imaginative insight, could hope to understand the possibilities and the
limitations of human plasticity in this matter, and say what any men
and any women could be induced to do willingly, and just exactly what
no man and no woman could stand, provided one had the training of them.
Though very young men will tell you readily enough.  The proceedings of
other races and other ages do not seem to carry conviction; what our
ancestors did, or what the Greeks or Egyptians did, though it is the
direct physical cause of the modern young man or the modern young lady,
is apt to impress these remarkable consequences merely as an arrangement
of quaint, comical, or repulsive proceedings.

But there emerges to the modern inquirer certain ideals and desiderata
that at least go some way towards completing and expanding the crude
primaries of a Utopian marriage law set out in Section 4.

The sound birth being assured, does there exist any valid reason for
the persistence of the Utopian marriage union?

There are two lines of reasoning that go to establish a longer duration
for marriage.  The first of these rests upon the general necessity for a
home and for individual attention in the case of children.  Children are
the results of a choice between individuals; they grow well, as a rule,
only in relation to sympathetic and kindred individualities, and no
wholesale character-ignoring method of dealing with them has ever had
a shadow of the success of the individualised home. Neither Plato
nor Socrates, who repudiated the home, seems ever to have had to
do with anything younger than a young man.  Procreation is only the
beginning of parentage, and even where the mother is not the direct
nurse and teacher of her child, even where she delegates these duties,
her supervision is, in the common case, essential to its welfare.
Moreover, though the Utopian State will pay the mother, and the mother
only, for the being and welfare of her legitimate children, there will
be a clear advantage in fostering the natural disposition of the father
to associate his child's welfare with his individual egotism, and to
dispense some of his energies and earnings in supplementing the common
provision of the State.  It is an absurd disregard of a natural economy
to leave the innate philoprogenitiveness of either sex uncultivated.
Unless the parents continue in close relationship, if each is passing
through a series of marriages, the dangers of a conflict of rights,
and of the frittering away of emotions, become very grave.  The family
will lose homogeneity, and its individuals will have for the mother
varied and perhaps incompatible emotional associations.  The balance of
social advantage is certainly on the side of much more permanent unions,
on the side of an arrangement that, subject to ample provisions for a
formal divorce without disgrace in cases of incompatibility, would bind,
or at least enforce ideals that would tend to bind, a man and woman
together for the whole term of her maternal activity, until, that is,
the last born of her children was no longer in need of her help.

The second system of considerations arises out of the artificiality
of woman's position.  It is a less conclusive series than the first,
and it opens a number of interesting side vistas.

A great deal of nonsense is talked about the natural equality or
inferiority of women to men.  But it is only the same quality that can be
measured by degrees and ranged in ascending and descending series, and the
things that are essentially feminine are different qualitatively from and
incommensurable with the distinctly masculine things.  The relationship
is in the region of ideals and conventions, and a State is perfectly
free to determine that men and women shall come to intercourse on
a footing of conventional equality, or with either the man or woman
treated as the predominating individual. Aristotle's criticism of Plato
in this matter, his insistence upon the natural inferiority of slaves
and women, is just the sort of confusion between inherent and imposed
qualities that was his most characteristic weakness.  The spirit of
the European people, of almost all the peoples now in the ascendant,
is towards a convention of equality; the spirit of the Mahometan world
is towards the intensification of a convention that the man alone is a
citizen and that the woman is very largely his property.  There can be
no doubt that the latter of these two convenient fictions is the more
primitive way of regarding this relationship.  It is quite unfruitful to
argue between these ideals as if there were a demonstrable conclusion,
the adoption of either is an arbitrary act, and we shall simply follow
our age and time if we display a certain bias for the former.

If one looks closely into the various practical expansions of these ideas,
we find their inherent falsity works itself out in a very natural way
so soon as reality is touched.  Those who insist upon equality work in
effect for assimilation, for a similar treatment of the sexes.  Plato's
women of the governing class, for example, were to strip for gymnastics
like men, to bear arms and go to war, and follow most of the masculine
occupations of their class.  They were to have the same education and
to be assimilated to men at every doubtful point.  The Aristotelian
attitude, on the other hand, insists upon specialisation.  The men are
to rule and fight and toil; the women are to support motherhood in a
state of natural inferiority.  The trend of evolutionary forces through
long centuries of human development has been on the whole in this second
direction, has been towards differentiation. [Footnote: See Havelock
Ellis's ~Man and Woman~.] An adult white woman differs far more from
a white man than a negress or pigmy woman from her equivalent male.
The education, the mental disposition, of a white or Asiatic woman,
reeks of sex; her modesty, her decorum is not to ignore sex but
to refine and put a point to it; her costume is clamorous with the
distinctive elements of her form.  The white woman in the materially
prosperous nations is more of a sexual specialist than her sister of
the poor and austere peoples, of the prosperous classes more so than the
peasant woman.  The contemporary woman of fashion who sets the tone of
occidental intercourse is a stimulant rather than a companion for a man.
Too commonly she is an unwholesome stimulant turning a man from wisdom
to appearance, from beauty to beautiful pleasures, from form to colour,
from persistent aims to belief and stirring triumphs.  Arrayed in what
she calls distinctly "dress," scented, adorned, displayed, she achieves
by artifice a sexual differentiation profounder than that of any other
vertebrated animal.  She outshines the peacock's excess above his mate,
one must probe among the domestic secrets of the insects and crustacea
to find her living parallel.  And it is a question by no means easy and
yet of the utmost importance, to determine how far the wide and widening
differences between the human sexes is inherent and inevitable, and how
far it is an accident of social development that may be converted and
reduced under a different social regimen.  Are we going to recognise
and accentuate this difference and to arrange our Utopian organisation
to play upon it, are we to have two primary classes of human being,
harmonising indeed and reacting, but following essentially different
lives, or are we going to minimise this difference in every possible way?

The former alternative leads either to a romantic organisation
of society in which men will live and fight and die for wonderful,
beautiful, exaggerated creatures, or it leads to the hareem.  It would
probably lead through one phase to the other.  Women would be enigmas
and mysteries and maternal dignitaries that one would approach in a
state of emotional excitement and seclude piously when serious work
was in hand.  A girl would blossom from the totally negligible to the
mystically desirable at adolescence, and boys would be removed from
their mother's educational influence at as early an age as possible.
Whenever men and women met together, the men would be in a state of
inflamed competition towards one another, and the women likewise,
and the intercourse of ideas would be in suspense.  Under the latter
alternative the sexual relation would be subordinated to friendship and
companionship;  boys and girls would be co-educated -- very largely under
maternal direction, and women, disarmed of their distinctive barbaric
adornments, the feathers, beads, lace, and trimmings that enhance their
clamorous claim to a directly personal attention would mingle, according
to their quality, in the counsels and intellectual development of men.
Such women would be fit to educate boys even up to adolescence. It is
obvious that a marriage law embodying a decision between these two sets
of ideas would be very different according to the alternative adopted.
In the former case a man would be expected to earn and maintain in an
adequate manner the dear delight that had favoured him.  He would tell
her beautiful lies about her wonderful moral effect upon him, and keep
her sedulously from all responsibility and knowledge. And, since there
is an undeniably greater imaginative appeal to men in the first bloom of
a woman's youth, she would have a distinct claim upon his energies for
the rest of her life.  In the latter case a man would no more pay for
and support his wife than she would do so for him.  They would be two
friends, differing in kind no doubt but differing reciprocally, who had
linked themselves in a matrimonial relationship.  Our Utopian marriage, so
far as we have discussed it, is indeterminate between these alternatives.

We have laid it down as a general principle that the private morals
of an adult citizen are no concern for the State.  But that involves
a decision to disregard certain types of bargain. A sanely contrived
State will refuse to sustain bargains wherein there is no plausibly
fair exchange, and if private morality is really to be outside the
scope of the State then the affections and endearments most certainly
must not be regarded as negotiable commodities.  The State, therefore,
will absolutely ignore the distribution of these favours unless children,
or at least the possibility of children, is involved.  It follows that
it will refuse to recognise any debts or transfers of property that are
based on such considerations.  It will be only consistent, therefore, to
refuse recognition in the marriage contract to any financial obligation
between husband and wife, or any settlements qualifying that contract,
except when they are in the nature of accessory provision for the
prospective children. [Footnote: Unqualified gifts for love by solvent
people will, of course, be quite possible and permissible, unsalaried
services and the like, provided the standard of life is maintained and
the joint income of the couple between whom the services hold does not
sink below twice the minimum wage.] So far the Utopian State will throw
its weight upon the side of those who advocate the independence of women
and their conventional equality with men.

But to any further definition of the marriage relation the World State
of Utopia will not commit itself.  The wide range of relationships that
are left possible, within and without the marriage code, are entirely a
matter for the individual choice and imagination.  Whether a man treat
his wife in private as a goddess to be propitiated, as a "mystery" to be
adored, as an agreeable auxiliary, as a particularly intimate friend, or
as the wholesome mother of his children, is entirely a matter for their
private intercourse: whether he keep her in Oriental idleness or active
co-operation, or leave her to live her independent life, rests with the
couple alone, and all the possible friendship and intimacies outside
marriage also lie quite beyond the organisation of the modern State.
Religious teaching and literature may affect these; customs may arise;
certain types of relationship may involve social isolation; the justice
of the statesman is blind to such things.  It may be urged that according
to Atkinson's illuminating analysis [Footnote: See Lang and Atkinson's
~Social Origins and Primal Law~.] the control of love-making was the
very origin of the human community.  In Utopia, nevertheless, love-making
is no concern of the State's beyond the province that the protection of
children covers. [Footnote: It cannot be made too clear that though the
control of morality is outside the law the state must maintain a general
decorum, a systematic suppression of powerful and moving examples, and of
incitations and temptations of the young and inexperienced, and to that
extent it will, of course, in a sense, exercise a control over morals.
But this will be only part of a wider law to safeguard the tender mind.
For example, lying advertisements, and the like, when they lean towards
adolescent interests, will encounter a specially disagreeable disposition
in the law, over and above the treatment of their general dishonesty.]
Change of function is one of the ruling facts in life, the sac that was
in our remotest ancestors a swimming bladder is now a lung, and the State
which was once, perhaps, no more than the jealous and tyrannous will of
the strongest male in the herd, the instrument of justice and equality.
The State intervenes now only where there is want of harmony between
individuals -- individuals who exist or who may presently come into
existence.


SECTION 6


It must be reiterated that our reasoning still leaves Utopian marriage an
institution with wide possibilities of variation.  We have tried to give
effect to the ideal of a virtual equality, an equality of spirit between
men and women, and in doing so we have overridden the accepted opinion
of the great majority of mankind.  Probably the first writer to do as
much was Plato.  His argument in support of this innovation upon natural
human feeling was thin enough -- a mere analogy to illustrate the spirit
of his propositions; it was his creative instinct that determined him.
In the atmosphere of such speculations as this, Plato looms very large
indeed, and in view of what we owe to him, it seems reasonable that we
should hesitate before dismissing as a thing prohibited and evil, a type
of marriage that he made almost the central feature in the organisation
of the ruling class, at least, of his ideal State.  He was persuaded that
the narrow monogamic family is apt to become illiberal and anti-social,
to withdraw the imagination and energies of the citizen from the services
of the community as a whole, and the Roman Catholic Church has so far
endorsed and substantiated his opinion as to forbid family relations
to its priests and significant servants.  He conceived of a poetic
devotion to the public idea, a devotion of which the mind of Aristotle,
as his criticisms of Plato show, was incapable, as a substitute for
the warm and tender but illiberal emotions of the home.  But while
the Church made the alternative to family ties celibacy [Footnote:
The warm imagination of Campanella, that quaint Calabrian monastic,
fired by Plato, reversed this aspect of the Church.] and participation
in an organisation, Plato was far more in accordance with modern ideas in
perceiving the disadvantage that would result from precluding the nobler
types of character from offspring.  He sought a way to achieve progeny,
therefore, without the narrow concentration of the sympathies about the
home, and he found it in a multiple marriage in which every member of the
governing class was considered to be married to all the others.  But the
detailed operation of this system he put tentatively and very obscurely.
His suggestions have the experimental inconsistency of an inquiring man.
He left many things altogether open, and it is unfair to him to adopt
Aristotle's forensic method and deal with his discussion as though it was
a fully-worked-out project.  It is clear that Plato intended every member
of his governing class to be so "changed at birth" as to leave paternity
untraceable; mothers were not to know their children, nor children
their parents, but there is nothing to forbid the supposition that lie
intended these people to select and adhere to congenial mates within the
great family.  Aristotle's assertion that the Platonic republic left no
scope for the virtue of continence shows that he had jumped to just the
same conclusions a contemporary London errand boy, hovering a little
shamefacedly over Jowett in a public library, might be expected to reach.

Aristotle obscures Plato's intention, it may be accidentally, by speaking
of his marriage institution as a community of wives.  When reading Plato
he could not or would not escape reading in his own conception of the
natural ascendency of men, his idea of property in women and children.
But as Plato intended women to be conventionally equal to men, this phrase
belies him altogether; community of husbands and wives would be truer to
his proposal.  Aristotle condemns Plato as roundly as any commercial room
would condemn him to-day, and in much the same spirit; he asserts rather
than proves that such a grouping is against the nature of man. He wanted
to have women property just as he wanted to have slaves property, he
did not care to ask why, and it distressed his conception of convenience
extremely to imagine any other arrangement.  It is no doubt true that the
natural instinct of either sex is exclusive of participators in intimacy
during a period of intimacy, but it was probably Aristotle who gave Plato
an offensive interpretation in this matter.  No one would freely submit
to such a condition of affairs as multiple marriage carried out, in the
spirit of the Aristotelian interpretation, to an obscene completeness,
but that is all the more reason why the modern Utopia should not refuse a
grouped marriage to three or more freely consenting persons.  There is no
sense in prohibiting institutions which no sane people could ever want to
abuse.  It is claimed -- though the full facts are difficult to ascertain
-- that a group marriage of over two hundred persons was  successfully
organised by John Humphrey Noyes at Oneida Creek. [Footnote: See John H.
Noyes's ~History of American Socialisms~ and his writings generally.
The bare facts of this and the other American experiments are given,
together with more recent matter, by Morris Hillquirt, in ~The History
of Socialism in the United States~.]  It is fairly certain in the latter
case that there was no "promiscuity," and that the members mated for
variable periods, and often for life, within the group.  The documents are
reasonably clear upon that point.  This Oneida community was, in fact,
a league of two hundred persons to regard their children as "common."
Choice and preference were not abolished in the community, though in
some cases they were set aside -- just as they are by many parents under
our present conditions.  There seems to have been a premature attempt
at "stirpiculture," at what Mr. Francis Galton now calls "Eugenics," in
the mating of the members, and there was also a limitation of offspring.
Beyond these points the inner secrets of the community do not appear to
be very profound; its atmosphere was almost commonplace, it was made
up of very ordinary people.  There is no doubt that it had a career
of exceptional success throughout the whole lifetime of its founder,
and it broke down with the advent of a new generation, with the onset
of theological differences, and the loss of its guiding intelligence.
The Anglo-Saxon spirit, it has been said by one of the ablest children of
the experiment, is too individualistic for communism.  It is possible to
regard the temporary success of this complex family as a strange accident,
as the wonderful exploit of what was certainly a very exceptional man.
Its final disintegration into frankly monogamic couples -- it is still
a prosperous business association -- may be taken as an experimental
verification of Aristotle's common-sense psychology, and was probably
merely the public acknowledgment of conditions already practically
established.

Out of respect for Plato we cannot ignore this possibility of multiple
marriage altogether in our Utopian theorising, but even if we leave this
possibility open we are still bound to regard it as a thing so likely
to be rare as not to come at all under our direct observation during
our Utopian journeyings. But in one sense, of course, in the sense that
the State guarantees care and support for all properly born children,
our entire Utopia is to be regarded as a comprehensive marriage group.
[Footnote: The Thelma of Rabelais, with its principle of "Fay ce que
vouldras" within the limits of the order, is probably intended to suggest
a Platonic complex marriage after the fashion of our interpretation.]

It must be remembered that a modern Utopia must differ from the Utopias
of any preceding age in being world-wide it is not, therefore, to be the
development of any special race or type of culture, as Plato's developed
an Athenian-Spartan blend, or More, Tudor England.  The modern Utopia
is to be, before all things, synthetic.  Politically and socially,
as linguistically, we must suppose it a synthesis; politically it will
be a synthesis at once widely different forms of government; socially
and morally, a synthesis of a great variety of domestic traditions
and ethical habits.  Into the modern Utopia there must have entered the
mental tendencies and origins that give our own world the polygamy of the
Zulus and of Utah, the polyandry of Tibet, the latitudes of experiment
permitted in the United States, and the divorceless wedlock of Comte.
The tendency of all synthetic processes in matters of law and custom is
to reduce and simplify the compulsory canon, to admit alternatives and
freedoms; what were laws before become traditions of feeling and style,
and in no matter will this be more apparent than in questions affecting
the relations of the sexes.



CHAPTER SEVEN

A FEW UTOPIAN IMPRESSIONS


SECTION 1


But now we are in a better position to describe the houses and ways of
the Utopian townships about the Lake of Lucerne, and to glance a little
more nearly at the people who pass.  You figure us as curiously settled
down in Utopia, as working for a low wage at wood-carving, until the
authorities at the central registry in Paris can solve the perplexing
problem we have set them.  We stay in an inn looking out upon the lake,
and go to and fro for our five hours' work a day, with a curious effect
of having been born Utopians. The rest of our time is our own.

Our inn is one of those inns and lodging houses which have a minimum
tariff, inns which are partly regulated, and, in the default of private
enterprise, maintained and controlled by the World State throughout
the entire world.  It is one of several such establishments in Lucerne.
It possesses many hundreds of practically self-cleaning little bedrooms,
equipped very much after the fashion of the rooms we occupied in the
similar but much smaller inn at Hospenthal, differing only a little in
the decoration.  There is the same dressing-room recess with its bath, the
same graceful proportion in the succinct simplicity of its furniture. This
particular inn is a quadrangle after the fashion of an Oxford college;
it is perhaps forty feet high, and with about five stories of bedrooms
above its lower apartments; the windows of the rooms look either outward
or inward to the quadrangle, and the doors give upon artificially-lit
passages with staircases passing up and down.  These passages are carpeted
with a sort of cork carpet, but are otherwise bare. The lower story is
occupied by the equivalent of a London club, kitchens and other offices,
dining-room, writing-room, smoking and assembly-rooms, a barber's shop,
and a library.  A colonnade with seats runs about the quadrangle, and
in the middle is a grass-plot. In the centre of this a bronze figure,
a sleeping child, reposes above a little basin and fountain, in which
water lilies are growing.  The place has been designed by an architect
happily free from the hampering traditions of Greek temple building,
and of Roman and Italian palaces; it is simple, unaffected, gracious.
The material is some artificial stone with the dull surface and something
of the tint of yellow ivory the colour is a little irregular, and a
partial confession of girders and pillars breaks this front of tender
colour with lines and mouldings of greenish grey, that blend with the
tones of the leaden gutters and rain pipes from the light red roof.
At one point only does any explicit effort towards artistic effect
appear, and that is in the great arched gateway opposite my window.
Two or three abundant yellow roses climb over the face of the building,
and when I look out of my window in the early morning -- for the usual
Utopian working day commences within an hour of sunrise -- I see Pilatus
above this outlook, rosy in the morning sky.

This quadrangle type of building is the prevalent element in Utopian
Lucerne, and one may go from end to end of the town a on corridors
and covered colonnades without emerging by a gateway into the open
roads at all.  Small shops are found in these colonnades, but the
larger stores are usually housed in buildings specially adapted to
their needs.  The majority of the residential edifices are far finer and
more substantial than our own modest shelter, though we gather from such
chance glimpses as we get of their arrangements that the labour-saving
ideal runs through every grade of this servantless world; and what we
should consider a complete house in earthly England is hardly known here.

The autonomy of the household has been reduced far below terrestrial
conditions by hotels and clubs, and all sorts of co-operative expedients.
People who do not live in hotels seem usually to live in clubs. The fairly
prosperous Utopian belongs, in most cases, to one or two residential clubs
of congenial men and women.  These clubs usually possess, in addition to
furnished bedrooms, more or less elaborate suites of apartments, and if
a man prefers it one of these latter can be taken and furnished according
to his personal taste.  A pleasant boudoir, a private library and study, a
private garden plot, are among the commonest of such luxuries.  Devices to
secure roof gardens, loggias, verandahs, and such-like open-air privacies
to the more sumptuous of these apartments, give interest and variety to
Utopian architecture. There are sometimes little cooking corners in these
fiats -- as one would call them on earth -- but the ordinary Utopian
would no more think of a special private kitchen for his dinners than
he would think of a private flour mill or dairy farm.  Business, private
work, and professional practice go on sometimes in the house apartments,
but often in special offices in the great warren of the business quarter.
A common garden, an infant school, play rooms, and a playing garden for
children, are universal features of the club quadrangles.

Two or three main roads, with their tramways, their cyclists' paths, and
swift traffic paths, will converge on the urban centre, where the public
offices will stand in a group close to the two or three theatres and the
larger shops, and hither, too, in the case of Lucerne, the head of the
swift railway to Paris and England and Scotland, and to the Rhineland
and Germany will run.  And as one walks out from the town centre one
will come to that mingling of homesteads and open country which will be
the common condition of all the more habitable parts of the globe.

Here and there, no doubt, will stand quite solitary homesteads, homesteads
that will nevertheless be lit and warmed by cables from the central
force station, that will share the common water supply, will have their
perfected telephonic connection with the rest of the world, with doctor,
shop, and so forth, and may even have a pneumatic tube for books and
small parcels to the nearest post office.  But the solitary homestead,
as a permanent residence, will be something of a luxury -- the resort of
rather wealthy garden lovers; and most people with a bias for retirement
will probably get as much residential solitude as they care for in the
hire of a holiday chlet in a forest, by remote lagoons or high up
the mountain side.

The solitary house may indeed prove to be very rare indeed in Utopia.
The same forces, the same facilitation of communications that will
diffuse the towns will tend to little concentrations of the agricultural
population over the countryside. The field workers will probably take
their food with them to their work during the day, and for the convenience
of an interesting dinner and of civilised intercourse after the working
day is over, they will most probably live in a college quadrangle with
a common room and club.  I doubt if there will be any agricultural
labourers drawing wages in Utopia. I am inclined to imagine farming done
by tenant associations, by little democratic unlimited liability companies
working under elected managers, and paying not a fixed rent but a share
of the produce to the State.  Such companies could reconstruct annually
to weed out indolent members. [Footnote: Schemes for the co-operative
association of producers will be found in Dr. Hertzka's ~Freeland~.]
A minimum standard of efficiency in farming would be insured by fixing a
minimum beneath which the rent must not fall, and perhaps by inspection.
The general laws respecting the standard of life would, of course,
apply to such associations. This type of co-operation presents itself
to me as socially the best arrangement of productive agriculture and
horticulture, but such enterprises as stock breeding, seed farming,
and the stocking of loan and agricultural implements are probably, and
agricultural research and experiment certainly, best handled directly
by large companies or the municipality of the State.

But I should do little to investigate this question; these are presented
as quite incidental impressions.  You must suppose that for the most
part our walks and observations keep us within the more urban quarters
of Lucerne.  From a number of beautifully printed placards at the streets
corners, adorned with caricatures of considerable pungency, we discover
an odd little election is in progress.  This is the selection, upon
strictly democratic lines, with a suffrage that includes every permanent
resident in the Lucerne ward over the age of fifteen, of the ugliest
local building.  The old little urban and local governing bodies, we find,
have long since been superseded by great provincial municipalities for
all the more serious administrative purposes, but they still survive to
discharge a number of curious minor functions, and not the least among
these is this sort of sthetic ostracism.  Every year every minor
local governing body pulls down a building selected by local plebiscite,
and the greater Government pays a slight compensation to the owner,
and resumes possession of the land it occupies.  The idea would strike
us at first as simply whimsical, but in practice it appears to work as
a cheap and practical device for the sthetic education of builders,
engineers, business men, opulent persons, and the general body of the
public. But when we come to consider its application to our own world we
should perceive it was the most Utopian thing we had so far encountered.


SECTION 2


The factory that employs us is something very different from the ordinary
earthly model.  Our business is to finish making little wooden toys --
bears, cattle men, and the like -- for children.  The things are made in
the rough by machinery, and then finished by hand, because the work of
unskilful but interested men -- and it really is an extremely amusing
employment -- is found to give a personality and interest to these
objects no machine can ever attain.

We carvers -- who are the riff-raff of Utopia -- work in a long shed
together, nominally by time; we must keep at the job for the length
of the spell, but we are expected to finish a certain number of toys
for each spell of work.  The rules of the game as between employer and
employed in this particular industry hang on the wall behind us; they are
drawn up by a conference of the Common Council of Wages Workers with the
employers, a common council which has resulted in Utopia from a synthesis
of the old Trades Unions, and which has become a constitutional power;
but any man who has skill or humour is presently making his own bargain
with our employer more or less above that datum line.

Our employer is a quiet blue-eyed man with a humorous smile.  He dresses
wholly in an indigo blue, that later we come to consider a sort of
voluntary uniform for Utopian artists.  As he walks about the workshop,
stopping to laugh at this production or praise that, one is reminded
inevitably of an art school.  Every now and then he carves a little
himself or makes a sketch or departs to the machinery to order some
change in the rough shapes it is turning out.  Our work is by no means
confined to animals.  After a time I am told to specialise in a comical
little Roman-nosed pony; but several of the better paid carvers work
up caricature images of eminent Utopians.  Over these our employer is
most disposed to meditate, and from them he darts off most frequently
to improve the type.

It is high summer, and our shed lies open at either end. On one hand is
a steep mountain side down which there comes, now bridging a chasm, now
a mere straight groove across a meadow, now hidden among green branches,
the water-slide that brings our trees from the purple forest overhead.
Above us, but nearly hidden, hums the machine shed, but we see a
corner of the tank into which, with a mighty splash, the pine trees
are delivered. Every now and then, bringing with him a gust of resinous
smell, a white-clad machinist will come in with a basketful of crude,
unwrought little images, and will turn them out upon the table from
which we carvers select them.

(Whenever I think of Utopia that faint and fluctuating smell of resin
returns to me, and whenever I smell resin, comes the memory of the
open end of the shed looking out upon the lake, the blue-green lake,
the boats mirrored in the water, and far and high beyond floats the
atmospheric fairyland of the mountains of Glarus, twenty miles away.)

The cessation of the second and last spell of work comes about midday,
and then we walk home, through this beautiful intricacy of a town to
our cheap hotel beside the lake.

