A MODERN UTOPIA

BY H. G. WELLS

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--myAnticipations was the beginning. Originally I intended Anticipationsto 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 upthe muddle in my own mind about innumerable social and politicalquestions, questions I could not keep out of my work, which itdistressed me to touch upon in a stupid haphazard way, and whichno one, so far as I knew, had handled in a manner to satisfy myneeds. But Anticipations did not achieve its end. I have a slowconstructive hesitating sort of mind, and when I emerged from thatundertaking I found I had still most of my questions to state andsolve. In Mankind in the Making, therefore, I tried to reviewthe social organisation in a different way, to consider it as aneducational process instead of dealing with it as a thing witha future history, and if I made this second book even lesssatisfactory from a literary standpoint than the former (and this ismy opinion), I blundered, I think, more edifyingly--at least fromthe point of view of my own instruction. I ventured upon severalthemes with a greater frankness than I had used in Anticipations, and came out of that second effort guilty of much rash writing, butwith a considerable development of formed opinion. In many matters Ihad shaped out at last a certain personal certitude, upon which Ifeel I shall go for the rest of my days. In this present book I havetried to settle accounts with a number of issues left over or openedup by its two predecessors, to correct them in some particulars, andto give the general picture of a Utopia that has grown up in my mindduring the course of these speculations as a state of affairs atonce possible and more desirable than the world in which I live. Butthis book has brought me back to imaginative writing again. In itstwo predecessors the treatment of social organisation had beenpurely objective; here my intention has been a little wider anddeeper, in that I have tried to present not simply an ideal, but anideal in reaction with two personalities. Moreover, since this maybe the last book of the kind I shall ever publish, I have writteninto it as well as I can the heretical metaphysical scepticism uponwhich all my thinking rests, and I have inserted certain sectionsreflecting upon the established methods of sociological and economicscience.... 

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 andentertaining as its matter permits, because I want it read by asmany people as possible, but I do not promise anything but rage andconfusion to him who proposes to glance through my pages just to seeif I agree with him, or to begin in the middle, or to read withouta constantly alert attention. If you are not already a littleinterested and open-minded with regard to social and politicalquestions, and a little exercised in self-examination, you will findneither interest nor pleasure here. If your mind is "made up" uponsuch issues your time will be wasted on these pages. And even if youare a willing reader you may require a little patience for thepeculiar method I have this time adopted. 

That method assumes an air of haphazard, but it is not so carelessas it seems. I believe it to be--even now that I am through with thebook--the best way to a sort of lucid vagueness which has alwaysbeen my intention in this matter. I tried over several beginnings ofa Utopian book before I adopted this. I rejected from the outset theform of the argumentative essay, the form which appeals most readilyto what is called the "serious" reader, the reader who is often nomore than the solemnly impatient parasite of great questions. Helikes everything in hard, heavy lines, black and white, yes and no, because he does not understand how much there is that cannot bepresented at all in that way; wherever there is any effect ofobliquity, of incommensurables, wherever there is any levityor humour or difficulty of multiplex presentation, he refusesattention. Mentally he seems to be built up upon an invincibleassumption that the Spirit of Creation cannot count beyond two, hedeals only in alternatives. Such readers I have resolved not toattempt to please here. Even if I presented all my tri-cliniccrystals as systems of cubes----! Indeed I felt it would not beworth doing. But having rejected the "serious" essay as a form, Iwas still greatly exercised, I spent some vacillating months, overthe scheme of this book. I tried first a recognised method ofviewing questions from divergent points that has always attracted meand which I have never succeeded in using, the discussion novel, after the fashion of Peacock's (and Mr. Mallock's) development ofthe ancient dialogue; but this encumbered me with unnecessarycharacters and the inevitable complication of intrigue among them, and I abandoned it. After that I tried to cast the thing into ashape resembling a little the double personality of Boswell'sJohnson, a sort of interplay between monologue and commentator; butthat too, although it got nearer to the quality I sought, finallyfailed. Then I hesitated over what one might call "hard narrative. "It will be evident to the experienced reader that by omittingcertain speculative and metaphysical elements and by elaboratingincident, this book might have been reduced to a straightforwardstory. But I did not want to omit as much on this occasion. I do notsee why I should always pander to the vulgar appetite for starkstories. And in short, I made it this. I explain all this in orderto make it clear to the reader that, however queer this bookappears at the first examination, it is the outcome of trial anddeliberation, it is intended to be as it is. I am aiming throughoutat a sort of shot-silk texture between philosophical discussion onthe one hand and imaginative narrative on the other. 

H. G. WELLS. 

CONTENTS

 The Owner of the Voice Chapter the First--Topographical Chapter the Second--Concerning Freedoms Chapter the Third--Utopian Economics Chapter the Fourth--The Voice of Nature Chapter the Fifth--Failure in a Modern Utopia Chapter the Sixth--Women in a Modern Utopia Chapter the Seventh--A Few Utopian Impressions Chapter the Eighth--My Utopian Self Chapter the Ninth--The Samurai Chapter the Tenth--Race in Utopia Chapter the Eleventh--The Bubble Bursts Appendix--Scepticism of the Instrument

A MODERN UTOPIA

THE OWNER OF THE VOICE

There are works, and this is one of them, that are best begun with aportrait of the author. And here, indeed, because of a very naturalmisunderstanding this is the only course to take. Throughout thesepapers sounds a note, a distinctive and personal note, a note thattends at times towards stridency; and all that is not, as thesewords are, in Italics, is in one Voice. Now, this Voice, and this isthe peculiarity of the matter, is not to be taken as the Voice ofthe ostensible author who fathers these pages. You have to clearyour mind of any preconceptions in that respect. The Owner of theVoice you must figure to yourself as a whitish plump man, a littleunder the middle size and age, with such blue eyes as many Irishmenhave, and agile in his movements and with a slight tonsorialbaldness--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 hebears himself as valiantly as a sparrow. Occasionally his hand fliesout with a fluttering gesture of illustration. And his Voice (whichis our medium henceforth) is an unattractive tenor that becomes attimes aggressive. Him you must imagine as sitting at a table readinga manuscript about Utopias, a manuscript he holds in two hands thatare just a little fat at the wrist. The curtain rises upon him so. But afterwards, if the devices of this declining art of literatureprevail, you will go with him through curious and interestingexperiences. Yet, ever and again, you will find him back at thatlittle table, the manuscript in his hand, and the expansion ofhis ratiocinations about Utopia conscientiously resumed. Theentertainment before you is neither the set drama of the work offiction you are accustomed to read, nor the set lecturing of theessay you are accustomed to evade, but a hybrid of these two. If youfigure this owner of the Voice as sitting, a little nervously, alittle modestly, on a stage, with table, glass of water and allcomplete, and myself as the intrusive chairman insisting with abland ruthlessness upon his "few words" of introduction before herecedes into the wings, and if furthermore you figure a sheet behindour friend on which moving pictures intermittently appear, and iffinally you suppose his subject to be the story of the adventure ofhis soul among Utopian inquiries, you will be prepared for some atleast of the difficulties of this unworthy but unusual work. 

But over against this writer here presented, there is also anotherearthly person in the book, who gathers himself together into adistinct personality only after a preliminary complication with thereader. This person is spoken of as the botanist, and he is aleaner, rather taller, graver and much less garrulous man. His faceis weakly handsome and done in tones of grey, he is fairishand grey-eyed, and you would suspect him of dyspepsia. It is ajustifiable suspicion. Men of this type, the chairman remarks witha sudden intrusion of exposition, are romantic with a shadow ofmeanness, they seek at once to conceal and shape their sensuouscravings beneath egregious sentimentalities, they get into mightytangles and troubles with women, and he has had his troubles. Youwill hear of them, for that is the quality of his type. He gets nopersonal expression in this book, the Voice is always that other's, but you gather much of the matter and something of the manner of hisinterpolations from the asides and the tenour of the Voice. 

So much by way of portraiture is necessary to present the explorersof the Modern Utopia, which will unfold itself as a backgroundto these two enquiring figures. The image of a cinematographentertainment is the one to grasp. There will be an effect of thesetwo people going to and fro in front of the circle of a ratherdefective lantern, which sometimes jams and sometimes gets out offocus, but which does occasionally succeed in displaying on a screena momentary moving picture of Utopian conditions. Occasionally thepicture goes out altogether, the Voice argues and argues, and thefootlights return, and then you find yourself listening again to therather too plump little man at his table laboriously enunciatingpropositions, upon whom the curtain rises now. 

CHAPTER THE FIRST

Topographical

Section 1

The Utopia of a modern dreamer must needs differ in one fundamentalaspect from the Nowheres and Utopias men planned before Darwinquickened the thought of the world. Those were all perfect andstatic States, a balance of happiness won for ever against theforces of unrest and disorder that inhere in things. One beheld ahealthy and simple generation enjoying the fruits of the earth inan atmosphere of virtue and happiness, to be followed by othervirtuous, happy, and entirely similar generations, until the Godsgrew weary. Change and development were dammed back by invincibledams for ever. But the Modern Utopia must be not static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage, leadingto a long ascent of stages. Nowadays we do not resist and overcomethe great stream of things, but rather float upon it. We build nownot citadels, but ships of state. For one ordered arrangement ofcitizens rejoicing in an equality of happiness safe and assuredto them and their children for ever, we have to plan "a flexiblecommon compromise, in which a perpetually novel succession ofindividualities may converge most effectually upon a comprehensiveonward development. " That is the first, most generalised differencebetween a Utopia based upon modern conceptions and all the Utopiasthat were written in the former time. 

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

It is no doubt an optimistic enterprise. But it is good for awhileto be free from the carping note that must needs be audible whenwe discuss our present imperfections, to release ourselves frompractical difficulties and the tangle of ways and means. It is goodto stop by the track for a space, put aside the knapsack, wipe thebrows, and talk a little of the upper slopes of the mountain wethink 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 aholiday from politics and movements and methods. But for all that, we must needs define certain limitations. Were we free to have ouruntrammelled desire, I suppose we should follow Morris to hisNowhere, we should change the nature of man and the nature of thingstogether; we should make the whole race wise, tolerant, noble, perfect--wave our hands to a splendid anarchy, every man doing asit pleases him, and none pleased to do evil, in a world as good inits essential nature, as ripe and sunny, as the world before theFall. But that golden age, that perfect world, comes out into thepossibilities of space and time. In space and time the pervadingWill to Live sustains for evermore a perpetuity of aggressions. Ourproposal here is upon a more practical plane at least than that. We are to restrict ourselves first to the limitations of humanpossibility as we know them in the men and women of this worldto-day, and then to all the inhumanity, all the insubordination ofnature. We are to shape our state in a world of uncertain seasons, sudden catastrophes, antagonistic diseases, and inimical beasts andvermin, out of men and women with like passions, like uncertaintiesof mood and desire to our own. And, moreover, we are going to acceptthis world of conflict, to adopt no attitude of renunciation towardsit, to face it in no ascetic spirit, but in the mood of the Westernpeoples, whose purpose is to survive and overcome. So much we adoptin common with those who deal not in Utopias, but in the world ofHere and Now. 

Certain liberties, however, following the best Utopian precedents, we may take with existing fact. We assume that the tone of publicthought may be entirely different from what it is in the presentworld. We permit ourselves a free hand with the mental conflict oflife, within the possibilities of the human mind as we know it. Wepermit ourselves also a free hand with all the apparatus ofexistence 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 andreligious organisation, with creeds and customs, with everything, infact, that it lies within man's power to alter. That, indeed, is thecardinal assumption of all Utopian speculations old and new; theRepublic and Laws of Plato, and More's Utopia, Howells' implicitAltruria, and Bellamy's future Boston, Comte's great WesternRepublic, Hertzka's Freeland, Cabet's Icaria, and Campanella's Cityof the Sun, are built, just as we shall build, upon that, upon thehypothesis of the complete emancipation of a community of men fromtradition, from habits, from legal bonds, and that subtler servitudepossessions entail. And much of the essential value of all suchspeculations lies in this assumption of emancipation, lies in thatregard towards human freedom, in the undying interest of the humanpower 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 aboutUtopian speculations. Their common fault is to be comprehensivelyjejune. That which is the blood and warmth and reality of life islargely absent; there are no individualities, but only generalisedpeople. In almost every Utopia--except, perhaps, Morris's "News fromNowhere"--one sees handsome but characterless buildings, symmetricaland 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 largepictures of coronations, royal weddings, parliaments, conferences, and gatherings so popular in Victorian times, in which, instead of aface, each figure bears a neat oval with its index number legiblyinscribed. This burthens us with an incurable effect of unreality, and I do not see how it is altogether to be escaped. It is adisadvantage that has to be accepted. Whatever institution hasexisted or exists, however irrational, however preposterous, has, byvirtue of its contact with individualities, an effect of realnessand rightness no untried thing may share. It has ripened, it hasbeen christened with blood, it has been stained and mellowed byhandling, it has been rounded and dented to the softened contoursthat we associate with life; it has been salted, maybe, in a brineof tears. But the thing that is merely proposed, the thing that ismerely suggested, however rational, however necessary, seems strangeand inhuman in its clear, hard, uncompromising lines, itsunqualified angles and surfaces. 

There is no help for it, there it is! The Master suffers with thelast and least of his successors. For all the humanity he wins to, through his dramatic device of dialogue, I doubt if anyone has everbeen warmed to desire himself a citizen in the Republic of Plato; Idoubt if anyone could stand a month of the relentless publicity ofvirtue planned by More.... No one wants to live in any community ofintercourse really, save for the sake of the individualities hewould meet there. The fertilising conflict of individualities is theultimate meaning of the personal life, and all our Utopias no morethan schemes for bettering that interplay. At least, that is howlife shapes itself more and more to modern perceptions. Until youbring in individualities, nothing comes into being, and a Universeceases when you shiver the mirror of the least of individualminds. 

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 promisesufficient isolation for a polity to maintain itself intact fromoutward force; the Republic of Plato stood armed ready for defensivewar, and the New Atlantis and the Utopia of More in theory, likeChina and Japan through many centuries of effectual practice, heldthemselves isolated from intruders. Such late instances as Butler'ssatirical "Erewhon, " and Mr. Stead's queendom of inverted sexualconditions in Central Africa, found the Tibetan method ofslaughtering the inquiring visitor a simple, sufficient rule. Butthe whole trend of modern thought is against the permanence of anysuch enclosures. We are acutely aware nowadays that, however subtlycontrived a State may be, outside your boundary lines the epidemic, the breeding barbarian or the economic power, will gather itsstrength to overcome you. The swift march of invention is all forthe invader. Now, perhaps you might still guard a rocky coast or anarrow pass; but what of that near to-morrow when the flying machinesoars overhead, free to descend at this point or that? A statepowerful enough to keep isolated under modern conditions would bepowerful enough to rule the world, would be, indeed, if not activelyruling, yet passively acquiescent in all other human organisations, and so responsible for them altogether. World-state, therefore, itmust be. 

That leaves no room for a modern Utopia in Central Africa, or inSouth America, or round about the pole, those last refuges ofideality. The floating isle of La Cite Morellyste no longer avails. We need a planet. Lord Erskine, the author of a Utopia ("Armata")that might have been inspired by Mr. Hewins, was the first of allUtopists to perceive this--he joined his twin planets pole to poleby a sort of umbilical cord. But the modern imagination, obsessedby physics, must travel further than that. 

Out beyond Sirius, far in the deeps of space, beyond the flight of acannon-ball flying for a billion years, beyond the range of unaidedvision, blazes the star that is _our_ Utopia's sun. To those whoknow where to look, with a good opera-glass aiding good eyes, itand three fellows that seem in a cluster with it--though they areincredible billions of miles nearer--make just the faintest speckof light. About it go planets, even as our planets, but weaving adifferent fate, and in its place among them is Utopia, with itssister mate, the Moon. It is a planet like our planet, the samecontinents, the same islands, the same oceans and seas, anotherFuji-Yama is beautiful there dominating another Yokohama--andanother Matterhorn overlooks the icy disorder of another Theodule. It is so like our planet that a terrestrial botanist might find hisevery species there, even to the meanest pondweed or the remotestAlpine blossom.... 

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

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

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

We should scarcely note the change. Not a cloud would have gone fromthe sky. It might be the remote town below would take a differentair, and my companion the botanist, with his educated observation, might almost see as much, and the train, perhaps, would be gone outof the picture, and the embanked straightness of the Ticino in theAmbri-Piotta meadows--that might be altered, but that would be allthe visible change. Yet I have an idea that in some obscure mannerwe should come to feel at once a difference in things. 

The botanist's glance would, under a subtle attraction, float backto Airolo. "It's queer, " he would say quite idly, "but I nevernoticed 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.... Andbig, you know! Handsome! I wonder----"

That would interrupt our Utopian speculations. We should bothdiscover that the little towns below had changed--but how, we shouldnot have marked them well enough to know. It would be indefinable, achange in the quality of their grouping, a change in the quality oftheir remote, small shapes. 

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

Long before we got to that, before even we got to the great highroad, we should have hints from the stone cabin in the nape of thepass--it would be gone or wonderfully changed--from the very goatsupon 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--noSwiss--dressed in unfamiliar clothing and speaking an unfamiliarspeech.... 

Section 4

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

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

Section 5

We need suppose no linguistic impediments to intercourse. The wholeworld will surely have a common language, that is quite elementarilyUtopian, and since we are free of the trammels of convincingstory-telling, we may suppose that language to be sufficiently ourown to understand. Indeed, should we be in Utopia at all, if wecould not talk to everyone? That accursed bar of language, thathostile inscription in the foreigner's eyes, "deaf and dumb to you, sir, and so--your enemy, " is the very first of the defects andcomplications one has fled the earth to escape. 

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

If I may take a daring image, a mediaeval liberty, I would supposethat in this lonely place the Spirit of Creation spoke to us on thismatter. "You are wise men, " that Spirit might say--and I, being asuspicious, touchy, over-earnest man for all my predisposition toplumpness, would instantly scent the irony (while my companion, Ifancy, might even plume himself), "and to beget your wisdom ischiefly why the world was made. You are so good as to propose anacceleration of that tedious multitudinous evolution upon which I amengaged. I gather, a universal tongue would serve you there. While Isit here among these mountains--I have been filing away at them forthis last aeon or so, just to attract your hotels, you know--willyou be so kind----? A few hints----?"

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

Yet, after all, why should two men be smiled into apathy by theInfinite? Here we are, with our knobby little heads, our eyes andhands and feet and stout hearts, and if not us or ours, still theendless multitudes about us and in our loins are to come at last tothe World State and a greater fellowship and the universal tongue. Let us to the extent of our ability, if not answer that question, atany rate try to think ourselves within sight of the best thingpossible. That, after all, is our purpose, to imagine our best andstrive for it, and it is a worse folly and a worse sin thanpresumption, to abandon striving because the best of all our bestslooks mean amidst the suns. 

Now you as a botanist would, I suppose, incline to something asthey say, "scientific. " You wince under that most offensiveepithet--and I am able to give you my intelligent sympathy--though"pseudo-scientific" and "quasi-scientific" are worse by far for theskin. You would begin to talk of scientific languages, of Esperanto, La Langue Bleue, New Latin, Volapuk, and Lord Lytton, of thephilosophical language of Archbishop Whateley, Lady Welby's workupon Significs and the like. You would tell me of the remarkableprecisions, the encyclopaedic quality of chemical terminology, andat the word terminology I should insinuate a comment on that eminentAmerican biologist, Professor Mark Baldwin, who has carried thelanguage biological to such heights of expressive clearness as to betriumphantly and invincibly unreadable. (Which foreshadows the lineof my defence. )

You make your ideal clear, a scientific language you demand, withoutambiguity, as precise as mathematical formulae, and with every termin relations of exact logical consistency with every other. It willbe a language with all the inflexions of verbs and nouns regular andall its constructions inevitable, each word clearly distinguishablefrom every other word in sound as well as spelling. 