We should go our way with a curious contentment, for all that we were
earning scarcely more than the minimum wage. We should have, of course,
our uneasiness about the final decisions of that universal eye which
has turned upon us, we should have those ridiculous sham numbers on our
consciences; but that general restlessness, that brooding stress that
pursues the weekly worker on earth, that aching anxiety that drives
him so often to stupid betting, stupid drinking, and violent and mean
offences will have vanished out of mortal experience.


SECTION 3


I should find myself contrasting my position with my preconceptions about
a Utopian visit.  I had always imagined myself as standing outside the
general machinery of the State -- in the distinguished visitors' gallery,
as it were -- and getting the new world in a series of comprehensive
perspective views.  But this Utopia, for all the sweeping floats of
generalisation I do my best to maintain, is swallowing me up.  I find
myself going between my work and the room in which I sleep and the place
in which I dine, very much as I went to and fro in that real world into
which I fell five-and-forty years ago. I find about me mountains and
horizons that limit my view, institutions that vanish also without an
explanation, beyond the limit of sight, and a great complexity of things I
do not understand and about which, to tell the truth, I do not formulate
acute curiosities.  People, very unrepresentative people, people just
as casual as people in the real world, come into personal relations with
us, and little threads of private and immediate interest spin themselves
rapidly into a thickening grey veil across the general view.  I lose the
comprehensive interrogation of my first arrival; I find myself interested
in the grain of the wood I work, in birds among the tree branches, in
little irrelevant things, and it is only now and then that I get fairly
back to the mood that takes all Utopia for its picture.

We spend our first surplus of Utopian money in the reorganisation of our
wardrobes upon more Utopian lines; we develop acquaintance with several of
our fellow-workers, and of those who share our table at the inn.  We pass
insensibly into acquaintanceships and the beginnings of friendships.
The World Utopia, I say, seems for a time to be swallowing me up.  At the
thought of detail it looms too big for me.  The question of government,
of its sustaining ideas, of race, and the wider future, hang like the arch
of the sky over these daily incidents, very great indeed, but very remote.
These people about me are everyday people, people not so very far from
the minimum wage accustomed much as the everyday people of earth are
accustomed to take their world as they find it.  Such inquiries as I
attempt are pretty obviously a bore to them, pass outside their range
as completely as Utopian speculation on earth outranges a stevedore or
a member of Parliament or a working plumber.  Even the little things of
daily life interest them in a different way.  So I get on with my facts
and reasoning rather slowly.  I find myself looking among the pleasant
multitudes of the streets for types that promise congenial conversation.

My sense of loneliness is increased during this interlude by the
better social success of the botanist.  I find him presently falling
into conversation with two women who are accustomed to sit at a table
near our own.  They wear the loose, coloured robes of soft material
that are the usual wear of common adult Utopian women; they are both
dark and sallow, and they affect amber and crimson in their garments.
Their faces strike me as a little unintelligent, and there is a faint
touch of middle-aged coquetry in their bearing that I do not like.
Yet on earth we should consider them women of exceptional refinement.
But the botanist evidently sees in this direction scope for the feelings
that have wilted a little under my inattention, and he begins that
petty intercourse of a word, of a slight civility, of vague inquiries
and comparisons that leads at last to associations and confidences.
Such superficial confidences, that is to say, as he finds satisfactory.

This throws me back upon my private observations.

The general effect of a Utopian population is vigour.  Every one one
meets seems to be not only in good health but in training; one rarely
meets fat people, bald people, or bent or grey.  People who would be
obese or bent and obviously aged on earth are here, in good repair,
and as a consequence the whole effect of a crowd is livelier and
more invigorating than on earth.  The dress is varied and graceful;
that of the women reminds one most of the Italian fifteenth century;
they have an abundance of soft and beautifully-coloured stuffs, and the
clothes, even of the poorest, fit admirably.  Their hair is very simply
but very carefully and beautifully dressed, and, except in very sunny
weather, they do not wear hats or bonnets.  There is little difference
in deportment between one class and another; they all are graceful and
bear themselves with quiet dignity, and among a group of them a European
woman of fashion in her lace and feathers, her hat and metal ornaments,
her mixed accumulations of "trimmings," would look like a barbarian
tricked out with the miscellaneous plunder of a museum.  Boys and
girls wear much the same sort of costume -- brown leather shoes, then
a sort of combination of hose and close-fitting trousers that reaches
from toe to waist, and over this a beltless jacket fitting very well,
or a belted tunic.  Many slender women wear the same sort of costume.
We should see them in it very often in such a place as Lucerne, as they
returned from expeditions in the mountains, The older men would wear
long robes very frequently, but the greater proportion of the men would
go in variations of much the same costume as the children.  There would
certainly be hooded cloaks and umbrellas for rainy weather, high boots
for mud and snow, and cloaks and coats and furry robes for the winter.
There would be no doubt a freer use of colour than terrestrial Europe sees
in these days, but the costume of the women at least would be soberer
and more practical, and (in harmony with our discussion in the previous
chapter) less differentiated from the men's.

But these, of course, are generalisations.  These are the mere translation
of the social facts we have hypotheticated into the language of costume.
There will be a great variety of costume and no compulsions.  The doubles
of people who are naturally foppish on earth will be foppish in Utopia,
and people who have no natural taste on earth will have inartistic
equivalents.  Every one will not be quiet in tone, or harmonious,
or beautiful.  Occasionally, as I go through the streets to my work, I
shall turn round to glance again at some robe shot with gold embroidery,
some slashing of the sleeves, some eccentricity of cut, or some discord
or untidiness.  But these will be but transient flashes in a general flow
of harmonious graciousness; dress will have scarcely any of that effect of
disorderly conflict, of self-assertion qualified by the fear of ridicule,
that it has in the crudely competitive civilisations of earth.

I shall have the seeker's attitude of mind during those few days at
Lucerne.  I shall become a student of faces.  I shall be, as it were,
looking for some one.  I shall see heavy faces, dull faces, faces with
an uncongenial animation, alien faces, and among these some with an
immediate quality of appeal. I should see desirable men approaching me,
and I should think; "Now if I were to speak to ~you~?"  Many of these
latter I should note wore the same clothing as the man who spoke to us
at Wassen I should begin to think of it as a sort of uniform....

Then I should see grave-faced girls, girls of that budding age when
their bearing becomes delusively wise, and the old deception of my youth
will recur to me; "Could you and I but talk together?" I should think.
Women will pass me lightly, women with open and inviting faces, but
they will not attract me, and there will come beautiful women, women
with that touch of claustral preoccupation which forbids the thought of
any near approach.  They are private and secret, and I may not enter,
I know, into their thoughts....

I go as often as I can to the seat by the end of old Kapelbrucke, and
watch the people passing over.

I shall find a quality of dissatisfaction throughout all these days.
I shall come to see this period more and more distinctly as a pause,
as a waiting interlude, and the idea of an encounter with my double,
which came at first as if it were a witticism, as something verbal and
surprising, begins to take substance.  The idea grows in my mind that
after all this is the "some one" I am seeking, this Utopian self of mine.
I had at first an idea of a grotesque encounter, as of something happening
in a looking-glass, but presently it dawns on me that my Utopian self
must be a very different person from me. His training will be different,
his mental content different. But between us there will be a strange link
of essential identity, a sympathy, and understanding.  I find the thing
rising suddenly to a preponderance in my mind.  I find the interest of
details dwindling to the vanishing point.  That I have come to Utopia
is the lesser thing now; the greater is that I have come to meet myself.

I spend hours trying to imagine the encounter, inventing little dialogues.
I go alone to the Bureau to find if any news has come to hand from the
Great Index in Paris, but I am told to wait another twenty-four hours.
I cease absolutely to be interested in anything else, except so far as
it leads towards intercourse with this being who is to be at once so
strangely alien and so totally mine.


SECTION 4


Wrapped up in these preoccupations as I am, it will certainly be the
botanist who will notice the comparative absence of animals about us.

He will put it in the form of a temperate objection to the Utopian planet.

He is a professed lover of dogs and there are none.  We have seen
no horses and only one or two mules on the day of our arrival, and
there seems not a cat in the world.  I bring my mind round to his.
"This follows," I say.

It is only reluctantly that I allow myself to be drawn from my secret
musings into a discussion of Utopian pets.

I try to explain that a phase in the world's development is inevitable
when a systematic world-wide attempt will be made to destroy for ever a
great number of contagious and infectious diseases, and that this will
involve, for a time at any rate, a stringent suppression of the free
movement of familiar animals.  Utopian houses, streets and drains will
be planned and built to make rats, mice, and such-like house parasites
impossible; the race of cats and dogs providing, as it does, living
fastnesses to which such diseases as plague, influenza, catarrhs and
the like, can retreat to sally forth again -- must pass for a time out
of freedom, and the filth made by horses and the other brutes of the
highway vanish from the face of the earth.  These things make an old
story to me, and perhaps explicitness suffers through my brevity.

My botanist fails altogether to grasp what the disappearance of diseases
means.  His mind has no imaginative organ of that compass.  As I talk
his mind rests on one fixed image.  This presents what the botanist
would probably call a "dear old doggie" -- which the botanist would
make believe did not possess any sensible odour -- and it has faithful
brown eyes and understands everything you say.  The botanist would make
believe it understood him mystically, and I figure his long white hand --
which seems to me, in my more jaundiced moments, to exist entirely for
picking things and holding a lens -- patting its head, while the brute
looked things unspeakable....

The botanist shakes his head after my explanation and says quietly,
"I do not like your Utopia, if there are to be no dogs."

Perhaps that makes me a little malicious.  Indeed, I do not hate dogs,
but I care ten thousand times more for a man than for all the brutes on
the earth, and I can see, what the botanist I think cannot, that a life
spent in the delightful atmosphere of many pet animals may have too dear
a price....

I find myself back again at the comparison of the botanist and myself.
There is a profound difference in our imaginations, and I wonder whether
it is the consequence of innate character or of training, and whether he
is really the human type or I.  I am not altogether without imagination,
but what imagination I have has the most insistent disposition to square
itself with every fact in the universe.  It hypothesises very boldly, but
on the other hand it will not gravely make believe.  Now the botanist's
imagination is always busy with the most impossible make-believe.
That is the way with all children I know.  But it seems to me one
ought to pass out of it.  It isn't as though the world was an untidy
nursery it is a place of splendours indescribable for all who will
lift its veils.  It may be he is essentially different from me, but I
am much more inclined to think he is simply more childish. Always it
is make-believe.  He believes that horses are beautiful creatures, for
example, dogs are beautiful creatures, that some women are inexpressibly
lovely, and he makes believe that this is always so.  Never a word of
criticism of horse or dog or woman!  Never a word of criticism of his
impeccable friends!  Then there is his botany.  He makes believe that
all the vegetable kingdom is mystically perfect and exemplary, that all
flowers smell deliciously and are exquisitely beautiful, that ~Drosera~
does not hurt flies very much, and that onions do not smell.  Most of
the universe does not interest this nature lover at all.  But I know,
and I am querulously incapable of understanding why every one else does
not know, that a horse is beautiful in one way and quite ugly in another,
that everything has this shot-silk quality, and is all the finer for that.
When people talk of a horse as an ugly animal I think of its beautiful
moments, but when I hear a flow of indiscriminate praise of its beauty
I think of such an aspect as one gets for example from a dog-cart,
the fiddle-shaped back, and that distressing blade of the neck, the
narrow clumsy place between the ears, and the ugly glimpse of cheek.
There is, indeed, no beauty whatever save that transitory thing that
comes and comes again; all beauty is really the beauty of expression,
is really kinetic and momentary.  That is true even of those triumphs
of static endeavour achieved by Greece.  The Greek temple, for example,
is a barn with a face that at a certain angle of vision and in a certain
light has a great calm beauty.

But where are we drifting?  All such things, I hold, are cases of more
and less, and of the right moment and the right aspect, even the things
I most esteem.  There is no perfection, there is no enduring treasure.
This pet dog's beautiful affection, I say, or this other sensuous or
imaginative delight, is no doubt good, but it can be put aside if it is
incompatible with some other and wider good.  You cannot focus all good
things together.

All right action and all wise action is surely sound judgment and
courageous abandonment in the matter of such incompatibilities. If I
cannot imagine thoughts and feelings in a dog's brain that cannot possibly
be there, at least I can imagine things in the future of men that might
be there had we the will to demand them....

"I don't like this Utopia," the botanist repeats.  "You don't understand
about dogs.  To me they're human beings -- and more!  There used to be
such a jolly old dog at my aunt's at Frognal when I was a boy----"

But I do not heed his anecdote.  Something -- something of the nature of
conscience -- has suddenly jerked back the memory of that beer I drank
at Hospenthal, and puts an accusing finger on the memory.

I never have had a pet animal, I confess, though I have been fairly
popular with kittens.  But with regard to a certain petting of myself----?

Perhaps I was premature about that beer.  I have had no pet animals, but
I perceive if the Modern Utopia is going to demand the sacrifice of the
love of animals, which is, in its way, a very fine thing indeed, so much
the more readily may it demand the sacrifice of many other indulgencies,
some of which are not even fine in the lowest degree.

It is curious this haunting insistence upon sacrifice and discipline!

It is slowly becoming my dominant thought that the sort of people whose
will this Utopia embodies must be people a little heedless of small
pleasures.  You cannot focus all good things at the same time. That is
my chief discovery in these meditations at Lucerne.  Much of the rest of
this Utopia I had in a sort of way anticipated, but not this. I wonder if
I shall see my Utopian self for long and be able to talk to him freely....

We lie in the petal-strewn grass under some Judas trees beside the lake
shore, as I meander among these thoughts, and each of us, disregardful
of his companion, follows his own associations.

"Very remarkable," I say, discovering that the botanist has come to an
end with his story of that Frognal dog.

"You'd wonder how he knew," he says.

"You would."

I nibble a green blade.

"Do you realise quite," I ask, "that within a week we shall face our
Utopian selves and measure something of what we might have been?"

The botanist's face clouds.  He rolls over, sits up abruptly and puts
his lean hands about his knees.

"I don't like to think about it," he says.  "What is the good of
reckoning... might have beens?"


SECTION 5


It is pleasant to think of one's puzzling the organised wisdom of so
superior a planet as this Utopia, this moral monster State my Frankenstein
of reasoning has made, and to that pitch we have come.  When we are next
in the presence of our Lucerne official, he has the bearing of a man who
faces a mystification beyond his powers, an incredible disarrangement
of the order of Nature.  Here, for the first time in the records of
Utopian science, are two cases -- not simply one but two, and these in
each other's company! -- of duplicated thumb marks.  This, coupled with a
cock-and-bull story of an instantaneous transfer from some planet unknown
to Utopian astronomy.  That he and all his world exists only upon a
hypothesis that would explain every one of these difficulties absolutely,
is scarcely likely to occur to his obviously unphilosophic mind.

The official eye is more eloquent than the official lips and asks almost
urgently, "What in this immeasurable universe have you managed to do to
your thumbs?  And why?" But he is only a very inferior sort of official
indeed, a mere clerk of the post, and he has all the guarded reserve
of your thoroughly unoriginal man.  "You are not the two persons I
ascertained you were," he says, with the note of one resigned to communion
with unreason; "because you" -- he indicates me -- "are evidently at your
residence in London."  I smile. "That gentleman" -- he points a pen at
the botanist in a manner that is intended to dismiss my smile once for
all -- "will be in London next week.  He will be returning next Friday
from a special mission to investigate the fungoid parasites that have
been attacking the cinchona trees in Ceylon."

The botanist blesses his heart.

"Consequently" -- the official sighs at the burthen of such nonsense,
"you will have to go and consult with -- the people you ought to be."

I betray a faint amusement.

"You will have to end by believing in our planet," I say.

He waggles a negation with his head.  He would intimate his position is
too responsible a one for jesting, and both of us in our several ways
enjoy the pleasure we poor humans have in meeting with intellectual
inferiority.  "The Standing Committee of Identification," he says,
with an eye on a memorandum, "has remitted your case to the Research
Professor of Anthropology in the University of London, and they want
you to go there, if you will, and talk to him."

"What else can we do?" says the botanist.

"There's no positive compulsion," he remarks, "but your work here will
probably cease.  Here----" he pushed the neat slips of paper towards us --
"are your tickets for London, and a small but sufficient supply of money,"
-- he indicates two piles of coins and paper on either haand of him --
"for a day or so there."  He proceeds in the same dry manner to inform
us we are invited to call at our earliest convenience upon our doubles,
and upon the Professor, who is to investigate our case.

"And then?"

He pulls down the corners of his mouth in a wry deprecatory smile, eyes
us obliquely under a crumpled brow, shrugs his shoulders, and shows us
the palms of his hands.

On earth, where there is nationality, this would have been a Frenchman
-- the inferior sort of Frenchman -- the sort whose only  happiness is
in the routine security of Government employment.


SECTION 6


London will be the first Utopian city centre we shall see.

We shall find ourselves there with not a little amazement. It will be our
first experience of the swift long distance travel of Utopia, and I have
an idea -- I know not why -- that we should make the journey by night.
Perhaps I think so because the ideal of long-distance travel is surely
a restful translation less suitable for the active hours.

We shall dine and gossip and drink coffee at the pretty little tables
under the lantern-lit trees, we shall visit the theatre, and decide
to sup in the train, and so come at last to the station.  There we
shall find pleasant rooms with seats and books -- luggage all neatly
elsewhere -- and doors that we shall imagine give upon a platform.
Our cloaks and hats and such-like outdoor impedimenta will be taken in
the hall and neatly labelled for London, we shall exchange our shoes for
slippers there, and we shall sit down like men in a club.  An officious
little bell will presently call our attention to a label "London" on
the doorway, and an excellent phonograph will enforce that notice with
infinite civility.  The doors will open, and we shall walk through into
an equally comfortable gallery.

"Where is the train for London?" we shall ask a uniformed fellow Utopian.

"This is the train for London," he will say.

There will be a shutting of doors, and the botanist and I, trying not
to feel too childish, will walk exploring through the capacious train.

The resemblance to a club will strike us both.  "A ~good~ club," the
botanist will correct me.

When one travels beyond a certain speed, there is nothing but fatigue
in looking out of a window, and this corridor train, twice the width
of its poor terrestrial brother, will have no need of that distraction.
The simple device of abandoning any but a few windows, and those set high,
gives the wall space of the long corridors to books; the middle part of
the train is indeed a comfortable library with abundant arm-chairs and
couches, each with its green-shaded light, and soft carpets upon the
sound-proof floor.  Farther on will be a news-room, with a noiseless
but busy tape, at one corner, printing off messages from the wires by
the wayside, and farther still, rooms for gossip and smoking, a billiard
room, and the dining car.  Behind we shall come to bedrooms, bathrooms,
the hairdresser, and so forth.

"When shall we start?" I ask presently, as we return, rather like bashful
yokels, to the library, and the old gentleman reading the ~Arabian Nights~
in the arm-chair in the corner glances up at me with a sudden curiosity.

The botanist touches my arm and nods towards a pretty little lead-paned
window, through which we see a village sleeping under cloudy moonlight
go flashing by.  Then a skylit lake, and then a string of swaying lights,
gone with the leap of a camera shutter.

Two hundred miles an hour!

We resort to a dignified Chinese steward and secure our berths.  It is
perhaps terrestrial of us that we do not think of reading the Utopian
literature that lines the middle part of the train.  I find a bed of the
simple Utopian pattern, and lie for a time thinking -- quite tranquilly --
of this marvellous adventure.

I wonder why it is that to lie securely in bed, with the light out,
seems ever the same place, wherever in space one may chance to be?
And asleep, there is no space for us at all. I become drowsy and
incoherent and metaphysical....

The faint and fluctuating drone of the wheels below the car, re-echoed
by the flying track, is more perceptible now, but it is not unpleasantly
loud, merely a faint tinting of the quiet....

No sea crossing breaks our journey; there is nothing to prevent a Channel
tunnel in that other planet; and I wake in London.

The train has been in London some time when I awake, for these marvellous
Utopians have discovered that it is not necessary to bundle out passengers
from a train in the small hours, simply because they have arrived.
A Utopian train is just a peculiar kind of hotel corridor that flies
about the earth while one sleeps.


SECTION 7


How will a great city of Utopia strike us?

To answer that question well one must needs be artist and engineer,
and I am neither.  Moreover, one must employ words and phrases that do
not exist, for this world still does not dream of the things that may be
done with thought and steel, when the engineer is sufficiently educated
to be an artist, and the artistic intelligence has been quickened to the
accomplishment of an engineer.  How can one write of these things for
a generation which rather admires that inconvenient and gawky muddle of
ironwork and Flemish architecture, the London Tower Bridge.  When before
this, temerarious anticipators have written of the mighty buildings that
might some day be, the illustrator has blended with the poor ineffectual
splutter of the author's words, his powerful suggestion that it amounted
simply to something bulbous, florid and fluent in the vein of the onion,
and ~L'Art Nouveau~.  But here, it may be, the illustrator will not
intervene.

Art has scarcely begun in the world.

There have been a few forerunners and that is all.  Leonardo Michael
Angelo; how they would have exulted in the liberties of steel!  There
are no more pathetic documents in the archives of art than Leonardo's
memoranda.  In these, one sees him again and again reaching out as it
were, with empty desirous hands, towards the unborn possibilities of the
engineer. And Drer, too, was a Modern, with the same turn towards
creative invention.  In our times these men would have wanted to make
viaducts to bridge wild and inaccessible places, to cut and straddle
great railways athwart the mountain masses of the world.  You can see,
time after time, in Drer's work, as you can see in the imaginary
architectural landscape of the Pompeian walls, the dream of structures,
lighter and bolder than stone or brick can yield....  These Utopian town
buildings will be the realisation of such dreams.

Here will be one of the great meeting-places of mankind. Here -- I speak
of Utopian London -- will be the traditional centre of one of the great
races in the commonalty of the World State -- and here will be its
social and intellectual exchange. There will be a mighty University
here, with thousands of professors and tens of thousands of advanced
students, and here great journals of thought and speculation, mature
and splendid books of philosophy and science, and a glorious fabric of
literature will be woven and shaped, and with a teeming leisureliness,
put forth. Here will be stupendous libraries, and a mighty organisation
of museums. About these centres will cluster a great swarm of people,
and close at hand will be another centre, for I who am an Englishman
must needs stipulate that Westminster shall still be a seat of world
Empire. one of several seats, if you will -- where the ruling council
of the world assembles.  Then the arts will cluster round this city, as
gold gathers about wisdom, and here Englishmen will weave into wonderful
prose and beautiful rhythms and subtly atmospheric forms, the intricate,
austere and courageous imagination of our race.

One will come into this place as one comes into a noble mansion.  They
will have flung great arches and domes of glass above the wider spaces of
the town, the slender beauty of the perfect metal-work far overhead will
be softened to a fairy-like unsubstantiality by the mild London air.
It will be the London air we know, clear of filth and all impurity,
the same air that gives our October days their unspeakable clarity, and
makes every London twilight mysteriously beautiful. We shall go along
avenues of architecture that will be emancipated from the last memories
of the squat temple boxes of the Greek, the buxom curvatures of Rome;
the Goth in us will have taken to steel and countless new materials as
kindly as once he took to stone.  The gay and swiftly moving platforms of
the public ways will go past on either hand, carrying sporadic groups of
people, and very speedily we shall find ourselves in a sort of central
space, rich with palms and flowering bushes and statuary.  We shall
look along an avenue of trees, down a wide gorge between the cliffs of
crowded hotels, the hotels that are still glowing with internal lights,
to where the shining morning river streams dawnlit out to sea.

Great multitudes of people will pass softly to and fro in this central
space, beautiful girls and youths going to the University classes that
are held in the stately palaces about us, grave and capable men and women
going to their businesses, children meandering along to their schools,
holiday makers, lovers, setting out upon a hundred quests; and here
we shall ask for the two we more particularly seek.  A graceful little
telephone kiosk will put us within reach of them, and with a queer sense
of unreality I shall find myself talking to my Utopian twin. He has heard
of me, he wants to see me and he gives me clear directions how to come
to him.

I wonder if my Own voice sounds like that.

"Yes," I say, "then I will come as soon as we have been to our hotel."

We indulge in no eloquence upon this remarkable occasion. Yet I feel an
unusual emotional stir.  I tremble greatly, and the telephonic mouthpiece
rattles as I replace it.

And thence the botanist and I walk on to the apartments that have been
set aside for us, and into which the poor little rolls of the property
that has accumulated about us in Utopia, our earthly raiment, and a
change of linen and the like, have already been delivered.  As we go I
find I have little to say to my companion, until presently I am struck
by a transitory wonder that he should have so little to say to me.

"I can still hardly realise," I say, "that I am going to see myself --
as I might have been."

"No," he says, and relapses at once into his own preoccupation.

For a moment my wonder as to what he should be thinking about brings me
near to a double self-forgetfulness.

I realise we are at the entrance of our hotel before I can formulate
any further remark.

"This is the place," I say.



CHAPTER EIGHT

MY UTOPIAN SELF


SECTION 1


It falls to few of us to interview our better selves.  My Utopian self
is, of course, my better self -- according to my best endeavours -- and
I must confess myself fully alive to the difficulties of the situation.
When I came to this Utopia I had no thought of any such intimate
self-examination.

The whole fabric of that other universe sways for a moment as I come
into his room, into his clear and ordered work-room. I am trembling.
A figure rather taller than myself stands against the light.

He comes towards me, and I, as I advance to meet him, stumble against
a chair.  Then, still without a word, we are clasping hands.

I stand now so that the light falls upon him, and I can see his face
better.  He is a little taller than I, younger looking and sounder
looking; he has missed an illness or so, and there is no scar over his
eye.  His training has been subtly finer than mine; he has made himself
a better face than mine....  These things I might have counted upon.
I can fancy he winces with a twinge of sympathetic understanding at
my manifest inferiority.  Indeed, I come, trailing clouds of earthly
confusion and weakness; I bear upon me all the defects of my world.
He wears, I see, that white tunic with the purple band that I have already
begun to consider the proper Utopian clothing for grave men, and his
face is clean shaven. We forget to speak at first in the intensity of
our mutual inspection.  When at last I do gain my voice it is to say
something quite different from the fine, significant openings of my
premeditated dialogues.

"You have a pleasant room," I remark, and look about a little,
disconcerted because there is no fireplace for me to put my back against,
or hearth-rug to stand upon.  He pushed me a chair, into which I plump,
and we hang over an immensity of conversational possibilities.

"I say," I plunge, "what do you think of me?  You don't think I'm an
impostor?"