That, at any rate, is the sort of thing one hears demanded, and ifonly because the demand rests upon implications that reach farbeyond the region of language, it is worth considering here. Itimplies, indeed, almost everything that we are endeavouring torepudiate in this particular work. It implies that the wholeintellectual basis of mankind is established, that the rules oflogic, the systems of counting and measurement, the generalcategories and schemes of resemblance and difference, areestablished for the human mind for ever--blank Comte-ism, in fact, of the blankest description. But, indeed, the science of logic andthe whole framework of philosophical thought men have kept since thedays of Plato and Aristotle, has no more essential permanence asa final expression of the human mind, than the Scottish LongerCatechism. Amidst the welter of modern thought, a philosophy longlost to men rises again into being, like some blind and almostformless embryo, that must presently develop sight, and form, andpower, a philosophy in which this assumption is denied. [Footnote:The serious reader may refer at leisure to Sidgwick's Use of Wordsin Reasoning (particularly), and to Bosanquet's Essentials of Logic, Bradley's Principles of Logic, and Sigwart's Logik; the lighterminded may read and mark the temper of Professor Case in the BritishEncyclopaedia, article Logic (Vol. XXX. ). I have appended to hisbook a rude sketch of a philosophy upon new lines, originally readby me to the Oxford Phil. Soc. In 1903. ]

All through this Utopian excursion, I must warn you, you shall feelthe thrust and disturbance of that insurgent movement. In thereiterated use of "Unique, " you will, as it were, get the gleam ofits integument; in the insistence upon individuality, and theindividual difference as the significance of life, you will feel thetexture of its shaping body. Nothing endures, nothing is precise andcertain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mererepudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is themysterious inmost quality of Being. Being, indeed!--there is nobeing, but a universal becoming of individualities, and Plato turnedhis back on truth when he turned towards his museum of specificideals. Heraclitus, that lost and misinterpreted giant, may perhapsbe coming to his own.... 

There is no abiding thing in what we know. We change from weaker tostronger lights, and each more powerful light pierces our hithertoopaque foundations and reveals fresh and different opacities below. We can never foretell which of our seemingly assured fundamentalsthe next change will not affect. What folly, then, to dream ofmapping out our minds in however general terms, of providing forthe endless mysteries of the future a terminology and an idiom! Wefollow the vein, we mine and accumulate our treasure, but who cantell which way the vein may trend? Language is the nourishment ofthe thought of man, that serves only as it undergoes metabolism, andbecomes thought and lives, and in its very living passes away. Youscientific people, with your fancy of a terrible exactitude inlanguage, of indestructible foundations built, as that Wordsworthiandoggerel on the title-page of Nature says, "for aye, " aremarvellously without imagination!

The language of Utopia will no doubt be one and indivisible; allmankind will, in the measure of their individual differences inquality, be brought into the same phase, into a common resonance ofthought, but the language they will speak will still be a livingtongue, an animated system of imperfections, which every individualman will infinitesimally modify. Through the universal freedom ofexchange and movement, the developing change in its general spiritwill be a world-wide change; that is the quality of itsuniversality. I fancy it will be a coalesced language, a synthesisof many. Such a language as English is a coalesced language; it is acoalescence of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French and Scholar's Latin, welded into one speech more ample and more powerful and beautifulthan either. The Utopian tongue might well present a more spaciouscoalescence, and hold in the frame of such an uninflected orslightly inflected idiom as English already presents, a profusevocabulary into which have been cast a dozen once separate tongues, superposed and then welded together through bilingual and trilingualcompromises. [Footnote: Vide an excellent article, La LangueFrancaise 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 thinknow that this wedding and survival of several in a common offspringis a far more probable thing. 

Section 6

This talk of languages, however, is a digression. We were on ourway along the faint path that runs round the rim of the Lake ofLucendro, and we were just upon the point of coming upon our firstUtopian man. He was, I said, no Swiss. Yet he would have been aSwiss on mother Earth, and here he would have the same face, withsome difference, maybe, in the expression; the same physique, thougha little better developed, perhaps--the same complexion. He wouldhave 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 distinctlyprovided at the outset that the modern Utopia must have peopleinherently the same as those in the world. 

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

That proposition gives one characteristic difference between amodern Utopia and almost all its predecessors. It is to be a worldUtopia, we have agreed, no less; and so we must needs face the factthat we are to have differences of race. Even the lower class ofPlato's Republic was not specifically of different race. But this isa 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 masterquestion, 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 herewe underline that stipulation; every race of this planet earth isto be found in the strictest parallelism there, in numbers thesame--only, as I say, with an entirely different set of traditions, ideals, ideas, and purposes, and so moving under those differentskies to an altogether different destiny. 

There follows a curious development of this to anyone clearlyimpressed by the uniqueness and the unique significance ofindividualities. Races are no hard and fast things, no crowd ofidentically similar persons, but massed sub-races, and tribesand families, each after its kind unique, and these again areclusterings of still smaller uniques and so down to each severalperson. So that our first convention works out to this, that notonly is every earthly mountain, river, plant, and beast in thatparallel planet beyond Sirius also, but every man, woman, and childalive has a Utopian parallel. From now onward, of course, the fatesof these two planets will diverge, men will die here whom wisdomwill save there, and perhaps conversely here we shall save men;children will be born to them and not to us, to us and not to them, but this, this moment of reading, is the starting moment, and forthe first and last occasion the populations of our planets areabreast. 

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

For example, we must assume there is a man such as I might havebeen, better informed, better disciplined, better employed, thinnerand more active--and I wonder what he is doing!--and you, Sir orMadam, are in duplicate also, and all the men and women that youknow and I. I doubt if we shall meet our doubles, or if it would bepleasant for us to do so; but as we come down from these lonelymountains to the roads and houses and living places of the Utopianworld-state, we shall certainly find, here and there, faces thatwill remind us singularly of those who have lived under oureyes. 

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

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

What sorrows?

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

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

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

It is an amazing story to hear upon a mountain crest in Utopia, thisHampstead affair, this story of a Frognal heart. "Frognal, " he says, is the place where they met, and it summons to my memory the wordon a board at the corner of a flint-dressed new road, an estatedevelopment road, with a vista of villas up a hill. He had knownher before he got his professorship, and neither her "people" norhis--he speaks that detestable middle-class dialect in which auntsand things with money and the right of intervention are called"people"!--approved of the affair. "She was, I think, rather easilyswayed, " he says. "But that's not fair to her, perhaps. She thoughttoo much of others. If they seemed distressed, or if they seemed tothink 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 worthierchannel. It is necessary to override these modest regrets, thisintrusive, petty love story. Does he realise this is indeed Utopia?Turn your mind, I insist, to this Utopia of mine, and leave theseearthly troubles to their proper planet. Do you realise just wherethe propositions necessary to a modern Utopia are taking us?Everyone on earth will have to be here;--themselves, but with adifference. Somewhere here in this world is, for example, Mr. Chamberlain, and the King is here (no doubt incognito), and all theRoyal 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, andfor a time I forget my companion. I am distracted by the curiousside issues this general proposition trails after it. There will beso-and-so, and so-and-so. The name and figure of Mr. Roosevelt jerksinto focus, and obliterates an attempt to acclimatise the Emperor ofthe Germans. What, for instance, will Utopia do with Mr. Roosevelt?There drifts across my inner vision the image of a strenuousstruggle with Utopian constables, the voice that has thrilledterrestrial millions in eloquent protest. The writ of arrest, drifting loose in the conflict, comes to my feet; I impale the scrapof 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 littleUtopia, that like the holy families of the mediaeval artists (orMichael Angelo's Last Judgement) should compliment one's friends invarious degrees. Or one might embark upon a speculative treatment ofthe entire Almanach de Gotha, something on the lines of Epistemon'svision 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! Inspiredby 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 inAmerica, " 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 doublesduring our Utopian journey, or know them when we meet them. I doubtif anyone will be making the best of both these worlds. The greatmen in this still unexplored Utopia may be but village Hampdens inour own, and earthly goatherds and obscure illiterates sit here inthe seats of the mighty. 

That again opens agreeable vistas left of us and right. 

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

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

His interruption serves to turn me back from my momentarycontemplation of those popular effigies inflated by old newspapersand windy report, the earthly great. He sets me thinking of morepersonal and intimate applications, of the human beings one knowswith a certain approximation to real knowledge, of the actual commonsubstance of life. He turns me to the thought of rivalries andtendernesses, of differences and disappointments. I am suddenlybrought painfully against the things that might have been. What ifinstead of that Utopia of vacant ovals we meet relinquished loveshere, and opportunities lost and faces as they might have looked tous?

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

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

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

(You figure him doing it. )

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

CHAPTER THE SECOND

Concerning Freedoms

Section 1

Now what sort of question would first occur to two men descendingupon the planet of a Modern Utopia? Probably grave solicitude abouttheir personal freedom. Towards the Stranger, as I have alreadyremarked, the Utopias of the past displayed their least amiableaspect. Would this new sort of Utopian State, spread to thedimensions of a world, be any less forbidding?

We should take comfort in the thought that universal Toleration iscertainly a modern idea, and it is upon modern ideas that this WorldState rests. But even suppose we are tolerated and admitted to thisunavoidable citizenship, there will still remain a wide range ofpossibility.... I think we should try to work the problem out froman inquiry into first principles, and that we should follow thetrend of our time and kind by taking up the question as one of "Manversus the State, " and discussing the compromise of Liberty. 

The idea of individual liberty is one that has grown in importanceand grows with every development of modern thought. To the classicalUtopists freedom was relatively trivial. Clearly they consideredvirtue and happiness as entirely separable from liberty, and asbeing altogether more important things. But the modern view, withits deepening insistence upon individuality and upon thesignificance of its uniqueness, steadily intensifies the value offreedom, until at last we begin to see liberty as the very substanceof life, that indeed it is life, and that only the dead things, thechoiceless things, live in absolute obedience to law. To have freeplay for one's individuality is, in the modern view, the subjectivetriumph of existence, as survival in creative work and offspring isits objective triumph. But for all men, since man is a socialcreature, the play of will must fall short of absolute freedom. Perfect human liberty is possible only to a despot who is absolutelyand universally obeyed. Then to will would be to command andachieve, and within the limits of natural law we could at any momentdo exactly as it pleased us to do. All other liberty is a compromisebetween our own freedom of will and the wills of those with whom wecome in contact. In an organised state each one of us has a more orless elaborate code of what he may do to others and to himself, andwhat others may do to him. He limits others by his rights, and islimited by the rights of others, and by considerations affecting thewelfare of the community as a whole. 

Individual liberty in a community is not, as mathematicians wouldsay, always of the same sign. To ignore this is the essentialfallacy of the cult called Individualism. But in truth, a generalprohibition in a state may increase the sum of liberty, and ageneral permission may diminish it. It does not follow, as thesepeople would have us believe, that a man is more free where there isleast law and more restricted where there is most law. A socialismor a communism is not necessarily a slavery, and there is no freedomunder Anarchy. Consider how much liberty we gain by the loss of thecommon liberty to kill. Thereby one may go to and fro in all theordered parts of the earth, unencumbered by arms or armour, free ofthe 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 invendetta, and think what would happen in our suburbs. Consider theinconvenience of two households in a modern suburb estranged andprovided with modern weapons of precision, the inconvenience notonly to each other, but to the neutral pedestrian, the practicalloss 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 thefinal hope of the world in the evolving interplay of uniqueindividualities, that the State will have effectually chipped awayjust all those spendthrift liberties that waste liberty, and notone 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 takesthe form of a conditional command, and this one needs to bear inmind. 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 aseaworthy vessel. But the pure command is unconditional; it says, whatever you have done or are doing or want to do, you are todo this, as when the social system, working through the basenecessities of base parents and bad laws, sends a child of thirteeninto a factory. Prohibition takes one definite thing from theindefinite liberty of a man, but it still leaves him an unboundedchoice of actions. He remains free, and you have merely taken abucketful from the sea of his freedom. But compulsion destroysfreedom altogether. In this Utopia of ours there may be manyprohibitions, but no indirect compulsions--if one may so contriveit--and few or no commands. As far as I see it now, in this presentdiscussion, I think, indeed, there should be no positive compulsionsat all in Utopia, at any rate for the adult Utopian--unless theyfall upon him as penalties incurred. 

Section 2

What prohibitions should we be under, we two Uitlanders in thisUtopian world? We should certainly not be free to kill, assault, orthreaten anyone we met, and in that we earth-trained men would notbe likely to offend. And until we knew more exactly the Utopianidea of property we should be very chary of touching anything thatmight conceivably be appropriated. If it was not the property ofindividuals it might be the property of the State. But beyond thatwe might have our doubts. Are we right in wearing the strangecostumes we do, in choosing the path that pleases us athwart thisrock and turf, in coming striding with unfumigated rucksacks andsnow-wet hobnails into what is conceivably an extremely neat andorderly world? We have passed our first Utopian now, with ananswered vague gesture, and have noted, with secret satisfaction, there is no access of dismay; we have rounded a bend, and down thevalley in the distance we get a glimpse of what appears to be asingularly well-kept road.... 

I submit that to the modern minded man it can be no sort of Utopiaworth desiring that does not give the utmost freedom of going to andfro. Free movement is to many people one of the greatest of life'sprivileges--to go wherever the spirit moves them, to wander andsee--and though they have every comfort, every security, everyvirtuous discipline, they will still be unhappy if that is deniedthem. Short of damage to things cherished and made, the Utopianswill surely have this right, so we may expect no unclimbable wallsand fences, nor the discovery of any laws we may transgress incoming down these mountain places. 

And yet, just as civil liberty itself is a compromise defended byprohibitions, so this particular sort of liberty must also have itsqualifications. Carried to the absolute pitch the right of freemovement ceases to be distinguishable from the right of freeintrusion. We have already, in a comment on More's Utopia, hinted atan agreement with Aristotle's argument against communism, that itflings people into an intolerable continuity of contact. Schopenhauer carried out Aristotle in the vein of his own bitternessand with the truest of images when he likened human society tohedgehogs clustering for warmth, and unhappy when either too closelypacked or too widely separated. Empedocles found no significance inlife whatever except as an unsteady play of love and hate, ofattraction and repulsion, of assimilation and the assertion ofdifference. So long as we ignore difference, so long as we ignoreindividuality, and that I hold has been the common sin of allUtopias hitherto, we can make absolute statements, prescribecommunisms or individualisms, and all sorts of hard theoreticarrangements. But in the world of reality, which--to moderniseHeraclitus and Empedocles--is nothing more nor less than the worldof individuality, there are no absolute rights and wrongs, there areno qualitative questions at all, but only quantitative adjustments. Equally strong in the normal civilised man is the desire for freedomof movement and the desire for a certain privacy, for a cornerdefinitely his, and we have to consider where the line ofreconciliation comes. 

The desire for absolute personal privacy is perhaps never a verystrong or persistent craving. In the great majority of human beings, the gregarious instinct is sufficiently powerful to render any butthe most temporary isolations not simply disagreeable, but painful. The savage has all the privacy he needs within the compass of hisskull; like dogs and timid women, he prefers ill-treatment todesertion, and it is only a scarce and complex modern type thatfinds comfort and refreshment in quite lonely places and quitesolitary occupations. Yet such there are, men who can neither sleepwell nor think well, nor attain to a full perception of beautifulobjects, who do not savour the best of existence until they aresecurely alone, and for the sake of these even it would bereasonable to draw some limits to the general right of freemovement. But their particular need is only a special andexceptional aspect of an almost universal claim to privacy amongmodern people, not so much for the sake of isolation as forcongenial companionship. We want to go apart from the great crowd, not so much to be alone as to be with those who appeal to usparticularly and to whom we particularly appeal; we want to formhouseholds and societies with them, to give our individualities playin intercourse with them, and in the appointments and furnishingsof that intercourse. We want gardens and enclosures and exclusivefreedoms for our like and our choice, just as spacious as we can getthem--and it is only the multitudinous uncongenial, anxious also forsimilar developments in some opposite direction, that checks thisexpansive movement of personal selection and necessitates acompromise on privacy. 

Glancing back from our Utopian mountain side down which thisdiscourse marches, to the confusions of old earth, we may remarkthat the need and desire for privacies there is exceptionally greatat the present time, that it was less in the past, that in thefuture it may be less again, and that under the Utopian conditionsto which we shall come when presently we strike yonder road, it maybe reduced to quite manageable dimensions. But this is to beeffected not by the suppression of individualities to some commonpattern, [Footnote: More's Utopia. "Whoso will may go in, for thereis nothing within the houses that is private or anie man's owne. "]but by the broadening of public charity and the general ameliorationof mind and manners. It is not by assimilation, that is to say, butby understanding that the modern Utopia achieves itself. The idealcommunity of man's past was one with a common belief, with commoncustoms and common ceremonies, common manners and common formulae;men of the same society dressed in the same fashion, each accordingto his defined and understood grade, behaved in the same fashion, loved, worshipped, and died in the same fashion. They did or feltlittle that did not find a sympathetic publicity. The naturaldisposition of all peoples, white, black, or brown, a naturaldisposition that education seeks to destroy, is to insist uponuniformity, to make publicity extremely unsympathetic to even themost harmless departures from the code. To be dressed "odd, " tobehave "oddly, " to eat in a different manner or of different food, to commit, indeed, any breach of the established convention is togive offence and to incur hostility among unsophisticated men. Butthe disposition of the more original and enterprising minds at alltimes has been to make such innovations. 

This is particularly in evidence in this present age. The almostcataclysmal development of new machinery, the discovery of newmaterials, and the appearance of new social possibilities throughthe organised pursuit of material science, has given enormous andunprecedented facilities to the spirit of innovation. The old localorder has been broken up or is now being broken up all over theearth, and everywhere societies deliquesce, everywhere men areafloat amidst the wreckage of their flooded conventions, and stilltremendously unaware of the thing that has happened. The old localorthodoxies of behaviour, of precedence, the old accepted amusementsand employments, the old ritual of conduct in the important smallthings of the daily life and the old ritual of thought in thethings that make discussion, are smashed up and scattered and mixeddiscordantly together, one use with another, and no world-wideculture of toleration, no courteous admission of differences, nowider understanding has yet replaced them. And so publicity in themodern earth has become confusedly unsympathetic for everyone. Classes are intolerable to classes and sets to sets, contactprovokes aggressions, comparisons, persecutions and discomforts, and the subtler people are excessively tormented by a sense ofobservation, unsympathetic always and often hostile. To live withoutsome sort of segregation from the general mass is impossible inexact proportion to one's individual distinction. 

Of course things will be very different in Utopia. Utopia willbe saturated with consideration. To us, clad as we are inmountain-soiled tweeds and with no money but British bank-notesnegotiable only at a practically infinite distance, this must needsbe a reassuring induction. And Utopian manners will not only betolerant, but almost universally tolerable. Endless things will beunderstood perfectly and universally that on earth are understoodonly by a scattered few; baseness of bearing, grossness of manner, will be the distinctive mark of no section of the communitywhatever. The coarser reasons for privacy, therefore, will not existhere. And that savage sort of shyness, too, that makes so manyhalf-educated people on earth recluse and defensive, that too theUtopians will have escaped by their more liberal breeding. In thecultivated State we are assuming it will be ever so much easier forpeople to eat in public, rest and amuse themselves in public, andeven work in public. Our present need for privacy in many thingsmarks, indeed, a phase of transition from an ease in public in thepast due to homogeneity, to an ease in public in the future due tointelligence and good breeding, and in Utopia that transition willbe complete. We must bear that in mind throughout the considerationof this question. 

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

This is a quantitative question, be it remembered, and not to bedismissed by any statement of principle. Our Utopians will meet it, I presume, by detailed regulations, very probably varying locallywith local conditions. Privacy beyond the house might be made aprivilege to be paid for in proportion to the area occupied, and thetax on these licences of privacy might increase as the square of thearea affected. A maximum fraction of private enclosure for eachurban and suburban square mile could be fixed. A distinction couldbe drawn between an absolutely private garden and a garden privateand closed only for a day or a couple of days a week, and at othertimes open to the well-behaved public. Who, in a really civilisedcommunity, would grudge that measure of invasion? Walls could betaxed by height and length, and the enclosure of really naturalbeauties, of rapids, cascades, gorges, viewpoints, and so forthmade impossible. So a reasonable compromise between the vital andconflicting claims of the freedom of movement and the freedom ofseclusion might be attained.... 

And as we argue thus we draw nearer and nearer to the road that goesup and over the Gotthard crest and down the Val Tremola towardsItaly. 

What sort of road would that be?

Section 3

Freedom of movement in a Utopia planned under modern conditions mustinvolve something more than unrestricted pedestrian wanderings, andthe very proposition of a world-state speaking one common tonguecarries with it the idea of a world population travelled andtravelling to an extent quite beyond anything our native earth hasseen. It is now our terrestrial experience that whenever economicand political developments set a class free to travel, that class atonce begins to travel; in England, for example, above the five orsix hundred pounds a year level, it is hard to find anyone who isnot habitually migratory, who has not been frequently, as peoplesay, "abroad. " In the Modern Utopia travel must be in the commontexture of life. To go into fresh climates and fresh scenery, tomeet a different complexion of humanity and a different type of homeand food and apparatus, to mark unfamiliar trees and plants andflowers and beasts, to climb mountains, to see the snowy night ofthe North and the blaze of the tropical midday, to follow greatrivers, to taste loneliness in desert places, to traverse the gloomof tropical forests and to cross the high seas, will be an essentialpart of the reward and adventure of life, even for the commonestpeople.... This is a bright and pleasant particular in which amodern Utopia must differ again, and differ diametrically, from itspredecessors. 

We may conclude from what has been done in places upon our earththat the whole Utopian world will be open and accessible and as safefor the wayfarer as France or England is to-day. The peace of theworld will be established for ever, and everywhere, except in remoteand desolate places, there will be convenient inns, at least asconvenient and trustworthy as those of Switzerland to-day; thetouring clubs and hotel associations that have tariffed that countryand France so effectually will have had their fine Utopianequivalents, and the whole world will be habituated to the comingand going of strangers. The greater part of the world will be assecure and cheaply and easily accessible to everyone as is Zermattor Lucerne to a Western European of the middle-class at the presenttime. 

On this account alone no places will be so congested as these twoare now on earth. With freedom to go everywhere, with easy accesseverywhere, with no dread of difficulties about language, coinage, custom, or law, why should everyone continue to go to just a fewspecial places? Such congestions are merely the measure of thegeneral inaccessibility and insecurity and costliness ofcontemporary life, an awkward transitory phase in the firstbeginnings of the travel age of mankind. 

No doubt the Utopian will travel in many ways. It is unlikely therewill be any smoke-disgorging steam railway trains in Utopia, theyare already doomed on earth, already threatened with thatobsolescence that will endear them to the Ruskins of to-morrow, buta thin spider's web of inconspicuous special routes will cover theland of the world, pierce the mountain masses and tunnel under theseas. These may be double railways or monorails or what not--we areno engineers to judge between such devices--but by means of them theUtopian will travel about the earth from one chief point to anotherat a speed of two or three hundred miles or more an hour. Thatwill abolish the greater distances.... One figures these maincommunications as something after the manner of corridor trains, smooth-running and roomy, open from end to end, with cars in whichone may sit and read, cars in which one may take refreshment, carsinto which the news of the day comes printing itself from the wiresbeside the track; cars in which one may have privacy and sleep ifone is so disposed, bath-room cars, library cars; a train ascomfortable as a good club. There will be no distinctions of classin such a train, because in a civilised world there would be nooffence between one kind of man and another, and for the good of thewhole world such travelling will be as cheap as it can be, and wellwithin the reach of any but the almost criminally poor. 

Such great tramways as this will be used when the Utopians wish totravel fast and far; thereby you will glide all over the landsurface of the planet; and feeding them and distributing from them, innumerable minor systems, clean little electric tramways I picturethem, will spread out over the land in finer reticulations, growingclose and dense in the urban regions and thinning as the populationthins. And running beside these lighter railways, and spreadingbeyond their range, will be the smooth minor high roads such as thisone we now approach, upon which independent vehicles, motor cars, cycles, and what not, will go. I doubt if we shall see any horsesupon this fine, smooth, clean road; I doubt if there will be manyhorses on the high roads of Utopia, and, indeed, if they will usedraught horses at all upon that planet. Why should they? Where theworld gives turf or sand, or along special tracts, the horse willperhaps be ridden for exercise and pleasure, but that will be allthe use for him; and as for the other beasts of burthen, on theremoter mountain tracks the mule will no doubt still be apicturesque survival, in the desert men will still find a use forthe camel, and the elephant may linger to play a part in the pageantof the East. But the burthen of the minor traffic, if not the wholeof it, will certainly be mechanical. This is what we shall see evenwhile the road is still remote, swift and shapely motor-cars goingpast, cyclists, and in these agreeable mountain regions there willalso be pedestrians upon their way. Cycle tracks will abound inUtopia, sometimes following beside the great high roads, but oftenertaking their own more agreeable line amidst woods and crops andpastures; and there will be a rich variety of footpaths and minorways. There will be many footpaths in Utopia. There will be pleasantways over the scented needles of the mountain pinewoods, primrose-strewn tracks amidst the budding thickets of the lowercountry, paths running beside rushing streams, paths across the widespaces of the corn land, and, above all, paths through the flowerygarden spaces amidst which the houses in the towns will stand. Andeverywhere about the world, on road and path, by sea and land, thehappy holiday Utopians will go. 

The population of Utopia will be a migratory population beyond anyearthly precedent, not simply a travelling population, butmigratory. The old Utopias were all localised, as localised as aparish councillor; but it is manifest that nowadays even quiteordinary people live over areas that would have made a kingdom inthose former days, would have filled the Athenian of the Laws withincredulous astonishment. Except for the habits of the very richduring the Roman Empire, there was never the slightest precedent forthis modern detachment from place. It is nothing to us that we goeighty or ninety miles from home to place of business, or take anhour's spin of fifty miles to our week-end golf; every summer it hasbecome a fixed custom to travel wide and far. Only the clumsiness ofcommunications limit us now, and every facilitation of locomotionwidens not only our potential, but our habitual range. Not onlythis, but we change our habitations with a growing frequency andfacility; to Sir Thomas More we should seem a breed of nomads. Thatold fixity was of necessity and not of choice, it was a mere phasein the development of civilisation, a trick of rooting man learntfor a time from his new-found friends, the corn and the vine andthe hearth; the untamed spirit of the young has turned for ever towandering and the sea. The soul of man has never yet in any landbeen willingly adscript to the glebe. Even Mr. Belloc, who preachesthe happiness of a peasant proprietary, is so much wiser than histhoughts that he sails about the seas in a little yacht or goesafoot from Belgium to Rome. We are winning our freedom again oncemore, a freedom renewed and enlarged, and there is now neithernecessity nor advantage in a permanent life servitude to this placeor that. Men may settle down in our Modern Utopia for love and thefamily at last, but first and most abundantly they will see theworld. 

And with this loosening of the fetters of locality from the feet ofmen, necessarily there will be all sorts of fresh distributions ofthe factors of life. On our own poor haphazard earth, wherever menwork, wherever there are things to be grown, minerals to be won, power to be used, there, regardless of all the joys and decencies oflife, the households needs must cluster. But in Utopia there will bewide stretches of cheerless or unhealthy or toilsome or dangerousland with never a household; there will be regions of mining andsmelting, black with the smoke of furnaces and gashed and desolatedby mines, with a sort of weird inhospitable grandeur of industrialdesolation, and the men will come thither and work for a spell andreturn to civilisation again, washing and changing their attire inthe swift gliding train. And by way of compensation there will bebeautiful regions of the earth specially set apart and favoured forchildren; in them the presence of children will remit taxation, while in other less wholesome places the presence of children willbe taxed; the lower passes and fore hills of these very Alps, forexample, will be populous with homes, serving the vast arable levelsof Upper Italy. 

So we shall see, as we come down by our little lake in the lap ofLucendro, and even before we reach the road, the first scatteredchalets and households in which these migrant people live, the uppersummer homes. With the coming of summer, as the snows on the highAlps 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 tothe modern ideal of life that the period of education and growthshould be prolonged to as late a period as possible and pubertycorrespondingly retarded, and by wise regulation the statesmen ofUtopia will constantly adjust and readjust regulations and taxationto diminish the proportion of children reared in hot and stimulatingconditions. These high mountains will, in the bright sweet summer, be populous with youth. Even up towards this high place where thesnow is scarce gone until July, these households will extend, andbelow, the whole long valley of Urseren will be a scattered summertown. 

One figures one of the more urban highways, one of those along whichthe light railways of the second order run, such as that in thevalley of Urseren, into which we should presently come. I figure itas one would see it at night, a band a hundred yards perhaps inwidth, the footpath on either side shaded with high trees and litsoftly with orange glowlights; while down the centre the tramway ofthe road will go, with sometimes a nocturnal tram-car gliding, litand gay but almost noiselessly, past. Lantern-lit cyclists will flitalong the track like fireflies, and ever and again some hummingmotor-car will hurry by, to or from the Rhoneland or the Rhinelandor Switzerland or Italy. Away on either side the lights of thelittle 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 thatruns down the lonely rock wilderness of the San Gotthard Pass, weshould descend that nine miles of winding route, and so arrivetowards twilight among the clustering homes and upland unenclosedgardens of Realp and Hospenthal and Andermatt. Between Realp andAndermatt, and down the Schoellenen gorge, the greater road wouldrun. By the time we reached it, we should be in the way ofunderstanding our adventure a little better. We should know already, when we saw those two familiar clusters of chalets and hotelsreplaced by a great dispersed multitude of houses--we should seetheir window lights, but little else--that we were the victims ofsome strange transition in space or time, and we should come down bydimly-seen buildings into the part that would answer to Hospenthal, wondering and perhaps a little afraid. We should come out into thisgreat main roadway--this roadway like an urban avenue--and look upit and down, hesitating whether to go along the valley Furka-ward, or down by Andermatt through the gorge that leads to Goschenen.... 

People would pass us in the twilight, and then more people; weshould 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 dimfaces would turn with a passing scrutiny towards us. 

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

Section 4

Were this a story, I should tell at length how much we were helpedby the good fortune of picking up a Utopian coin of gold, how atlast we adventured into the Utopian inn and found it allmarvellously easy. You see us the shyest and most watchful ofguests; but of the food they put before us and the furnishings ofthe house, and all our entertainment, it will be better to speaklater. We are in a migratory world, we know, one greatly accustomedto foreigners; our mountain clothes are not strange enough toattract acute attention, though ill-made and shabby, no doubt, byUtopian standards; we are dealt with as we might best wish to bedealt with, that is to say as rather untidy, inconspicuous men. Welook about us and watch for hints and examples, and, indeed, getthrough with the thing. And after our queer, yet not unpleasant, dinner, in which we remark no meat figures, we go out of the housefor a breath of air and for quiet counsel one with another, andthere it is we discover those strange constellations overhead. Itcomes to us then, clear and full, that our imagination has realiseditself; we dismiss quite finally a Rip-Van-Winkle fancy we haveentertained, all the unfamiliarities of our descent from themountain pass gather together into one fullness of conviction, andwe know, we know, we are in Utopia. 

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

Two lovers pass us whispering, and we follow them with our eyes. This Utopia has certainly preserved the fundamental freedom, tolove. And then a sweet-voiced bell from somewhere high up towardsOberalp 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 riverbelow. I become aware of the keen edge of the moon like a needle ofincandescent silver creeping over the crest, and suddenly the riveris alive with flashes. 

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

"We two were boy and girl lovers like that, " he says, and jerks ahead at the receding Utopians. "I loved her first, and I do notthink I have ever thought of loving anyone but her. "

It is a curiously human thing, and, upon my honour, not one I haddesigned, that when at last I stand in the twilight in the midst ofa Utopian township, when my whole being should be taken up withspeculative wonder, this man should be standing by my side, andlugging my attention persistently towards himself, towards hislimited futile self. This thing perpetually happens to me, thisintrusion of something small and irrelevant and alive, upon my greatimpressions. The time I first saw the Matterhorn, that Queen amongthe Alpine summits, I was distracted beyond appreciation by the taleof a man who could not eat sardines--always sardines did this withhim and that; and my first wanderings along the brown streets ofPompeii, an experience I had anticipated with a strange intensity, was shot with the most stupidly intelligent discourse on vehiculartariffs in the chief capitals of Europe that it is possible toimagine. And now this man, on my first night in Utopia, talks andtalks and talks of his poor little love affair. 

It shapes itself as the most trite and feeble of tragedies, one ofthose stories of effortless submission to chance and custom in whichMr. Hardy or George Gissing might have found a theme. I do but halflisten at first--watching the black figures in the moonlit roadwaypacing to and fro. Yet--I cannot trace how he conveys the subtleconviction to my mind--the woman he loves is beautiful. 

They were boy and girl together, and afterwards they met again asfellow students in a world of comfortable discretions. He seems tohave taken the decorums of life with a confiding good faith, to havebeen shy and innocent in a suppressed sort of way, and of a mentaltype not made for worldly successes; but he must have dreamt abouther and loved her well enough. How she felt for him I could nevergather; it seemed to be all of that fleshless friendliness intowhich we train our girls. Then abruptly happened stresses. The manwho became her husband appeared, with a very evident passion. He wasa year or so older than either of them, and he had the habit andquality of achieving his ends; he was already successful, and withthe promise of wealth, and I, at least, perceived, from mybotanist's phrasing, that his desire was for her beauty. 

As my botanist talked I seemed to see the whole little drama, ratherclearer than his words gave it me, the actors all absurdly inHampstead 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 fictionread in their homes, its ambling sentimentalities of thought, theamiably worldly mothers, the respectable fathers, the aunts, the"people"--his "people" and her "people"--the piano music and thesong, and in this setting our friend, "quite clever" at botany and"going in" for it "as a profession, " and the girl, gratuitouslybeautiful; so I figured the arranged and orderly environment intowhich this claw of an elemental force had thrust itself to grip. 

The stranger who had come in got what he wanted; the girl consideredthat she thought she had never loved the botanist, had had onlyfriendship for him--though little she knew of the meaning of thosefine words--they parted a little incoherently and in tears, and ithad not occurred to the young man to imagine she was not going offto conventional life in some other of the endless Frognals heimagined as the cellular tissue of the world. 

But she wasn't. 

He had kept her photograph and her memory sweet, and if ever he hadstrayed from the severest constancy, it seemed only in the end tostrengthen with the stuff of experience, to enhance by comparativedisappointment his imagination of what she might have meant tohim.... Then eight years afterwards they met again. 

By the time he gets to this part of his story we have, at myinitiative, left the bridge and are walking towards the Utopianguest 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 theiruniversal tongue, and I answer them "Good-night. "

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

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

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

"She told you?"

"Not much, but someone else did. He brings other women almost intoher 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 dismalgrizzling and carry her off?" (You figure the heroic sweep of thearm that belongs to the Voice. ) I positively forget for the momentthat we are in Utopia at all. 

"You mean?"

"Take her away from him! What's all this emotion of yours worth ifit 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 Utopiantram-car passes and I see his face, poor bitted wretch! lookingpinched and scared in its trailing glow of light. 

"That's all very well in a novel, " he says. "But how could I go backto my laboratory, mixed classes with young ladies, you know, after athing like that? How could we live and where could we live? We mighthave a house in London, but who would call upon us? ... Besides, youdon't know her. She is not the sort of woman.... Don't think I'mtimid 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 Icould 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 roadways and railways and tramways, for those who go to andfro in the earth the Modern Utopians will have very many other waysof travelling. There will be rivers, for example, with a vastvariety of boats; canals with diverse sorts of haulage; there willbe lakes and lagoons; and when one comes at last to the borders ofthe land, the pleasure craft will be there, coming and going, andthe swift great passenger vessels, very big and steady, doing thirtyknots an hour or more, will trace long wakes as they go dwindlingout 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 believethis wonder is coming, and coming nearly, than it was five yearsago. But unless we are to suppose Utopian scientific knowledge farin advance of ours--and though that supposition was not proscribedin our initial undertaking, it would be inconvenient for us and notquite in the vein of the rest of our premises--they, too, will onlybe in the same experimental stage as ourselves. In Utopia, however, they will conduct research by the army corps while we conduct it--wedon't conduct it! We let it happen. Fools make researches and wisemen exploit them--that is our earthly way of dealing with thequestion, and we thank Heaven for an assumed abundance offinancially 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 theelements. Bacon's visionary House of Saloman [Footnote: In The NewAtlantis. ] will be a thing realised, and it will be humming withthis business. Every university in the world will be urgentlyworking for priority in this aspect of the problem or that. Reportsof experiments, as full and as prompt as the telegraphic reports ofcricket in our more sportive atmosphere, will go about the world. All this will be passing, as it were, behind the act drop of ourfirst experience, behind this first picture of the urbanised Urserenvalley. The literature of the subject will be growing and developingwith the easy swiftness of an eagle's swoop as we come down thehillside; unseen in that twilight, unthought of by us until thismoment, a thousand men at a thousand glowing desks, a busyspecialist press, will be perpetually sifting, criticising, condensing, and clearing the ground for further speculation. Thosewho are concerned with the problems of public locomotion willbe following these aeronautic investigations with a keen andenterprising interest, and so will the physiologist and thesociologist. That Utopian research will, I say, go like an eagle'sswoop in comparison with the blind-man's fumbling of our terrestrialway. Even before our own brief Utopian journey is out, we may get aglimpse of the swift ripening of all this activity that will be inprogress at our coming. To-morrow, perhaps, or in a day or so, some silent, distant thing will come gliding into view over themountains, will turn and soar and pass again beyond our astonishedsight.... 

Section 6

But my friend and his great trouble turn my mind from thesequestions of locomotion and the freedoms that cluster about them. Inspite of myself I find myself framing his case. He is a lover, themost conventional of Anglican lovers, with a heart that has had itstraining, I should think, in the clean but limited schoolroom ofMrs. Henry Wood.... 

In Utopia I think they will fly with stronger pinions, it will notbe in the superficialities of life merely that movement will be wideand free, they will mount higher and swoop more steeply than he inhis 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 aneventful day, and as we walk along in silence towards our inn I rovefrom issue to issue, I find myself ranging amidst the fundamentalthings of the individual life and all the perplexity of desires andpassions. I turn my questionings to the most difficult of all setsof compromises, those mitigations of spontaneous freedom thatconstitute the marriage laws, the mystery of balancing justiceagainst the good of the future, amidst these violent and elusivepassions. Where falls the balance of freedoms here? I pass for atime from Utopianising altogether, to ask the question that, afterall, Schopenhauer failed completely to answer, why sometimes in thecase of hurtful, pointless, and destructive things we want sovehemently.... 

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

As Plato demonstrated long ago, the principles of the relation ofState control to personal morals may be best discussed in the caseof intoxication, the most isolated and least complicated of all thisgroup of problems. But Plato's treatment of this issue as a questionof who may or may not have the use of wine, though suitable enoughin considering a small State in which everybody was the effectualinspector of everybody, is entirely beside the mark under modernconditions, in which we are to have an extraordinarily higherstandard of individual privacy and an amplitude and quantity ofmigration inconceivable to the Academic imagination. We may accepthis principle and put this particular freedom (of the use of wine)among the distinctive privileges of maturity, and still find allthat a modern would think of as the Drink Question untouched. 