"Not now that I have seen you.  No."

"Am I so like you?"

"Like me and your story -- exactly."

"You haven't any doubt left?" I ask.

"Not in the least since I saw you enter.  You come from the world beyond
Sirius, twin to this.  Eh?"

"And you don't want to know how I got here?"

"I've ceased even to wonder how I got here," he says, with a laugh that
echoes mine.

He leans back in his chair, and I in mine, and the absurd parody of our
attitude strikes us both.

"Well?" we say, simultaneously, and laugh together.

I will confess this meeting is more difficult even than I anticipated.


SECTION 2


Our conversation at that first encounter would do very little to
develop the Modern Utopia in my mind.  Inevitably, it would be personal
and emotional.  He would tell me how he stood in his world, and I how
I stood in mine.  I should have to tell him things, I should have to
explain things----

No, the conversation would contribute nothing to a modern Utopia.

And so I leave it out.


SECTION 3


But I should go back to my botanist in a state of emotional relaxation.
At first I should not heed the fact that he, too, had been in some manner
stirred.  "I have seen him," I should say, needlessly, and seem to be
on the verge of telling the untellable.  Then I should fade off into:
"It's the strangest thing."

He would interrupt me with his own preoccupation.  "You know," he would
say, "I've seen some one."

I should pause and look at him.

"She is in this world," he says.

"Who is in this world?"

"Mary!"

I have not heard her name before, but I understand, of course, at once.

"I saw her," he explains.

"Saw her?"

"I'm certain it was her.  Certain.  She was far away across those gardens
near here -- and before I had recovered from my amazement she had gone!
But it was Mary."

He takes my arm.  "You know I did not understand this," he says.  "I did
not really understand that when you said Utopia, you meant I was to meet
her -- in happiness."

"I didn't."

"It works out at that."

"You haven't met her yet."

"I shall.  It makes everything different.  To tell you the truth I've
rather hated this Utopia of yours at times.  You mustn't mind my saying
it, but there's something of the Gradgrind----"

Probably I should swear at that.

"What?" he says.

"Nothing."

"But you spoke?"

"I was purring.  I'm a Gradgrind -- it's quite right -- anything you
can say about Herbert Spencer, vivisectors, materialistic Science or
Atheists, applies without correction to me.  Begbie away!  But now you
think better of a modern Utopia?  Was the lady looking well?"

"It was her real self.  Yes.  Not the broken woman I met -- in the
real world."

"And as though she was pining for you."

He looks puzzled.

"Look there!" I say.

He looks.

We are standing high above the ground in the loggia into which our
apartments open, and I point across the soft haze of the public gardens
to a tall white mass of University buildings that rises with a free
and fearless gesture, to lift saluting pinnacles against the clear
evening sky.  "Don't you think that rather more beautiful than -- say --
our National Gallery?"

He looks at it critically.  "There's a lot of metal in it," he objects.
"What?"

I purred.  "But, anyhow, whatever you can't see is that, you can,
I suppose, see that it is different from anything in your world -- it
lacks the kindly humanity of a red-brick Queen Anne villa residence, with
its gables and bulges and bow windows, and its stained glass fanlight,
and so forth.  It lacks the self-complacent unreasonableness of Board
of Works classicism.  There's something in its proportions -- as though
some one with brains had taken a lot of care to get it quite right, some
one who not only knew what metal can do, but what a University ought
to be, somebody who had found the Gothic spirit enchanted, petrified,
in a cathedral, and had set it free."

"But what has this," he asks, "to do with her?"

"Very much," I say.  "This is not the same world.  If she is here,
she will be younger in spirit and wiser.  She will be in many ways
more refined----"

"No one----" he begins, with a note of indignation.

"No, no!  She couldn't be.  I was wrong there.  But she will be different.
Grant that at any rate.  When you go forward to speak to her, she may not
remember -- very many things ~you~ may remember.  Things that happened
at Frognal -- dear romantic walks through the Sunday summer evenings,
practically you two alone, you in your adolescent silk hat and your nice
gentlemanly gloves....  Perhaps that did not happen here!  And she may
have other memories -- of things -- that down there haven't happened.
You noted her costume She wasn't by any chance one of the ~samurai~?"

He answers, with a note of satisfaction, "No!  She wore a womanly dress
of greyish green."

"Probably under the Lesser Rule."

"I don't know what you mean by the Lesser Rule.  She wasn't one of
the ~samurai~."

"And, after all, you know -- I keep on reminding you, and you keep on
losing touch with the fact, that this world contains your double."

He pales, and his countenance is disturbed.  Thank Heaven, I've touched
him at last!

"This world contains your double.  But, conceivably, everything may be
different here.  The whole romantic story may have run a different course.
It was as it was in our world, by the accidents of custom and proximity.
Adolescence is a defenceless plastic period.  You are a man to form
great affections -- noble, great affections.  You might have met any
one almost at that season and formed the same attachment."

For a time he is perplexed and troubled by this suggestion.

"No," he says, a little doubtfully.  "No.  It was herself...." Then,
emphatically, "~No!~"


SECTION 4


For a time we say no more, and I fall musing about my strange encounter
with my Utopian double.  I think of the confessions I have just
made to him, the strange admissions both to him and myself.  I have
stirred up the stagnations of my own emotional life, the pride that
has slumbered, the hopes and disappointments that have not troubled me
for years.  There are things that happened to me in my adolescence that
no discipline of reason will ever bring to a just proportion for me,
the first humiliations I was made to suffer, the waste of all the fine
irrecoverable loyalties and passions of my youth. The dull base caste of
my little personal tragi-comedy -- I have ostensibly forgiven, I have
for the most part forgotten -- and yet when I recall them I hate each
actor still.  Whenever it comes into my mind -- I do my best to prevent
it -- there it is, and these detestable people blot out the stars for me.

I have told all that story to my double, and he has listened with
understanding eyes.  But for a little while those squalid memories will
not sink back into the deeps.  We lean, side by side, over our balcony,
lost in such egotistical absorptions, quite heedless of the great palace
of noble dreams to which our first enterprise has brought us.


SECTION 5


I can understand the botanist this afternoon; for once we are in the
same key.  My own mental temper has gone for the day, and I know what
it means to be untempered.  Here is a world and a glorious world, and
it is for me to take hold of it, to have to do with it, here and now,
and behold!  I can only think that I am burnt and scarred, and there
rankles that wretched piece of business, the mean unimaginative triumph
of my antagonist----

I wonder how many men have any real freedom of mind, are, in truth,
unhampered by such associations, to whom all that is great and noble
in life does not, at times at least, if not always, seem secondary to
obscure rivalries and considerations, to the petty hates that are like
germs in the blood, to the lust for self-assertion, to dwarfish pride,
to affections they gave in pledge even before they were men.

The botanist beside me dreams, I know, of vindications for that woman.

All this world before us, and its order and liberty, are no more than
a painted scene before which he is to meet Her at last freed from "that
scoundrel."

He expects "that scoundrel" really to be present and, as it were,
writhing under their feet....

I wonder if that man ~was~ a scoundrel.  He has gone wrong on earth,
no doubt, has failed and degenerated, but what was it sent him wrong?
Was his failure inherent, or did some net of cross purposes tangle about
his feet?  Suppose he is not a failure in Utopia!...

I wonder that this has never entered the botanist's head.

He, with his vaguer mind, can overlook -- spite of my ruthless reminders
-- all that would mar his vague anticipations. That, too,, if I suggested
it, he would overcome and disregard. He has the most amazing power of
resistance to uncongenial ideas; amazing that is, to me.  He hates the
idea of meeting his double, and, consequently, so soon as I cease to speak
of that, with scarcely an effort of his will it fades again from his mind.

Down below in the gardens two children pursue one another, and one,
near caught, screams aloud and rouses me from my reverie.

I follow their little butterfly antics until they vanish beyond a thicket
of flowering rhododendra, and then my eyes go back to the great faade
of the University buildings.

But I am in no mood to criticise architecture.

Why should a modern Utopia insist upon slipping out of the hands of its
creator and becoming the background of a personal drama -- of such a
silly little drama?

The botanist will not see Utopia in any other way.  He tests it entirely
by its reaction upon the individual persons and things he knows;
he dislikes it because he suspects it of wanting to lethal chamber
his aunt's "dear old doggie," and now he is reconciled to it because a
certain "Mary" looks much younger and better here than she did on earth.
And here am I, near fallen into the same way of dealing!

We agree to purge this State and all the people in it of traditions,
associations, bias, laws, and artificial entanglements, and begin anew;
but we have no power to liberate ourselves.  Our past, even its accidents,
its accidents above all, and ourselves, are one.



CHAPTER NINE

THE SAMURAI


SECTION 1


Neither my Utopian double nor I love emotion sufficiently to cultivate it,
and my feelings are in a state of seemly subordination when we meet again.
He is now in possession of some clear, general ideas about my own world,
and I can broach almost at once the thoughts that have been growing
and accumulating since my arrival in this planet of my dreams. We find
our interest in a humanised state-craft makes us, in spite of our vast
difference in training and habits, curiously akin.

I put it to him that I came to Utopia with but very vague ideas of the
method of government, biased, perhaps, a little in favour of certain
electoral devices, but for the rest indeterminate, and that I have come
to perceive more and more clearly that the large intricacy of Utopian
organisation demands more powerful and efficient method of control
than electoral methods can give.  I have come to distinguish among the
varied costumes and the innumerable types of personality Utopia presents,
certain men and women of a distinctive costume and bearing, and I know
now that these people constitute an order, the ~samurai~, the "voluntary
nobility," which is essential in the scheme of the Utopian State.  I know
that this order is open to every physically and mentally healthy adult
in the Utopian State who will observe its prescribed austere rule of
living, that much of the responsible work of the State is reserved for it,
and I am inclined now at the first onset of realisation to regard it as
far more significant than it really is in the Utopian scheme, as being,
indeed, in itself and completely the Utopian scheme.  My predominant
curiosity concerns the organisation of this order.  As it has developed
in my mind, it has reminded me more and more closely of that strange
class of guardians which constitutes the essential substance of Plato's
~Republic~, and it is with an implicit reference to Plato's profound
intuitions that I and my double discuss this question.

To clarify our comparison he tells me something of the history of
Utopia, and incidentally it becomes necessary to make a correction in
the assumptions upon which I have based my enterprise.  We are assuming
a world identical in every respect with the real planet Earth, except for
the profoundest differences in the mental content of life.  This implies a
different literature, a different philosophy, and a different history, and
so soon as I come to talk to him I find that though it remains unavoidable
that we should assume the correspondence of the two populations, man for
man -- unless we would face unthinkable complications -- we must assume
also that a great succession of persons of extraordinary character and
mental gifts, who on earth died in childhood or at birth, or who never
learnt to read, or who lived and died amidst savage or brutalising
surroundings that gave their gifts no scope, did in Utopia encounter
happier chances, and take up the development and application of social
theory -- from the time of the first Utopists in a steady onward progress,
down to the present hour. [Footnote: One might assume as an alternative to
this that amidst the four-fifths of the Greek literature now lost to the
world, there perished, neglected, some book of elementary significance,
some earlier ~Novum Organum~, that in Utopia survived to achieve the
profoundest consequences.]  The differences of conditions, therefore,
had widened with each successive year.  Jesus Christ had been born into
a liberal and progressive Roman Empire that spread from the Arctic Ocean
to the Bight of Benin, and was to know no Decline and Fall, and Mahomet,
instead of embodying the dense prejudices of Arab ignorance, opened his
eyes upon an intellectual horizon already nearly as wide as the world.

And through this empire the flow of thought, the flow of intention,
poured always more abundantly.  There were wars, but they were conclusive
wars that established new and more permanent relations, that swept aside
obstructions, and abolished centres of decay; there were prejudices
tempered to an ordered criticism, and hatreds that merged at last in
tolerant reactions.  It was several hundred years ago that the great
organisation of the ~samurai~ came into its present form. And it was
this organisation's widely sustained activities that had shaped and
established the World State in Utopia.

This organisation of the ~samurai~ was a quite deliberate invention.
It arose in the course of social and political troubles and complications,
analogous to those of our own time on earth, and was, indeed, the last
of a number of political and religious experiments dating back to the
first dawn of philosophical state-craft in Greece.  That hasty despair
of specialisation for government that gave our poor world individualism,
democratic liberalism, and anarchism, and that curious disregard of the
fund of enthusiasm and self-sacrifice in men, which is the fundamental
weakness of worldly economics, do not appear in the history of Utopian
thought. All that history is pervaded with the recognition of the fact
that self-seeking is no more the whole of human life than the satisfaction
of hunger; that it is an essential of a man's existence no doubt, and
that under stress of evil circumstances it may as entirely obsess him
as would the food hunt during famine, but that life may pass beyond
to an illimitable world of emotions and effort.  Every sane person
consists of possibilities beyond the unavoidable needs, is capable of
disinterested feeling, even if it amounts only to enthusiasm for a sport
or an industrial employment well done, for an art, or for a locality
or class.  In our world now, as in the Utopian past, this impersonal
energy of a man goes out into religious emotion and work, into patriotic
effort, into artistic enthusiasms, into games and amateur employments,
and an enormous proportion of the whole world's fund of effort wastes
itself in religious and political misunderstandings and conflicts, and
in unsatisfying amusements and unproductive occupations. In a modern
Utopia there will, indeed, be no perfection; in Utopia there must also
be friction, conflicts, and waste, but the waste will be enormously less
than in our world.  And the co-ordination of activities this relatively
smaller waste will measure, will be the achieved end for which the order
of the ~samurai~ was first devised.

Inevitably such an order must have first arisen among a clash of social
forces and political systems as a revolutionary organisation.  It must
have set before itself the attainment of some such Utopian ideal as
this modern Utopia does, in the key of mortal imperfection, realise.
At first it may have directed itself to research and discussion, to
the elaboration of its ideal, to the discussion of a plan of campaign,
but at some stage it must have assumed a more militant organisation,
and have prevailed against and assimilated the pre-existing political
organisations, and to all intents and purposes have become this present
synthesised World State.  Traces of that militancy would, therefore,
pervade it still, and a campaigning quality -- no longer against specific
disorders, but against universal human weaknesses, and the inanimate
forces that trouble man -- still remain as its essential quality.

"Something of this kind," I should tell my double, "had arisen in our
thought" -- I jerk my head back to indicate an infinitely distant planet
-- "just before I came upon these explorations.  The ideaa had reached me,
for example, of something to be called a New Republic, which was to be
in fact an organisation for revolution something after the fashion of
your ~samurai~, as I understand them -- only most of the organisation
and the rule of life still remained to be invented. All sorts of people
were thinking of something in that way about the time of my coming.
The idea, as it reached me, was pretty crude in several respects.
It ignored the high possibility of a synthesis of languages in the
future; it came from a literary man, who wrote only English, and, as
I read him -- he was a little vague in his proposals -- it was to be a
purely English-speaking movement.  And his ideas were coloured too much
by the peculiar opportunism of his time; he seemed to have more than half
an eye for a prince or a millionaire of genius; he seemed looking here
and there for support and the structural elements of a party.  Still,
the idea of a comprehensive movement of disillusioned and illuminated
men behind the shams and patriotisms, the spites and personalities of
the ostensible world, was there."

I added some particulars.

"Our movement had something of that spirit in the beginning," said my
Utopian double.  "But while your men seem to be thinking disconnectedly,
and upon a very narrow and fragmentary basis of accumulated conclusions,
ours had a fairly comprehensive science of human association, and a very
careful analysis of the failures of preceding beginnings to draw upon.
After all, your world must be as full as ours was of the wreckage and
decay of previous attempts; churches, aristocracies, orders, cults...."

"Only at present we seem to have lost heart altogether and now there are
no new religions, no new orders, no new cults -- no beginnings any more."

"But that's only a resting phase, perhaps.  You were saying----"

"Oh! -- let that distressful planet alone for a time!  Tell me how you
manage in Utopia."


SECTION 2


The social theorists of Utopia, my double explained, did not base their
schemes upon the classification of men into labour and capital, the
landed interest, the liquor trade, and the like.  They esteemed these
as accidental categories, indefinitely amenable to statesmanship, and
they looked for some practical and real classification upon which to
base organisation. [Footnote: In that they seem to have profited by a
more searching criticism of early social and political speculations than
our earth has yet undertaken.  The social speculations of the Greeks, for
example, had just the same primary defect as the economic speculations of
the eighteenth century they began with the assumption that the general
conditions of the prevalent state of affairs were permanent.]  But,
on the other hand, the assumption that men are unclassifiable, because
practically homogeneous, which underlies modern democratic methods
and all the fallacies of our equal justice, is even more alien to the
Utopian mind.  Throughout Utopia there is, of course, no other than
provisional classifications, since every being is regarded as finally
unique, but for political and social purposes things have long rested
upon a classification of temperaments, which attends mainly to differences
in the range and quality and character of the individual imagination.

This Utopian classification was a rough one, but it served its purpose
to determine the broad lines of political organisation; it was so
far unscientific that many individuals fall between or within two or
even three of its classes.  But that was met by giving the correlated
organisation a compensatory looseness of play.  Four main classes of
mind were distinguished, called, respectively, the Poietic, the Kinetic,
the Dull, and the Base.  The former two are supposed to constitute the
living tissue of the State; the latter are the fulcra and resistances,
the bone and cover of its body.  They are not hereditary classes, nor is
there any attempt to develop any class by special breeding, simply because
the intricate interplay of heredity is untraceable and incalculable.
They are classes to which people drift of their own accord.  Education is
uniform until differentiation becomes unmistakable, and each man (and
woman) must establish his position with regard to the lines of this
abstract classification by his own quality, choice, and development....

The Poietic or creative class of mental individuality embraces a wide
range of types, but they agree in possessing imaginations that range
beyond the known and accepted, and that involve the desire to bring the
discoveries made in such excursions, into knowledge and recognition.
The scope and direction of the imaginative excursion may vary very
greatly. It may be the invention of something new or the discovery of
something hitherto unperceived.  When the invention or discovery is
primarily beauty then we have the artistic type of Poietic mind; when
it is not so, we have the true scientific man.  The range of discovery
may be narrowed as it is in the art of Whistler or the science of a
cytologist, or it may embrace a wide extent of relevance, until at last
both artist or scientific inquirer merge in the universal reference of
the true philosopher. To the accumulated activities of the Poietic type,
reacted upon by circumstances, are due almost all the forms assumed by
human thought and feeling.  All religious ideas, all ideas of what is
good or beautiful, entered life through the Poietic inspirations of man.
Except for processes of decay, the forms of the human future must come
also through men of this same type, and it is a primary essential to
our modern idea of an abundant secular progress that these activities
should be unhampered and stimulated.

The Kinetic class consists of types, various, of course, and merging
insensibly along the boundary into the less representative constituents
of the Poietic group, but distinguished by a more restricted range
of imagination.  Their imaginations do not range beyond the known,
experienced, and accepted, though within these limits they may imagine
as vividly or more vividly than members of the former group. They are
often very clever and capable people, but they do not do, and they do
not desire to do, new things.  The more vigorous individuals of this
class are the most teachable people in the world, and they are generally
more moral and more trustworthy than the Poietic types.  They live --
while the Poietics are always something of experimentalists with life.
The characteristics of either of these two classes may be associated
with a good or bad physique, with excessive or defective energy, with
exceptional keenness of the senses in some determinate direction or
such-like "bent," and the Kinetic type, just as the Poietic type, may
display an imagination of restricted or of the most universal range.
But a fairly energetic Kinetic is probably the nearest thing to that
ideal our earthly anthropologists have in mind when they speak of the
"Normal" human being.  The very definition of the Poietic class involves
a certain abnormality.

The Utopians distinguished two extremes of this Kinetic class according
to the quality of their imaginative preferences. the Dan and Beersheba,
as it were, of this division.  At one end is the mainly intellectual,
unoriginal type, which, with energy of personality, makes an admirable
judge or administrator and without it an uninventive, laborious, common
mathematician, or common scholar, or common scientific man; while at the
other end is the mainly emotional, unoriginal man, the type to which --
at a low level of personal energy -- my botanist inclines.  The second
type includes, amidst its energetic forms, great actors, and popular
politicians and preachers.  Between these extremes is a long and wide
region of varieties, into which one would put most of the people who
form the reputable workmen, the men of substance, the trustworthy men
and women, the pillars of society on earth.

Below these two classes in the Utopian scheme of things, and merging
insensibly into them, come the Dull.  The Dull are persons of altogether
inadequate imagination, the people who never seem to learn thoroughly,
or hear distinctly, or think clearly.  (I believe if every one is to
be carefully educated they would be considerably in the minority in the
world, but it is quite possible that will not be the reader's opinion.
It is clearly a matter of an arbitrary line.)  They are the stupid people,
the incompetent people, the formal, imitative people, the people who,
in any properly organised State, should, as a class, gravitate towards
and below the minimum wage that qualifies for marriage.  The laws of
heredity are far too mysterious for such offspring as they do produce
to be excluded from a fair chance in the world, but for themselves,
they count neither for work nor direction in the State.

Finally, with a bold disregard of the logician's classificatory rules,
these Utopian statesmen who devised the World State, hewed out in theory
a class of the Base.  The Base may, indeed, be either poietic, kinetic,
or dull, though most commonly they are the last, and their definition
concerns not so much the quality of their imagination as a certain bias
in it, that to a statesman makes it a matter for special attention.
The Base have a narrower and more persistent egoistic reference than
the common run of humanity; they may boast, but they have no frankness;
they have relatively great powers of concealment, and they are capable
of, and sometimes have an aptitude and inclination towards, cruelty.
In the queer phrasing of earthly psychology with its clumsy avoidance
of analysis, they have no "moral sense."  They count as an antagonism
to the State organisation.

Obviously, this is the rudest of classifications, and no Utopian has
ever supposed it to be a classification for individual application,
a classification so precise that one can say, this man is "poietic,"
and that man is "base."  In actual experience these qualities mingle
and vary in every possible way.  It is not a classification for Truth,
but a classification to an end.  Taking humanity as a multitude, of
unique individuals in mass, one may, for practical purposes, deal with
it far more conveniently by disregarding its uniqueness and its mixed
cases altogether, and supposing it to be an assembly of poietic, kinetic,
dull, and base people.  In many respects it behaves as if it were that.
The State, dealing as it does only with non-individualised affairs,
is not only justified in disregarding, but is bound to disregard,
a man's special distinction, and to provide for him on the strength
of his prevalent aspect as being on the whole poietic, kinetic, or
what not.  In a world of hasty judgments and carping criticism, it
cannot be repeated too often that the fundamental ideas of a modern
Utopia imply everywhere and in everything, margins and elasticities,
a certain universal compensatory looseness of play.


SECTION 3


Now these Utopian statesmen who founded the World State put the problem
of social organisation in the following fashion: -- To contrive a
revolutionary movement that shall absorb all existing governments and
fuse them with itself, and that must be rapidly progressive and adaptable,
and yet coherent, persistent, powerful, and efficient.

The problem of combining progress with political stability had never
been accomplished in Utopia before that time, any more than it has been
accomplished on earth.  Just as on earth, Utopian history was a succession
of powers rising and falling in an alternation of efficient conservative
with unstable liberal States.  Just as on earth, so in Utopia, the kinetic
type of men had displayed a more or less unintentional antagonism to
the poietic.  The general life-history of a State had been the same
on either planet.  First, through poietic activities, the idea of a
community has developed, and the State has shaped itself; poietic men
have arisen first in this department of national life, and then that,
and have given place to kinetic men of a high type -- for it seems
to be in their nature that poietic men should be mutually repulsive,
and not succeed and develop one another consecutively -- and a period
of expansion and vigour has set in.  The general poietic activity has
declined with the development of an efficient and settled social and
political organisation; the statesman has given way to the politician
who has incorporated the wisdom of the statesman with his own energy,
the original genius in arts, letters, science, and every department
of activity to the cultivated and scholarly man.  The kinetic man
of wide range, who has assimilated his poietic predecessor, succeeds
with far more readiness than his poietic contemporary in almost every
human activity.  The latter is by his very nature undisciplined and
experimental, and is positively hampered by precedents and good order.
With this substitution of the efficient for the creative type, the
State ceases to grow, first in this department of activity, and then in
that, and so long as its conditions remain the same it remains orderly
and efficient.  But it has lost its power of initiative and change; its
power of adaptation is gone, and with that secular change of conditions
which is the law of life, stresses must arise within and without, and
bring at last either through revolution or through defeat the release
of fresh poietic power.  The process, of course, is not in its entirety
simple; it may be masked by the fact that one department of activity may
be in its poietic stage, while another is in a phase of realisation.
In the United States of America, for example, during the nineteenth
century, there was great poietic activity in industrial organisation,
and none whatever in political philosophy; but a careful analysis of the
history of any period will show the rhythm almost invariably present,
and the initial problem before the Utopian philosopher, therefore, was
whether this was an inevitable alternation, whether human progress was
necessarily a series of developments, collapses, and fresh beginnings,
after an interval of disorder, unrest, and often great unhappiness,
or whether it was possible to maintain a secure, happy, and progressive
State beside an unbroken flow of poietic activity.

Clearly they decided upon the second alternative.  If, indeed, I am
listening to my Utopian self, then they not only decided the problem
could be solved, but they solved it.

He tells me how they solved it.

A modern Utopia differs from all the older Utopias in its recognition of
the need of poietic activities -- one sees this new consideration creeping
into thought for the first time in the phrasing of Comte's insistence that
"spiritual" must precede political reconstruction, and in his admission
of the necessity of recurrent books and poems about Utopias -- and at
first this recognition appears to admit only an added complication
to a problem already unmanageably complex.  Comte's separation of
the activities of a State into the spiritual and material does, to
a certain extent, anticipate this opposition of poietic and kinetic,
but the intimate texture of his mind was dull and hard, the conception
slipped from him again, and his suppression of literary activities,
and his imposition of a rule of life upon the poietic types, who are
least able to sustain it, mark how deeply he went under.  To a large
extent he followed the older Utopists in assuming that the philosophical
and constructive problem could be done once for all, and he worked the
results out simply under an organised kinetic government. But what seems
to be merely an addition to the difficulty may in the end turn out to be
a simplification, just as the introduction of a fresh term to an intricate
irreducible mathematical expression will at times bring it to unity.