That question in Utopia will differ perhaps in the proportion of itsfactors, but in no other respect, from what it is upon earth. Thesame desirable ends will be sought, the maintenance of public orderand decency, the reduction of inducements to form this bad andwasteful habit to their lowest possible minimum, and the completeprotection of the immature. But the modern Utopians, havingsystematised their sociology, will have given some attention to thepsychology of minor officials, a matter altogether too muchneglected by the social reformer on earth. They will not put intothe hands of a common policeman powers direct and indirect thatwould be dangerous to the public in the hands of a judge. And theywill have avoided the immeasurable error of making their control ofthe drink traffic a source of public revenue. Privacies they willnot invade, but they will certainly restrict the public consumptionof intoxicants to specified licensed places and the sale of them tounmistakable adults, and they will make the temptation of the younga grave offence. In so migratory a population as the Modern Utopian, the licensing of inns and bars would be under the same control asthe railways and high roads. Inns exist for the stranger and not forthe locality, and we shall meet with nothing there to correspondwith our terrestrial absurdity of Local Option. 

The Utopians will certainly control this trade, and as certainlypunish personal excesses. Public drunkenness (as distinguished fromthe mere elation that follows a generous but controlled use of wine)will be an offence against public decency, and will be dealt with insome 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 adultshall use wine or beer or spirits, or not, seems to me entirely amatter for his doctor and his own private conscience. I doubt if weexplorers shall meet any drunken men, and I doubt not we shall meetmany who have never availed themselves of their adult freedom inthis respect. The conditions of physical happiness will be betterunderstood in Utopia, it will be worth while to be well there, andthe intelligent citizen will watch himself closely. Half and more ofthe drunkenness of earth is an attempt to lighten dull days andhopelessly sordid and disagreeable lives, and in Utopia they do notsuffer these things. Assuredly Utopia will be temperate, not onlydrinking, but eating with the soundest discretion. Yet I do notthink 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 ofanother opinion. We differ here and leave the question to theearnest reader. I have the utmost respect for all Teetotalers, Prohibitionists, and Haters and Persecutors of Innkeepers, theirenergy of reform awakens responsive notes in me, and to theirspecies 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 kindlyBurgundy, taken to make a sunshine on one's lunch when fourstrenuous hours of toil have left one on the further side ofappetite. Or ale, a foaming tankard of ale, ten miles of sturdytramping in the sleet and slush as a prelude, and then good breadand good butter and a ripe hollow Stilton and celery and ale--alewith a certain quantitative freedom. Or, again, where is the sin ina glass of tawny port three or four times, or it may be five, ayear, when the walnuts come round in their season? If you drink noport, then what are walnuts for? Such things I hold for the rewardof vast intervals of abstinence; they justify your wide, immaculatemargin, which is else a mere unmeaning blankness on the page ofpalate God has given you! I write of these things as a fleshly man, confessedly and knowingly fleshly, and more than usually aware of myliability to err; I know myself for a gross creature more given tosedentary world-mending than to brisk activities, and not one-tenthas active as the dullest newspaper boy in London. Yet still I havemy uses, uses that vanish in monotony, and still I must ask whyshould we bury the talent of these bright sensations altogether?Under no circumstances can I think of my Utopians maintaining theirfine order of life on ginger ale and lemonade and the ale that isKops'. Those terrible Temperance Drinks, solutions of qualifiedsugar 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 andself-righteousness. Indeed they do! Coffee destroys brain andkidney, a fact now universally recognised and advertised throughoutAmerica; and tea, except for a kind of green tea best used withdiscretion in punch, tans the entrails and turns honest stomachsinto leather bags. Rather would I be Metchnikoffed [Footnote: SeeThe Nature of Man, by Professor Elie Metchnikoff. ] at once and havea clean, good stomach of German silver. No! If we are to have no alein Utopia, give me the one clean temperance drink that is worthy toset beside wine, and that is simple water. Best it is when not quitepure and with a trace of organic matter, for then it tastes andsparkles.... 

My botanist would still argue. 

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

"You see, my dear Teetotaler?--he sets before me tray and glassand... " Here follows the necessary experiment and a deep sigh.... "Yes, a bottle of quite _excellent_ light beer! So there are alsocakes and ale in Utopia! Let us in this saner and more beautifulworld drink perdition to all earthly excesses. Let us drink moreparticularly to the coming of the day when men beyond there willlearn to distinguish between qualitative and quantitative questions, to temper good intentions with good intelligence, and righteousnesswith wisdom. One of the darkest evils of our world is surely theunteachable wildness of the Good. "

Section 7

So presently to bed and to sleep, but not at once to sleep. At firstmy brain, like a dog in unfamiliar quarters, must turn itself roundfor a time or so before it lies down. This strange mystery of aworld of which I have seen so little as yet--a mountain slope, atwilit road, a traffic of ambiguous vehicles and dim shapes, thewindow lights of many homes--fills me with curiosities. Figures andincidents come and go, the people we have passed, our landlord, quietly attentive and yet, I feel, with the keenest curiositypeeping from his eyes, the unfamiliar forms of the house parts andfurnishings, the unfamiliar courses of the meal. Outside this littlebedroom is a world, a whole unimagined world. A thousand millionthings lie outside in the darkness beyond this lit inn of ours, unthought-of possibilities, overlooked considerations, surprises, riddles, incommensurables, a whole monstrous intricate universe ofconsequences that I have to do my best to unravel. I attemptimpossible recapitulations and mingle the weird quality of dreamstuff with my thoughts. 

Athwart all this tumult of my memory goes this queer figure of myunanticipated companion, so obsessed by himself and his ownegotistical love that this sudden change to another world seems onlya change of scene for his gnawing, uninvigorating passion. It occursto me that she also must have an equivalent in Utopia, and then thatidea and all ideas grow thin and vague, and are dissolved at last inthe rising tide of sleep.... 

CHAPTER THE THIRD

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 meredreamstuff, incredible even by twilight, until we have shown that atthat level the community will still sustain itself. At any rate, thecommon liberty of the Utopians will not embrace the common libertyto be unserviceable, the most perfect economy of organisation stillleaves the fact untouched that all order and security in a Staterests on the certainty of getting work done. How will the work ofthis planet be done? What will be the economics of a modernUtopia?

Now in the first place, a state so vast and complex as this worldUtopia, and with so migratory a people, will need some handy symbolto check the distribution of services and commodities. Almostcertainly they will need to have money. They will have money, andit is not inconceivable that, for all his sorrowful thoughts, ourbotanist, with his trained observation, his habit of looking atlittle things upon the ground, would be the one to see and pick upthe coin that has fallen from some wayfarer's pocket. (This, in ourfirst hour or so before we reach the inn in the Urseren Thal. ) Youfigure us upon the high Gotthard road, heads together over thelittle disk that contrives to tell us so much of this strangeworld. 

It is, I imagine, of gold, and it will be a convenient accident ifit is sufficient to make us solvent for a day or so, until we are alittle more informed of the economic system into which we have come. It is, moreover, of a fair round size, and the inscription declaresit one Lion, equal to "twaindy" bronze Crosses. Unless the ratio ofmetals is very different here, this latter must be a token coin, andtherefore legal tender for but a small amount. (That would be painand pleasure to Mr. Wordsworth Donisthorpe if he were to chance tojoin us, for once he planned a Utopian coinage, [Footnote: A Systemof Measures, by Wordsworth Donisthorpe. ] and the words Lion andCross are his. But a token coinage and "legal tender" he cannotabide. They make him argue. ) And being in Utopia, that unfamiliar"twaindy" suggests at once we have come upon that most Utopian ofall things, a duodecimal system of counting. 

My author's privilege of details serves me here. This Lion isdistinctly a beautiful coin, admirably made, with its value in fine, clear letters circling the obverse side, and a head thereon--ofNewton, as I live! One detects American influence here. Eachyear, as we shall find, each denomination of coins celebrates acentenary. The reverse shows the universal goddess of the Utopiancoinage--Peace, as a beautiful woman, reading with a child out of agreat book, and behind them are stars, and an hour-glass, halfwayrun. Very human these Utopians, after all, and not by any meansabove the obvious in their symbolism!

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

It dates--so much of this present Utopia of ours dates. Those formerUtopists were bitterly against gold. You will recall the undignifieduse Sir Thomas More would have us put it to, and how there was nomoney at all in the Republic of Plato, and in that later communityfor which he wrote his Laws an iron coinage of austere appearanceand doubtful efficacy.... It may be these great gentlemen were alittle hasty with a complicated difficulty, and not a little unjustto a highly respectable element. 

Gold is abused and made into vessels of dishonour, and abolishedfrom ideal society as though it were the cause instead of theinstrument of human baseness; but, indeed, there is nothing bad ingold. Making gold into vessels of dishonour and banishing it fromthe 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 thingin 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 notsee how one can imagine anything at all worthy of being called acivilisation without it. It is the water of the body social, itdistributes and receives, and renders growth and assimilation andmovement and recovery possible. It is the reconciliation of humaninterdependence with liberty. What other device will give a man sogreat a freedom with so strong an inducement to effort? The economichistory of the world, where it is not the history of the theory ofproperty, is very largely the record of the abuse, not so much ofmoney as of credit devices to supplement money, to amplify the scopeof this most precious invention; and no device of labour credits[Footnote: Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Ch. IX. ] or freedemand of commodities from a central store [Footnote: More's Utopiaand Cabet's Icaria. ] or the like has ever been suggested that doesnot give ten thousand times more scope for that inherent moral drossin man that must be reckoned with in any sane Utopia we may designand plan.... Heaven knows where progress may not end, but at anyrate this developing State, into which we two men have fallen, thisTwentieth Century Utopia, has still not passed beyond money and theuse of coins. 

Section 2

Now if this Utopian world is to be in some degree parallel tocontemporary thought, it must have been concerned, it may be stillconcerned, with many unsettled problems of currency, and with theproblems that centre about a standard of value. Gold is perhaps ofall material substances the best adapted to the monetary purpose, but even at that best it falls far short of an imaginable ideal. Itundergoes spasmodic and irregular cheapening through new discoveriesof gold, and at any time it may undergo very extensive and suddenand disastrous depreciation through the discovery of some way oftransmuting less valuable elements. The liability to suchdepreciations introduces an undesirable speculative element into therelations of debtor and creditor. When, on the one hand, there isfor a time a check in the increase of the available stores of gold, or an increase in the energy applied to social purposes, or achecking of the public security that would impede the free exchangeof credit and necessitate a more frequent production of gold inevidence, then there comes an undue appreciation of money as againstthe general commodities of life, and an automatic impoverishment ofthe citizens in general as against the creditor class. The commonpeople are mortgaged into the bondage of debt. And on the otherhand an unexpected spate of gold production, the discovery of asingle nugget as big as St. Paul's, let us say--a quite possiblething--would result in a sort of jail delivery of debtors and afinancial earthquake. 

It has been suggested by an ingenious thinker that it is possibleto use as a standard of monetary value no substance whatever, butinstead, force, and that value might be measured in units of energy. An excellent development this, in theory, at any rate, of thegeneral idea of the modern State as kinetic and not static; itthrows the old idea of the social order and the new into thesharpest antithesis. The old order is presented as a system ofinstitutions and classes ruled by men of substance; the new, ofenterprises and interests led by men of power. 

Now I glance at this matter in the most incidental manner, as a manmay skim through a specialist's exposition in a popular magazine. You must figure me, therefore, finding from a casual periodicalpaper in our inn, with a certain surprise at not having anticipatedas much, the Utopian self of that same ingenious person quiteconspicuously a leader of thought, and engaged in organising thediscussion of the currency changes Utopia has under consideration. The article, as it presents itself to me, contains a completeand lucid, though occasionally rather technical, explanation ofhis newest proposals. They have been published, it seems, forgeneral criticism, and one gathers that in the modern Utopia theadministration presents the most elaborately detailed schemes of anyproposed alteration in law or custom, some time before any measureis taken to carry it into effect, and the possibilities of everydetail are acutely criticised, flaws anticipated, side issuesraised, and the whole minutely tested and fined down by a planetfulof critics, before the actual process of legislation begins. 

The explanation of these proposals involves an anticipatory glanceat the local administration of a Modern Utopia. To anyone who haswatched the development of technical science during the last decadeor so, there will be no shock in the idea that a generalconsolidation of a great number of common public services over areasof considerable size is now not only practicable, but verydesirable. In a little while heating and lighting and the supply ofpower for domestic and industrial purposes and for urban andinter-urban communications will all be managed electrically fromcommon generating stations. And the trend of political and socialspeculation points decidedly to the conclusion that so soon as itpasses out of the experimental stage, the supply of electricalenergy, just like drainage and the supply of water, will fall to thelocal authority. Moreover, the local authority will be the universallandowner. Upon that point so extreme an individualist as HerbertSpencer was in agreement with the Socialist. In Utopia we concludethat, whatever other types of property may exist, all naturalsources of force, and indeed all strictly natural products, coal, water power, and the like, are inalienably vested in the localauthorities (which, in order to secure the maximum of convenienceand administrative efficiency, will probably control areas as largesometimes as half England), they will generate electricity by waterpower, by combustion, by wind or tide or whatever other naturalforce is available, and this electricity will be devoted, some of itto the authority's lighting and other public works, some of it, asa subsidy, to the World-State authority which controls the highroads, the great railways, the inns and other apparatus of worldcommunication, and the rest will pass on to private individualsor to distributing companies at a uniform fixed rate for privatelighting and heating, for machinery and industrial applications ofall sorts. Such an arrangement of affairs will necessarily involve avast amount of book-keeping between the various authorities, theWorld-State government and the customers, and this book-keeping willnaturally be done most conveniently in units of physical energy. 

It is not incredible that the assessment of the various localadministrations for the central world government would be alreadycalculated upon the estimated total of energy, periodicallyavailable in each locality, and booked and spoken of in thesephysical units. Accounts between central and local governments couldbe kept in these terms. Moreover, one may imagine Utopian localauthorities making contracts in which payment would be no longer incoinage upon the gold basis, but in notes good for so many thousandsor millions of units of energy at one or other of the generatingstations. 

Now the problems of economic theory will have undergone an enormousclarification 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 myUtopia, at any rate, this has been done, the production anddistribution of common commodities have been expressed as a problemin the conversion of energy, and the scheme that Utopia was nowdiscussing was the application of this idea of energy as thestandard of value to the entire Utopian coinage. Every one of thosegiant local authorities was to be free to issue energy notes againstthe security of its surplus of saleable available energy, and tomake all its contracts for payment in those notes up to a certainmaximum defined by the amount of energy produced and disposed of inthat locality in the previous year. This power of issue was to berenewed just as rapidly as the notes came in for redemption. In aworld without boundaries, with a population largely migratory andemancipated from locality, the price of the energy notes of thesevarious local bodies would constantly tend to be uniform, becauseemployment would constantly shift into the areas where energy wascheap. Accordingly, the price of so many millions of units of energyat any particular moment in coins of the gold currency would beapproximately the same throughout the world. It was proposed toselect some particular day when the economic atmosphere wasdistinctly equable, and to declare a fixed ratio between the goldcoinage and the energy notes; each gold Lion and each Lion of creditrepresenting exactly the number of energy units it could buy on thatday. The old gold coinage was at once to cease to be legal tenderbeyond certain defined limits, except to the central government, which would not reissue it as it came in. It was, in fact, to becomea temporary token coinage, a token coinage of full value for the dayof conversion at any rate, if not afterwards, under the new standardof energy, and to be replaceable by an ordinary token coinage astime went on. The old computation by Lions and the values of thesmall change of daily life were therefore to suffer no disturbancewhatever. 

The economists of Utopia, as I apprehended them, had a differentmethod and a very different system of theories from those I haveread on earth, and this makes my exposition considerably moredifficult. This article upon which I base my account floated beforeme in an unfamiliar, perplexing, and dream-like phraseology. Yet Ibrought away an impression that here was a rightness that earthlyeconomists have failed to grasp. Few earthly economists have beenable to disentangle themselves from patriotisms and politics, andtheir obsession has always been international trade. Here in Utopiathe World State cuts that away from beneath their feet; there are noimports but meteorites, and no exports at all. Trading is theearthly economists' initial notion, and they start from perplexingand insoluble riddles about exchange value, insoluble because alltrading finally involves individual preferences which areincalculable and unique. Nowhere do they seem to be handling reallydefined standards, every economic dissertation and discussionreminds one more strongly than the last of the game of croquet Aliceplayed in Wonderland, when the mallets were flamingoes and the ballswere hedgehogs and crawled away, and the hoops were soldiers andkept getting up and walking about. But economics in Utopia must be, it seems to me, not a theory of trading based on bad psychology, butphysics applied to problems in the theory of sociology. The generalproblem of Utopian economics is to state the conditions of the mostefficient application of the steadily increasing quantities ofmaterial energy the progress of science makes available for humanservice, to the general needs of mankind. Human labour and existingmaterial are dealt with in relation to that. Trading and relativewealth are merely episodical in such a scheme. The trend of thearticle I read, as I understood it, was that a monetary system basedupon a relatively small amount of gold, upon which the business ofthe whole world had hitherto been done, fluctuated unreasonably andsupplied no real criterion of well-being, that the nominal values ofthings and enterprises had no clear and simple relation to the realphysical prosperity of the community, that the nominal wealth ofa community in millions of pounds or dollars or Lions, measurednothing but the quantity of hope in the air, and an increase ofconfidence meant an inflation of credit and a pessimistic phase acollapse of this hallucination of possessions. The new standards, this advocate reasoned, were to alter all that, and it seemed to methey would. 

I have tried to indicate the drift of these remarkable proposals, but about them clustered an elaborate mass of keen and temperatediscussion. Into the details of that discussion I will not enternow, nor am I sure I am qualified to render the multitudinous aspectof this complicated question at all precisely. I read the wholething in the course of an hour or two of rest after lunch--it waseither the second or third day of my stay in Utopia--and we weresitting in a little inn at the end of the Lake of Uri. We hadloitered there, and I had fallen reading because of a shower ofrain.... But certainly as I read it the proposition struck me as asingularly simple and attractive one, and its exposition opened outto me for the first time clearly, in a comprehensive outline, thegeneral conception of the economic nature of the Utopian State. 

Section 3

The difference between the social and economic sciences as theyexist in our world [Footnote: But see Gidding's Principles ofSociology, a modern and richly suggestive American work, imperfectlyappreciated by the British student. See also Walter Bagehot'sEconomic Studies. ] and in this Utopia deserves perhaps a word orso more. I write with the utmost diffidence, because upon eartheconomic science has been raised to a very high level of tortuousabstraction by the industry of its professors, and I can claimneither a patient student's intimacy with their productionsnor--what is more serious--anything but the most generalisedknowledge of what their Utopian equivalents have achieved. The vitalnature of economic issues to a Utopia necessitates, however, someattempt 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 thescope of Utopian psychology. My Utopians make two divisions of thescience of psychology, first, the general psychology of individuals, a sort of mental physiology separated by no definite line fromphysiology proper, and secondly, the psychology of relationshipbetween individuals. This second is an exhaustive study ofthe reaction of people upon each other and of all possiblerelationships. It is a science of human aggregations, of allpossible family groupings, of neighbours and neighbourhood, ofcompanies, associations, unions, secret and public societies, religious groupings, of common ends and intercourse, and of themethods of intercourse and collective decision that hold humangroups together, and finally of government and the State. Theelucidation of economic relationships, depending as it does on thenature of the hypothesis of human aggregation actually in operationat any time, is considered to be subordinate and subsequent to thisgeneral science of Sociology. Political economy and economics, inour world now, consist of a hopeless muddle of social assumptionsand preposterous psychology, and a few geographical and physicalgeneralisations. Its ingredients will be classified out and widelyseparated in Utopian thought. On the one hand there will be thestudy of physical economies, ending in the descriptive treatment ofsociety as an organisation for the conversion of all the availableenergy in nature to the material ends of mankind--a physicalsociology which will be already at such a stage of practicaldevelopment as to be giving the world this token coinagerepresenting energy--and on the other there will be the study ofeconomic problems as problems in the division of labour, havingregard to a social organisation whose main ends are reproduction andeducation in an atmosphere of personal freedom. Each of theseinquiries, working unencumbered by the other, will be continuallycontributing fresh valid conclusions for the use of the practicaladministrator. 

In no region of intellectual activity will our hypothesis of freedomfrom tradition be of more value in devising a Utopia than here. Fromits beginning the earthly study of economics has been infertile andunhelpful, because of the mass of unanalysed and scarcely suspectedassumptions upon which it rested. The facts were ignored that tradeis a bye-product and not an essential factor in social life, thatproperty is a plastic and fluctuating convention, that value iscapable of impersonal treatment only in the case of the mostgeneralised requirements. Wealth was measured by the standards ofexchange. Society was regarded as a practically unlimited number ofavaricious adult units incapable of any other subordinate groupingsthan business partnerships, and the sources of competition wereassumed to be inexhaustible. Upon such quicksands rose an edificethat aped the securities of material science, developed a technicaljargon and professed the discovery of "laws. " Our liberation fromthese false presumptions through the rhetoric of Carlyle and Ruskinand the activities of the Socialists, is more apparent than real. The old edifice oppresses us still, repaired and altered byindifferent builders, underpinned in places, and with a slightchange of name. "Political Economy" has been painted out, andinstead we read "Economics--under entirely new management. " ModernEconomics differs mainly from old Political Economy in havingproduced no Adam Smith. The old "Political Economy" made certaingeneralisations, and they were mostly wrong; new Economics evadesgeneralisations, and seems to lack the intellectual power to makethem. The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fogwhich begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaninginconvenience to passers-by. Its most typical exponents display adisposition to disavow generalisations altogether, to claimconsideration as "experts, " and to make immediate politicalapplication 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 fashionablephysician, but indecent in a philosopher or a man of science. Inthis state of impotent expertness, however, or in some equallyunsound state, economics must struggle on--a science that is noscience, a floundering lore wallowing in a mud of statistics--untileither the study of the material organisation of production on theone hand as a development of physics and geography, or the studyof social aggregation on the other, renders enduring foundationspossible. 

Section 4

The older Utopias were all relatively small states; Plato'sRepublic, for example, was to be smaller than the average Englishborough, and no distinction was made between the Family, the LocalGovernment, and the State. Plato and Campanella--for all that thelatter was a Christian priest--carried communism to its final pointand prescribed even a community of husbands and wives, an idea thatwas brought at last to the test of effectual experiment in theOneida Community of New York State (1848-1879). This latter body didnot long survive its founder, at least as a veritable communism, byreason of the insurgent individualism of its vigorous sons. More, too, denied privacy and ruled an absolute community of goods, atany rate, and so, coming to the Victorian Utopias, did Cabet. ButCabet's communism was one of the "free store" type, and the goodswere yours only after you had requisitioned them. That seems thecase in the "Nowhere" of Morris also. Compared with the olderwriters Bellamy and Morris have a vivid sense of individualseparation, and their departure from the old homogeneity issufficiently marked to justify a doubt whether there will be anymore thoroughly communistic Utopias for ever. 

A Utopia such as this present one, written in the opening of theTwentieth Century, and after the most exhaustive discussion--nearlya century long--between Communistic and Socialistic ideas on the onehand, and Individualism on the other, emerges upon a sort ofeffectual conclusion to those controversies. The two parties have sochipped and amended each other's initial propositions that, indeed, except for the labels still flutteringly adhesive to the implicatedmen, it is hard to choose between them. Each side established a goodmany propositions, and we profit by them all. We of the succeedinggeneration can see quite clearly that for the most part the heat andzeal of these discussions arose in the confusion of a quantitativefor a qualitative question. To the onlooker, both Individualism andSocialism are, in the absolute, absurdities; the one would make menthe slaves of the violent or rich, the other the slaves of the Stateofficial, and the way of sanity runs, perhaps even sinuously, downthe intervening valley. Happily the dead past buries its dead, andit is not our function now to adjudicate the preponderance ofvictory. In the very days when our political and economic order isbecoming steadily more Socialistic, our ideals of intercourse turnmore and more to a fuller recognition of the claims of individuality. The State is to be progressive, it is no longer to be static, andthis alters the general condition of the Utopian problem profoundly;we have to provide not only for food and clothing, for order andhealth, but for initiative. The factor that leads the World Stateon from one phase of development to the next is the interplay ofindividualities; to speak teleologically, the world exists for thesake of and through initiative, and individuality is the methodof initiative. Each man and woman, to the extent that his or herindividuality is marked, breaks the law of precedent, transgressesthe general formula, and makes a new experiment for the direction ofthe life force. It is impossible, therefore, for the State, whichrepresents all and is preoccupied by the average, to make effectualexperiments and intelligent innovations, and so supply the essentialsubstance of life. As against the individual the state representsthe species, in the case of the Utopian World State it absolutelyrepresents 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 andresults, intellectual, material and moral, upon the world. 

Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments ofall its successful individuals since the beginning, and the WorldState of the Modern Utopist will, in its economic aspect, be acompendium of established economic experience, about whichindividual enterprise will be continually experimenting, either tofail and pass, or to succeed and at last become incorporated withthe undying organism of the World State. This organism is theuniversal rule, the common restriction, the rising level platformon which individualities stand. 

The World State in this ideal presents itself as the sole landownerof the earth, with the great local governments I have adumbrated, the local municipalities, holding, as it were, feudally under it aslandlords. The State or these subordinates holds all the sources ofenergy, and either directly or through its tenants, farmers andagents, develops these sources, and renders the energy available forthe work of life. It or its tenants will produce food, and so humanenergy, and the exploitation of coal and electric power, and thepowers of wind and wave and water will be within its right. It willpour out this energy by assignment and lease and acquiescence andwhat not upon its individual citizens. It will maintain order, maintain roads, maintain a cheap and efficient administration ofjustice, maintain cheap and rapid locomotion and be the commoncarrier of the planet, convey and distribute labour, control, let, or administer all natural productions, pay for and secure healthybirths and a healthy and vigorous new generation, maintain thepublic health, coin money and sustain standards of measurement, subsidise research, and reward such commercially unprofitableundertakings as benefit the community as a whole; subsidise whenneedful chairs of criticism and authors and publications, andcollect and distribute information. The energy developed and theemployment afforded by the State will descend like water that thesun has sucked out of the sea to fall upon a mountain range, andback to the sea again it will come at last, debouching in groundrent and royalty and license fees, in the fees of travellers andprofits upon carrying and coinage and the like, in death duty, transfer tax, legacy and forfeiture, returning to the sea. Betweenthe clouds and the sea it will run, as a river system runs, downthrough a great region of individual enterprise and interplay, whosefreedom it will sustain. In that intermediate region between thekindred heights and deeps those beginnings and promises will arisethat are the essential significance, the essential substance, oflife. From our human point of view the mountains and sea are forthe habitable lands that lie between. So likewise the State isfor Individualities. The State is for Individuals, the law is forfreedoms, the world is for experiment, experience, and change: theseare 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 manmay own? Under modern conditions--indeed, under any conditions--aman without some negotiable property is a man without freedom, andthe extent of his property is very largely the measure of hisfreedom. Without any property, without even shelter or food, a manhas no choice but to set about getting these things; he is inservitude to his needs until he has secured property to satisfythem. But with a certain small property a man is free to do manythings, to take a fortnight's holiday when he chooses, for example, and to try this new departure from his work or that; with so muchmore, 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 trycurious novelties, build himself houses and make gardens, establishbusinesses and make experiments at large. Very speedily, underterrestrial conditions, the property of a man may reach suchproportions that his freedom oppresses the freedom of others. Here, again, is a quantitative question, an adjustment of conflictingfreedoms, a quantitative question that too many people insist onmaking a qualitative one. 

The object sought in the code of property laws that one would findin operation in Utopia would be the same object that pervades thewhole Utopian organisation, namely, a universal maximum ofindividual freedom. Whatever far-reaching movements the State orgreat rich men or private corporations may make, the starvation byany complication of employment, the unwilling deportation, thedestruction of alternatives to servile submissions, must notensue. Beyond such qualifications, the object of Modern Utopianstatesmanship will be to secure to a man the freedom given by allhis legitimate property, that is to say, by all the values his toilor skill or foresight and courage have brought into being. Whateverhe 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 thisquestion of what may be property takes really the form of what maya man buy in Utopia?

A modern Utopian most assuredly must have a practically unqualifiedproperty in all those things that become, as it were, by possession, extensions and expressions of his personality; his clothing, hisjewels, the tools of his employment, his books, the objects of arthe may have bought or made, his personal weapons (if Utopia haveneed of such things), insignia, and so forth. All such things thathe has bought with his money or acquired--provided he is not aprofessional or habitual dealer in such property--will beinalienably his, his to give or lend or keep, free even fromtaxation. So intimate is this sort of property that I have no doubtUtopia will give a man posthumous rights over it--will permit him toassign it to a successor with at the utmost the payment of a smallredemption. A horse, perhaps, in certain districts, or a bicycle, orany such mechanical conveyance personally used, the Utopians mightfind it well to rank with these possessions. No doubt, too, a houseand privacy owned and occupied by a man, and even a man's ownhousehold furniture, might be held to stand as high or almost ashigh in the property scale, might be taxed as lightly andtransferred under only a slightly heavier redemption, provided hehad not let these things on hire, or otherwise alienated them fromhis intimate self. A thorough-going, Democratic Socialist will nodoubt be inclined at first to object that if the Utopians make thesethings a specially free sort of property in this way, men wouldspend much more upon them than they would otherwise do, but indeedthat will be an excellent thing. We are too much affected by theneedy atmosphere of our own mismanaged world. In Utopia no one willhave to hunger because some love to make and have made and own andcherish beautiful things. To give this much of property toindividuals will tend to make clothing, ornamentation, implements, books, and all the arts finer and more beautiful, because by buyingsuch things a man will secure something inalienable--save in thecase of bankruptcy--for himself and for those who belong to him. Moreover, a man may in his lifetime set aside sums to ensure specialadvantages of education and care for the immature children ofhimself and others, and in this manner also exercise a posthumousright. [Footnote: But a Statute of Mortmain will set a distinct timelimit to the continuance of such benefactions. A periodic revisionof 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. Whathe did not choose to gather and assimilate to himself, or assign forthe special education of his children, the State will share in thelion's proportion with heir and legatee. 

This applies, for example, to the property that a man creates andacquires in business enterprises, which are presumably undertakenfor gain, and as a means of living rather than for themselves. Allnew machinery, all new methods, all uncertain and variable andnon-universal undertakings, are no business for the State; theycommence always as experiments of unascertained value, and nextafter the invention of money, there is no invention has sofacilitated freedom and progress as the invention of the limitedliability company to do this work of trial and adventure. Theabuses, the necessary reforms of company law on earth, are noconcern of ours here and now, suffice it that in a Modern Utopiasuch laws must be supposed to be as perfect as mortal laws canpossibly be made. Caveat vendor will be a sound qualification ofCaveat emptor in the beautifully codified Utopian law. Whether theUtopian company will be allowed to prefer this class of share tothat or to issue debentures, whether indeed usury, that is to saylending money at fixed rates of interest, will be permitted at allin Utopia, one may venture to doubt. But whatever the nature of theshares a man may hold, they will all be sold at his death, andwhatever he has not clearly assigned for special educationalpurposes will--with possibly some fractional concession to nearsurvivors--lapse to the State. The "safe investment, " thatpermanent, undying claim upon the community, is just one of thosethings Utopia will discourage; which indeed the developing securityof civilisation quite automatically discourages through the fall inthe rate of interest. As we shall see at a later stage, the Statewill insure the children of every citizen, and those legitimatelydependent upon him, against the inconvenience of his death; it willcarry out all reasonable additional dispositions he may have madefor them in the same event; and it will insure him against old ageand infirmity; and the object of Utopian economics will be to give aman every inducement to spend his surplus money in intensifying thequality of his surroundings, either by economic adventures andexperiments, which may yield either losses or large profits, or inincreasing the beauty, the pleasure, the abundance and promise oflife. 

Besides strictly personal possessions and shares in businessadventures, Utopia will no doubt permit associations of its citizensto have a property in various sorts of contracts and concessions, inleases of agricultural and other land, for example; in houses theymay have built, factories and machinery they may have made, andthe like. And if a citizen prefer to adventure into businesssingle-handed, he will have all the freedoms of enterprise enjoyedby a company; in business affairs he will be a company of one, andhis single share will be dealt with at his death like any othershares.... So much for the second kind of property. And these twokinds of property will probably exhaust the sorts of property aUtopian may possess. 

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

The property of a parent in his children, and of a husband in hiswife, seems to be undergoing a steadily increasing qualification inthe world of to-day, but the discussion of the Utopian state ofaffairs in regard to such property may be better reserved untilmarriage becomes our topic. Suffice it here to remark, that theincreasing control of a child's welfare and upbringing by thecommunity, and the growing disposition to limit and tax inheritanceare complementary aspects of the general tendency to regard thewelfare and free intraplay of future generations no longer as theconcern of parents and altruistic individuals, but as thepredominant issue of statesmanship, and the duty and moral meaningof the world community as a whole. 

Section 6

From the conception of mechanical force as coming in from Nature tothe service of man, a conception the Utopian proposal of a coinagebased on energy units would emphasise, arise profound contrastsbetween the modern and the classical Utopias. Except for a meagreuse of water power for milling, and the wind for sailing--so meagrein the latter case that the classical world never contrived to dowithout the galley slave--and a certain restricted help from oxen inploughing, and from horses in locomotion, all the energy thatsustained the old-fashioned State was derived from the muscularexertion of toiling men. They ran their world by hand. Continualbodily labour was a condition of social existence. It is only withthe coming of coal burning, of abundant iron and steel, and ofscientific 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 theUnited States or England rests, it would be found that a vastlypreponderating moiety is derived from non-human sources, from coaland liquid fuel, and explosives and wind and water. There is everyindication of a steady increase in this proportion of mechanicalenergy, in this emancipation of men from the necessity of physicallabour. There appears no limit to the invasion of life by themachine. 

Now it is only in the last three hundred years that any human beingseems to have anticipated this. It stimulates the imagination toremark how entirely it was overlooked as a modifying cause in humandevelopment. [Footnote: It is interesting to note how little evenBacon seems to see of this, in his New Atlantis. ] Plato clearly hadno ideas about machines at all as a force affecting socialorganisation. There was nothing in his world to suggest them to him. I suppose there arose no invention, no new mechanical appliance ormethod of the slightest social importance through all his length ofyears. He never thought of a State that did not rely for its forceupon human muscle, just as he never thought of a State that was notprimarily organised for warfare hand to hand. Political and moralinventions he saw enough of and to spare, and in that direction hestill stimulates the imagination. But in regard to all materialpossibilities he deadens rather than stimulates. [Footnote: The lostUtopia of Hippodamus provided rewards for inventors, but unlessAristotle misunderstood him, and it is certainly the fate of allUtopias to be more or less misread, the inventions contemplated werepolitical devices. ] An infinitude of nonsense about the Greek mindwould never have been written if the distinctive intellectual andartistic quality of Plato's time, its extraordinarily cleardefinition of certain material conditions as absolutely permanent, coupled with its politico-social instability, had been borne inmind. The food of the Greek imagination was the very antithesis ofour own nourishment. We are educated by our circumstances to thinkno revolution in appliances and economic organisation incredible, our minds play freely about possibilities that would have struck themen of the Academy as outrageous extravagance, and it is in regardto politico-social expedients that our imaginations fail. Sparta, for all the evidence of history, is scarcely more credible to usthan a motor-car throbbing in the agora would have been toSocrates. 

By sheer inadvertence, therefore, Plato commenced the tradition ofUtopias without machinery, a tradition we find Morris still loyallyfollowing, except for certain mechanical barges and such-like toys, in his News from Nowhere. There are some foreshadowings ofmechanical possibilities in the New Atlantis, but it is only in thenineteenth century that Utopias appeared in which the fact isclearly recognised that the social fabric rests no longer upon humanlabour. It was, I believe, Cabet [Footnote: Cabet, Voyage en Icarie, 1848. ] who first in a Utopian work insisted upon the escape of manfrom irksome labours through the use of machinery. He is the greatprimitive of modern Utopias, and Bellamy is his American equivalent. Hitherto, either slave labour (Phaleas), [Footnote: Aristotle'sPolitics, Bk. II. , Ch. VIII. ] or at least class distinctionsinvolving unavoidable labour in the lower class, have beenassumed--as Plato does, and as Bacon in the New Atlantis probablyintended to do (More gave his Utopians bondsmen sans phrase fortheir most disagreeable toil); or there is--as in Morris and theoutright Return-to-Nature Utopians--a bold make-believe that alltoil may be made a joy, and with that a levelling down of allsociety to an equal participation in labour. But indeed this isagainst all the observed behaviour of mankind. It needed theOlympian unworldliness of an irresponsible rich man of theshareholding type, a Ruskin or a Morris playing at life, to imagineas much. Road-making under Mr. Ruskin's auspices was a joy at Oxfordno doubt, and a distinction, and it still remains a distinction; itproved the least contagious of practices. And Hawthorne did not findbodily toil anything more than the curse the Bible says it is, atBrook Farm. [Footnote: The Blythedale Experiment, and see also hisNotebook. ]

If toil is a blessing, never was blessing so effectually disguised, and the very people who tell us that, hesitate to suggest more thana beautiful ease in the endless day of Heaven. A certain amount ofbodily or mental exercise, a considerable amount of doing thingsunder the direction of one's free imagination is quite anothermatter. Artistic production, for example, when it is at its best, when a man is freely obeying himself, and not troubling to pleaseothers, is really not toil at all. It is quite a different thingdigging potatoes, as boys say, "for a lark, " and digging thembecause otherwise you will starve, digging them day after day as adull, unavoidable imperative. The essence of toil is thatimperative, and the fact that the attention _must_ cramp itself tothe work in hand--that it excludes freedom, and not that it involvesfatigue. So long as anything but a quasi-savage life depended upontoil, so long was it hopeless to expect mankind to do anything butstruggle to confer just as much of this blessing as possible uponone another. But now that the new conditions physical science isbringing about, not only dispense with man as a source of energy butsupply the hope that all routine work may be made automatic, it isbecoming conceivable that presently there may be no need for anyoneto toil habitually at all; that a labouring class--that is to say, a class of workers without personal initiative--will becomeunnecessary to the world of men. 

The plain message physical science has for the world at large isthis, that were our political and social and moral devices only aswell contrived to their ends as a linotype machine, an antisepticoperating plant, or an electric tram-car, there need now at thepresent moment be no appreciable toil in the world, and only thesmallest fraction of the pain, the fear, and the anxiety that nowmakes human life so doubtful in its value. There is more than enoughfor everyone alive. Science stands, a too competent servant, behindher wrangling underbred masters, holding out resources, devices, andremedies they are too stupid to use. [Footnote: See that mostsuggestive little book, Twentieth Century Inventions, by Mr. GeorgeSutherland. ] And on its material side a modern Utopia must needspresent these gifts as taken, and show a world that is reallyabolishing the need of labour, abolishing the last base reason foranyone's servitude or inferiority. 