Now philosophers after my Utopian pattern, who find the ultimate
significance in life in individuality, novelty, and the undefined,
would not only regard the poietic element as the most important in
human society, but would perceive quite clearly the impossibility of its
organisation.  This, indeed, is simply the application to the moral and
intellectual fabric of the principles already applied in discussing the
State control of reproduction (in Chapter Six, Section 2).  But just as
in the case of births it was possible for the State to frame limiting
conditions within which individuality plays more freely than in the
void, so the founders of this modern Utopia believed it possible to
define conditions under which every individual born with poietic gifts
should be enabled and encouraged to give them a full development, in art,
philosophy, invention, or discovery. Certain general conditions presented
themselves as obviously reasonable: -- to give every citizen as good
an education as he or she could acquire, for example; to so frame it
that the directed educational process would never at any period occupy
the whole available time of the learner, but would provide throughout a
marginal free leisure with opportunities for developing idiosyncrasies,
and to ensure by the expedient of a minimum wage for a specified amount
of work, that leisure and opportunity did not cease throughout life.

But, in addition to thus making poietic activities universally possible,
the founders of this modern Utopia sought to supply incentives, which
was an altogether more difficult research, a problem in its nature
irresolvably complex, and admitting of no systematic solution.  But my
double told me of a great variety of devices by which poetic men and
women were given honour and enlarged freedoms, so soon as they produced
an earnest of their quality, and he explained to me how great an ambition
they might entertain.

There were great systems of laboratories attached to every municipal force
station at which research could be conducted under the most favourable
conditions, and every mine, and, indeed, almost every great industrial
establishment, was saddled under its lease with similar obligations.
So much for poietic ability and research in physical science.  The World
State tried the claims of every living contributor to any materially
valuable invention, and paid or charged a royalty on its use that went
partly to him personally, and partly to the research institution that
had produced him.  In the matter of literature and the philosophical and
sociological sciences, every higher educational establishment carried its
studentships, its fellowships, its occasional lectureships, and to produce
a poem, a novel, a speculative work of force or merit, was to be come the
object of a generous competition between rival Universities.  In Utopia,
any author has the option either of publishing his works through the
public bookseller as a private speculation, or, if he is of sufficient
merit, of accepting a University endowment and conceding his copyright
to the University press.  All sorts of grants in the hands of committees
of the most varied constitution, supplemented these academic resources,
and ensured that no possible contributor to the wide flow of the Utopian
mind slipped into neglect. Apart from those who engaged mainly in teaching
and administration, my double told me that the world-wide House of Saloman
[Footnote: ~The New Atlantis~.] thus created sustained over a million men.
For all the rarity of large fortunes, therefore, no original man with
the desire and capacity for material or mental experiments went long
without resources and the stimulus of attention, criticism, and rivalry.

"And finally," said my double, "our Rules ensure a considerable
understanding of the importance of poietic activities in the majority
of the ~samurai~, in whose hands as a class all the real power of the
world resides."

"Ah!" said I, "and now we come to the thing that interests me most.
For it is quite clear, in my mind, that these ~samurai~ form the real
body of the State.  All this time that I have spent going to and fro
in this planet, it has been growing upon me that this order of men and
women, wearing such a uniform as you wear, and with faces strengthened by
discipline and touched with devotion, is the Utopian reality; but that
for them, the whole fabric of these fair appearances would crumble and
tarnish, shrink and shrivel, until at last, back I should be amidst the
grime and disorders of the life of earth. Tell me about these ~samurai~,
who remind me of Plato's guardians, who look like Knights Templars,
who bear a name that recalls the swordsmen of Japan... and whose uniform
you yourself are wearing.  What are they?  Are they an hereditary caste,
a specially educated order, an elected class? For, certainly, this world
turns upon them as a door upon its hinges."


SECTION 4


"I follow the Common Rule, as many men do," said my double, answering
my allusion to his uniform almost apologetically.  "But my own work is,
in its nature, poietic; there is much dissatisfaction with our isolation
of criminals upon islands, and I am analysing the psychology of prison
officials and criminals in general with a view to some better scheme. I am
supposed to be ingenious with expedients in this direction. Typically, the
~samurai~ are engaged in administrative work.  Practically the whole of
the responsible rule of the world is in their hands; all our head teachers
and disciplinary heads of colleges, our judges, barristers, employers of
labour beyond a certain limit, practising medical men, legislators, must
be ~samurai~, and all the executive committees, and so forth, that play
so large a part in our affairs are drawn by lot exclusively from them.
The order is not hereditary -- we know just enough of biology and the
uncertainties of inheritance to know how silly that would be -- and
it does not require an early consecration or novitiate or ceremonies
and initiations of that sort.  The ~samurai~ are, in fact, volunteers.
Any intelligent adult in a reasonably healthy and efficient state may,
at any age after five-and-twenty, become one of the ~samurai~, and take
a hand in the universal control."

"Provided he follows the Rule."

"Precisely -- provided he follows the Rule."

"I have heard the phrase, `voluntary nobility.'"

"That was the idea of our Founders.  They made a noble and privileged
order -- open to the whole world.  No one could complain of an unjust
exclusion, for the only thing that could exclude from the order was
unwillingness or inability to follow the Rule."

"But the Rule might easily have been made exclusive of special lineages
and races."

"That wasn't their intention.  The Rule was planned to exclude the dull,
to be unattractive to the base, and to direct and co-ordinate all sound
citizens of good intent."

"And it has succeeded?"

"As well as anything finite can.  Life is still imperfect, still a thick
felt of dissatisfactions and perplexing problems, but most certainly the
quality of all its problems has been raised, and there has been no war,
no grinding poverty, not half the disease, and an enormous increase of
the order, beauty, and resources of life since the ~samurai~, who began
as a private aggressive cult, won their way to the rule of the world."

"I would like to have that history," I said.  "I expect there was
fighting?"  He nodded.  "But first -- tell me about the Rule."

"The Rule aims to exclude the dull and base altogether, to discipline
the impulses and emotions, to develop a moral habit and sustain a man
in periods of stress, fatigue, and temptation, to produce the maximum
co-operation of all men of good intent, and, in fact, to keep all the
~samurai~ in a state of moral and bodily health and efficiency.  It does
as much of this as well as it can, but, of course, like all general
propositions, it does not do it in any case with absolute precision.
On the whole, it is so good that most men who, like myself, are doing
poietic work, and who would be just as well off without obedience, find
a satisfaction in adhesion.  At first, in the militant days, it was
a trifle hard and uncompromising; it had rather too strong an appeal
to the moral prig and harshly righteous man, but it has undergone,
and still undergoes, revision and expansion, and every year it becomes
a little better adapted to the need of a general rule of life that all
men may try to follow.  We have now a whole literature, with many very
fine things in it, written about the Rule."

He glanced at a little book on his desk, took it up as if to show it me,
then put it down again.

"The Rule consists of three parts; there is the list of things that
qualify, the list of things that must not be done, and the list of things
that must be done.  Qualification exacts a little exertion, as evidence
of good faith, and it is designed to weed out the duller dull and many
of the base.  Our schooling period ends now about fourteen, and a small
number of boys and girls -- about three per cent. -- are set aside then
as unteachable, as, in fact, nearly idiotic; the rest go on to a college
or upper school."

"All your population?"

"With that exception."

"Free?"

"Of course.  And they pass out of college at eighteen. There are several
different college courses, but one or other must be followed and a
satisfactory examination passed at the end -- perhaps ten per cent.
fail -- and the Rule requires that the candidate for the ~samurai~
must have passed."

"But a very good man is sometimes an idle schoolboy."

"We admit that.  And so any one who has failed to pass the college leaving
examination may at any time in later life sit for it again and again
and again.  Certain carefully specified things excuse it altogether."

"That makes it fair.  But aren't there people who cannot pass
examinations?"

"People of nervous instability----"

"But they may be people of great though irregular poietic gifts."

"Exactly.  That is quite possible.  But we don't want that sort of
people among our ~samurai~.  Passing an examination is a proof of a
certain steadiness of purpose, a certain self-control and submission----"

"Of a certain `ordinariness.'"

"Exactly what is wanted."

"Of course, those others can follow other careers."

"Yes.  That's what we want them to do.  And, besides these two
educational qualifications, there are two others of a similar kind
of more debatable value.  One is practically not in operation now.
Our Founders put it that a candidate for the ~samurai~ must possess
what they called a Technique, and, as it operated in the beginning,
he had to hold the qualification for a doctor, for a lawyer, for a
military officer, or an engineer, or teacher, or have painted acceptable
pictures, or written a book, or something of the sort.  He had, in fact,
as people say, to `be something,' or to have `done something.' It was
a regulation of vague intention even in the beginning, and it became
catholic to the pitch of absurdity.  To play a violin skilfully has
been accepted as sufficient for this qualification. There may have been
a reason in the past for this provision; in those days there were many
daughters of prosperous parents -- and even some sons -- who did nothing
whatever but idle uninterestingly in the world, and the organisation
might have suffered by their invasion, but that reason has gone now,
and the requirement remains a merely ceremonial requirement.  But, on
the other hand, another has developed. Our Founders made a collection
of several volumes, which they called, collectively, the Book of the
Samurai, a compilation of articles and extracts, poems and prose pieces,
which were supposed to embody the idea of the order.  It was to play
the part for the ~samurai~ that the Bible did for the ancient Hebrews.
To tell you the truth, the stuff was of very unequal merit; there was
a lot of very second-rate rhetoric, and some nearly namby-pamby verse.
There was also included some very obscure verse and prose that had the
trick of seeming wise.  But for all such defects, much of the Book,
from the very beginning, was splendid and inspiring matter. From that
time to this, the Book of the Samurai has been under revision, much
has been added, much rejected, and some deliberately rewritten.  Now,
there is hardly anything in it that is not beautiful and perfect in form.
The whole range of noble emotions finds expression there, and all the
guiding ideas of our Modern State.  We have recently admitted some terse
criticism of its contents by a man named Henley."

"Old Henley!"

"A man who died a little time ago."

"I knew that man on earth.  And he was in Utopia, too! He was a great
red-faced man, with fiery hair, a noisy, intolerant maker of enemies,
with a tender heart -- and he was one of the ~samurai~?"

"He defied the Rules."

"He was a great man with wine.  He wrote like wine; in our world he
wrote wine; red wine with the light shining through."

"He was on the Committee that revised our Canon.  For the revising
and bracing of our Canon is work for poietic as well as kinetic men.
You knew him in your world?"

"I wish I had.  But I have seen him.  On earth he wrote a thing...
it would run --


"Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever Gods may be, For my unconquerable soul...."


"We have that here.  All good earthly things are in Utopia also.  We put
that in the Canon almost as soon as he died," said my double.


SECTION 5


"We have now a double Canon, a very fine First Canon, and a Second Canon
of work by living men and work of inferior quality, and a satisfactory
knowledge of both of these is the fourth intellectual qualification for
the ~samurai~."

"It must keep a sort of uniformity in your tone of thought."

"The Canon pervades our whole world.  As a matter of fact, very much
of it is read and learnt in the schools.... Next to the intellectual
qualification comes the physical, the man must be in sound health,
free from certain foul, avoidable, and demoralising diseases, and in
good training.  We reject men who are fat, or thin and flabby, or whose
nerves are shaky -- we refer them back to training.  And finally the
man or woman must be fully adult."

"Twenty-one?  But you said twenty-five!"

"The age has varied.  At first it was twenty-five or over; then the
minimum became twenty-five for men and twenty-one for women.  Now there
is a feeling that it ought to be raised. We don't want to take advantage
of mere boy and girl emotions -- men of my way of thinking, at any rate,
don't -- we want to get our ~samurai~ with experiences, with a settled
mature conviction.  Our hygiene and regimen are rapidly pushing back
old age and death, and keeping men hale and hearty to eighty and more.
There's no need to hurry the young.  Let them have a chance of wine,
love, and song; let them feel the bite of full-bodied desire, and know
what devils they have to reckon with."

"But there is a certain fine sort of youth that knows the desirability
of the better things at nineteen."

"They may keep the Rule at any time -- without its privileges. But a
man who breaks the Rule after his adult adhesion at five-and-twenty is
no more in the ~samurai~ for ever. Before that age he is free to break
it and repent."

"And now, what is forbidden?"

"We forbid a good deal.  Many small pleasures do no great harm,
but we think it well to forbid them, none the less, so that we can
weed out the self-indulgent.  We think that a constant resistance to
little seductions is good for a man's quality.  At any rate, its show
that a man is prepared to pay something for his honour and privileges.
We prescribe a regimen of food, forbid tobacco, wine, or any alcoholic
drink, all narcotic drugs----"

"Meat?"

"In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be.
But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughter-houses.  And, in a
population that is all educated, and at about the same level of physical
refinement, it is practically impossible to find any one who will hew
a dead ox or pig. We never settled the hygienic question of meat-eating
at all. This other aspect decided us.  I can still remember, as a boy,
the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughter-house."

"You eat fish."

"It isn't a matter of logic.  In our barbaric past horrible flayed
carcasses of brutes dripping blood were hung for sale in the public
streets."  He shrugged his shoulders.

"They do that still in London -- in ~my~ world," I said.

He looked again at my laxer, coarser face, and did not say whatever
thought had passed across his mind.

"Originally the ~samurai~ were forbidden usury, that is to say the
lending of money at fixed rates of interest.  They are still under that
interdiction, but since our commercial code practically prevents usury
altogether, and our law will not recognise contracts for interest upon
private accommodation loans to unprosperous borrowers, it is now scarcely
necessary. The idea of a man growing richer by mere inaction and at the
expense of an impoverishing debtor, is profoundly distasteful to Utopian
ideas, and our State insists pretty effectually now upon the participation
of the lender in the borrower's risks.  This, however, is only one part
of a series of limitations of the same character.  It is felt that
to buy simply in order to sell again brings out many unsocial human
qualities; it makes a man seek to enhance profits and falsify values,
and so the ~samurai~ are forbidden to buy to sell on their own account
or for any employer save the State, unless some process of manufacture
changes the nature of the commodity (a mere change in bulk or packing
does not suffice), and they are forbidden salesmanship and all its arts.
Consequently they cannot be hotel-keepers, or hotel proprietors, or hotel
shareholders, and a doctor -- all practising doctors must be ~samurai~
-- cannot sell drugs except as a public servant of the muunicipality or
the State."

"That, of course, runs counter to all our current terrestrial ideas,"
I said.  "We are obsessed by the power of money. These rules will work
out as a vow of moderate poverty, and if your ~samurai~ are an order of
poor men----"

"They need not be.  ~Samurai~ who have invented, organised, and developed
new industries, have become rich men, and many men who have grown rich
by brilliant and original trading have subsequently become ~samurai~."

"But these are exceptional cases.  The bulk of your money-making business
must be confined to men who are not ~samurai~. You must have a class of
rich, powerful outsiders----"

"~Have~ we?"

"I don't see the evidences of them."

"As a matter of fact, we have such people!  There are rich traders,
men who have made discoveries in the economy of distribution, or who
have called attention by intelligent, truthful advertisement to the
possibilities of neglected commodities, for example."

"But aren't they a power?"

"Why should they be?"

"Wealth ~is~ power."

I had to explain that phrase.

He protested.  "Wealth," he said, "is no sort of power at all unless
you make it one.  If it is so in your world it is so by inadvertency.
Wealth is a State-made thing, a convention, the most artificial of powers.
You can, by subtle statesmanship, contrive what it shall buy and what it
shall not.  In your world it would seem you have made leisure, movement,
any sort of freedom, life itself, ~purchasable~.  The more fools you!
A poor working man with you is a man in discomfort and fear. No wonder
your rich have power.  But here a reasonable leisure, a decent life,
is to be had by every man on easier terms than by selling himself to the
rich. And rich as men are here, there is no private fortune in the whole
world that is more than a little thing beside the wealth of the State.
The ~samurai~ control the State and the wealth of the State, and by their
vows they may not avail themselves of any of the coarser pleasures wealth
can still buy.  Where, then, is the power of your wealthy man?"

"But, then -- where is the incentive----?"

"Oh! a man gets things for himself with wealth -- no end of things.
But little or no power over his fellows -- unless they are exceptionally
weak or self-indulgent persons."

I reflected.  "What else may not the ~samurai~ do?"

"Acting, singing, or reciting are forbidden them, though they may lecture
authoritatively or debate.  But professional mimicry is not only held
to be undignified in a man or woman, but to weaken and corrupt the
soul; the mind becomes foolishly dependent on applause, over-skilful
in producing tawdry and momentary illusions of excellence; it is our
experience that actors and actresses as a class are loud, ignoble, and
insincere. If they have not such flamboyant qualities then they are tepid
and ineffectual players.  Nor may the ~samurai~ do personal services,
except in the matter of medicine or surgery; they may not be barbers,
for example, nor inn waiters, nor boot cleaners.  But, nowadays, we have
scarcely any barbers or boot cleaners; men do these things for themselves.
Nor may a man under the Rule be any man's servant, pledged to do whatever
he is told.  He may neither be a servant nor keep one; he must shave and
dress and serve himself, carry his own food from the helper's place to
the table, redd his sleeping room, and leave it clean...."

"That is all easy enough in a world as ordered as yours. I suppose no
~samurai~ may bet?"

"Absolutely not.  He may insure his life and his old age for the better
equipment of his children, or for certain other specified ends, but
that is all his dealings with chance.  And he is also forbidden to play
games in public or to watch them being played.  Certain dangerous and
hardy sports and exercises are prescribed for him, but not competitive
sports between man and man or side and side.  That lesson was learnt
long ago before the coming of the ~samurai~.  Gentlemen of honour,
according to the old standards, rode horses, raced chariots, fought,
and played competitive games of skill, and the dull, cowardly and base
came in thousands to admire, and howl, and bet.  The gentlemen of honour
degenerated fast enough into a sort of athletic prostitute, with all
the defects, all the vanity, trickery, and self-assertion of the common
actor, and with even less intelligence.  Our Founders made no peace with
this organisation of public sports.  They did not spend their lives to
secure for all men and women on the earth freedom, health, and leisure,
in order that they might waste lives in such folly."

"We have those abuses," I said, "but some of our earthly games have a
fine side.  There is a game called cricket.  It is a fine, generous game."

"Our boys play that, and men too.  But it is thought rather puerile to
give very much time to it; men should have graver interests.  It was
undignified and unpleasant for the ~samurai~ to play conspicuously ill,
and impossible for them to play so constantly as to keep hand and eye
in training against the man who was fool enough and cheap enough to
become an expert.  Cricket, tennis, fives, billiards----  You will find
clubs and a class of men to play all these things in Utopia, but not
the ~samurai~. And they must play their games as games, not as displays;
the price of a privacy for playing cricket, so that they could charge
for admission, would be overwhelmingly high....  Negroes are often
very clever at cricket.  For a time, most of the ~samurai~ had their
sword-play, but few do those exercises now, and until about fifty years
ago they went out for military training, a fortnight in every year,
marching long distances, sleeping in the open, carrying provisions, and
sham fighting over unfamiliar ground dotted with disappearing targets.
There was a curious inability in our world to realise that war was really
over for good and all."

"And now," I said, "haven't we got very nearly to the end of your
prohibitions?  You have forbidden alcohol, drugs, smoking, betting,
and usury, games, trade, servants.  But isn't there a vow of Chastity?"

"That is the Rule for your earthly orders?"

"Yes -- except, if I remember rightly, for Plato's Guardians."

"There is a Rule of Chastity here -- but not of Celibacy.  We know
quite clearly that civilisation is an artificial arrangement, and that
all the physical and emotional instincts of man are too strong, and
his natural instinct of restraint too weak, for him to live easily in
the civilised State.  Civilisation has developed far more rapidly than
man has modified.  Under the unnatural perfection of security, liberty,
and abundance our civilisation has attained, the normal untrained human
being is disposed to excess in almost every direction; he tends to eat
too much and too elaborately, to drink too much, to become lazy faster
than his work can be reduced, to waste his interest upon displays, and
to make love too much and too elaborately.  He gets out of training, and
concentrates upon egoistic or erotic broodings. The past history of our
race is very largely a history of social collapses due to demoralisation
by indulgences following security and abundance.  In the time of our
Founders the signs of a world-wide epoch of prosperity and relaxation were
plentiful. Both sexes drifted towards sexual excesses, the men towards
sentimental extravagances, imbecile devotions, and the complication and
refinement of physical indulgences; the women towards those expansions
and differentiations of feeling that find expression in music and costly
and distinguished dress.  Both sexes became unstable and promiscuous.
The whole world seemed disposed to do exactly the same thing with its
sexual interest as it had done with its appetite for food and drink --
make the most of it."

He paused.

"Satiety came to help you," I said.

"Destruction may come before satiety.  Our Founders organised motives from
all sorts of sources, but I think the chief force to give men self-control
is Pride.  Pride may not be the noblest thing in the soul, but it is the
best King there, for all that.  They looked to it to keep a man clean and
sound and sane.  In this matter, as in all matters of natural desire, they
held no appetite must be glutted, no appetite must have artificial whets,
and also and equally that no appetite should be starved.  A man must come
from the table satisfied, but not replete.  And, in the matter of love,
a straight and clean desire for a clean and straight fellow-creature
was our Founders' ideal.  They enjoined marriage between equals as the
~samurai's~ duty to the race, and they framed directions of the precisest
sort to prevent that uxorious inseparableness, that connubiality which
will reduce a couple of people to something jointly less than either.
That Canon is too long to tell you now.  A man under the Rule who loves
a woman who does not follow it, must either leave the ~samurai~ to marry
her, or induce her to accept what is called the Woman's Rule, which,
while it excepts her from the severer qualifications and disciplines,
brings her regimen of life into a working harmony with his."

"Suppose she breaks the Rule afterwards?"

"He must leave either her or the order."

"There is matter for a novel or so in that."

"There has been matter for hundreds."

"Is the Woman's Rule a sumptuary law as well as a regimen? I mean --
may she dress as she pleases?"

"Not a bit of it," said my double.  "Every woman who could command money
used it, we found, to make underbred aggressions on other women.  As men
emerged to civilisation, women seemed going back to savagery -- to paint
and feathers. But the ~samurai~, both men and women, and the women under
the Lesser Rule also, all have a particular dress.  No difference is made
between women under either the Great or the Lesser Rule.  You have seen
the men's dress -- always like this I wear. The women may wear the same,
either with the hair cut short or plaited behind them, or they may have
a high-waisted dress of very fine, soft woollen material, with their
hair coiled up behind."

"I have seen it," I said.  Indeed, nearly all the women had seemed
to be wearing variants of that simple formula. "It seems to me a very
beautiful dress.  The other -- I'm not used to.  But I like it on girls
and slender woman."

I had a thought, and added, "Don't they sometimes, well -- take a good
deal of care, dressing their hair?"

My double laughed in my eyes.  "They do," he said.

"And the Rule?"

"The Rule is never fussy," said my double, still smiling.

"We don't want women to cease to be beautiful, and consciously beautiful,
if you like," he added.  "The more real beauty of form and face we have,
the finer our world.  But costly sexualised trappings----"

"I should have thought," I said, "a class of women who traded on their
sex would have arisen, women, I mean, who found an interest and an
advantage in emphasising their individual womanly beauty.  There is no
law to prevent it. Surely they would tend to counteract the severity of
costume the Rule dictates."

"There are such women.  But for all that the Rule sets the key of
everyday dress.  If a woman is possessed by the passion for gorgeous
raiment she usually satisfies it in her own private circle, or with rare
occasional onslaughts upon the public eye. Her everyday mood and the
disposition of most people is against being conspicuous abroad.  And I
should say there are little liberties under the Lesser Rule; a discreet
use of fine needlework and embroidery, a wider choice of materials."

"You have no changing fashions?"

"None.  For all that, are not our dresses as beautiful as yours?"

"Our women's dresses are not beautiful at all," I said, forced for a
time towards the mysterious philosophy of dress. "Beauty?  That isn't
their concern."

"Then what are they after?"

"My dear man!  What is all my world after?"


SECTION 6


I should come to our third talk with a great curiosity to hear of the last
portion of the Rule, of the things that the ~samurai~ are obliged to do.

There would be many precise directions regarding his health, and rules
that would aim at once at health and that constant exercise of will
that makes life good.  Save in specified exceptional circumstances, the
~samurai~ must bathe in cold water, and the men must shave every day;
they have the precisest directions in such matters; the body must be in
health, the skin and muscles and nerves in perfect tone, or the ~samurai~
must go to the doctors of the order, and give implicit obedience to the
regimen prescribed.  They must sleep alone at least four nights in five;
and they must eat with and talk to any one in their fellowship who cares
for their conversation for an hour, at least, at the nearest clubhouse
of the ~samurai~ once on three chosen days in every week.  Moreover,
they must read aloud from the Book of the Samurai for at least ten minutes
every day.  Every month they must buy and read faithfully through at least
one book that has been published during the past five years, and the only
intervention with private choice in that matter is the prescription of
a certain minimum of length for the monthly book or books.  But the full
Rule in these minor compulsory matters is voluminous and detailed, and it
abounds with alternatives.  Its aim is rather to keep before the ~samurai~
by a number of sample duties, as it were, the need of, and some of the
chief methods towards health of body and mind, rather than to provide
a comprehensive rule, and to ensure the maintenance of a community of
feeling and interests among the ~samurai~ through habit, intercourse, and
a living contemporary literature.  These minor obligations do not earmark
more than an hour in the day.  Yet they serve to break down isolations
of sympathy, all sorts of physical and intellectual sluggishness and
the development of unsocial preoccupations of many sorts.

Women ~samurai~ who are married, my double told me, must bear children --
if they are to remain married as well as in the order -- before the second
period for terminating a childless marriage is exhausted.  I failed to
ask for the precise figures from my double at the time, but I think it is
beyond doubt that it is from ~samurai~ mothers of the Greater or Lesser
Rule that a very large proportion of the future population of Utopia will
be derived.  There is one liberty accorded to women ~samurai~ which is
refused to men, and that is to marry outside the Rule, and women married
to men not under the Rule are also free to become ~samurai~.  Here, too,
it will be manifest there is scope for novels and the drama of life.
In practice, it seems that it is only men of great poietic distinction
outside the Rule, or great commercial leaders, who have wives under it.
The tendency of such unions is either to bring the husband under the Rule,
or take the wife out of it.  There can be no doubt that these marriage
limitations tend to make the ~samurai~ something of an hereditary class.
Their children, as a rule, become ~samurai~. But it is not an exclusive
caste; subject to the most reasonable qualifications, any one who sees
fit can enter it at any time, and so, unlike all other privileged castes
the world has seen, it increases relatively to the total population, and
may indeed at last assimilate almost the whole population of the earth.


SECTION 7


So much my double told me readily.

But now he came to the heart of all his explanations, to the will and
motives at the centre that made men and women ready to undergo discipline,
to renounce the richness and elaboration of the sensuous life, to master
emotions and control impulses, to keep in the key of effort while they
had abundance about them to rouse and satisfy all desires, and his
exposition was more difficult.