Section 7

The effectual abolition of a labouring and servile class will makeitself felt in every detail of the inn that will shelter us, of thebedrooms we shall occupy. You conceive my awakening to all thesethings on the morning after our arrival. I shall lie for a minute orso with my nose peeping over the coverlet, agreeably and gentlycoming awake, and with some vague nightmare of sitting at a commontable with an unavoidable dustman in green and gold called Boffin, [Footnote: Vide William Morris's News from Nowhere. ] fading out ofmy mind. Then I should start up. You figure my apprehensive, startled inspection of my chamber. "Where am I?" that classicphrase, recurs. Then I perceive quite clearly that I am in bed inUtopia. 

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

The room is, of course, very clear and clean and simple; not by anymeans cheaply equipped, but designed to economise the labour ofredding and repair just as much as is possible. It is beautifullyproportioned, and rather lower than most rooms I know on earth. There is no fireplace, and I am perplexed by that until I find athermometer beside six switches on the wall. Above this switch-boardis a brief instruction: one switch warms the floor, which is notcarpeted, but covered by a substance like soft oilcloth; one warmsthe mattress (which is of metal with resistance coils threaded toand fro in it); and the others warm the wall in various degrees, each directing current through a separate system of resistances. Thecasement does not open, but above, flush with the ceiling, anoiseless rapid fan pumps air out of the room. The air enters by aTobin shaft. There is a recess dressing-room, equipped with a bathand all that is necessary to one's toilette, and the water, oneremarks, is warmed, if one desires it warm, by passing it through anelectrically heated spiral of tubing. A cake of soap drops out of astore machine on the turn of a handle, and when you have done withit, you drop that and your soiled towels and so forth, which alsoare given you by machines, into a little box, through the bottom ofwhich they drop at once, and sail down a smooth shaft. A littlenotice tells you the price of your room, and you gather the price isdoubled if you do not leave the toilette as you found it. Beside thebed, and to be lit at night by a handy switch over the pillow, is alittle clock, its face flush with the wall. The room has no cornersto gather dirt, wall meets floor with a gentle curve, and theapartment could be swept out effectually by a few strokes of amechanical sweeper. The door frames and window frames are of metal, rounded and impervious to draught. You are politely requested toturn a handle at the foot of your bed before leaving the room, andforthwith the frame turns up into a vertical position, and thebedclothes hang airing. You stand at the doorway and realise thatthere remains not a minute's work for anyone to do. Memories of thefoetid disorder of many an earthly bedroom after a night's usefloat across your mind. 

And you must not imagine this dustless, spotless, sweet apartment asanything but beautiful. Its appearance is a little unfamiliar ofcourse, but all the muddle of dust-collecting hangings and witlessornament that cover the earthly bedroom, the valances, the curtainsto check the draught from the ill-fitting wood windows, theworthless irrelevant pictures, usually a little askew, the dustycarpets, and all the paraphernalia about the dirty, black-leadedfireplace are gone. But the faintly tinted walls are framed withjust one clear coloured line, as finely placed as the member of aGreek capital; the door handles and the lines of the panels of thedoor, the two chairs, the framework of the bed, the writing table, have all that final simplicity, that exquisite finish of contourthat is begotten of sustained artistic effort. The graciously shapedwindows each frame a picture--since they are draughtless the windowseats are no mere mockeries as are the window seats of earth--and onthe sill, the sole thing to need attention in the room, is onelittle 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 wedo not understand the electrically heated coffee-pot before us, shows us what to do. Coffee and milk we have, in the Continentalfashion, and some excellent rolls and butter. 

He is a swarthy little man, our landlord, and overnight we saw himpreoccupied with other guests. But we have risen either late orearly by Utopian standards, we know not which, and this morning hehas us to himself. His bearing is kindly and inoffensive, but hecannot conceal the curiosity that possesses him. His eye meets ourswith a mute inquiry, and then as we fall to, we catch himscrutinising our cuffs, our garments, our boots, our faces, ourtable manners. He asks nothing at first, but says a word or so aboutour night's comfort and the day's weather, phrases that have an airof 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-tressedlittle girl, who stares at us half impudently, half shyly, withbright 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'sshoulder. 

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

I expand. "We have come so far that this country of yours seems verystrange 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 hesends away his little girl with a needless message to hermother. 

"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 Utopiawill probably keep its more intelligent citizens for better workthan inn-tending. He is evidently inaccessible to the idea we thinkof 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 fashionof the familiar hotel visitors' book of earth. He places this beforeus, and beside it puts pen and ink and a slab, upon which ink hasbeen 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. Thebook 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 andmakes the thumbmark first with the utmost deliberation. Meanwhilehe studies the other two entries. The "numbers" of the previousguests above are complex muddles of letters and figures. He writeshis name, then with a calm assurance writes down his number, A. M. A. 1607. 2. Ab+. I am wrung with momentary admiration. I followhis example, and fabricate an equally imposing signature. We thinkourselves very clever. The landlord proffers finger bowls for ourthumbs, and his eye goes, just a little curiously, to our entries. 

I decide it is advisable to pay and go before any conversation aboutour formulae arises. 

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

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

I glance back to discover the landlord and a gracefully robed womanstanding outside the pretty simplicity of the Utopian inn, watchingus doubtfully as we recede. 

"Come on, " I insist. 

Section 8

We should go towards the Schoellenen gorge, and as we went, ourfresh morning senses would gather together a thousand factors forour impression of this more civilised world. A Modern Utopia willhave done with yapping about nationality, and so the uglyfortifications, the barracks and military defilements of the earthlyvale of Urseren will be wanting. Instead there will be a greatmultitude of gracious little houses clustering in college-likegroups, no doubt about their common kitchens and halls, down andabout the valley slopes. And there will be many more trees, and agreat variety of trees--all the world will have been ransacked forwinter conifers. Despite the height of the valley there will be adouble avenue along the road. This high road with its tramway wouldturn with us to descend the gorge, and we should hesitate upon theadventure of boarding the train. But now we should have the memoryof our landlord's curious eye upon us, and we should decide at lastto defer the risk of explanations such an enterprise mightprecipitate. 

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

The tramway, the train road, the culverts, and bridges, theUrnerloch tunnel, into which the road plunges, will all be beautifulthings. 

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments andrailways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them tobe ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection; a thing of humanmaking is for the most part ugly in proportion to the poverty of itsconstructive thought, to the failure of its producer fully to graspthe purpose of its being. Everything to which men continue to givethought and attention, which they make and remake in the samedirection, and with a continuing desire to do as well as they can, grows beautiful inevitably. Things made by mankind under modernconditions are ugly, primarily because our social organisation isugly, because we live in an atmosphere of snatch and uncertainty, and do everything in an underbred strenuous manner. This is themisfortune of machinery, and not its fault. Art, like some beautifulplant, lives on its atmosphere, and when the atmosphere is good, itwill grow everywhere, and when it is bad nowhere. If we smashed andburied every machine, every furnace, every factory in the world, andwithout any further change set ourselves to home industries, handlabour, spade husbandry, sheep-folding and pig minding, we shouldstill do things in the same haste, and achieve nothing butdirtiness, inconvenience, bad air, and another gaunt and gawkyreflection of our intellectual and moral disorder. We should mendnothing. 

But in Utopia a man who designs a tram road will be a cultivatedman, an artist craftsman; he will strive, as a good writer, or apainter strives, to achieve the simplicity of perfection. He willmake his girders and rails and parts as gracious as that firstengineer, Nature, has made the stems of her plants and the jointsand gestures of her animals. To esteem him a sort of anti-artist, tocount every man who makes things with his unaided thumbs an artist, and every man who uses machinery as a brute, is merely a passingphase of human stupidity. This tram road beside us will be a triumphof design. The idea will be so unfamiliar to us that for a time itwill not occur to us that it is a system of beautiful objects atall. We shall admire its ingenious adaptation to the need of adistrict that is buried half the year in snow, the hard bed below, curved and guttered to do its own clearing, the great arched sleepermasses, raising the rails a good two yards above the ground, theeasy, simple standards and insulators. Then it will creep in uponour 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 incompetition to design an electric tram, students who know somethingof modern metallurgy, and something of electrical engineering, andwe shall find people as keenly critical of a signal box or an ironbridge as they are on earth of----! Heavens! what _are_ theycritical about on earth?

The quality and condition of a dress tie!

We should make some unpatriotic comparisons with our own planet, nodoubt. 

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

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 turnus off the road down the steep ruin of an ancient mule track towardsit. It is our first reminder that Utopia too must have a history. Wecross it and find the Reuss, for all that it has already lit andwarmed and ventilated and cleaned several thousands of houses in thedale above, and for all that it drives those easy trams in thegallery overhead, is yet capable of as fine a cascade as ever itflung 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 aboutthose thumb marks we have left behind. 

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

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

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

He overtakes us and begins talking forthwith in a fluty, but notunamiable, tenor. He is a great talker, this man, and a fairlyrespectable gesticulator, and to him it is we make our firstineffectual tentatives at explaining who indeed we are; but his flowof talk washes that all away again. He has a face of that rubicund, knobby type I have heard an indignant mineralogist speak of asbotryoidal, and about it waves a quantity of disorderly blond hair. He is dressed in leather doublet and knee breeches, and he wearsover these a streaming woollen cloak of faded crimson that give hima fine dramatic outline as he comes down towards us over the rocks. His feet, which are large and handsome, but bright pink with thekeen morning air, are bare, except for sandals of leather. (It wasthe only time that we saw anyone in Utopia with bare feet. ) Hesalutes us with a scroll-like waving of his stick, and falls in withour slower paces. 

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

As he speaks, his staff indicates the great mechanical road thatruns across the gorge and high overhead through a gallery in therock, follows it along until it turns the corner, picks it up as aviaduct far below, traces it until it plunges into an arcade througha 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 howwe should broach our remarkable situation to these Utopians beforeour money is spent. 

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

I do my best. 

"You came from the other side of space!" says the man in the crimsoncloak, interrupting me. "Precisely! I like that--it's exactly mynote! So do I! And you find this world strange! Exactly my case! Weare brothers! We shall be in sympathy. I am amazed, I have beenamazed 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! Fortunatemen!" He chuckled. "For my part I found myself in the still strangerposition of infant to two parents of the most intractabledispositions!"

"The fact remains, " I protest. 

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

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

Section 2

An agreeable person, though a little distracting, he was, and hetalked, we recall, of many things. He impressed us, we foundafterwards, as a poseur beyond question, a conscious Ishmaelite inthe world of wit, and in some subtly inexplicable way as a mostconsummate ass. He talked first of the excellent and commodioustrams that came from over the passes, and ran down the long valleytowards middle Switzerland, and of all the growth of pleasant homesand chalets amidst the heights that made the opening gorge sodifferent from its earthly parallel, with a fine disrespect. "Butthey are beautiful, " I protested. "They are graciously proportioned, they are placed in well-chosen positions; they give no offence tothe 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 ourMother?"

"All life is that!"

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

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

He ignored my question. For him, untroubled Nature was the best, hesaid, and, with a glance at his feet, the most beautiful. Heprofessed himself a Nazarite, and shook back his Teutonic poet'sshock of hair. So he came to himself, and for the rest of our walkhe kept to himself as the thread of his discourse, and went overhimself from top to toe, and strung thereon all topics under the sunby way of illustrating his splendours. But especially his foil wasthe relative folly, the unnaturalness and want of logic in hisfellow men. He held strong views about the extreme simplicity ofeverything, only that men, in their muddle-headedness, hadconfounded it all. "Hence, for example, these trams! They are alwaysrunning up and down as though they were looking for the lostsimplicity of nature. 'We dropped it here!'" He earned a living, wegathered, "some considerable way above the minimum wage, " whichthrew a chance light on the labour problem--by perforating recordsfor automatic musical machines--no doubt of the Pianotist andPianola kind--and he spent all the leisure he could gain in going toand 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, andesteemed us fair game. He had been lecturing on these topics inItaly, and he was now going back through the mountains to lecture inSaxony, lecturing on the way, to perforate a lot more records, lecturing the while, and so start out lecturing again. He wasundisguisedly glad to have us to lecture to by the way. 

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

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

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

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

Subsequently while we lunched and he waited for the specific naturaldishes he ordered--they taxed the culinary resources of the inn tothe utmost--he broached a comprehensive generalisation. "The animalkingdom and the vegetable kingdom are easily distinguished, and forthe life of me I see no reason for confusing them. It is, I hold, asin against Nature. I keep them distinct in my mind and I keep themdistinct in my person. No animal substance inside, no vegetablewithout;--what could be simpler or more logical? Nothing upon me butleather and allwool garments, within, cereals, fruit, nuts, herbs, and the like. Classification--order--man's function. He is here toobserve and accentuate Nature's simplicity. These people"--he sweptan arm that tried not too personally to include us--"are filled andcovered with confusion. "

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

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

But we seemed to get little, his style was so elusive. Afterwards, indeed, we found much information and many persuasions had soakedinto us, but at the time it seemed to us he told us nothing. Heindicated things by dots and dashes, instead of by good hardassertive lines. He would not pause to see how little we knew. Sometimes his wit rose so high that he would lose sight of ithimself, 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 mouthwith grapes. He talked of the relations of the sexes, and love--apassion he held in great contempt as being in its essence complexand disingenuous--and afterwards we found we had learnt much of whatthe marriage laws of Utopia allow and forbid. 

"A simple natural freedom, " he said, waving a grape in anillustrative manner, and so we gathered the Modern Utopia did not atany rate go to that. He spoke, too, of the regulation of unions, ofpeople who were not allowed to have children, of complicated rulesand interventions. "Man, " he said, "had ceased to be a naturalproduct!"

We tried to check him with questions at this most illuminatingpoint, but he drove on like a torrent, and carried his topic out ofsight. The world, he held, was overmanaged, and that was the root ofall evil. He talked of the overmanagement of the world, and amongother 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 whatUtopia did with the feeble and insane. "We make all thesedistinctions between man and man, we exalt this and favour that, anddegrade 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 whohave taken the world in hand. I might be, of course, but I'mnot. "

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

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

"Voluntary noblemen!" he said, "voluntary Gods I fancy they thinkthemselves, " and I was left behind for a space in the perplexedexamination of this parenthesis, while he and the botanist--who issedulous to keep his digestion up to date with all the newestdevices--argued about the good of medicine men. 

"The natural human constitution, " said the blond-haired man, "isperfectly simple, with one simple condition--you must leave it toNature. But if you mix up things so distinctly and essentiallyseparated 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. Butyou shelter from Nature in houses, you protect yourselves by clothesthat are useful instead of being ornamental, you wash--with suchabstersive chemicals as soap for example--and above all you consultdoctors. " He approved himself with a chuckle. "Have you ever foundanyone seriously ill without doctors and medicine about? Never! Yousay a lot of people would die without shelter and medicalattendance! No doubt--but a natural death. A natural death is betterthan an artificial life, surely? That's--to be frank with you--thevery citadel of my position. "

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

You will understand, perhaps, the subdued irritation I felt, as Isat and listened to the botanist entangling himself in the logicalnet of this wild nonsense. It impressed me as being irrelevant. Whenone comes to a Utopia one expects a Cicerone, one expects a personas precise and insistent and instructive as an Americanadvertisement--the advertisement of one of those land agents, forexample, who print their own engaging photographs to instilconfidence and begin, "You want to buy real estate. " One expects tofind all Utopians absolutely convinced of the perfection of theirUtopia, and incapable of receiving a hint against its order. Andhere was this purveyor of absurdities!

And yet now that I come to think it over, is not this too one of thenecessary differences between a Modern Utopia and those finitecompact settlements of the older school of dreamers? It is not to bea unanimous world any more, it is to have all and more of the mentalcontrariety we find in the world of the real; it is no longer to beperfectly 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 notirrelevant to such a scheme, and our blond-haired friend is exactlyjust where he ought to be here. 

Still----

Section 3

I ceased to listen to the argumentation of my botanist with thisapostle of Nature. The botanist, in his scientific way, was, Ibelieve, defending the learned professions. (He thinks and argueslike drawing on squared paper. ) It struck me as transientlyremarkable that a man who could not be induced to forget himself andhis personal troubles on coming into a whole new world, who couldwaste our first evening in Utopia upon a paltry egotistical lovestory, should presently become quite heated and impersonal in thediscussion of scientific professionalism. He was--absorbed. I can'tattempt to explain these vivid spots and blind spots in theimaginations of sane men; there they are!

"You say, " said the botanist, with a prevalent index finger, and theresolute deliberation of a big siege gun being lugged into actionover rough ground by a number of inexperienced men, "you prefer anatural 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 mycigarette ash over the green trellis of the arbour, stretched mylegs with a fine restfulness, leant back, and gave my mind to thefields and houses that lay adown the valley. 

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

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

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

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

Now, had I come upon a hopeless incompatibility? Was this thereductio ad absurdum of my vision, and must it even as I sat therefade, dissolve, and vanish before my eyes?

There was no denying our blond friend. If this Utopia is indeed toparallel our earth, man for man--and I see no other reasonablechoice to that--there must be this sort of person and kindred sortsof persons in great abundance. The desire and gift to see life wholeis not the lot of the great majority of men, the service of truth isthe privilege of the elect, and these clever fools who choke theavenues of the world of thought, who stick at no inconsistency, whooppose, obstruct, confuse, will find only the freer scope amidstUtopian freedoms. 

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

"Ugh!" said I privately, and lighted another cigarette and went awayinto 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 themost brilliant, delightful, engaging and invincible of gay deliciouscreatures defending that position you can possibly imagine. And evenwhen the case is not so bad as that, there still remains the quality. We "take up our positions, " silly little contentious creaturesthat we are, we will not see the right in one another, we will notpatiently state and restate, and honestly accommodate and plan, andso we remain at sixes and sevens. We've all a touch of Gladstone inus, and try to the last moment to deny we have made a turn. And soour poor broken-springed world jolts athwart its trackless destiny. Try to win into line with some fellow weakling, and see the littlehost of suspicions, aggressions, misrepresentations, your approachwill stir--like summer flies on a high road--the way he will try toscore 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 andtenoring friend. I could find the thing negligible were it onlythat. But when one sees the same thread woven into men who areleaders, men who sway vast multitudes, who are indeed great andpowerful 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, itsvistas pale, its people become unsubstantial phantoms, all its orderand its happiness dim and recede.... 

If we are to have any Utopia at all, we must have a clear commonpurpose, and a great and steadfast movement of will to override allthese incurably egotistical dissentients. Something is needed wideand deep enough to float the worst of egotisms away. The world isnot to be made right by acclamation and in a day, and then for evermore trusted to run alone. It is manifest this Utopia could not comeabout by chance and anarchy, but by co-ordinated effort and acommunity of design, and to tell of just land laws and wisegovernment, a wisely balanced economic system, and wise socialarrangements without telling how it was brought about, and how it issustained against the vanity and self-indulgence, the moodyfluctuations and uncertain imaginations, the heat and aptitude forpartisanship that lurk, even when they do not flourish, in thetexture of every man alive, is to build a palace without either dooror staircase. 

I had not this in mind when I began. 

Somewhere in the Modern Utopia there must be adequate men, men thevery antithesis of our friend, capable of self-devotion, ofintentional courage, of honest thought, and steady endeavour. Theremust be a literature to embody their common idea, of which thisModern Utopia is merely the material form; there must be someorganisation, however slight, to keep them in touch one with theother. 

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

At first that phrase struck me as being merely queer, and then Ibegan to realise certain possibilities that were wrapped up init. 

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

Section 4

I was recalled from my meditations by the hand of the blond-hairedman 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 hadmeant to say. 

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

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

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

"I know, " I said. 

"It sounds absurd. "

"It is. "

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

"Quite. "

"He _would_ tell it to me. "

"It's his way. "

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

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

The perplexed expression of the blond-haired man intensified. It isvain to deny that he enlarged the scope of his inquiry, visibly ifnot verbally. "Dear me!" he said, and took up something he hadnearly forgotten. "And you found yourselves suddenly on a mountainside? ... I thought you were joking. "

I turned round upon him with a sudden access of earnestness. Atleast I meant my manner to be earnest, but to him it may have seemedwild. 