He tried to make his religion clear to me.

The leading principle of the Utopian religion is the repudiation of
the doctrine of original sin; the Utopians hold that man, on the whole,
is good.  That is their cardinal belief. Man has pride and conscience,
they hold, that you may refine by training as you refine his eye and
ear; he has remorse and sorrow in his being, coming on the heels of
all inconsequent enjoyments.  How can one think of him as bad?  He is
religious; religion is as natural to him as lust and anger, less intense,
indeed, but coming with a wide-sweeping inevitableness as peace comes
after all tumults and noises.  And in Utopia they understand this, or,
at least, the ~samurai~ do, clearly.  They accept Religion as they accept
Thirst, as something inseparably in the mysterious rhythms of life.
And just as thirst and pride and all desires may be perverted in an
age of abundant opportunities, and men may be degraded and wasted by
intemperance in drinking, by display, or by ambition, so, too, the
nobler complex of desires that constitutes religion may be turned to
evil by the dull, the base, and the careless.  Slovenly indulgence in
religious inclinations, a failure to think hard and discriminate as
fairly as possible in religious matters, is just as alien to the men
under the Rule as it would be to drink deeply because they were thirsty,
eat until glutted, evade a bath because the day was chilly, or make love
to any bright-eyed girl who chanced to look pretty in the dusk.  Utopia,
which is to have every type of character that one finds on earth, will
have its temples and its priests, just as it will have its actresses and
wine, but the ~samurai~, will be forbidden the religion of dramatically
lit altars, organ music, and incense, as distinctly as they are forbidden
the love of painted women, or the consolations of brandy.  And to all
the things that are less than religion and that seek to comprehend it,
to cosmogonies and philosophies, to creeds and formul, to catechisms
and easy explanations, the attitude of the ~samurai~, the note of the
Book of Samurai, will be distrust. These things, the ~samurai~ will
say, are part of the indulgences that should come before a man submits
himself to the Rule; they are like the early gratifications of young men,
experiences to establish renunciation.  The ~samurai~ will have emerged
above these things.

The theology of the Utopian rulers will be saturated with that same
philosophy of uniqueness, that repudiation of anything beyond similarities
and practical parallelisms, that saturates all their institutions.
They will have analysed exhaustively those fallacies and assumptions
that arise between the One and the Many, that have troubled philosophy
since philosophy began.  Just as they will have escaped that delusive
unification of every species under its specific definition that has
dominated earthly reasoning, so they will have escaped the delusive
simplification of God that vitiates all terrestrial theology.  They will
hold God to be complex and of an endless variety of aspects, to be
expressed by no universal formula nor approved in any uniform manner.
Just as the language of Utopia will be a synthesis, even so will its
God be.  The aspect of God is different in the measure of every man's
individuality, and the intimate thing of religion must, therefore,
exist in human solitude, between man and God alone.  Religion in its
quintessence is a relation between God and man; it is perversion to
make it a relation between man and man, and a man may no more reach
God through a priest than love his wife through a priest.  But just as
a man in love may refine the interpretation of his feelings and borrow
expression from the poems and music of poietic men, so an individual man
may at his discretion read books of devotion and hear music that is in
harmony with his inchoate feelings.  Many of the ~samurai~, therefore,
will set themselves private regimens that will help their secret religious
life, will pray habitually, and read books of devotion, but with these
things the Rule of the order will have nothing to do.

Clearly the God of the ~samurai~ is a transcendental and mystical God.
So far as the ~samurai~ have a purpose in common in maintaining the State,
and the order and progress of the world, so far, by their discipline
and denial, by their public work and effort, they worship God together.
But the fount of motive lies in the individual life, it lies in silent
and deliberate reflections, and at this, the most striking of all the
rules of the ~samurai~ aims.  For seven consecutive days in the year, at
least, each man or woman under the Rule must go right out of all the life
of man into some wild and solitary place, must speak to no man or woman,
and have no sort of intercourse with mankind.  They must go bookless and
weaponless, without pen or paper, or money.  Provisions must be taken
for the period of the journey, a rug or sleeping sack -- for they must
sleep under the open sky -- but no means of making a fire.  They may
study maps beforehand to guide them, showing any difficulties and dangers
in the journey, but they may not carry such helps.  They must not go by
beaten ways or wherever there are inhabited houses, but into the bare,
quiet places of the globe -- the regions set apart for them.

This discipline, my double said, was invented to secure a certain
stoutness of heart and body in the members of the order, which otherwise
might have lain open to too many timorous, merely abstemious, men and
women.  Many things had been suggested, swordplay and tests that verged on
torture, climbing in giddy places and the like, before this was chosen.
Partly, it is to ensure good training and sturdiness of body and mind,
but partly, also, it is to draw their minds for a space from the insistent
details of life, from the intricate arguments and the fretting effort
to work, from personal quarrels and personal affections, and the things
of the heated room.  Out they must go, clean out of the world.

Certain great areas are set apart for these yearly pilgrimages beyond the
securities of the State.  There are thousands of square miles of sandy
desert in Africa and Asia set apart; much of the Arctic and Antarctic
circles; vast areas of mountain land and frozen marsh; secluded reserves
of forest, and innumerable unfrequented lines upon the sea.  Some are
dangerous and laborious routes; some merely desolate; and there are even
some sea journeys that one may take in the halcyon days as one drifts
through a dream.  Upon the seas one must go in a little undecked sailing
boat, that may be rowed in a calm; all the other journeys one must
do afoot, none aiding.  There are, about all these desert regions and
along most coasts, little offices at which the ~samurai~ says good-bye
to the world of men, and at which they arrive after their minimum time
of silence is overpast.  For the intervening days they must be alone
with Nature, necessity, and their own thoughts.

"It is good?" I said.

"It is good," my double answered.  "We civilised men go back to the stark
Mother that so many of us would have forgotten were it not for this Rule.
And one thinks....  Only two weeks ago I did my journey for the year.
I went with my gear by sea to Tromso, and then inland to a starting-place,
and took my ice-axe and rcksack, and said good-bye to the world.
I crossed over four glaciers; I climbed three high mountain passes, and
slept on moss in desolate valleys.  I saw no human being for seven days.
Then I came down through pine woods to the head of a road that runs to
the Baltic shore.  Altogether it was thirteen days before I reported
myself again, and had speech with fellow creatures."

"And the women do this?"

"The women who are truly ~samurai~ -- yes.  Equally with the men.
Unless the coming of children intervenes."

I asked him how it had seemed to him, and what he thought about during
the journey.

"There is always a sense of effort for me," he said, "when I leave the
world at the outset of the journey.  I turn back again and again, and
look at the little office as I go up my mountain side.  The first day
and night I'm a little disposed to shirk the job -- every year it's the
same -- a little disposed, for example, to sling my pack from my back,
and sit down, and go through its contents, and make sure I've got all
my equipment."

"There's no chance of any one overtaking you?"

"Two men mustn't start from the same office on the same route within
six hours of each other.  If they come within sight of each other, they
must shun an encounter, and make no sign -- unless life is in danger.
All that is arranged beforehand."

"It would be, of course.  Go on telling me of your journey."

"I dread the night.  I dread discomfort and bad weather. I only begin
to brace up after the second day."

"Don't you worry about losing your way?"

"No.  There are cairns and skyline signs.  If it wasn't for that, of
course, we should be worrying with maps the whole time.  But I'm only
sure of being a man after the second night, and sure of my power to
go through."

"And then?"

"Then one begins to get into it.  The first two days one is apt to have
the events of one's journey, little incidents of travel, and thoughts
of one's work and affairs, rising and fading and coming again, but then
the perspectives begin.  I don't sleep much at nights on these journeys;
I lie awake and stare at the stars.  About dawn, perhaps, and in the
morning sunshine, I sleep!  The nights this last time were very short,
never more than twilight, and I saw the glow of the sun always, just
over the edge of the world.  But I had chosen the days of the new moon,
so that I could have a glimpse of the stars....  Years ago, I went
from the Nile across the Libyan Desert east, and then the stars -- the
stars in the later days of that journey -- brought me near weeping....
You begin to feel alone on the third day, when you find yourself out on
some shiny snowfield, and nothing of mankind visible in the whole world
save one landmark, one remote thin red triangle of iron, perhaps, in the
saddle of the ridge against the sky.  All this us world that has done so
much and so marvellously, and is still so little -- you see it little as
it is -- and far off.  All day long you go and the night comes, and it
might be another planet. Then, in the quiet, waking hours, one thinks
of one's self and the great external things, of space and eternity,
and what one means by God."

He mused.

"You think of death?"

"Not of my own.  But when I go among snows and desolations -- and usually
I take my pilgrimage in mountains or the north -- I think very much of
the Night of this World -- the time when our sun will be red and dull,
and air and water will lie frozen together in a common snowfield where
now the forests of the tropics are steaming....  I think very much of
that, and whether it is indeed God's purpose that our kind should end,
and the cities we have built, the books we have written, all that we
have given substance and a form, should lie dead beneath the snows."

"You don't believe that?"

"No.  But if it is not so----.  I went threading my way among gorges and
precipices, with my poor brain dreaming of what the alternative should
be, with my imagination straining and failing.  Yet, in those high airs
and in such solitude, a kind of exaltation comes to men....  I remember
that one night I sat up and told the rascal stars very earnestly how
they should not escape us in the end."

He glanced at me for a moment as though he doubted I should understand.

"One becomes a personification up there," he said.  "One becomes the
ambassador of mankind to the outer world.

"There is time to think over a lot of things.  One puts one's self and
one's ambition in a new pair of scales....

"Then there are hours when one is just exploring the wilderness like
a child.  Sometimes perhaps one gets a glimpse from some precipice edge
of the plains far away, and houses and roadways, and remembers there
is still a busy world of men.  And at last one turns one's feet down
some slope, some gorge that leads back.  You come down, perhaps, into
a pine forest, and hear that queer clatter reindeer make -- and then,
it may be, see a herdsman very far away, watching you.  You wear your
pilgrim's badge, and he makes no sign of seeing you....

"You know, after these solitudes, I feel just the same queer
disinclination to go back to the world of men that I feel when I have to
leave it.  I think of dusty roads and hot valleys, and being looked at
by many people.  I think of the trouble of working with colleagues and
opponents.  This last journey I outstayed my time, camping in the pine
woods for six days. Then my thoughts came round to my proper work again.
I got keen to go on with it, and so I came back into the world. You come
back physically clean -- as though you had had your arteries and veins
washed out.  And your brain has been cleaned, too.... I shall stick to the
mountains now until I am old, and then I shall sail a boat in Polynesia.
That is what so many old men do.  Only last year one of the great leaders
of the ~samurai~ -- a white-haired man, who followed the Rule in spite
of his one hundred and eleven years -- was found dead in his boat far
away from any land, far to the south, lying like a child asleep...."

"That's better than a tumbled bed," said I, "and some boy of a doctor
jabbing you with injections, and distressful people hovering about you."

"Yes," said my double; "in Utopia we who are samurai die better than
that....  Is that how your great men die?"

It came to me suddenly as very strange that, even as we sat and talked,
across deserted seas, on burning sands, through the still aisles of
forests, and in all the high and lonely places of the world, beyond the
margin where the ways and houses go, solitary men and women sailed alone
or marched alone, or clambered -- quiet, resolute exiles; they stood alone
amidst wildernesses of ice, on the precipitous banks of roaring torrents,
in monstrous caverns, or steering a tossing boat in the little circle
of the horizon amidst the tumbled, incessant sea, all in their several
ways communing with the emptiness, the enigmatic spaces and silences,
the winds and torrents and soulless forces that lie about the lit and
ordered life of men.

I saw more clearly now something I had seen dimly already, in the bearing
and the faces of this Utopian chivalry, a faint persistent tinge of
detachment from the immediate heats and hurries, the little graces and
delights, the tensions and stimulations of the daily world. It pleased
me strangely to think of this steadfast yearly pilgrimage of solitude,
and how near men might come then to the high distances of God.


SECTION 8


After that I remember we fell talking of the discipline of the Rule,
of the Courts that try breaches of it, and interpret doubtful cases --
for, though a man may resign with due notice and be free after a certain
time to rejoin again, one deliberate breach may exclude a man for ever
-- of the system of law that has grown up about such triaals, and of
the triennial council that revises and alters the Rule.  From that we
passed to the discussion of the general constitution of this World State.
Practically all political power vests in the ~samurai~.  Not only are
they the only administrators, lawyers, practising doctors, and public
officials of almost all kinds, but they are the only voters. Yet, by a
curious exception, the supreme legislative assembly must have one-tenth,
and may have one-half of its members outside the order, because, it
is alleged, there is a sort of wisdom that comes of sin and laxness,
which is necessary to the perfect ruling of life.  My double quoted me a
verse from the Canon on this matter that my unfortunate verbal memory did
not retain, but it was in the nature of a prayer to save the world from
"unfermented men."  It would seem that Aristotle's idea of a rotation
of rulers, an idea that crops up again in Harrington's ~Oceana~, that
first Utopia of "the sovereign people" (a Utopia that, through Danton's
readings in English, played a disastrous part in the French Revolution),
gets a little respect in Utopia.  The tendency is to give a practically
permanent tenure to good men.  Every ruler and official, it is true, is
put on his trial every three years before a jury drawn by lot, according
to the range of his activities, either from the ~samurai~ of his municipal
area or from the general catalogue of the ~samurai~, but the business of
this jury is merely to decide whether to continue him in office or order
a new election.  In the majority of cases the verdict is continuation.
Even if it is not so the official may still appear as a candidate before
the second and separate jury which fills the vacant post....

My double mentioned a few scattered details of the electoral methods,
but as at that time I believed we were to have a number of further
conversations, I did not exhaust my curiosities upon this subject.
Indeed, I was more than a little preoccupied and inattentive.
The religion of the ~samurai~ was after my heart, and it had taken hold
of me very strongly....  But presently I fell questioning him upon the
complications that arise in the Modern Utopia through the differences
between the races of men, and found my attention returning. But the
matter of that discussion I shall put apart into a separate chapter.
In the end we came back to the particulars of this great Rule of Life
that any man desiring of joining the ~samurai~ must follow.

I remember how, after our third bout of talking, I walked back through
the streets of Utopian London to rejoin the botanist at our hotel.

My double lived in an apartment in a great building -- I should judge
about where, in our London, the Tate Gallery squats, and, as the day
was fine, and I had no reason for hurry, I went not by the covered
mechanical way, but on foot along the broad, tree-set terraces that
follow the river on either side.

It was afternoon, and the mellow Thames Valley sunlight, warm and gentle,
lit a clean and gracious world.  There were many people abroad, going to
and fro, unhurrying, but not aimless, and I watched them so attentively
that were you to ask me for the most elementary details of the buildings
and terraces that lay back on either bank, or of the pinnacles and
towers and parapets that laced the sky, I could not tell you them.
But of the people I could tell a great deal.

No Utopians wear black, and for all the frequency of the ~samurai~
uniform along the London ways the general effect is of a gaily-coloured
population.  You never see any one noticeably ragged or dirty; the
police, who answer questions and keep order (and are quite distinct from
the organisation for the pursuit of criminals) see to that; and shabby
people are very infrequent.  People who want to save money for other
purposes, or who do not want much bother with their clothing, seem to
wear costumes of rough woven cloth, dyed an unobtrusive brown or green,
over fine woollen under-clothing, and so achieve a decent comfort in its
simplest form. Others outside the Rule of the ~samurai~ range the spectrum
for colour, and have every variety of texture; the colours attained by
the Utopian dyers seem to me to be fuller and purer than the common range
of stuffs on earth; and the subtle folding of the woollen materials
witness that Utopian Bradford is no whit behind her earthly sister.
White is extraordinarily frequent; white woollen tunics and robes into
which are woven bands of brilliant colour, abound.  Often these ape the
cut and purple edge that distinguishes the ~samurai~.  In Utopian London
the air is as clear and less dusty than it is among high mountains;
the roads are made of unbroken surfaces, and not of friable earth;
all heating is done by electricity, and no coal ever enters the town;
there are no horses or dogs, and so there is not a suspicion of smoke
and scarcely a particle of any sort of dirt to render white impossible.

The radiated influence of the uniform of the ~samurai~ has been to keep
costume simple, and this, perhaps, emphasises the general effect of
vigorous health, of shapely bodies.  Every one is well grown and well
nourished; every one seems in good condition; every one walks well, and
has that clearness of eye that comes with cleanness of blood.  In London
I am apt to consider myself of a passable size and carriage; here I
feel small and mean-looking.  The faint suspicions of spinal curvatures,
skew feet, unequal legs, and ill-grown bones, that haunt one in a London
crowd, the plain intimations -- in yellow faces, puffy faces, spotted
and irregular complexions, in nervous movements and coughs and colds --
of bad habits and an incompetent or disregarded medical profession,
do not appear here.  I notice few old people, but there seems to be a
greater proportion of men and women at or near the prime of life.

I hang upon that.  I have seen one two fat people here -- they are all
the more noticeable because they are rare.  But wrinkled age?  Have I
yet in Utopia set eyes on a bald head?

The Utopians have brought a sounder physiological science than ours to
bear upon regimen.  People know better what to do and what to avoid, how
to foresee and forestall coming trouble, and how to evade and suppress
the subtle poisons that blunt the edge of sensation.  They have put off
the years of decay.  They keep their teeth, they keep their digestions,
they ward off gout and rheumatism, neuralgia and influenza, and all those
cognate decays that bend and wrinkle men and women in the middle years
of existence.  They have extended the level years far into the seventies,
and age, when it comes, comes swiftly and easily.  The feverish hurry of
our earth, the decay that begins before growth has ceased, is replaced
by a ripe prolonged maturity.  This modern Utopia is an adult world.
The flushed romance, the predominant eroticisms, the adventurous
uncertainty of a world in which youth prevails, gives place here to a
grave deliberation, to a fuller and more powerful emotion, to a broader
handling of life.

Yet youth is here.

Amidst the men whose faces have been made fine by thought and steadfast
living, among the serene-eyed women, comes youth, gaily-coloured,
buoyantly healthy, with challenging eyes, with fresh and eager face....

For every one in Utopia who is sane enough to benefit, study and training
last until twenty; then comes the travel year, and many are still students
until twenty-four or twenty-five. Most are still, in a sense, students
throughout life, but it is thought that, unless responsible action is
begun in some form in the early twenties, will undergo a partial atrophy.
But the full swing of adult life is hardly attained until thirty is
reached.  Men marry before the middle thirties, and the women rather
earlier, few are mothers before five-and-twenty. The majority of those
who become ~samurai~ do so between twenty-seven and thirty-five.  And,
between seventeen and thirty, the Utopians have their dealings with
love, and the play and excitement of love is a chief interest in life.
Much freedom of act is allowed them so that their wills may grow freely.
For the most part they end mated, and love gives place to some special
and more enduring interest, though, indeed, there is love between older
men and fresh girls, and between youths and maturer women.  It is in
these most graceful and beautiful years of life that such freedoms of
dress as the atmosphere of Utopia permits are to be seen, and the crude
bright will and imagination of youth peeps out in ornament and colour.

Figures come into my sight and possess me for a moment and pass, and
give place to others; there comes a dusky little Jewess, red-lipped and
amber-clad, with a deep crimson flower -- I know not whether real or sham
-- in the dull black of her hair.  She passes me with an  unconscious
disdain; and then I am looking at a brightly-smiling, blue-eyed girl,
tall, ruddy, and freckled warmly, clad like a stage Rosalind, and talking
gaily to a fair young man, a novice under the Rule.  A red-haired
mother under the Lesser Rule goes by, green-gowned, with dark green
straps crossing between her breasts, and her two shock-headed children,
bare-legged and lightly shod, tug at her hands on either side.  Then a
grave man in a long, fur-trimmed robe, a merchant, maybe, debates some
serious matter with a white-tunicked clerk.  And the clerk's face----?
I turn to mark the straight, blue-black hair.  The man must be Chinese....

Then come two short-bearded men in careless indigo-blue raiment,
both of them convulsed with laughter -- men outside the Rule, who
practise, perhaps, some art -- and then one of the ~samurai~, in
cheerful altercation with a blue-robed girl of eight.  "But you ~could~
have come back yesterday, Dadda," she persists.  He is deeply sunburnt,
and suddenly there passes before my mind the picture of a snowy mountain
waste at nightfall and a solitary small figure under the stars....

When I come back to the present thing again, my eye is caught at once
by a young negro, carrying books in his hand, a prosperous-looking,
self-respecting young negro, in a trimly-cut coat of purple-blue and
silver.

I am reminded of what my double said to me of race.



CHAPTER TEN

RACE IN UTOPIA


SECTION 1


Above the sphere of the elemental cravings and necessities, the soul of
man is in a perpetual vacillation between two conflicting impulses: the
desire to assert his individual differences, the desire for distinction,
and his terror of isolation.  He wants to stand out, but not too far
out, and, on the contrary, he wants to merge himself with a group,
with some larger body, but not altogether.  Through all the things of
life runs this tortuous compromise, men follow the fashions but resent
ready-made uniforms on every plane of their being.  The disposition to
form aggregations and to imagine aggregations is part of the incurable
nature of man; it is one of the great natural forces the statesman
must utilise, and against which he must construct effectual defences.
The study of the aggregations and of the ideals of aggregations about
which men's sympathies will twine, and upon which they will base a
large proportion of their conduct and personal policy, is the legitimate
definition of sociology.

Now the sort of aggregation to which men and women will refer themselves
is determined partly by the strength and idiosyncrasy of the individual
imagination, and partly by the reek of ideas that chances to be in the
air at the time. Men and women may vary greatly both in their innate and
their acquired disposition towards this sort of larger body or that,
to which their social reference can be made.  The "natural" social
reference of a man is probably to some rather vaguely conceived tribe,
as the "natural" social reference of a dog is to a pack.  But just as the
social reference of a dog may be educated until the reference to a pack is
completely replaced by a reference to an owner, so on his higher plane of
educability the social reference of the civilised man undergoes the most
remarkable transformations.  But the power and scope of his imagination
and the need he has of response sets limits to this process.  A highly
intellectualised mature mind may refer for its data very consistently to
ideas of a higher being so remote and indefinable as God, so comprehensive
as humanity, so far-reaching as the purpose in things.  I write "may,"
but I doubt if this exaltation of reference is ever permanently sustained.
Comte, in his ~Positive Polity~, exposes his soul with great freedom, and
the curious may trace how, while he professes and quite honestly intends
to refer himself always to his "Greater Being" Humanity, he narrows
constantly to his projected "Western Republic" of civilised men, and
quite frequently to the minute indefinite body of Positivist subscribers.
And the history of the Christian Church, with its development of orders
and cults, sects and dissents, the history of fashionable society with
its cliques and sets, and every political history with its cabals and
inner cabinets, witness to the struggle that goes on in the minds of
men to adjust themselves to a body larger indeed than themselves, but
which still does not strain and escape their imaginative grasp.

The statesman, both for himself and others, must recognise this inadequacy
of grasp, and the necessity for real and imaginary aggregations to sustain
men in their practical service of the order of the world.  He must be a
sociologist; he must study the whole science of aggregations in relation
to that World State to which his reason and his maturest thought direct
him.  He must lend himself to the development of aggregatory ideas that
favour the civilising process, and he must do his best to promote the
disintegration of aggregations and the effacement of aggregatory ideas,
that keep men narrow and unreasonably prejudiced one against another.

He will, of course, know that few men are even rudely consistent in
such matters, that the same man in different moods and on different
occasions, is capable of referring himself in perfect good faith, not
only to different, but to contradictory larger beings, and that the
more important thing about an aggregatory idea from the State maker's
point of view is not so much what it explicitly involves as what it
implicitly repudiates.  The natural man does not feel he is aggregating
at all, unless he aggregates ~against~ something. He refers himself to
the tribe; he is loyal to the tribe, and quite inseparably he fears or
dislikes those others outside the tribe.  The tribe is always at least
defensively hostile and usually actively hostile to humanity beyond
the aggregation. The Anti-idea, it would seem, is inseparable from the
aggregatory idea; it is a necessity of the human mind.  When we think
of the class A as desirable, we think of Not-A as undesirable. The two
things are as inevitably connected as the tendons of our hands, so that
when we flatten down our little fingers on our palms, the fourth digit,
whether we want it or not, comes down half-way.  All real working gods,
one may remark, all gods that are worshipped emotionally, are tribal
gods, and every attempt to universalise the idea of God trails dualism
and the devil after it as a moral necessity.

When we inquire, as well as the unformed condition of terrestrial
sociology permits, into the aggregatory ideas that seem to satisfy
men, we find a remarkable complex, a disorderly complex, in the minds
of nearly all our civilised contemporaries. For example, all sorts
of aggregatory ideas come and go across the chameleon surfaces of my
botanist's mind.  He has a strong feeling for systematic botanists as
against plant physiologists, whom he regards as lewd and evil scoundrels
in this relation, but he has a strong feeling for all botanists, and,
indeed, all biologists, as against physicists, and those who profess the
exact sciences, all of whom he regards as dull, mechanical, ugly-minded
scoundrels in this relation; but he has a strong feeling for all who
profess what is called Science as against psychologists, sociologists,
philosophers, and literary men, whom he regards as wild, foolish, immoral
scoundrels in this relation; but he has a strong feeling for all educated
men as against the working man, whom he regards as a cheating, lying,
loafing, drunken, thievish, dirty scoundrel in this relation; but so
soon as the working man is comprehended together with those others, as
Englishmen -- which includes, in this case, I may remark, the Scottish
and Welsh -- he holds them superior to all other sorts of European,
whom he regards, etc....

Now one perceives in all these aggregatory ideas and rearrangements of the
sympathies one of the chief vices of human thought, due to its obsession
by classificatory suggestions. [Footnote: See Chapter One, Section 5, and
the Appendix.]  The necessity for marking our classes has brought with it
a bias for false and excessive contrast, and we never invent a term but we
are at once cramming it with implications beyond its legitimate content.
There is no feat of irrelevance that people will not perform quite easily
in this way; there is no class, however accidental, to which they will
not at once ascribe deeply distinctive qualities.  The seventh sons of
seventh sons have remarkable powers of insight; people with a certain
sort of ear commit crimes of violence; people with red hair have souls
of fire; all democratic socialists are trustworthy persons; all people
born in Ireland have vivid imaginations and all Englishmen are clods;
all Hindoos are cowardly liars; all curly-haired people are good-natured;
all hunchbacks are energetic and wicked, and all Frenchmen eat frogs.
Such stupid generalisations have been believed with the utmost readiness,
and acted upon by great numbers of sane, respectable people.  And when
the class is one's own class, when it expresses one of the aggregations
to which one refers one's own activities, then the disposition to divide
all qualities between this class and its converse, and to cram one's
own class with every desirable distinction, becomes overwhelming.