"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 oforder. "

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

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

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

"Men die of starvation; people die by the hundred thousandneedlessly and painfully; men and women are lashed together to makehell for each other; children are born--abominably, and reared incruelty and folly; there is a thing called war, a horror of bloodand vileness. The whole thing seems to me at times a cruel andwasteful wilderness of muddle. You in this decent world have nomeans 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 hopefulworld, objecting, obstructing, and breaking the law, displaying yourwit on science and order, on the men who toil so ingloriously toswell and use the knowledge that is salvation, this salvation forwhich _our_ poor world cries to heaven----"

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

"I do. "

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

"Yes. "

"Oh, nonsense!" he said abruptly. "You can't do it--really. I canassure you this present world touches the nadir of imbecility. Youand your friend, with his love for the lady who's so mysteriouslytied--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 veryagreeably before that, or rather I had, about the absurdity ofmarriage laws, the interference with a free and natural life, and soon, and suddenly he burst like a dam. No!" He paused. "It's reallyimpossible. You behave perfectly well for a time, and then you beginto interrupt.... And such a childish story, too!"

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

"We are going to have a very considerable amount of troubleexplaining ourselves, " I said in conclusion. "We are here by anact of the imagination, and that is just one of those metaphysicaloperations that are so difficult to make credible. We are, by thestandard of bearing and clothing I remark about us, unattractive indress and deportment. We have nothing to produce to explain ourpresence here, no bit of a flying machine or a space travellingsphere or any of the apparatus customary on these occasions. We haveno means beyond a dwindling amount of small change out of a goldcoin, upon which I suppose in ethics and the law some native Utopianhad a better claim. We may already have got ourselves into troublewith 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 wefind ourselves in the position--not to put too fine a point uponit--of tramps in this admirable world. The question of all others ofimportance to us at present is what do they do with their tramps?Because sooner or later, and the balance of probability seems toincline to sooner, whatever they do with their tramps that they willdo 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 arbourwith an expression of despondent discovery. "I say, " he remarked;"this is a strange world--quite strange and new. I'm only beginningto realise just what it means for us. The mountains there are thesame, the old Bristenstock and all the rest of it; but these houses, you know, and that roadway, and the costumes, and that machine thatis licking up the grass there--only.... "

He sought expression. "Who knows what will come in sight round thebend 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 THE FIFTH

Failure in a Modern Utopia

Section 1

The old Utopias--save for the breeding schemes of Plato andCampanella--ignored that reproductive competition amongindividualities which is the substance of life, and dealtessentially with its incidentals. The endless variety of men, theirendless gradation of quality, over which the hand of selectionplays, and to which we owe the unmanageable complication of reallife, is tacitly set aside. The real world is a vast disorder ofaccidents and incalculable forces in which men survive or fail. AModern Utopia, unlike its predecessors, dare not pretend to changethe last condition; it may order and humanise the conflict, but menmust still survive or fail. 

Most Utopias present themselves as going concerns, as happiness inbeing; they make it an essential condition that a happy land canhave no history, and all the citizens one is permitted to see arewell looking and upright and mentally and morally in tune. But weare under the dominion of a logic that obliges us to take over theactual population of the world with only such moral and mental andphysical improvements as lie within their inherent possibilities, and it is our business to ask what Utopia will do with itscongenital invalids, its idiots and madmen, its drunkards and men ofvicious mind, its cruel and furtive souls, its stupid people, toostupid to be of use to the community, its lumpish, unteachable andunimaginative people? And what will it do with the man who is "poor"all round, the rather spiritless, rather incompetent low-grade manwho on earth sits in the den of the sweater, tramps the streetsunder the banner of the unemployed, or trembles--in another man'scast-off clothing, and with an infinity of hat-touching--on theverge of rural employment?

These people will have to be in the descendant phase, the speciesmust 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 fullestopportunity of parentage. And it must be open to every man toapprove himself worthy of ascendency. 

The way of Nature in this process is to kill the weaker and thesillier, to crush them, to starve them, to overwhelm them, using thestronger and more cunning as her weapon. But man is the unnaturalanimal, the rebel child of Nature, and more and more does he turnhimself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him. He seeswith a growing resentment the multitude of suffering ineffectuallives over which his species tramples in its ascent. In the ModernUtopia he will have set himself to change the ancient law. No longerwill it be that failures must suffer and perish lest their breedincrease, but the breed of failure must not increase, lest theysuffer and perish, and the race with them. 

Now we need not argue here to prove that the resources of the worldand the energy of mankind, were they organised sanely, are amplysufficient to supply every material need of every living humanbeing. And if it can be so contrived that every human being shalllive in a state of reasonable physical and mental comfort, withoutthe reproduction of inferior types, there is no reason whatever whythat should not be secured. But there must be a competition in lifeof some sort to determine who are to be pushed to the edge, and whoare to prevail and multiply. Whatever we do, man will remain acompetitive creature, and though moral and intellectual trainingmay vary and enlarge his conception of success and fortify himwith refinements and consolations, no Utopia will ever save himcompletely from the emotional drama of struggle, from exultationsand humiliations, from pride and prostration and shame. He lives insuccess and failure just as inevitably as he lives in space andtime. 

But we may do much to make the margin of failure endurable. Onearth, for all the extravagance of charity, the struggle for themass of men at the bottom resolves itself into a struggle, and oftena very foul and ugly struggle, for food, shelter, and clothing. Deaths outright from exposure and starvation are now perhapsuncommon, but for the multitude there are only miserable houses, uncomfortable clothes, and bad and insufficient food; fractionalstarvation and exposure, that is to say. A Utopia planned uponmodern lines will certainly have put an end to that. It will insistupon every citizen being being properly housed, well nourished, andin good health, reasonably clean and clothed healthily, and uponthat insistence its labour laws will be founded. In a phrasingthat will be familiar to everyone interested in social reform, it will maintain a standard of life. Any house, unless it be apublic monument, that does not come up to its rising standard ofhealthiness and convenience, the Utopian State will incontinentlypull down, and pile the material and charge the owner for thelabour; any house unduly crowded or dirty, it must in some effectualmanner, directly or indirectly, confiscate and clear and clean. Andany citizen indecently dressed, or ragged and dirty, or publiclyunhealthy, or sleeping abroad homeless, or in any way neglected orderelict, must come under its care. It will find him work if he canand will work, it will take him to it, it will register him and lendhim the money wherewith to lead a comely life until work can befound or made for him, and it will give him credit and shelter himand strengthen him if he is ill. In default of private enterprisesit will provide inns for him and food, and it will--by itself actingas the reserve employer--maintain a minimum wage which will coverthe cost of a decent life. The State will stand at the back of theeconomic struggle as the reserve employer of labour. This mostexcellent idea does, as a matter of fact, underlie the Britishinstitution of the workhouse, but it is jumbled up with the reliefof old age and infirmity, it is administered parochially and on thesupposition that all population is static and localised whereasevery year it becomes more migratory; it is administered withoutany regard to the rising standards of comfort and self-respect ina progressive civilisation, and it is administered grudgingly. Thething that is done is done as unwilling charity by administratorswho are often, in the rural districts at least, competing forlow-priced labour, and who regard want of employment as a crime. Butif it were possible for any citizen in need of money to resort to aplace of public employment as a right, and there work for a week ormonth without degradation upon certain minimum terms, it seemsfairly certain that no one would work, except as the victim of somequite exceptional and temporary accident, for less. 

The work publicly provided would have to be toilsome, but notcruel or incapacitating. A choice of occupations would need to beafforded, occupations adapted to different types of training andcapacity, with some residual employment of a purely laborious andmechanical sort for those who were incapable of doing the thingsthat required intelligence. Necessarily this employment by theState would be a relief of economic pressure, but it would not beconsidered a charity done to the individual, but a public service. It need not pay, any more than the police need pay, but it couldprobably be done at a small margin of loss. There is a number ofdurable things bound finally to be useful that could be made andstored whenever the tide of more highly paid employment ebbed andlabour sank to its minimum, bricks, iron from inferior ores, shapedand preserved timber, pins, nails, plain fabrics of cotton andlinen, paper, sheet glass, artificial fuel, and so on; new roadscould be made and public buildings reconstructed, inconveniencesof all sorts removed, until under the stimulus of accumulatingmaterial, accumulating investments or other circumstances, the tideof private enterprise flowed again. 

The State would provide these things for its citizen as though itwas his right to require them; he would receive as a shareholder inthe common enterprise and not with any insult of charity. But on theother hand it will require that the citizen who renders the minimumof service for these concessions shall not become a parent until heis established in work at a rate above the minimum, and free of anydebt 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 womanremains childless; it will not even grudge them temporary spells ofgood fortune when they may lift their earnings above the minimumwage. It will pension the age of everyone who cares to take apension, and it will maintain special guest homes for the very oldto which they may come as paying guests, spending their pensionsthere. By such obvious devices it will achieve the maximumelimination of its feeble and spiritless folk in every generationwith the minimum of suffering and public disorder. 

Section 2

But the mildly incompetent, the spiritless and dull, the poorer sortwho are ill, do not exhaust our Utopian problem. There remain idiotsand lunatics, there remain perverse and incompetent persons, thereare people of weak character who become drunkards, drug takers, andthe like. Then there are persons tainted with certain foul andtransmissible diseases. All these people spoil the world for others. They may become parents, and with most of them there is manifestlynothing to be done but to seclude them from the great body of thepopulation. You must resort to a kind of social surgery. You cannothave social freedom in your public ways, your children cannot speakto whom they will, your girls and gentle women cannot go abroadwhile some sorts of people go free. And there are violent people, and those who will not respect the property of others, thieves andcheats, they, too, so soon as their nature is confirmed, must passout of the free life of our ordered world. So soon as there can beno doubt of the disease or baseness of the individual, so soon asthe insanity or other disease is assured, or the crime repeated athird time, or the drunkenness or misdemeanour past its seventhoccasion (let us say), so soon must he or she pass out of the commonways of men. 

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

No doubt for first offenders, and for all offenders underfive-and-twenty, the Modern Utopia will attempt cautionary andremedial treatment. There will be disciplinary schools and collegesfor the young, fair and happy places, but with less confidence andmore restraint than the schools and colleges of the ordinary world. In remote and solitary regions these enclosures will lie, they willbe 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 thatdiscipline 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 Utopiawill have the strength that begets mercy. Quietly the outcast willgo from among his fellow men. There will be no drumming of him outof 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 willkill all deformed and monstrous and evilly diseased births, but forthe rest, the State will hold itself accountable for their being. There is no justice in Nature perhaps, but the idea of justicemust be sacred in any good society. Lives that statesmanship haspermitted, errors it has not foreseen and educated against, mustnot be punished by death. If the State does not keep faith, no onewill keep faith. Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State'sfailure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community. Evenfor 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 bestaffed. Perhaps islands will be chosen, islands lying apart fromthe highways of the sea, and to these the State will send itsexiles, most of them thanking Heaven, no doubt, to be quit of aworld of prigs. The State will, of course, secure itself againstany children from these people, that is the primary object in theirseclusion, and perhaps it may even be necessary to make theseisland prisons a system of island monasteries and island nunneries. Upon that I am not competent to speak, but if I may believe theliterature of the subject--unhappily a not very well criticisedliterature--it is not necessary to enforce this separation. [Footnote: See for example Dr. W. A. Chapple's The Fertility ofthe Unfit. ]

About such islands patrol boats will go, there will be no freedomsof boat building, and it may be necessary to have armed guards atthe creeks and quays. Beyond that the State will give thesesegregated failures just as full a liberty as they can have. Ifit interferes any further it will be simply to police the islandsagainst the organisation of serious cruelty, to maintain the freedomof any of the detained who wish it to transfer themselves to otherislands, and so to keep a check upon tyranny. The insane, of course, will demand care and control, but there is no reason why the islandsof the hopeless drunkard, for example, should not each have avirtual autonomy, have at the most a Resident and a guard. I believethat a community of drunkards might be capable of organising evenits own bad habit to the pitch of tolerable existence. I do notsee why such an island should not build and order for itself andmanufacture and trade. "Your ways are not our ways, " the World Statewill say; "but here is freedom and a company of kindred souls. Electyour jolly rulers, brew if you will, and distil; here are vinecuttings and barley fields; do as it pleases you to do. We will takecare of the knives, but for the rest--deal yourselves with God!"

And you see the big convict steamship standing in to the Island ofIncurable Cheats. The crew are respectfully at their quarters, ready to lend a hand overboard, but wide awake, and the captain ishospitably on the bridge to bid his guests good-bye and keep an eyeon the movables. The new citizens for this particular Alsatia, eachno doubt with his personal belongings securely packed and at hand, crowd the deck and study the nearing coast. Bright, keen faces wouldbe there, and we, were we by any chance to find ourselves beside thecaptain, might recognise the double of this great earthly magnate orthat, Petticoat Lane and Park Lane cheek by jowl. The landing partof the jetty is clear of people, only a government man or so standsthere to receive the boat and prevent a rush, but beyond the gates anumber of engagingly smart-looking individuals loiter speculatively. One figures a remarkable building labelled Custom House, aninteresting fiscal revival this population has made, and beyond, crowding up the hill, the painted walls of a number of comfortableinns clamour loudly. One or two inhabitants in reduced circumstanceswould act as hotel touts, there are several hotel omnibuses and aBureau de Change, certainly a Bureau de Change. And a small housewith a large board, aimed point-blank seaward, declares itself aGratis Information Office, and next to it rises the graceful dome ofa small Casino. Beyond, great hoardings proclaim the advantages ofmany island specialities, a hustling commerce, and the opening of aPublic Lottery. There is a large cheap-looking barrack, the schoolof Commercial Science for gentlemen of inadequate training.... 

Altogether a very go-ahead looking little port it would be, andthough this disembarkation would have none of the flow of hilariousgood fellowship that would throw a halo of genial noise about theIslands of Drink, it is doubtful if the new arrivals would feelanything very tragic in the moment. Here at last was scope foradventure 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? Allmodern prisons are places of torture by restraint, and the habitualcriminal plays the part of a damaged mouse at the mercy of the catof our law. He has his little painful run, and back he comes againto a state more horrible even than destitution. There are noAlsatias left in the world. For my own part I can think of no crime, unless it is reckless begetting or the wilful transmission ofcontagious disease, for which the bleak terrors, the solitudes andignominies of the modern prison do not seem outrageously cruel. Ifyou want to go so far as that, then kill. Why, once you are rid ofthem, should you pester criminals to respect an uncongenial standardof conduct? Into such islands of exile as this a modern Utopia willhave to purge itself. There is no alternative that I cancontrive. 

Section 3

Will a Utopian be free to be idle?

Work has to be done, every day humanity is sustained by itscollective effort, and without a constant recurrence of effort inthe single man as in the race as a whole, there is neither healthnor happiness. The permanent idleness of a human being is notonly burthensome to the world, but his own secure misery. Butunprofitable occupation is also intended by idleness, and it may beconsidered whether that freedom also will be open to the Utopian. Conceivably it will, like privacy, locomotion, and almost all thefreedoms of life, and on the same terms--if he possess the money topay for it. 

That last condition may produce a shock in minds accustomed to theproposition that money is the root of all evil, and to the idea thatUtopia necessarily implies something rather oaken and hand-made andprimitive in all these relations. Of course, money is not the rootof any evil in the world; the root of all evil in the world, and theroot of all good too, is the Will to Live, and money becomes harmfulonly when by bad laws and bad economic organisation it is moreeasily attained by bad men than good. It is as reasonable to sayfood is the root of all disease, because so many people suffer fromexcessive and unwise eating. The sane economic ideal is to make thepossession of money the clear indication of public serviceableness, and the more nearly that ideal is attained, the smaller is thejustification of poverty and the less the hardship of being poor. Inbarbaric and disorderly countries it is almost honourable to beindigent and unquestionably virtuous to give to a beggar, and evenin the more or less civilised societies of earth, so many childrencome into life hopelessly handicapped, that austerity to the pooris regarded as the meanest of mean virtues. But in Utopia everyonewill have had an education and a certain minimum of nutrition andtraining; everyone will be insured against ill-health and accidents;there will be the most efficient organisation for balancing thepressure of employment and the presence of disengaged labour, and soto be moneyless will be clear evidence of unworthiness. In Utopia, no one will dream of giving to a casual beggar, and no one willdream 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 acertain extent no doubt, and even in some cases maintained, by theState. This tariff will have such a definite relation to the minimumpermissible wage, that a man who has incurred no liabilities throughmarriage or the like relationship, will be able to live in comfortand decency upon that minimum wage, pay his small insurance premiumagainst disease, death, disablement, or ripening years, and have amargin for clothing and other personal expenses. But he will getneither shelter nor food, except at the price of his freedom, unlesshe can produce money. 

But suppose a man without money in a district where employment isnot to be found for him; suppose the amount of employment to havediminished in the district with such suddenness as to have strandedhim there. Or suppose he has quarrelled with the only possibleemployer, or that he does not like his particular work. Then nodoubt the Utopian State, which wants everyone to be just as happy asthe 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 anysane State the economic conditions of every quarter of the earthwill be watched as constantly as its meteorological phases, and adaily map of the country within a radius of three or four hundredmiles showing all the places where labour is needed will hang uponthe post-office wall. To this his attention will be directed. Theman 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 incompatiblewith the universal registration of thumb-marks--and issue passes fortravel and coupons for any necessary inn accommodation on his way tothe chosen destination. There he will seek a new employer. 

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

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

Before we suppose that, we must take into consideration the generalassumption one is permitted to make in all Utopian speculations. AllUtopians will be reasonably well educated upon Utopian lines; therewill be no illiterates unless they are unteachable imbeciles, norule-of-thumb toilers as inadaptable as trained beasts. The Utopianworker will be as versatile as any well-educated man is on earthto-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 bestis not to be found, there is still the work he likes second best. Lacking his proper employment, he will turn to some kindredtrade. 

But even with that adaptability, it may be that sometimes he willnot find work. Such a disproportion between the work to be done andthe people to do it may arise as to present a surplus of laboureverywhere. This disproportion may be due to two causes: to anincrease of population without a corresponding increase ofenterprises, or to a diminution of employment throughout the worlddue to the completion of great enterprises, to economies achieved, or to the operation of new and more efficient labour-savingappliances. Through either cause, a World State may find itselfdoing well except for an excess of citizens of mediocre and lowerquality. 

But the first cause may be anticipated by wise marriage laws.... Thefull discussion of these laws will come later, but here one mayinsist that Utopia will control the increase of its population. Without the determination and ability to limit that increase as wellas 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 itsimmediate result in glutting the labour market is similar, its finalconsequences are entirely different from those of the first. Thewhole trend of a scientific mechanical civilisation is continuallyto replace labour by machinery and to increase it in itseffectiveness by organisation, and so quite independently of anyincrease in population labour must either fall in value until itcan compete against and check the cheapening process, or if thatis prevented, as it will be in Utopia, by a minimum wage, come outof employment. There is no apparent limit to this process. But asurplus of efficient labour at the minimum wage is exactly thecondition that should stimulate new enterprises, and that in a Statesaturated with science and prolific in invention will stimulate newenterprises. An increasing surplus of available labour without anabsolute increase of population, an increasing surplus of labourdue to increasing economy and not to proliferation, and which, therefore, does not press on and disarrange the food supply, issurely the ideal condition for a progressive civilisation. I aminclined to think that, since labour will be regarded as adelocalised and fluid force, it will be the World State and not thebig municipalities ruling the force areas that will be the reserveemployer of labour. Very probably it will be convenient for theState to hand over the surplus labour for municipal purposes, butthat is another question. All over the world the labour exchangeswill be reporting the fluctuating pressure of economic demand andtransferring workers from this region of excess to that of scarcity;and whenever the excess is universal, the World State--failing anadequate development of private enterprise--will either reduce theworking day and so absorb the excess, or set on foot some permanentspecial works of its own, paying the minimum wage and allowing themto progress just as slowly or just as rapidly as the ebb and flow oflabour dictated. But with sane marriage and birth laws there is noreason to suppose such calls upon the resources and initiative ofthe world more than temporary and exceptional occasions. 