It is part of the training of the philosopher to regard all such
generalisations with suspicion; it is part of the training of the Utopist
and statesman, and all good statesmen are Utopists, to mingle something
very like animosity with that suspicion.  For crude classifications and
false generalisations are the curse of all organised human life.


SECTION 2


Disregarding classes, cliques, sets, castes, and the like minor
aggregations, concerned for the most part with details and minor aspects
of life, one finds among the civilised peoples of the world certain
broad types of aggregatory idea.  There are, firstly, the national ideas,
ideas which, in their perfection, require a uniformity of physical and
mental type, a common idiom, a common religion, a distinctive style of
costume, decoration, and thought, and a compact organisation acting with
complete external unity.  Like the Gothic cathedral, the national idea is
never found complete with all its parts; but one has in Russia, with her
insistence on political and religious orthodoxy, something approaching it
pretty closely, and again in the inland and typical provinces of China,
where even a strange pattern of hat arouses hostility.  We had it in
vigorous struggle to exist in England under the earlier Georges in
the minds of those who supported the Established Church.  The idea of
the fundamental nature of nationality is so ingrained in thought, with
all the usual exaggeration of implication, that no one laughs at talk
about Swedish painting or American literature.  And I will confess and
point out that my own detachment from these delusions is so imperfect
and discontinuous that in another passage I have committed myself to
a short assertion of the exceptionally noble quality of the English
imagination. [Footnote: Chapter Seven, Section 6.]  I am constantly
gratified by flattering untruths about English superiority which I
should reject indignantly were the application bluntly personal, and I
am ever ready to believe the scenery of England, the poetry of England,
even the decoration and music of England, in some mystic and impregnable
way, the best.  This habit of intensifying all class definitions, and
particularly those in which one has a personal interest, is in the very
constitution of man's mind.  It is part of the defect of that instrument.
We may watch against it and prevent it doing any great injustices, or
leading us into follies, but to eradicate it is an altogether different
matter.  There it is, to be reckoned with, like the coccyx, the pineal
eye, and the vermiform appendix.  And a too consistent attack on it may
lead simply to its inversion, to a vindictively pro-foreigner attitude
that is equally unwise.

The second sort of aggregatory ideas, running very often across the
boundaries of national ideas and in conflict with them, are religious
ideas.  In Western Europe true national ideas only emerged to their
present hectic vigour after the shock of the Reformation had liberated men
from the great tradition of a Latin-speaking Christendom, a tradition
the Roman Catholic Church has sustained as its modification of the
old Latin-speaking Imperialism in the rule of the ~pontifex maximus~.
There was, and there remains to this day, a profound disregard of
local dialect and race in the Roman Catholic tradition, which has made
that Church a persistently disintegrating influence in national life.
Equally spacious and equally regardless of tongues and peoples is the
great Arabic-speaking religion of Mahomet.  Both Christendom and Islam
are indeed on their secular sides imperfect realisations of a Utopian
World State.  But the secular side was the weaker side of these cults;
they produced no sufficiently great statesmen to realise their spiritual
forces, and it is not in Rome under pontifical rule, nor in Munster under
the Anabaptists, but rather in Thomas a' Kempis and Saint Augustin's
City of God that we must seek for the Utopias of Christianity.

In the last hundred years a novel development of material forces, and
especially of means of communication, has done very much to break up the
isolations in which nationality perfected its prejudices and so to render
possible the extension and consolidation of such a world-wide culture
as medival Christendom and Islam foreshadowed.  The first onset of
these expansive developments has been marked in the world of mind by an
expansion of political ideals -- Comte's ~Western Republic~ (1848) was
the first Utopia that involved the synthesis of numerous States -- by the
development of "Imperialisms" in the place of national policies, and by
the search for a basis for wider political unions in racial traditions
and linguistic affinities.  Anglo-Saxonism, Pan-Germanism, and the like
are such synthetic ideas.  Until the 'eighties, the general tendency
of progressive thought was at one with the older Christian tradition
which ignored "race," and the aim of the expansive liberalism movement,
so far as it had a clear aim, was to Europeanise the world, to extend
the franchise to negroes, put Polynesians into trousers, and train the
teeming myriads of India to appreciate the exquisite lilt of ~The Lady of
the Lake~.  There is always some absurdity mixed with human greatness,
and we must not let the fact that the middle Victorians counted Scott,
the suffrage, and pantaloons among the supreme blessings of life, conceal
from us the very real nobility of their dream of England's mission to
the world....

We of this generation have seen a flood of reaction against such
universalism.  The great intellectual developments that centre upon the
work of Darwin have exacerbated the realisation that life is a conflict
between superior and inferior types, it has underlined the idea that
specific survival rates are of primary significance in the world's
development, and a swarm of inferior intelligences has applied to human
problems elaborated and exaggerated versions of these generalisations.
These social and political followers of Darwin have fallen into an obvious
confusion between race and nationality, and into the natural trap of
patriotic conceit.  The dissent of the Indian and Colonial governing
class to the first crude applications of liberal propositions in India
has found a voice of unparalleled penetration in Mr. Kipling, whose want
of intellectual deliberation is only equalled by his poietic power.
The search for a basis for a new political synthesis in adaptable
sympathies. based on linguistic affinities, was greatly influenced by
Max Mller's unaccountable assumption that language indicated kindred,
and led straight to wildly speculative ethnology, to the discovery that
there was a Keltic race, a Teutonic race, an Indo-European race, and so
forth.  A book that has had enormous influence in this matter, because
of its use in teaching, is J. R. Green's ~Short History of the English
People~, with its grotesque insistence upon Anglo-Saxonism.  And just now
the world is in a sort of delirium about race and the racial struggle.
The Briton forgetting his Defoe, [Footnote: ~The True-born Englishman~.]
the Jew forgetting the very word proselyte, the German forgetting
his anthropometric variations, and the Italian forgetting everything,
are obsessed by the singular purity of their blood, and the danger of
contamination the mere continuance of other races involves. True to the
law that all human aggregation involves the development of a spirit of
opposition to whatever is external to the aggregation, extraordinary
intensifications of racial definition are going on; the vileness,
the inhumanity, the incompatibility of alien races is being steadily
exaggerated. The natural tendency of every human being towards a stupid
conceit in himself and his kind, a stupid depreciation of all unlikeness,
is traded upon by this bastard science.  With the weakening of national
references, and with the pause before reconstruction in religious belief,
these new arbitrary and unsubstantial race prejudices become daily more
formidable. They are shaping policies and modifying laws, and they will
certainly be responsible for a large proportion of the wars, hardships,
and cruelties the immediate future holds in store for our earth.

No generalisations about race are too extravagant for the inflamed
credulity of the present time.  No attempt is ever made to distinguish
differences in inherent quality -- the true racial differences -- from
artificial differences due to culture. No lesson seems ever to be drawn
from history of the fluctuating incidence of the civilising process
first upon this race and then upon that.  The politically ascendant
peoples of the present phase are understood to be the superior races,
including such types as the Sussex farm labourer, the Bowery tough, the
London hooligan, and the Paris apache; the races not at resent prospering
politically, such as the Egyptians, the reeks, the Spanish, the Moors,
the Chinese, the Hindoos, the Peruvians, and all uncivilised people are
represented as the inferior races, unfit to associate with the former
on terms of equality, unfit to intermarry with them on any terms, unfit
for any decisive voice in human affairs.  In the popular imagination
of Western Europe, the Chinese are becoming bright gamboge in colour,
and unspeakably abominable in every respect; the people who are black
-- the people who have fuzzy hair and flattish noses, andd no calves
to speak of -- are no longer held to be within the pale of humanity.
These superstitions work out along the obvious lines of the popular logic.
The depopulation of the Congo Free State by the Belgians, the horrible
massacre of Chinese by European soldiery during the Pekin expedition,
are condoned as a painful but necessary part of the civilising process
of the world.  The world-wide repudiation of slavery in the nineteenth
century was done against a vast sullen force of ignorant pride, which,
reinvigorated by the new delusions, swings back again to power.

"Science" is supposed to lend its sanction to race mania, but it is only
"science" as it is understood by very illiterate people that does anything
of the sort -- "scientists'" science, in fact.  What science has to tell
about "The Races of Man" will be found compactly set forth by Doctor J.
Deinker, in the book published under that title. [Footnote: See also an
excellent paper in the ~American Journal of Sociology~ for March, 1904,
"The Psychology of Race Prejudice," by W. I. Thomas.] From that book one
may learn the beginnings of race charity.  Save for a few isolated pools
of savage humanity, there is probably no pure race in the whole world.
The great continental populations are all complex mixtures of numerous
and fluctuating types.  Even the Jews present every kind of skull that
is supposed to be racially distinctive, a vast range of complexion --
from blackness in Goa, to extreme fairness in Holland -- and a vast
mental and physical diversity.  Were the Jews to discontinue all
intermarriage with "other races" henceforth for ever, it would depend
upon quite unknown laws of fecundity, prepotency, and variability, what
their final type would be, or, indeed, whether any particular type would
ever prevail over diversity. And, without going beyond the natives of
the British Isles, one can discover an enormous range of types, tall and
short, straight-haired and curly, fair and dark, supremely intelligent
and unteachably stupid, straightforward, disingenuous, and what not.
The natural tendency is to forget all this range directly "race" comes
under discussion, to take either an average or some quite arbitrary ideal
as the type, and think only of that.  The more difficult thing to do,
but the thing that must be done, if we are to get just results in this
discussion, is to do one's best to bear the range in mind.

Let us admit that the average Chinaman is probably different in
complexion, and, indeed, in all his physical and psychical proportions,
from the average Englishman.  Does that render their association upon
terms of equality in a World State impossible?  What the average
Chinaman or Englishman may be, is of no importance whatever to our
plan of a World State.  It is not averages that exist, but individuals.
The average Chinaman will never meet the average Englishman anywhere; only
individual Chinamen will meet individual Englishmen.  Now among Chinamen
will be found a range of variety as extensive as among Englishmen, and
there is no single trait presented by all Chinamen and no Englishman,
or ~vice versa~.  Even the oblique eye is not universal in China, and
there are probably many Chinamen who might have been "changed at birth,"
taken away and educated into quite passable Englishmen.  Even after we
have separated out and allowed for the differences in carriage, physique,
moral prepossessions, and so forth, due to their entirely divergent
cultures, there remains, no doubt, a very great difference between the
average Chinaman and the average Englishman; but would that amount to a
wider difference than is to be found between extreme types of Englishmen?

For my own part I do not think that it would.  But it is evident that
any precise answer can be made only when anthropology has adopted much
more exact and exhaustive methods of inquiry, and a far more precise
analysis than its present resources permit.

Be it remembered how doubtful and tainted is the bulk of our evidence in
these matters.  These are extraordinarily subtle inquiries, from which few
men succeed in disentangling the threads of their personal associations
-- the curiously interwoven strands of self-love and selff-interest
that affect their inquiries.  One might almost say that instinct fights
against such investigations, as it does undoubtedly against many necessary
medical researches.  But while a long special training, a high tradition
and the possibility of reward and distinction, enable the medical student
to face many tasks that are at once undignified and physically repulsive,
the people from whom we get our anthropological information are rarely
men of more than average intelligence, and of no mental training at all.
And the problems are far more elusive. It surely needs at least the gifts
and training of a first-class novelist, combined with a sedulous patience
that probably cannot be hoped for in combination with these, to gauge
the all-round differences between man and man.  Even where there are no
barriers of language and colour, understanding may be nearly impossible.
How few educated people seem to understand the servant class in England,
or the working men! Except for Mr. Bart Kennedy's ~A Man Adrift~, I
know of scarcely any book that shows a really sympathetic and living
understanding of the navvy, the longshore sailor man, the rough chap
of our own race.  Caricatures, luridly tragic or gaily comic, in which
the misconceptions of the author blend with the preconceptions of the
reader and achieve success, are, of course, common enough.  And then
consider the sort of people who pronounce judgments on the moral
and intellectual capacity of the negro, the Malay, or the Chinaman.
You have missionaries, native schoolmasters, employers of coolies,
traders, simple downright men, who scarcely suspect the existence of any
sources of error in their verdicts, who are incapable of understanding
the difference between what is innate and what is acquired, much less of
distinguishing them in their interplay.  Now and then one seems to have
a glimpse of something really living -- in Mary Kingsley's buoyant work,
for instance -- and even that may be no more than my illusion.

For my own part I am disposed to discount all adverse judgments and all
statements of insurmountable differences between race and race.  I talk
upon racial qualities to all men who have had opportunities of close
observation, and I find that their insistence upon these differences
is usually in inverse proportion to their intelligence.  It may be the
chance of my encounters, but that is my clear impression.  Common sailors
will generalise in the profoundest way about Irishmen, and Scotchmen,
and Yankees, and Nova Scotians, and "Dutchies," until one might think
one talked of different species of animal, but the educated explorer
flings clear of all these delusions. To him men present themselves
individualised, and if they classify it is by some skin-deep accident
of tint, some trick of the tongue, or habit of gesture, or such-like
superficiality. And after all there exists to-day available one kind
at least of unbiased anthropological evidence.  There are photographs.
Let the reader turn over the pages of some such copiously illustrated
work as ~The Living Races of Mankind~, [Footnote: ~The Living Races
of Mankind~, by H. N. Hutchinson, J. W. Gregory, and R. Lydekker.
(Hutchinson ).] and look into the eyes of one alien face after another.
Are they not very like the people one knows?  For the most part,
one finds it hard to believe that, with a common language and common
social traditions, one would not get on very well with these people.
Here or there is a brutish or evil face, but you can find as brutish
and evil in the Strand on any afternoon. There are differences no doubt,
but fundamental incompatibilities -- ~no!~  And very many of them send
out a ray of special resemblance and remind one more strongly of this
friend or that, than they do of their own kind.  One notes with surprise
that one's good friend and neighbour X and an anonymous naked Gold Coast
negro belong to one type, as distinguished from one's dear friend Y and
a beaming individual from Somaliland, who as certainly belong to another.

In one matter the careless and prejudiced nature of accepted racial
generalisations is particularly marked.  A great and increasing number
of people are persuaded that "half-breeds" are peculiarly evil creatures
-- as hunchbacks and bastards were supposed to be in the  middle ages.
The full legend of the wickedness of the half-breed is best to be learnt
from a drunken mean white from Virginia or the Cape.  The half-breed,
one hears, combines all the vices of either parent, he is wretchedly
poor in health and spirit, but vindictive, powerful, and dangerous to
an extreme degree, his morals -- the mean white has high and exacting
standards -- are indescribable even in whispers in a saloon, and so on,
and so on.  There is really not an atom of evidence an unprejudiced mind
would accept to sustain any belief of the sort.  There is nothing to
show that the children of racial ad mixture are, as a class, inherently
either better or worse in any respect than either parent.  There is
an equally baseless theory that they are better, a theory displayed
to a fine degree of foolishness in the article on Shakespeare in the
~Encyclopdia Britannica~. Both theories belong to the vast edifice of
sham science that smothers the realities of modern knowledge.  It may be
that most "half-breeds" are failures in life, but that proves nothing.
They are, in an enormous number of cases, illegitimate and outcast from
the normal education of either race; they are brought up in homes that
are the battle-grounds of conflicting cultures; they labour under a heavy
premium of disadvantage. There is, of course, a passing suggestion of
Darwin's to account for atavism that might go to support the theory of
the vileness of half-breeds, if it had ever been proved.  But, then,
it never has been proved.  There is no proof in the matter at all.


SECTION 3


Suppose, now, there is such a thing as an all-round inferior race.
Is that any reason why we should propose to preserve it for ever in a
condition of tutelage?  Whether there is a race so inferior I do not
know, but certainly there is no race so superior as to be trusted with
human charges.  The true answer to Aristotle's plea for slavery, that
there are "natural slaves," lies in that fact that there are no "natural"
masters. Power is no more to be committed to men without discipline and
restriction than alcohol.  The true objection to slavery is not that it
is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior.  There is
only one sane and logical thing to be done with a really inferior race,
and that is to exterminate it.

Now there are various ways of exterminating a race, and most of them
are cruel.  You may end it with fire and sword after the old Hebrew
fashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniards did
the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowly with
deleterious commodities, as the Americans do with most of their Indians;
you may incite it to wear clothing to which it is not accustomed, and to
live under new and strange conditions that will expose it to infectious
diseases to which you yourselves are immune, as the missionaries do the
Polynesians; you may resort to honest simple murder, as we English did
with the Tasmanians; or you can maintain such conditions as conduce to
"race suicide," as the British administration does in Fiji.  Suppose,
then, for a moment, that there is an all-round inferior race; a Modern
Utopia is under the hard logic of life, and it would have to exterminate
such a race as quickly as it could.  On the whole, the Fijian device seems
the least cruel.  But Utopia would do that without any clumsiness of race
distinction, in exactly the same manner, and by the same machinery, as it
exterminates all its own defective and inferior strains; that is to say,
as we have already discussed in Chapter Five, Section 1, by its marriage
laws, and by the laws of the minimum wage.  That extinction need never
be discriminatory.  If any of the race did, after all, prove to be fit
to survive they would survive -- they would be picked out with a sure
and automatic justice from the over-ready condemnation of all their kind.

Is there, however, an all-round inferior race in the world? Even the
Australian black-fellow is, perhaps, not quite so entirely eligible for
extinction as a good, wholesome, horse-racing, sheep-farming Australian
white may think.  These queer little races, the black fellows, the
Pigmies, the Bushmen, may have their little gifts, a greater keenness, a
greater fineness of this sense or that, a quaintness of the imagination or
what not, that may serve as their little unique addition to the totality
of our Utopian civilisation.  We are supposing that every individual alive
on earth is alive in Utopia, and so all the surviving "black-fellows"
are there.  Every one of them in Utopia has had what none have had on
earth, a fair education and fair treatment, justice, and opportunity.
Suppose that the common idea is right about the general inferiority
of these people, then it would follow that in Utopia most of them are
childless, and working at or about the minimum wage, and some will have
passed out of all possibility of offspring under the hand of the offended
law; but still -- cannot we imagine some few of these little people --
whom you must suppose neither naked nor clothed in the European style,
but robed in the Utopian fashion -- may have found some delicate art to
practise, some peculiar sort of carving, for example, that justifies God
in creating them?  Utopia has sound sanitary laws, sound social laws,
sound economic laws; what harm are these people going to do?

Some may be even prosperous and admired, may have married women of their
own or some other race, and so may be transmitting that distinctive thin
thread of excellence, to take its due place in the great synthesis of
the future.

And, indeed, coming along that terrace in Utopia, I see a little figure,
a little bright-eyed, bearded man, inky black, frizzy haired, and clad in
a white tunic and black hose, and with a mantle of lemon yellow wrapped
about his shoulders. He walks, as most Utopians walk, as though he
had reason to be proud of something, as though he had no reason to be
afraid of anything in the world.  He carries a portfolio in his hand.
It is that, I suppose, as much as his hair, that recalls the ~Quartier
Latin~ to my mind.


SECTION 4


I had already discussed the question of race with the botanist at Lucerne.

"But you would not like," he cried in horror, "your daughter to marry
a Chinaman or a negro?"

"Of course," said I, "when you say Chinaman, you think of a creature
with a pigtail, long nails, and insanitary habits, and when you say
negro you think of a filthy-headed, black creature in an old hat. You do
this because your imagination is too feeble to disentangle the inherent
qualities of a thing from its habitual associations."

"Insult isn't argument," said the botanist.

"Neither is unsound implication.  You make a question of race into a
question of unequal cultures.  You would not like your daughter to marry
the sort of negro who steals hens, but then you would also not like your
daughter to marry a pure English hunchback with a squint, or a drunken
cab tout of Norman blood.  As a matter of fact, very few well-bred
English girls do commit that sort of indiscretion.  But you don't think
it necessary to generalise against men of your own race because they
are drunken cab touts, and why should you generalise against negroes?
Because the proportion of undesirables is higher among negroes, that
does not justify a sweeping condemnation.  You may have to condemn most,
but why ~all~?  There may be -- neither of us knows enough to deny --
negroes who are handsome, capable, courageous."

"Ugh!" said the botanist.

"How detestable you must find Othello!"

It is my Utopia, and for a moment I could almost find it in my heart to
spite the botanist by creating a modern Desdemona and her lover sooty
black to the lips, there before our eyes.  But I am not so sure of my
case as that, and for the moment there shall come nothing more than
a swart-faced, dusky Burmese woman in the dress of the Greater Rule,
with her tall Englishman (as he might be on earth) at her side. That,
however, is a digression from my conversation with the botanist.

"And the Chinaman?" said the botanist.

"I think we shall have all the buff and yellow peoples intermingling
pretty freely."

"Chinamen and white women, for example."

"Yes," I said, "you've got to swallow that, anyhow; you ~shall~ swallow
that."

He finds the idea too revolting for comment.

I try to make the thing seem easier for him.  "Do try," I said, "to grasp
a Modern Utopian's conditions.  The Chinaman will speak the same language
as his wife -- whatever her race may be -- he will wear costume of the
common civilised fashion, he will have much the same education as his
European rival, read the same literature, bow to the same traditions.
And you must remember a wife in Utopia is singularly not subject to
her husband...."

The botanist proclaims his invincible conclusion: "Every one would
cut her!"

"This is Utopia," I said, and then sought once more to tranquillise
his mind.  "No doubt among the vulgar, coarse-minded people outside the
Rule there may be something of the sort.  Every earthly moral blockhead,
a little educated, perhaps, is to be found in Utopia.  You will, no doubt,
find the `cut' and the `boycott,' and all those nice little devices
by which dull people get a keen edge on life, in their place here,
and their place here is somewhere----"

I turned a thumb earthward.  "There!"

The botanist did not answer for a little while.  Then he said, with
some temper and great emphasis: "Well, I'm jolly glad anyhow that I'm
not to be a permanent resident in this Utopia, ~if our daughters are to
be married to Hottentots by regulation~.  I'm jolly glad."

He turned his back on me.

Now did I say anything of the sort?...

I had to bring him, I suppose; there's no getting away from him in
this life.  But, as I have already observed, the happy ancients went to
their Utopias without this sort of company.


SECTION 5


What gives the botanist so great an advantage in all his Anti-Utopian
utterances is his unconsciousness of his own limitations.  He thinks
in little pieces that lie about loose, and nothing has any necessary
link with anything else in his mind.  So that I cannot retort upon him
by asking him, if he objects to this synthesis of all nations, tongues,
and peoples in a World State, what alternative ideal he proposes.

People of this sort do not even feel the need of alternatives. Beyond the
scope of a few personal projects, meeting Her again, and things like
that, they do not feel that there is a future.  They are unencumbered
by any baggage of convictions whatever, in relation to that.  That,
at least, is the only way in which I can explain our friend's high
intellectual mobility.  Attempts to correlate statesmanship, which they
regard with interest as a dramatic interplay of personalities, with any
secular movement of humanity, they class with the differential calculus
and Darwinism, as things far too difficult to be anything but finally
and subtly wrong.

So the argument must pass into a direct address to the reader.

If you are not prepared to regard a world-wide synthesis of all
cultures and polities and races into one World State as the desirable
end upon which all civilising efforts converge, what do you regard
as the desirable end?  Synthesis, one may remark in passing, does not
necessarily mean fusion, nor does it mean uniformity.

The alternatives fall roughly under three headings.  The first is to
assume there is a best race, to define as well as one can that best
race, and to regard all other races as material for extermination.
This has a fine, modern, biological air ("Survival of the Fittest").
If you are one of those queer German professors who write insanity about
Welt-Politik, you assume the best race is the "Teutonic"; Cecil Rhodes
affected that triumph of creative imagination, the "Anglo-Saxon race";
my friend, Moses Cohen, thinks there is much to be said for the Jew.
On its premises, this is a perfectly sound and reasonable policy, and it
opens out a brilliant prospect for the scientific inventor for what one
might call Welt-Apparat in the future, for national harrowing and reaping
machines, and race-destroying fumigations.  The great plain of China
("Yellow Peril") lends itself particularly to some striking wholesale
undertaking; it might, for example, be flooded for a few days, and then
disinfected with volcanic chlorine.  Whether, when all the inferior
races have been stamped out, the superior race would not proceed at once,
or after a brief millennial period of social harmony, to divide itself
into sub-classes, and begin the business over again at a higher level,
is an interesting residual question into which we need not now penetrate.

That complete development of a scientific Welt-Politik is not, however,
very widely advocated at present, no doubt from a want of confidence in
the public imagination.  We have, however, a very audible and influential
school, the Modern Imperialist school, which distinguishes its own
race -- there is a German, a British, and an Anglo-Saxon section in
the school, and a wider teaching which embraces the whole "white race"
in one remarkable tolerance -- as the superior race, as one, indeed,
superior enough to own slaves, collectively, if not individually; and the
exponents of this doctrine look with a resolute, truculent, but slightly
indistinct eye to a future in which all the rest of the world will be in
subjection to these elect.  The ideals of this type are set forth pretty
clearly in Mr. Kidd's ~Control of the Tropics~.  The whole world is to be
administered by the "white" Powers -- Mr. Kidd did not anticipate Japan --
who will see to it that their subjects do not "prevent the utilisation of
the immense natural resources which they have in charge."  Those other
races are to be regarded as children, recalcitrant children at times,
and without any of the tender emotions of paternity. It is a little
doubtful whether the races lacking "in the elementary qualities of social
efficiency" are expected to acquire them under the chastening hands of
those races which, through "strength and energy of character, humanity,
probity, and integrity, and a single-minded devotion to conceptions of
duty," are developing "the resources of the richest regions of the earth"
over their heads, or whether this is the ultimate ideal.

Next comes the rather incoherent alternative that one associates in
England with official Liberalism.

Liberalism in England is not quite the same thing as Liberalism
in the rest of the world; it is woven of two strands. There is
Whiggism, the powerful tradition of seventeenth-century Protestant
and republican England, with its great debt to republican Rome, its
strong constructive and disciplinary bias, its broad and originally
very living and intelligent outlook; and interwoven with this there is
the sentimental and logical Liberalism that sprang from the stresses
of the eighteenth century, that finds its early scarce differentiated
expression in Harrington's ~Oceana~, and after fresh draughts of the
tradition of Brutus and Cato and some elegant trifling with noble savages,
budded in ~La Cit Morellyste~, flowered in the emotional democratic
naturalism of Rousseau, and bore abundant fruit in the French Revolution.
These are two very distinct strands.  Directly they were freed in America
from the grip of conflict with British Toryism, they came apart as the
Republican and Democratic parties respectively.  Their continued union in
Great Britain is a political accident. Because of this mixture, the whole
career of English-speaking Liberalism, though it has gone to one unbroken
strain of eloquence, has never produced a clear statement of policy in
relation to other peoples politically less fortunate. It has developed no
definite ideas at all about the future of mankind. The Whig disposition,
which once had some play in India, was certainly to attempt to anglicise
the "native," to assimilate his culture, and then to assimilate his
political status with that of his temporary ruler. But interwoven with
this anglicising tendency, which was also, by the bye, a Christianising
tendency, was a strong disposition, derived from the Rousseau strand, to
leave other peoples alone, to facilitate even the separation and autonomy
of detached portions of our own peoples, to disintegrate finally into
perfect, because lawless, individuals. The official exposition of British
"Liberalism" to-day still wriggles unstably because of these conflicting
constituents, but on the whole the Whig strand now seems the weaker.
The contemporary Liberal politician offers cogent criticism upon the
brutality and conceit of modern imperialisms, but that seems to be the
limit of his service. Taking what they do not say and do not propose as
an indication of Liberal intentions, it would seem that the ideal of the
British Liberals and of the American Democrats is to favour the existence
of just as many petty, loosely allied, or quite independent nationalities
as possible, just as many languages as possible, to deprecate armies and
all controls, and to trust to the innate goodness of disorder and the
powers of an ardent sentimentality to keep the world clean and sweet.
The Liberals will not face the plain consequence that such a state of
affairs is hopelessly unstable, that it involves the maximum risk of
war with the minimum of permanent benefit and public order. They will
not reflect that the stars in their courses rule inexorably against it.
It is a vague, impossible ideal, with a rude sort of unworldly moral
beauty, like the gospel of the Doukhobors.  Besides that charm it has this
most seductive quality to an official British Liberal, that it does not
exact intellectual activity nor indeed activity of any sort whatever.
It is, by virtue of that alone, a far less mischievous doctrine than
the crude and violent Imperialism of the popular Press.

Neither of these two schools of policy, neither the international ~laisser
faire~ of the Liberals, nor "hustle to the top" Imperialism, promise
any reality of permanent progress for the world of men.  They are the
resort, the moral reference, of those who will not think frankly and
exhaustively over the whole field of this question.  Do that, insist
upon solutions of more than accidental applicability, and you emerge
with one or other of two contrasted solutions, as the consciousness
of kind or the consciousness of individuality prevails in your mind.
In the former case you will adopt aggressive Imperialism, but you will
carry it out to its "thorough" degree of extermination.  You will seek
to develop the culture and power of your kind of men and women to the
utmost in order to shoulder all other kinds from the earth.  If on the
other hand you appreciate the unique, you will aim at such a synthesis
as this Utopia displays, a synthesis far more credible and possible
than any other Welt-Politik.  In spite of all the pageant of modern
war, synthesis is in the trend of the world. To aid and develop it,
could be made the open and secure policy of any great modern empire now.
Modern war, modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only
through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the conceit and
intellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind.
Were the will of the mass of men lit and conscious, I am firmly convinced
it would now burn steadily for synthesis and peace.

It would be so easy to bring about a world peace within a few decades, was
there but the will for it among men!  The great empires that exist need
but a little speech and frankness one with another.  Within, the riddles
of social order are already half solved in books and thoughts, there are
the common people and the subject peoples to be educated and drilled,
to be led to a common speech and a common literature, to be assimilated
and made citizens; without, there is the possibility of treaties.  Why,
for example, should Britain and France, or either and the United States,
or Sweden and Norway, or Holland, or Denmark, or Italy, fight any more
for ever? And if there is no reason, how foolish and dangerous it is
still to sustain linguistic differences and custom houses, and all sorts
of foolish and irritating distinctions between their various citizens!
Why should not all these peoples agree to teach some common language,
French, for example, in their common schools, or to teach each other's
languages reciprocally?  Why should they not aim at a common literature,
and bring their various common laws, their marriage laws, and so on,
into uniformity?  Why should they not work for a uniform minimum of labour
conditions through all their communities? Why, then, should they not --
except in the interests of a few rascal plutocrats -- trade freely and
exchange their citizenship freely throughout their common boundaries?
No doubt there are difficulties to be found, but they are quite finite
difficulties.  What is there to prevent a parallel movement of all the
civilised Powers in the world towards a common ideal and assimilation?

Stupidity -- nothing but stupidity, a stupid brute jealousy, aimless
and unjustifiable.

The coarser conceptions of aggregation are at hand, the hostile,
jealous patriotisms, the blare of trumpets and the pride of fools;
they serve the daily need though they lead towards disaster.  The real
and the immediate has us in its grip, the accidental personal thing.
The little effort of thought, the brief sustained effort of will, is
too much for the contemporary mind.  Such treaties, such sympathetic
international movements, are but dream stuff yet on earth, though Utopia
has realised them long since and already passed them by.



CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE BUBBLE BURSTS


SECTION 1


As I walk back along the river terrace to the hotel where the botanist
awaits me, and observe the Utopians I encounter, I have no thought that
my tenure of Utopia becomes every moment more precarious.  There float
in my mind vague anticipations of more talks with my double and still
more, of a steady elaboration of detail, of interesting journeys of
exploration.  I forget that a Utopia is a thing of the imagination
that becomes more fragile with every added circumstance, that, like a
soap-bubble, it is most brilliantly and variously coloured at the very
instant of its dissolution. This Utopia is nearly done.  All the broad
lines of its social organisation are completed now, the discussion of
all its general difficulties and problems.  Utopian individuals pass me
by, fine buildings tower on either hand; it does not occur to me that
I may look too closely.  To find the people assuming the concrete and
individual, is not, as I fondly imagine, the last triumph of realisation,
but the swimming moment of opacity before the film gives way.  To come
to individual emotional cases, is to return to the earth.

I find the botanist sitting at a table in the hotel courtyard.

"Well?" I say, standing before him.

"I've been in the gardens on the river terrace," he answers, "hoping I
might see her again."

"Nothing better to do?"

"Nothing in the world."

"You'll have your double back from India to-morrow. Then you'll have
conversation."

"I don't want it," he replies compactly.

I shrug my shoulders, and he adds, "At least with him."

I let myself down into a seat beside him.

For a time I sit restfully enjoying his companionable silence, and
thinking fragmentarily of those ~samurai~ and their Rules. I entertain
something of the satisfaction of a man who has finished building a bridge;
I feel that I have joined together things that I had never joined before.
My Utopia seems real to me, very real, I can believe in it, until
the metal chair-back gives to my shoulder blades, and Utopian sparrows
twitter and hop before my feet.  I have a pleasant moment of unhesitating
self-satisfaction; I feel a shameless exultation to be there.  For a
moment I forget the consideration the botanist demands; the mere pleasure
of completeness, of holding and controlling all the threads possesses me.

"You ~will~ persist in believing," I say, with an aggressive expository
note, "that if you meet this lady she will be a person with the memories
and sentiments of her double on earth.  You think she will understand
and pity, and perhaps love you.  Nothing of the sort is the case."
I repeat with confident rudeness, "Nothing of the sort is the case.
Things are different altogether here; you can hardly tell even now how
different are----"

I discover he is not listening to me.

"What is the matter?" I ask abruptly.

He makes no answer, but his expression startles me.

"What is the matter?" and then I follow his eyes.

A woman and a man are coming through the great archway -- and instantly
I guess what has happened.  She it is arrests my attention first --
long ago I knew she was a sweetly beautiful woman.  She is fair, with
frank blue eyes, that look with a sort of tender receptivity into her
companion's face.  For a moment or so they remain, greyish figures in
the cool shadow, against the sunlit greenery of the gardens beyond.

"It is Mary," the botanist whispers with white lips, but he stares at
the form of the man.  His face whitens, it becomes so transfigured with
emotion that for a moment it does not look weak.  Then I see that his
thin hand is clenched.

I realise how little I understand his emotions.

A sudden fear of what he will do takes hold of me.  He sits white and
tense as the two come into the clearer light of the courtyard.  The man,
I see, is one of the ~samurai~, a dark, strong-faced man, a man I have
never seen before, and she is wearing the robe that shows her a follower
of the Lesser Rule.

Some glimmering of the botanist's feelings strikes through to my slow
sympathies.  Of course -- a strange man!  I put out a restraining hand
towards his arm.  "I told you," I say, "that very probably, most probably,
she would have met some other.  I tried to prepare you."

"Nonsense," he whispers, without looking at me.  "It isn't that.  It's --
that scoundrel----"

He has an impulse to rise.  "That scoundrel," he repeats.

"He isn't a scoundrel," I say.  "How do you know? Keep still!  Why are
you standing up?"

He and I stand up quickly, I as soon as he.  But now the full meaning of
the group has reached me.  I grip his arm. "Be sensible," I say, speaking
very quickly, and with my back to the approaching couple.  "He's not
a scoundrel here. This world is different from that.  It's caught his
pride somehow and made a man of him.  Whatever troubled them there----"

He turns a face of white wrath on me, of accusation, and for the moment
of unexpected force.  "This is ~your~ doing," he says.  "You have done
this to mock me.  He -- of all men!"  For a moment speech fails him,
then; "You -- you have done this to mock me."

I try to explain very quickly.  My tone is almost propitiatory.

"I never thought of it until now.  But he's----  How did I know he was
the sort of man a disciplined world has a use for?"

He makes no answer, but he looks at me with eyes that are positively
baleful, and in the instant I read his mute but mulish resolve that
Utopia must end.

"Don't let that old quarrel poison all this," I say almost entreatingly.
"It happened all differently here -- everything is different here.
Your double will be back to-morrow.  Wait for him.  Perhaps then you
will understand----"

He shakes his head, and then bursts out with, "What do I want with
a double?  Double!  What do I care if things have been different here?
This----"

He thrusts me weakly back with his long, white hand. "My God!" he says
almost forcibly, "what nonsense all this is!  All these dreams!  All
Utopias!  There she is----! Oh, but I have dreamt of her!  And now----"

A sob catches him.  I am really frightened by this time. I still try to
keep between him and these Utopians, and to hide his gestures from them.

"It's different here," I persist.  "It's different here.  The emotion
you feel has no place in it.  It's a scar from the earth -- the sore
scar of your past----"

"And what are we all but scars?  What is life but a scarring?  It's ~you~
-- you who don't understand!  Of course we are covered wiith scars,
we live to be scarred, we are scars! We are the scars of the past!
These ~dreams~, these childish dreams----!"

He does not need to finish his sentence, he waves an unteachable
destructive arm.

My Utopia rocks about me.

For a moment the vision of that great courtyard hangs real. There the
Utopians live real about me, going to and fro, and the great archway
blazes with sunlight from the green gardens by the riverside.  The man
who is one of the ~samurai~, and his lady, whom the botanist loved
on earth, pass out of sight behind the marble flower-set Triton that
spouts coolness in the middle of the place.  For a moment I see two
working men in green tunics sitting on a marble seat in the shadow of
the colonnade, and a sweet little silver-haired old lady, clad all in
violet, and carrying a book, comes towards us, and lifts a curious eye
at the botanist's gestures.  And then----

"Scars of the past!  Scars of the past!  These fanciful, useless dreams!"


SECTION 2


There is no jerk, no sound, no hint of material shock.  We are in London,
and clothed in the fashion of the town.  The sullen roar of London fills
our ears....

I see that I am standing beside an iron seat of poor design in that
grey and gawky waste of asphalt -- Trafalgar Square, and the botanist,
with perplexity in his face, stares from me to a poor, shrivelled,
dirt-lined old woman -- my God! what a neglected thing she is! -- who
proffers a box of matches....

He buys almost mechanically, and turns back to me.

"I was saying," he says, "the past rules us absolutely. These dreams----"

His sentence does not complete itself.  He looks nervous and irritated.

"You have a trick at times," he says instead, "of making your suggestions
so vivid----"

He takes a plunge.  "If you don't mind," he says in a sort of quavering
ultimatum, "we won't discuss that aspect of the question -- the lady,
I mean -- further."

He pauses, and there still hangs a faint perplexity between us.

"But----" I begin.

For a moment we stand there, and my dream of Utopia runs off me like water
from an oiled slab.  Of course -- we lunched at our club.  We came back
from Switzerland by no dream train but by the ordinary Ble express.
We have been talking of that Lucerne woman he harps upon, and I have made
some novel comment on his story.  I have touched certain possibilities.

"You can't conceivably understand," he says.

"The fact remains," he goes on, taking up the thread of his argument again
with an air of having defined our field, "we are the scars of the past.
That's a thing one can discuss -- without personalities."

"No," I say rather stupidly, "no."

"You are always talking as though you could kick the past to pieces;
as though one could get right out from oneself and begin afresh.  It is
your weakness -- if you don't mind my being frank -- it makes you seem
harsh and dogmatic.  Life has gone easily for you; you have never been
badly tried.  You have been lucky -- you do not understand the other
way about. You are -- hard."

I answer nothing.

He pants for breath.  I perceive that in our discussion of his case I
must have gone too far, and that he has rebelled. Clearly I must have
said something wounding about that ineffectual love story of his.

"You don't allow for my position," he says, and it occurs to me to say,
"I'm obliged to look at the thing from my own point of view...."

One or other of us makes a move.  What a lot of filthy, torn paper
is scattered about the world!  We walk slowly side by side towards the
dirt-littered basin of the fountain, and stand regarding two grimy tramps
who sit and argue on a farther seat.  One holds a horrible old boot in
his hand, and gesticulates with it, while his other hand caresses his
rag-wrapped foot.  "Wot does Cham'lain ~si~?" his words drift to us.
" W'y, 'e says, wot's the good of 'nvesting your kepital where these
'ere Americans may dump it flat any time they like...."

(Were there not two men in green sitting on a marble seat?)


SECTION 3


We walk on, our talk suspended, past a ruthlessly clumsy hoarding,
towards where men and women and children are struggling about a string
of omnibuses.  A newsvendor at the corner spreads a newspaper placard
upon the wood pavement, pins the corners down with stones, and we glimpse
something about:


MASSACRE IN ODESSA

DISCOVERY OF HUMAN REMAINS AT CHERTSEY


SHOCKING LYNCHING OUTRAGE IN NEW

YORK STATE


GERMAN INTRIGUES GET A SET-BACK

THE BIRTHDAY HONOURS -- FULL LIST


Dear old familiar world!

An angry parent in conversation with a sympathetic friend jostles
against us.  "I'll knock his blooming young 'ed orf if 'e cheeks me again.
It's these 'ere brasted Board Schools----"

An omnibus passes, bearing on a board beneath an incorrectly drawn Union
Jack an exhortation to the true patriot to "Buy Bumper's British-Boiled
Jam."...

I am stunned beyond the possibility of discussion for a space.  In this
very place it must have been that the high terrace ran with the gardens
below it, along which I came from my double to our hotel.  I am going
back, but now through reality, along the path I passed so happily in my
dream.  And the people I saw then are the people I am looking at now --
with a difference.

The botanist walks beside me, white and nervously jerky in his movements,
his ultimatum delivered.

We start to cross the road.  An open carriage drives by, and we see
a jaded, red-haired woman, smeared with paint, dressed in furs, and
petulantly discontented.  Her face is familiar to me, her face with
a difference.

Why do I think of her as dressed in green?

Of course! -- she it was I saw leading her children by the hand!

Comes a crash to our left, and a running of people to see a cab-horse
down on the slippery, slanting pavement outside St. Martin's Church.

We go on up the street.

A heavy-eyed young Jewess, a draggled prostitute -- no crimson flower
for her hair, poor girl! -- regards us with a momentary speculation,
and we get a whiff of foul language from two newsboys on the kerb.

"We can't go on talking," the botanist begins, and ducks aside just
in time to save his eyes from the ferrule of a stupidly held umbrella.
He is going to treat our little tiff about that lady as closed.  He has
the air of picking up our conversation again at some earlier point.

He steps into the gutter, walks round outside a negro hawker, just
escapes the wheel of a hansom, and comes to my side again.

"We can't go on talking of your Utopia," he says, "in a noise and crowd
like this."

We are separated by a portly man going in the opposite direction,
and join again.  "We can't go on talking of Utopia," he repeats, "in
London....  Up in the mountains -- and holiday-time -- it was all right.
We let ourselves go!"

"I've been living in Utopia," I answer, tacitly adopting his tacit
proposal to drop the lady out of the question.

"At times," he says, with a queer laugh, "you've almost made me live
there, too."

He reflects.  "It doesn't do, you know.  ~No!~  And I don't know whether,
after all, I want----"

We are separated again by half a dozen lifted flagstones, a burning
brazier, and two engineers concerned with some underground business or
other -- in the busiest hour of the day's traffic.

"Why shouldn't it do?" I ask.

"It spoils the world of everyday to let your mind run on impossible
perfections."

"I wish," I shout against the traffic, "I could ~smash~ the world of
everyday."

My note becomes quarrelsome.  "You may accept ~this~ as the world of
reality, ~you~ may consent to be one scar in an ill-dressed compound
wound, but so -- not I!  This is a dream, too -- this world.  ~Your~
dream, and you bring me back to it -- out of Utopia----"

The crossing of Bow Street gives me pause again.

The face of a girl who is passing westward, a student girl, rather
carelessly dressed, her books in a carrying-strap, comes across my field
of vision.  The westward sun of London glows upon her face.  She has
eyes that dream, surely no sensuous nor personal dream.

After all, after all, dispersed, hidden, disorganised, undiscovered,
unsuspected even by themselves, the ~samurai~ of Utopia are in this world,
the motives that are developed and organised there stir dumbly here and
stifle in ten thousand futile hearts....

I overtake the botanist, who got ahead at the crossing by the advantage
of a dust-cart.

"You think this is real because you can't wake out of it," I say.
"It's all a dream, and there are people -- I'm just one of the first
of a multitude -- between sleeping and waking -- who will presently be
rubbing it out of their eyes."

A pinched and dirty little girl, with sores upon her face stretches
out a bunch of wilting violets, in a pitifully thin little fist, and
interrupts my speech.  "Bunch o' vi'lets -- on'y a penny."

"No!" I says curtly, hardening my heart.

A ragged and filthy nursing mother, with her last addition to our
Imperial People on her arm, comes out of a drinkshop, and stands a little
unsteadily, and wipes mouth and nose comprehensively with the back of
a red chapped hand....


SECTION 4


"Isn't ~that~ reality?" says the botanist, almost triumphantly, and
leaves me aghast at his triumph.

"~That!~" I say belatedly.  "It's a thing in a nightmare!"

He shakes his head and smiles -- exasperatingly.

I perceive quite abruptly that the botanist and I have reached the limits
of our intercourse.

"The world dreams things like that," I say, "because it suffers from an
indigestion of such people as you."

His low-toned self-complacency, like the faded banner of an obstinate
fort, still flies unconquered.  And you know, he's not even a happy man
with it all!

For ten seconds or more I am furiously seeking in my mind for a word,
for a term of abuse, for one compendious verbal missile that shall smash
this man for ever.  It has to express total inadequacy of imagination
and will, spiritual anmia, dull respectability, gross sentimentality,
a cultivated pettiness of heart....

That word will not come.  But no other word will do. Indeed the word does
not exist.  There is nothing with sufficient vituperative concentration
for this moral and intellectual stupidity of educated people....

"Er----" he begins.

No! I can't endure him.

With a passionate rapidity of movement, I leave his side, dart between
a carriage and a van, duck under the head of a cab-horse, and board a
bus going westward somewhere -- but anyhow, going in exactly the reverse
direction to the botanist. I clamber up the steps and thread my swaying
way to the seat immediately behind the driver.

"There!" I say, as I whack myself down on the seat and pant.

When I look round the botanist is out of sight.


SECTION 5


But I am back in the world for all that, and my Utopia is done.

It is good discipline for the Utopist to visit this world occasionally.

But from the front seat on the top of an omnibus on a sunny September
afternoon, the Strand, and Charing Cross corner, and Whitehall, and
the great multitude of people, the great uproar of vehicles, streaming
in all directions, is apt to look a world altogether too formidable.
It has a glare, it has a tumult and vigour that shouts one down.
It shouts one down, if shouting is to carry it.  What good was it to
trot along the pavement through this noise and tumult of life, pleading
Utopia to that botanist?  What good would it be to recommend Utopia in
this driver's preoccupied ear?

There are moments in the life of every philosopher and dreamer when he
feels himself the flimsiest of absurdities, when the Thing in Being
has its way with him, its triumphant way, when it asks in a roar,
unanswerably, with a fine solid use of the current vernacular, "What
Good is all this -- Rot about Utopias?"

One inspects the Thing in Being with something of the diffident
speculation of primitive man, peering from behind a tree at an angry
elephant.

(There is an omen in that image.  On how many occasions must that ancestor
of ours have had just the Utopist's feeling of ambitious unreality,
have decided that on the whole it was wiser to go very quietly home
again, and leave the big beast alone?  But, in the end, men rode upon
the elephant's head, and guided him this way or that....  The Thing
in Being that roars so tremendously about Charing Cross corner seems
a bigger antagonist than an elephant, but then we have better weapons
than chipped flint blades....)

After all, in a very little time everything that impresses me so mightily
this September afternoon will have changed or passed away for ever,
everything.  These omnibuses, these great, stalwart, crowded many-coloured
things that jostle one another, and make so handsome a clatter-clamour,
will all have gone; they and their horses and drivers and organisation;
you will come here and you will not find them.  Something else will be
here, some different sort of vehicle, that is now perhaps the mere germ
of an idea in some engineer student's brain.  And this road and pavement
will have changed, and these impressive great buildings; other buildings
will be here, buildings that are as yet more impalpable than this page
you read, more formless and flimsy by far than anything that is reasoned
here.  Little plans sketched on paper, strokes of a pen or of a brush,
will be the first materialisations of what will at last obliterate every
detail and atom of these re-echoing actualities that overwhelm us now.
And the clothing and gestures of these innumerable people, the character
of their faces and bearing, these, too, will be recast in the spirit of
what are now obscure and impalpable beginnings.

The new things will be indeed of the substance of the things that is,
but differing just in the measure of the will and imagination that
goes to make them.  They will be strong and fair as the will is sturdy
and organised and the imagination comprehensive and bold; they will be
ugly and smeared with wretchedness as the will is fluctuating and the
imagination timid and mean.

Indeed Will is stronger than Fact, it can mould and overcome Fact.
But this world has still to discover its will, it is a world that slumbers
inertly, and all this roar and pulsation of life is no more than its
heavy breathing....  My mind runs on to the thought of an awakening.

As my omnibus goes lumbering up Cockspur Street, through the clatter
rattle of the cabs and carriages, there comes another fancy in my mind....
Could one but realise an apocalyptic image and suppose an angel, such
as was given to each of the seven churches of Asia, given for a space
to the service of the Greater Rule.  I see him as a towering figure of
flame and colour, standing between earth and sky, with a trumpet in
his hands, over there above the Haymarket, against the October glow;
and when he sounds, all the ~samurai~, all who are ~samurai~ in Utopia,
will know themselves and one another....

(Whup! says a motor brougham, and a policeman stays the traffic with
his hand.)

All of us who partake of the ~samurai~ would know ourselves and one
another!

For a moment I have a vision of this resurrection of the living, of a
vague, magnificent answer, of countless myriads at attention, of all
that is fine in humanity at attention, round the compass of the earth.

Then that philosophy of individual uniqueness resumes its sway over my
thoughts, and my dream of a world's awakening fades.

I had forgotten....

Things do not happen like that.  God is not simple, God is not theatrical,
the summons comes to each man in its due time for him, with an infinite
subtlety of variety....

If that is so, what of my Utopia?

This infinite world must needs be flattened to get it on one retina.
The picture of a solid thing, although it is flattened and simplified,
is not necessarily a lie.  Surely, surely, in the end, by degrees,
and steps, something of this sort, some such understanding, as this
Utopia must come.  First here, then there, single men and then groups
of men will fall into line -- not indeed with my poor faulty hesitating
suggestions -- but with a great and comprehensive plan wrought out by
many minds and in many tongues.  It is just because my plan is faulty,
because it mis-states so much, and omits so much, that they do not
now fall in.  It will not be like ~my~ dream, the world that is coming.
My dream is just my own poor dream, the thing sufficient for me.  We fail
in comprehension, we fail so variously and abundantly.  We see as much
as it is serviceable for us to see, and we see no further.  But the fresh
undaunted generations come to take on our work beyond our utmost effort,
beyond the range of our ideas.  They will learn with certainty things
that to us are guesses and riddles....

There will be many Utopias.  Each generation will have its new version
of Utopia, a little more certain and complete and real, with its problems
lying closer and closer to the problems of the Thing in Being.  Until at
last from dreams Utopias will have come to be working drawings, and the
whole world will be shaping the final World State, the fair and great
and fruitful World State, that will only not be a Utopia because it will
be this world.  So surely it must be----


--------------


The policeman drops his hand.  "Come up," says the bus driver, and the
horses strain; "Clitter, clatter, cluck, clak," the line of hurrying
hansoms overtakes the omnibus going west.  A dexterous lad on a bicycle
with a bale of newspapers on his back dodges nimbly across the head of
the column and vanishes up a side street.

The omnibus sways forward.  Rapt and prophetic, his plump hands clasped
round the handle of his umbrella, his billycock hat a trifle askew, this
irascible little man of the Voice, this impatient dreamer, this scolding
Optimist, who has argued so rudely and dogmatically about economics and
philosophy and decoration, and indeed about everything under the sun, who
has been so hard on the botanist and fashionable women, and so reluctant
in the matter of beer, is carried onward, dreaming dreams, dreams that
with all the inevitable ironies of difference, may be realities when
you and I are dreams.

He passes, and for a little space we are left with his egoisms and
idiosyncrasies more or less in suspense.

But why was he intruded?  you ask.  Why could not a modern Utopia be
discussed without this impersonation -- impersonally? It has confused the
book, you say, made the argument hard to follow, and thrown a quality of
insincerity over the whole.  Are we but mocking at Utopias, you demand,
using all these noble and generalised hopes as the back cloth against
which two bickering personalities jar and squabble?  Do I mean we are
never to view the promised land again except through a foreground of
fellow-travellers?  There is a common notion that the reading of a Utopia
should end with a swelling heart and clear resolves, with lists of names,
formation of committees, and even the commencement of subscriptions.
But this Utopia began upon a philosophy of fragmentation, and ends,
confusedly, amidst a gross tumult of immediate realities, in dust and
doubt, with, at the best, one individual's aspiration.  Utopias were
once in good faith, projects for a fresh creation of the world and of
a most unworldly completeness; this so-called Modern Utopia is a mere
story of personal adventures among Utopian philosophies.

Indeed, that came about without the writer's intention.  So it was the
summoned vision came.  For I see about me a great multitude of little
souls and groups of souls as darkened, as derivative as my own, with the
passage of years I understand more and more clearly the quality of the
motives that urge me and urge them to do whatever we do....  Yet that
is not all I see, and I am not altogether bounded by my littleness.
Ever and again, contrasting with this immediate vision, come glimpses of
a comprehensive scheme, in which these personalities float, the scheme
of a synthetic wider being, the great State, mankind, in which we all
move and go, like blood corpuscles, like nerve cells, it may be at times
like brain cells, in the body of a man.  But the two visions are not seen
consistently together, at least by me, and I do not surely know that they
exist consistently together.  The motives needed for those wider issues
come not into the interplay of my vanities and wishes. That greater
scheme lies about the men and women I know, as I have tried to make the
vistas and spaces, the mountains, cities, laws, and order of Utopia lie
about my talking couple, too great for their sustained comprehension.
When one focuses upon these two that wide landscape becomes indistinct and
distant, and when one regards that then the real persons one knows grow
vague and unreal.  Nevertheless, I cannot separate these two aspects of
human life, each commenting on the other.  In that in congruity between
great and individual inheres the incompatibility I could not resolve,
and which, therefore, I have had to present in this conflicting form.
At times that great scheme does seem to me to enter certain men's lives
as a passion, as a real and living motive; there are those who know it
almost as if it was a thing of desire; even for me, upon occasion, the
little lures of the immediate life are seen small and vain, and the soul
goes out to that mighty Being, to apprehend it and serve it and possess.
But this is an illumination that passes as it comes, a rare transitory
lucidity, leaving the soul's desire suddenly turned to presumption and
hypocrisy upon the lips.  One grasps at the Universe and attains --
Bathos.  The hungers, the jealousies, the prejudices and habits have us
again, and we are forced back to think that it is so, and not otherwise,
that we are meant to serve the mysteries; that in these blinkers it is
we are driven to an end we cannot understand.  And then, for measured
moments in the night watches, or as one walks alone, or while one sits
in thought and speech with a friend, the wider aspirations glow again
with a sincere emotion, with the colours of attainable desire....

That is my all about Utopia, and about the desire and need for Utopia,
and how that planet lies to this planet that bears the daily lives of men.



APPENDIX

SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT


A Portion of a Paper read to the Oxford Philosophical Society, November 8,
1903, and reprinted, with some Revision, from the Version given in ~Mind~,
vol. xiii. (N.S.), No. 51.


(See also Chapter One, Section 6, and Chapter Ten, Sections 1 and 2.)


It seems to me that I may most propitiously attempt to interest you
this evening by describing very briefly the particular metaphysical and
philosophical system in which I do my thinking, and more particularly
by setting out for your consideration one or two points in which I seem
to myself to differ most widely from current accepted philosophy.

You must be prepared for things that will strike you as crude, for a
certain difference of accent and dialect that you may not like, and
you must be prepared, too, to hear what may strike you as the clumsy
statement of my ignorant re-discovery of things already beautifully
thought out and said.  But in the end you may incline to forgive me some
of this first offence.... It is quite unavoidable that, in setting out
these intellectual foundations of mine, I should lapse for a moment or
so towards autobiography.

A convergence of circumstances led to my having my knowledge of
concrete things quite extensively developed before I came to philosophy
examination at all.  I have heard some one say that a savage or an animal
is mentally a purely objective being, and in that respect I was like
a savage or an animal until I was well over twenty.  I was extremely
unaware of the subjective or introverted element in my being.  I was
a Positivist without knowing it.  My early education was a feeble one;
it was one in which my private observation, inquiry and experiment were
far more important factors than any instruction, or rather perhaps the
instruction I received was less even than what I learnt for myself, and it
terminated at thirteen.  I had come into pretty intimate contact with the
harder realities of life, with hunger in various forms, and many base and
disagreeable necessities, before I was fifteen.  About that age, following
the indication of certain theological and speculative curiosities, I
began to learn something of what I will call deliberately and justly,
Elemental Science -- stuff I got out of ~Cassell's Popular Educator~
and cheap text-books -- and then, through accidents and ambitions that do
not matter in the least to us now, I came to three years of illuminating
and good scientific work.  The central fact of those three years was
Huxley's course in Comparative Anatomy at the school in Exhibition Road.
About that as a nucleus I arranged a spacious digest of facts.  At the
end of that time I had acquired what I still think to be a fairly clear
and complete and ordered view of the ostensibly real universe.  Let me
try to give you the chief things I had.  I had man definitely placed
in the great scheme of space and time.  I knew him incurably for what
he was, finite and not final, a being of compromises and adaptations.
I had traced his lungs, for example, from a swimming bladder, step by
step, with scalpel and probe, through a dozen types or more, I had seen
the ancestral c‘cum shrink to that disease nest, the appendix of to-day,
I had watched the gill slit patched slowly to the purposes of the ear
and the reptile jaw suspension utilised to eke out the needs of a sense
organ taken from its native and natural water.  I had worked out the
development of those extraordinarily unsatisfactory and untrustworthy
instruments, man's teeth, from the skin scutes of the shark to their
present function as a basis for gold stoppings, and followed the slow
unfolding of the complex and painful process of gestation through which
man comes into the world.  I had followed all these things and many
kindred things by dissection and in embryology -- I had checked the whole
theory of development again in a year's course of pal‘ontology, and I had
taken the dimensions of the whole process, by the scale of the stars,
in a course of astronomical physics.  And all that amount of objective
elucidation came before I had reached the beginnings of any philosophical
or metaphysical inquiry, any inquiry as to why I believed, how I believed,
what I believed, or what the fundamental stuff of things was.

Now following hard upon this interlude with knowledge, came a time when
I had to give myself to teaching, and it became advisable to acquire one
of those Teaching Diplomas that are so widely and so foolishly despised,
and that enterprise set me to a superficial, but suggestive study of
educational method, of educational theory, of logic, of psychology,
and so at last, when the little affair with the diploma was settled, to
philosophy.  Now to come to logic over the bracing uplands of comparative
anatomy is to come to logic with a lot of very natural preconceptions
blown clean out of one's mind.  It is, I submit, a way of taking logic in
the flank.  When you have realised to the marrow that all the physical
organs of man and all his physical structure are what they are through
a series of adaptations and approximations, and that they are kept up
to a level of practical efficiency only by the elimination of death,
and that this is true also of his brain and of his instincts and of many
of his mental predispositions, you are not going to take his thinking
apparatus unquestioningly as being in any way mysteriously different
and better.  And I had read only a little logic before I became aware
of implications that I could not agree with, and assumptions that seemed
to me to be altogether at variance with the general scheme of objective
fact established in my mind.

I came to an examination of logical processes and of language with the
expectation that they would share the profoundly provisional character,
the character of irregular limitation and adaptation that pervades
the whole physical and animal being of man.  And I found the thing I
had expected.  And, as a consequence, I found a sort of intellectual
hardihood about the assumptions of logic, that at first confused me and
then roused all the latent scepticism in my mind.

My first quarrel with the accepted logic I developed long ago in a little
paper that was printer in the ~Fortnightly Review~ in July 1891.  It was
called the "Rediscovery of the Unique," and re-reading it I perceive not
only how bad and even annoying it was in manner -- a thing I have long
known -- but also how remarkably bad it was in expression.  I have good
reason for doubting whether my powers of expression in these uses have
very perceptibly improved, but at any rate I am doing my best now with
that previous failure before me.

That unfortunate paper, among other oversights I can no longer regard as
trivial, disregarded quite completely the fact that a whole literature
upon the antagonism of the one and the many, of the specific ideal and the
individual reality, was already in existence.  It defined no relations to
other thought or thinkers.  I understand now, what i did not understand
then, why it was totally ignored.  But the idea underlying that paper I
cling to to-day.  I consider it an idea that will ultimately be regarded
as one of primary importance to human thought, and I will try to present
the substance of that early paper again now very briefly, as the best
opening of my general case.  My opening scepticism is essentially a doubt
of ~the objective reality of classification~.  I have no hesitation in
saying that is the first and primary proposition of my philosophy.

I have it in mind that classification is a necessary condition of the
working of the mental implement, but that it is a departure from the
objective truth of things, that classification is very serviceable for
the practical purposes of life, but a very doubtful preliminary to those
fine penetrations the philosophical purpose, in its more arrogant moods,
demands. All the peculiarities of my way of thinking derive from that.

A mind nourished upon anatomical study is, of course, permeated with
the suggestion of the vagueness and instability of biological species.
A biological species is quite obviously a great number of unique
individuals which is separable from other biological species only by the
fact that an enormous number of other linking individuals are inaccessible
in time -- are in other words dead and gone -- and each new individual in
that species does, in the distinction of its own individuality, break away
in however infinitesimal degree from the previous average properties of
the species.  There is no property of any species, even the properties
that constitute the specific definition, that is not a matter of more
or less.  If, for example, a species be distinguished by a single large
red spot on the back, you will find if you go over a great number of
specimens that red spot shrinking here to nothing, expanding there to a
more general redness, weakening to pink, deepening to russet and brown,
shading into crimson, and so on, and so on.  And this is true not only
of biological species.  It is true of the mineral specimens constituting
a mineral species, and I remember as a constant refrain in the lectures
of Prof. Judd upon rock classification, the words "they pass into one
another by insensible gradations."  That is true, I hold, of all things.

You will think perhaps of atoms of the elements as instances of
identically similar things, but these are things not of experience
but of theory, and there is not a phenomenon in chemistry that is not
equally well explained on the supposition that it is merely the immense
quantities of atoms necessarily taken in any experiment that mask by
the operation of the law of averages the fact that each atom also has
its unique quality, its special individual difference.  This idea of
uniqueness in all individuals is not only true of the classifications
of material science; it is true, and still more evidently true, of the
species of common thought, it is true of common terms.  Take the word
~chair~.  When one says chair, one thinks vaguely of an average chair.
But collect individual instances, think of armchairs and reading chairs,
and dining-room chairs and kitchen chairs, chairs that pass into benches,
chairs that cross the boundary and become settees, dentists' chairs,
thrones, opera stalls, seats of all sorts, those miraculous fungoid
growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, and you
will perceive what a lax bundle in fact is this simple straight. forward
term.  In co-operation with an intelligent joiner I would undertake to
defeat any definition of chair or chairishness that you gave me.  Chairs,
just as much as individual organisms, just as much as mineral and rock
specimens, are unique things -- if you know them well enough you will
find an individual difference even in a set of machine-made chairs --
and it is only because we do not possess minds of unlimited capacity,
because our brain has only a limited number of pigeon-holes for our
correspondence with an unlimited universe of objective uniques, that we
have to delude ourselves into the belief that there is a chairishness
in this species common to and distinctive of all chairs.

Let me repeat; this is of the very smallest importance in all the
practical affairs of life, or, indeed, in relation to anything but
philosophy and wide generalisations.  But in philosophy it matters
profoundly.  If I order two new-laid eggs for breakfast, up come two
unhatched but still unique avian individuals, and the chances are they
serve my rude physiological purpose.  I can afford to ignore the hens'
eggs of the past that were not quite so nearly this sort of thing, and the
hens' eggs of the future that will accumulate modification age by age;
I can venture to ignore the rare chance of an abnormality in chemical
composition and of any startling aberration in my physiological reaction;
I can, with a confidence that is practically perfect, say with unqualified
simplicity "two eggs," but not if my concern is not my morning's breakfast
but the utmost possible truth.

Now let me go on to point out whither this idea of uniqueness tends.
I submit to you that syllogism is based on classification, that all hard
logical reasoning tends to imply and is apt to imply a confidence in
the objective reality of classification. Consequently in denying that
I deny the absolute validity of logic.  Classification and number,
which in truth ignore the fine differences of objective realities,
have in the past of human thought been imposed upon things.  Let me
for clearness' sake take a liberty here -- commit, as you may perhaps
think, an unpardonable insolence.  Hindoo thought and Greek thought
alike impress me as being overmuch obsessed by an objective treatment
of certain necessary preliminary conditions of human thought -- number
and definition and class and abstract form.  But these things, number,
definition, class and abstract form, I hold, are merely unavoidable
conditions of mental activity -- regrettable conditions rather than
essential facts. ~The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush
the truth a little in taking hold of it.~

It was about this difficulty that the mind of Plato played a little
inconclusively all his life.  For the most part he tended to regard the
~idea~ as the something behind reality, whereas it seems to me that idea
idea is the more proximate and less perfect thing, the thing by which
the mind, by ignoring individual differences, attempts to comprehend an
otherwise unmanageable number of unique realities.

Let me give you a rough figure of what I am trying to convey in
this first attack upon the philosophical validity of general terms.
You have seen the results of those various methods of black and white
reproduction that involve the use of a rectangular net.  You know the
sort of process picture I mean -- it used to be employed very frequently
in reproducing photographs.  At a little distance you really seem to have
a faithful reproduction of the original picture, but when you peer closer
you find not the unique form and masses of the original, but a multitude
of little rectangles, uniform in shape and size.  The more earnestly you
go into the thing, the closer you look, the more the picture is lost in
reticulations. I submit the world of reasoned inquiry has a very similar
relation to the world I call objectively real.  For the rough purposes
of every day the network picture will do, but the finer your purpose
the less it will serve, and for an ideally fine purpose, for absolute
and general knowledge that will be as true for a man at a distance with
a telescope as for a man with a microscope it will not serve at all.

It is true you can make your net of logical interpretation finer
and finer, you can fine your classification more and more -- up to a
certain limit.  But essentially you are working in limits, and as you
come closer, as you look at finer and subtler things, as you leave
the practical purpose for which the method exists, the element of
error increases. Every species is vague, every term goes cloudy at its
edges, and so in my way of thinking, relentless logic is only another
phrase for a stupidity -- for a sort of intellectual pigheadedness.
If you push a philosophical or metaphysical inquiry through a series of
valid syllogisms-never committing any generally recognised fallacy-you
nevertheless leave a certain rubbing and marginal loss of objective truth,
and you get deflections that are difficult to trace, at each phase in
the process. Every species waggles about in its definition, every tool
is a little loose in its handle, every scale has its individual error.
So long as you are reasoning for practical purposes about the finite
things of experience, you can every now and then check your process,
and correct your adjustments.  But not when you make what are called
philosophical and theological inquiries, when you turn your implement
towards the final absolute truth of things.  Doing that is like firing
at an inaccessible, unmarkable and indestructible target at an unknown
distance, with a defective rifle and variable cartridges.  Even if by
chance you hit, you cannot know that you hit, and so it will matter
nothing at all.

This assertion of the necessary untrustworthiness of all reasoning
processes arising out of the fallacy of classification in what is quite
conceivably a universe of uniques, forms only one introductory aspect
of my general scepticism of the Instrument of Thought.

I have now to tell you of another aspect of this scepticism of the
instrument which concerns negative terms.

Classes in logic are not only represented by circles with a hard firm
outline, whereas they have no such definite limits, but also there is a
constant disposition to think of negative terms as if they represented
positive classes.  With words just as with numbers and abstract forms
there are definite phases of human development.  There is, you know, with
regard to number, the phase when man can barely count at all, or counts in
perfect good faith and sanity upon his fingers.  Then there is the phase
when he is struggling with the development of number, when he begins to
elaborate all sorts of ideas about numbers, until at last he develops
complex superstitions about perfect numbers and imperfect numbers, about
threes and sevens and the like.  The same is the case with abstracted
forms, and even to-day we are scarcely more than heads out of the vast
subtle muddle of thinking about spheres and ideally perfect forms and so
on, that was the price of this little necessary step to clear thinking.
You know better than I do how large a part numerical and geometrical
magic, numerical and geometrical philosophy has played in the history of
the mind.  And the whole apparatus of language and mental communication
is beset with like dangers.  The language of the savage is, I suppose,
purely positive; the thing has a name, the name has a thing.  This indeed
is the tradition of language, and to-day even, we, when we hear a name,
are predisposed -- and sometimes it is a very vicious disposition -- to
imagine forthwith something answering to the name.  ~We are disposed,
as an incurable mental vice, to accumulate intension in terms.~ If I
say to you Wodget or Crump, you find yourself passing over the fact that
these are nothings, these are, so to speak, mere terms.  Our instrument
of knowledge persists in handling even such openly negative terms as the
Absolute, the Infinite, as though they were real existences, and when
the negative element is ever so little disguised, as it is in such a word
as Omniscience, then the illusion of positive reality may be complete.

Please remember that I an trying to tell you my philosophy, and not
arguing about yours.  Let me try to express how in my mind this matter
of negative terms has shaped itself.  I think of something which I may
perhaps best describe as being off the stage or out of the court, or as
the Void without Implications, or as Nothingness or as Outer Darkness.
This is a sort of hypothetical Beyond to the visible world of human
thought, and thither I think all negative terms reach at last, and merge
and become nothing.  Whatever positive class you make, whatever boundary
you draw, straight away from that boundary begins the corresponding
negative class and passes into the illimitable horizon of nothingness.
You talk of pink things, you ignore, if you are a trained logician,
the more elusive shades of pink, and draw your line.  Beyond is the
not pink, known and knowable, and still in the not pink region one
comes to the Outer Darkness.  Not blue, not happy, not iron, all the
~not~ classes meet in that Outer Darkness.  That same Outer Darkness
and nothingness is infinite space, and infinite time, and any being
of infinite qualities, and all that region I rule out of court in my
philosophy altogether.  I will neither affirm nor deny if I can help
it about any ~not~ things.  I will not deal with not things at all,
except by accident and inadvertence. If I use the word "infinite" I use
it as one often uses "countless," "the countless hosts of the enemy"
-- or "immeasurable" -- "immeasurable cliffs" -- that is  to say as the
limit of measurement rather than as the limit of imaginary measurability,
as a convenient equivalent to as many times this cloth yard as you can,
and as many again and so on and so on.  Now a great number of apparently
positive terms are, or have become, practically negative terms and are
under the same ban with me.  A considerable number of terms that have
played a great part in the world of thought, seem to me to be invalidated
by this same defect, to have no content or an undefined content or an
unjustifiable content. For example, that word Omniscient, as implying
infinite knowledge, impresses me as being a word with a delusive air of
being solid and full when it is really hollow with no content whatever.
I am persuaded that knowing is the relation of a conscious being to
something not itself, that the thing known is defined as a system of parts
and aspects and relationships, that knowledge is comprehension, and so
that only finite things can know or be known.  When you talk of a being
of infinite extension and infinite duration, omniscient and omnipotent and
Perfect, you seem to me to be talking in negatives of nothing whatever.

When you speak of the Absolute you speak to me of nothing.

If, however, you talk of a great yet finite and thinkable being, a
being not myself, extending beyond my imagination in time and space,
knowing all that I can think of as known and capable of doing all that I
can think of as done, you come into the sphere of my mental operations,
and into the scheme of my philosophy....

These then are my first two charges against our Instrument of Knowledge,
firstly, that it can work only by disregarding individuality and treating
uniques as identically similar objects in this respect or that, so as
to group them under one term, and that once it has done so it tends
automatically to intensify the significance of that term, and secondly,
that it can only deal freely with negative terms by treating them
as though they were positive.  But I have a further objection to the
Instrument of Human Thought, that is not correlated to these former
objections and that is also rather more difficult to convey.

Essentially this idea is to present a sort of stratification in human
ideas.  I have it very much in mind that various terms in our reasoning
lie, as it were, at different levels and in different planes, and that
we accomplish a large amount of error and confusion by reasoning terms
together that do not lie or nearly lie in the same plane.

Let me endeavour to make myself a little less obscure by a most flagrant
instance from physical things.  Suppose some one began to talk seriously
of a man seeing an atom through a microscope, or better perhaps of cutting
one in half with a knife. There are a number of non-analytical people
who would be quite prepared to believe that an atom could be visible
to the eye or cut in this manner. But any one at all conversant with
physical conceptions would almost as soon think of killing the square
root of 2 with a rook rifle as of cutting an atom in half with a knife.
Our conception of an atom is reached through a process of hypothesis
and analysis, and in the world of atoms there are no knives and no men
to cut. If you have thought with a strong consistent mental movement,
then when you have thought of your atom under the knife blade, your
knife blade has itself become a cloud of swinging grouped atoms, and your
microscope lens a little universe of oscillatory and vibratory molecules.
If you think of the universe, thinking at the level of atoms, there is
neither knife to cut, scale to weigh, nor eye to see.  The universe ~at
that plane to which the mind of the molecular physicist descends~ has
none of the shapes or forms of our common life whatever. This hand with
which I write is in the universe of molecular physics a cloud of warring
atoms and molecules, combining and recombining, colliding, rotating,
flying hither and thither in the universal atmosphere of ether.

You see, I hope, what I mean when I say that the universe of molecular
physics is at a different level from the universe of common experience;
-- what we call stable and solid is in that world a freelly moving system
of interlacing centres of force, what we call colour and sound is there
no more that this length of vibration or that.  We have reached to a
conception of that universe of molecular physics by a great enterprise
of organised analysis, and our universe of daily experiences stands
in relation to that elemental world as if it were a synthesis of those
elemental things.

I would suggest to you that this is only a very extreme instance of the
general state of affairs, that there may be finer and subtler differences
of level between one term and another, and that terms may very well be
thought of as lying obliquely and as being twisted through different
levels.

It will perhaps give a clearer idea of what I am seeking to convey if
I suggest a concrete image for the whole world of a man's thought and
knowledge.  Imagine a large clear jelly, in which at all angles and in
all states of simplicity or contortion his ideas are embedded.  They are
all valid and possible ideas as they lie, none in reality incompatible
with any.  If you imagine the direction in which one moves by analysis or
by synthesis, if you go down for example from matter to atoms and centres
of force and up to men and states and countries -- if you will imagine the
ideas lying in that manner -- you will get the beginning of my intention.
But our Instrument, our process of thinking, like a drawing before the
discovery of perspective, appears to have difficulties with the third
dimension, appears capable only of dealing with or reasoning about ideas
by projecting them upon the same plane.  It will be obvious that a great
multitude of things may very well exist together in a solid jelly, which
would be overlapping and incompatible and mutually destructive, when
projected together upon one plane. Through the bias in our Instrument
to do this, through reasoning between terms not in the same plane, an
enormous amount of confusion, perplexity, and mental deadlocking occurs.

The old theological deadlock between predestination and free-will serves
admirably as an example of the sort of deadlock I mean.  Take life at
the level of common sensation and common experience, and there is no more
indisputable fact than man's freedom of will, unless it is his complete
moral responsibility.  But make only the least penetrating of analyses
and you perceive a world of inevitable consequences, a rigid succession
of cause and effect.  Insist upon a flat agreement between the two,
and there you are!  The Instrument fails.

It is upon these three objections, and upon an extreme suspicion of
abstract terms which arises materially out of my first and second
objections, that I chiefly rest my case for a profound scepticism of
the remoter possibilities of the Instrument of Thought.  It is a thing
no more perfect than the human eye or the human ear, though like those
other instruments it may have undefined possibilities of evolution
towards increased range, and increased power.

So much for my main contention.  But before I conclude I may -- since I am
here -- say a little more in the autobiographical vein, and with a view
to your discussion to show how I reconcile this fundamental scepticism
with the very positive beliefs about world-wide issues I possess, and
the very definite distinction I make between right and wrong.

I reconcile these things by simply pointing out to you that if there
is any validity in my image of that three dimensional jelly in which
our ideas are suspended, such a reconciliation as you demand in logic,
such a projection of the things as in accordance upon one plane, is
totally unnecessary and impossible.

This insistence upon the element of uniqueness in being, this
subordination of the class to the individual difference, not only
destroys the universal claim of philosophy, but the universal claim
of ethical imperatives, the universal claim of any religious teaching.
If you press me back upon my fundamental position I must confess I put
faith and standards and rules of conduct upon exactly the same level
as I put my belief of what is right in art, and what I consider right
practice in art.  I have arrived at a certain sort of self-knowledge,
and there are, I find, very distinct imperatives for me, but I am quite
prepared to admit there is no proving them imperative on any one else.
One's political proceedings, one's moral acts are, I hold, just as much
self-expression as one's poetry or painting or music.  But since life has
for its primordial elements assimilation and aggression, I try not only to
obey my imperatives, but to put them persuasively and convincingly into
other minds, to bring about ~my~ good and to resist and overcome ~my~
evil as though they were the universal Good and the universal Evil in
which unthinking men believe. And it is obviously in no way contradictory
to this philosophy, for me, if I find others responding sympathetically
to any notes of mine, or if I find myself responding sympathetically to
notes sounding about me, to give that common resemblance between myself
and others a name, to refer these others and myself in common to this
thing as if it were externalised and spanned us all.

Scepticism of the Instrument is, for example, not incompatible with
religious association and with organisation upon the basis of a common
faith.  It is possible to regard God as a Being synthetic in relation to
men and societies, just as the idea of a universe of atoms and molecules
and inorganic relationships is analytical in relation to human life.

The repudiation of demonstration in any but immediate and verifiable
cases that this Scepticism of the Instrument amounts to, the abandonment
of any universal validity for moral and religious propositions, brings
ethical, social, and religious teaching into the province of poetry,
and does something to correct the estrangement between knowledge and
beauty that is a feature of so much mental existence at this time.
All these things are self-expression.  Such an opinion sets a new and
greater value on that penetrating and illuminating quality of mind we
call insight, insight which when it faces towards the contradictions that
arise out of the imperfections of the mental instrument is called humour.
In these innate, unteachable qualities I hold -- in humour and the sense
of beauty -- lies such hope of intellectual salvation from the original
sin of our intellectual instrument as we may entertain in this uncertain
and fluctuating world of unique appearances....

So frankly I spread my little equipment of fundamental assumptions before
you, heartily glad of the opportunity you have given me of taking them
out, of looking at them with the particularity the presence of hearers
ensures, and of hearing the impression they have made upon you. Of course,
such a sketch must have an inevitable crudity of effect. The time I
had for it -- I mean the time I was able to give in preparation --
was altogether too limited for any exhaustive finish of presentation;
but I think on the whole I have got the main lines of this sketch map
of my mental basis true.  Whether I have made myself comprehensible is
a different question altogether.  It is for you rather than me to say
how this sketch map of mine lies with regard to your own more systematic
cartography....


[Here followed certain comments upon ~Personal Idealism~, and Mr. F. C. S.
Schiller's ~Humanism~, of no particular value.]


[End.]

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