Section 4

The existence of our blond bare-footed friend was evidence enoughthat in a modern Utopia a man will be free to be just as idle oruselessly busy as it pleases him, after he has earned the minimumwage. He must do that, of course, to pay for his keep, to pay hisassurance tax against ill-health or old age, and any charge or debtpaternity may have brought upon him. The World State of the modernUtopist is no state of moral compulsions. If, for example, under therestricted Utopian scheme of inheritance, a man inherited sufficientmoney to release him from the need to toil, he would be free to gowhere he pleased and do what he liked. A certain proportion of menat ease is good for the world; work as a moral obligation is themorality of slaves, and so long as no one is overworked there is noneed to worry because some few are underworked. Utopia does notexist as a solace for envy. From leisure, in a good moral andintellectual atmosphere, come experiments, come philosophy and thenew departures. 

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

But inherited independence will be the rarest and least permanent ofUtopian facts, for the most part that wider freedom will have to beearned, and the inducements to men and women to raise their personalvalue far above the minimum wage will be very great indeed. Therebywill come privacies, more space in which to live, liberty to goeverywhere and do no end of things, the power and freedom toinitiate interesting enterprises and assist and co-operate withinteresting people, and indeed all the best things of life. Themodern Utopia will give a universal security indeed, and exercisethe minimum of compulsions to toil, but it will offer some acutelydesirable prizes. The aim of all these devices, the minimum wage, the standard of life, provision for all the feeble and unemployedand so forth, is not to rob life of incentives but to change theirnature, to make life not less energetic, but less panic-stricken andviolent and base, to shift the incidence of the struggle forexistence from our lower to our higher emotions, so to anticipateand neutralise the motives of the cowardly and bestial, that theambitious and energetic imagination which is man's finest qualitymay become the incentive and determining factor in survival. 

Section 5

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

The public office of Utopia would of course contain a few surprisesfor two men from terrestrial England. You imagine us entering, thebotanist lagging a little behind me, and my first attempts to beoffhand and commonplace in a demand for work. 

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

"Where are your papers?" she asks. 

I think for a moment of the documents in my pocket, my passportchequered with visas and addressed in my commendation and in thename of her late Majesty by We, Robert Arthur Talbot GascoigneCecil, Marquess of Salisbury, Earl of Salisbury, Viscount Cranborne, Baron Cecil, and so forth, to all whom it may concern, my Carted'Identite (useful on minor occasions) of the Touring Club deFrance, my green ticket to the Reading Room of the British Museum, and my Lettre d'Indication from the London and County Bank. Afoolish humour prompts me to unfold all these, hand them to herand 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 toreflect on procedure. 

"What are your numbers?" she asks, abruptly. 

A vision of that confounded visitors' book at the inn above comesinto my mind. "Let me _see_, " I say, and pat my forehead andreflect, 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 thelittle post-mistress, with a rising note. 

"Yes, " I say, with an engaging smile and trying to keep up a goodsocial 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, ofcourse. "

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

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

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

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

She explains. 

So far the impression we have had of our Utopia is one of a quiteunearthly sanity, of good management and comprehensive design inevery material thing, and it has seemed to us a little incongruousthat all the Utopians we have talked to, our host of last night, the post-mistress and our garrulous tramp, have been of the mostcommonplace type. But suddenly there looks out from this man's poseand regard a different quality, a quality altogether nearer that ofthe beautiful tramway and of the gracious order of the mountainhouses. He is a well-built man of perhaps five and thirty, with theeasy movement that comes with perfect physical condition, his faceis clean shaven and shows the firm mouth of a disciplined man, andhis grey eyes are clear and steady. His legs are clad in some wovenstuff deep-red in colour, and over this he wears a white shirtfitting pretty closely, and with a woven purple hem. His generaleffect reminds me somehow of the Knights Templars. On his head is acap of thin leather and still thinner steel, and with the vestigesof ear-guards--rather like an attenuated version of the caps thatwere worn by Cromwell's Ironsides. 

He looks at us and we interpolate a word or so as she explains andfeel a good deal of embarrassment at the foolish position we havemade for ourselves. I determine to cut my way out of thisentanglement 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 entirelyexceptional, 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, " Isay, in the tone one adopts for really lucid explanations, "we comefrom another world. Consequently, whatever thumb-mark registrationor numbering you have in this planet doesn't apply to us, and wedon'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 aninfinite distance. "

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

"I know it sounds impossible, " I say, "but here is the simplefact--we _appear_ in your world. We appeared suddenly upon the neckof Lucendro--the Passo Lucendro--yesterday afternoon, and I defy youto discover the faintest trace of us before that time. Down wemarched 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 likethis?"

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

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

"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, astattered 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 thecentral registers, and there you'll be!"

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

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

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

The post-mistress intervenes. "What would you advise me to do?"

"No money?" he asks. 

"No. "

He makes some suggestions. "Frankly, " he says, "I think you haveescaped from some island. How you got so far as here I can'timagine, or what you think you'll do.... But anyhow, there's thestuff for your thumbs. "

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

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

Section 6

The old Utopias are sessile organisations; the new must squareitself to the needs of a migratory population, to an endless comingand going, to a people as fluid and tidal as the sea. It does notenter into the scheme of earthly statesmanship, but indeed all localestablishments, all definitions of place, are even now melting underour eyes. Presently all the world will be awash with anonymousstranger men. 

Now the simple laws of custom, the homely methods of identificationthat served in the little communities of the past when everyone kneweveryone, fail in the face of this liquefaction. If the modernUtopia is indeed to be a world of responsible citizens, it must havedevised some scheme by which every person in the world can bepromptly and certainly recognised, and by which anyone missing canbe traced and found. 

This is by no means an impossible demand. The total population ofthe world is, on the most generous estimate, not more than1, 500, 000, 000, and the effectual indexing of this number of people, the record of their movement hither and thither, the entry ofvarious material facts, such as marriage, parentage, criminalconvictions and the like, the entry of the new-born and theelimination of the dead, colossal task though it would be, is stillnot so great as to be immeasurably beyond comparison with the workof the post-offices in the world of to-day, or the cataloguing ofsuch libraries as that of the British Museum, or such collections asthat of the insects in Cromwell Road. Such an index could be housedquite comfortably on one side of Northumberland Avenue, for example. It is only a reasonable tribute to the distinctive lucidity of theFrench mind to suppose the central index housed in a vast series ofbuildings at or near Paris. The index would be classified primarilyby some unchanging physical characteristic, such as we are toldthe thumb-mark and finger-mark afford, and to these would beadded any other physical traits that were of material value. The classification of thumb-marks and of inalterable physicalcharacteristics goes on steadily, and there is every reason forassuming it possible that each human being could be given a distinctformula, a number or "scientific name, " under which he or she couldbe docketed. [Footnote: It is quite possible that the actualthumb-mark may play only a small part in the work of identification, but it is an obvious convenience to our thread of story to assumethat it is the one sufficient feature. ] About the buildings in whichthis great main index would be gathered, would be a system of otherindices with cross references to the main one, arranged under names, under professional qualifications, under diseases, crimes and thelike. 

These index cards might conceivably be transparent and so contrivedas to give a photographic copy promptly whenever it was needed, andthey could have an attachment into which would slip a ticket bearingthe name of the locality in which the individual was last reported. A little army of attendants would be at work upon this index day andnight. From sub-stations constantly engaged in checking backthumb-marks and numbers, an incessant stream of information wouldcome, of births, of deaths, of arrivals at inns, of applications topost-offices for letters, of tickets taken for long journeys, ofcriminal convictions, marriages, applications for public doles andthe like. A filter of offices would sort the stream, and all day andall night for ever a swarm of clerks would go to and fro correctingthis central register, and photographing copies of its entries fortransmission to the subordinate local stations, in response to theirinquiries. So the inventory of the State would watch its every manand the wide world write its history as the fabric of its destinyflowed on. At last, when the citizen died, would come the last entryof all, his age and the cause of his death and the date and place ofhis cremation, and his card would be taken out and passed on to theuniversal pedigree, to a place of greater quiet, to the ever-growinggalleries of the records of the dead. 

Such a record is inevitable if a Modern Utopia is to beachieved. 

Yet at this, too, our blond-haired friend would no doubt rebel. Oneof the many things to which some will make claim as a right, is thatof going unrecognised and secret whither one will. But that, so faras 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-fashionednineteenth-century Liberal, that is to say to all professedLiberals, brought up to be against the Government on principle, thisorganised clairvoyance will be the most hateful of dreams. Perhaps, too, the Individualist would see it in that light. But these areonly the mental habits acquired in an evil time. The old Liberalismassumed bad government, the more powerful the government the worseit was, just as it assumed the natural righteousness of the freeindividual. Darkness and secrecy were, indeed, the natural refugesof liberty when every government had in it the near possibility oftyranny, and the Englishman or American looked at the papers of aRussian or a German as one might look at the chains of a slave. Youimagine that father of the old Liberalism, Rousseau, slinking offfrom his offspring at the door of the Foundling Hospital, and youcan understand what a crime against natural virtue this quiet eye ofthe State would have seemed to him. But suppose we do not assumethat government is necessarily bad, and the individual necessarilygood--and the hypothesis upon which we are working practicallyabolishes either alternative--then we alter the case altogether. Thegovernment of a modern Utopia will be no perfection of intentionsignorantly ruling the world.... [Footnote: In the typical modernState of our own world, with its population of many millions, andits extreme facility of movement, undistinguished men who adopt analias can make themselves untraceable with the utmost ease. Thetemptation of the opportunities thus offered has developed a newtype of criminality, the Deeming or Crossman type, base men whosubsist and feed their heavy imaginations in the wooing, betrayal, ill-treatment, and sometimes even the murder of undistinguishedwomen. This is a large, a growing, and, what is gravest, a prolificclass, fostered by the practical anonymity of the common man. It isonly the murderers who attract much public attention, but the supplyof low-class prostitutes is also largely due to these freeadventures of the base. It is one of the bye products of StateLiberalism, and at present it is very probably drawing ahead in therace against the development of police organisation. ]

Such is the eye of the State that is now slowly beginning toapprehend our existence as two queer and inexplicable partiesdisturbing the fine order of its field of vision, the eye that willpresently be focussing itself upon us with a growing astonishmentand interrogation. "Who in the name of Galton and Bertillon, " onefancies Utopia exclaiming, "are _you_?"

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

Section 7

And now see how an initial hypothesis may pursue and overtake itsmaker. Our thumb-marks have been taken, they have travelled bypneumatic tube to the central office of the municipality hard byLucerne, and have gone on thence to the headquarters of the index atParis. There, after a rough preliminary classification, I imaginethem photographed on glass, and flung by means of a lantern incolossal images upon a screen, all finely squared, and the carefulexperts marking and measuring their several convolutions. And thenoff goes a brisk clerk to the long galleries of the indexbuilding. 

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

You figure us returning after a day or so of such Utopianexperiences as I must presently describe, to the central office inLucerne, 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 lessremarkable. "

"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 madeat 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-fingerin 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 ofthat. "

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

"I can't think why you keep it up, " he remarks, and then almostwearily tells me the facts about my Utopian self. They are a littledifficult to understand. He says I am one of the samurai, whichsounds Japanese, "but you will be degraded, " he says, with a gesturealmost of despair. He describes my position in this world in phrasesthat convey very little. 

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

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

The idea needs explanation. He says something incomprehensible abouta pilgrimage. "Sooner or later, " I say, "you will have to believethere are two of us with the same thumb-mark. I won't trouble youwith 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 ableto 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 areonly just beginning. How did I get from Norway hither? Does myfriend look like hopping from India to the Saint Gotthard at onehop? The situation is a little more difficult than that----"

"But here!" says the official, and waves what are no doubtphotographic 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 seenow, " he says. 

"There is a mistake, " I maintain, "an unprecedented mistake. There'sthe difficulty. If you inquire you will find it begin to unravel. What reason is there for us to remain casual workmen here, when youallege we are men of position in the world, if there isn't somethingwrong? We shall stick to this wood-carving work you have found ushere, and meanwhile I think you ought to inquire again. That's howthe 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 sametime"--hand out to those copies from the index again--"there youare, you know!"

Section 8

When my botanist and I have talked over and exhausted everypossibility of our immediate position, we should turn, I think, tomore general questions. 

I should tell him the thing that was becoming more and more apparentin my own mind. Here, I should say, is a world, obviously on theface of it well organised. Compared with our world, it is like awell-oiled engine beside a scrap-heap. It has even got thisconfounded visual organ swivelling about in the most alert andlively fashion. But that's by the way.... You have only to look atall these houses below. (We should be sitting on a seat on theGutsch and looking down on the Lucerne of Utopia, a Lucerne thatwould, I insist, quite arbitrarily, still keep the Wasserthurm andthe Kapellbrucke. ) You have only to mark the beauty, the simplecleanliness and balance of this world, you have only to see the freecarriage, the unaffected graciousness of even the common people, tounderstand how fine and complete the arrangements of this world mustbe. How are they made so? We of the twentieth century are not goingto accept the sweetish, faintly nasty slops of Rousseauism that sogratified our great-great-grandparents in the eighteenth. We knowthat order and justice do not come by Nature--"if only the policemanwould go away. " These things mean intention, will, carried to ascale that our poor vacillating, hot and cold earth has never known. What I am really seeing more and more clearly is the will beneaththis visible Utopia. Convenient houses, admirable engineering thatis no offence amidst natural beauties, beautiful bodies, and auniversally gracious carriage, these are only the outward andvisible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. Such an order meansdiscipline. It means triumph over the petty egotisms and vanitiesthat keep men on our earth apart; it means devotion and a noblerhope; it cannot exist without a gigantic process of inquiry, trial, forethought and patience in an atmosphere of mutual trust andconcession. Such a world as this Utopia is not made by the chanceoccasional co-operations of self-indulgent men, by autocratic rulersor by the bawling wisdom of the democratic leader. And anunrestricted competition for gain, an enlightened selfishness, thattoo fails us.... 

I have compared the system of indexing humanity we have come upon toan eye, an eye so sensitive and alert that two strangers cannotappear anywhere upon the planet without discovery. Now an eye doesnot see without a brain, an eye does not turn round and look withouta will and purpose. A Utopia that deals only with appliances andarrangements is a dream of superficialities; the essential problemhere, the body within these garments, is a moral and an intellectualproblem. Behind all this material order, these perfectedcommunications, perfected public services and economic organisations, there must be men and women willing these things. There must be aconsiderable number and a succession of these men and women of will. No single person, no transitory group of people, could order andsustain this vast complexity. They must have a collective if nota common width of aim, and that involves a spoken or writtenliterature, a living literature to sustain the harmony of theirgeneral activity. In some way they must have put the moreimmediate objects of desire into a secondary place, and that meansrenunciation. They must be effectual in action and persistent inwill, and that means discipline. But in the modern world in whichprogress advances without limits, it will be evident that whatevercommon creed or formula they have must be of the simplest sort;that whatever organisation they have must be as mobile and flexibleas a thing alive. All this follows inevitably from the generalpropositions of our Utopian dream. When we made those, we boundourselves 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 massof memories three days in Utopia will have given us. Besides thepersonalities with whom we have come into actual contact, ourvarious hosts, our foreman and work-fellows, the blond man, thepublic officials and so on, there will be a great multitude ofother impressions. There will be many bright snapshots of littlechildren, for example, of girls and women and men, seen in shops andoffices and streets, on quays, at windows and by the wayside, peopleriding hither and thither and walking to and fro. A very human crowdit has seemed to me. But among them were there any who might bethought of as having a wider interest than the others, who seemed inany way detached from the rest by a purpose that passed beyond theseen?

Then suddenly I recall that clean-shaven man who talked with us fora little while in the public office at Wassen, the man who remindedme of my boyish conception of a Knight Templar, and with him comemomentary impressions of other lithe and serious-looking peopledressed after the same manner, words and phrases we have read insuch scraps of Utopian reading as have come our way, and expressionsthat fell from the loose mouth of the man with the blondhair.... 

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

Women in a Modern Utopia

Section 1

But though I have come to a point where the problem of a Utopia hasresolved itself very simply into the problem of government anddirection, I find I have not brought the botanist with me. Franklyhe cannot think so steadily onward as I can. I feel to think, hethinks to feel. It is I and my kind that have the wider range, because we can be impersonal as well as personal. We can escapeourselves. In general terms, at least, I understand him, buthe does not understand me in any way at all. He thinks me anincomprehensible brute because his obsession is merely one of myincidental interests, and wherever my reasoning ceases to beexplicit and full, the slightest ellipsis, the most transitorydigression, he evades me and is back at himself again. He may have apersonal liking for me, though I doubt it, but also he hates mepretty distinctly, because of this bias he cannot understand. Myphilosophical insistence that things shall be reasonable and hangtogether, that what can be explained shall be explained, and thatwhat can be done by calculation and certain methods shall not beleft to chance, he loathes. He just wants adventurously to feel. Hewants to feel the sunset, and he thinks that on the whole he wouldfeel it better if he had not been taught the sun was aboutninety-two million miles away. He wants to feel free and strong, andhe would rather feel so than be so. He does not want to accomplishgreat things, but to have dazzling things occur to him. He does notknow that there are feelings also up in the clear air of thephilosophic mountains, in the long ascents of effort and design. Hedoes not know that thought itself is only a finer sort of feelingthan his--good hock to the mixed gin, porter and treacle of hisemotions, a perception of similitudes and oppositions that carrieseven thrills. And naturally he broods on the source of all his mostcopious feelings and emotions, women, and particularly upon thewoman who has most made him feel. He forces me also to that. 

Our position is unfortunate for me. Our return to the Utopianequivalent of Lucerne revives in him all the melancholy distressesthat so preoccupied him when first we were transferred to thisbetter planet. One day, while we are still waiting there for thepublic office to decide about us, he broaches the matter. It isearly evening, and we are walking beside the lake after our simpledinner. "About here, " he says, "the quays would run and all thosebig hotels would be along here, looking out on the lake. It's sostrange to have seen them so recently, and now not to see them atall.... 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 oflittle trees along this quay with seats, and she was sitting lookingout upon the lake.... I hadn't seen her for ten years. "

He looks about him still a little perplexed. "Now we are here, " hesays, "it seems as though that meeting and the talk we had must havebeen 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 andon for a little way, trying to control myself.... Then I turned backand sat down beside her, very quietly. She looked up at me. Everything came back--everything. For a moment or so I felt I wasgoing to cry.... "

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

"We talked for a time just like casual acquaintances--about the viewand 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 thatthe 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 thissort of man keeps up the pretence of highly distinguished andremarkable mental processes, whereas--have not I, in my owncomposition, the whole diapason of emotional fool? Is not thesuppression 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 knewthat the instant I saw you. ' Then, you know, she began to talk to mevery quietly, very frankly, about everything. It was only afterwardsI 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 bebound unhappily upon earth and you may be bound, but not here. HereI think it will be different. Here the laws that control all thesethings will be humane and just. So that all you said and did, overthere, does not signify here--does not signify here!"

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

"Yes, " he says, without interest, with something of the tone of anabstracted elder speaking to a child, "I dare say it will be allvery fine here. " And he lapses, thwarted from his confidences, intomusing. 

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

I am snubbed. I am also amazed to find myself snubbed. I becomebreathless with indignation. We walk along side by side, but nowprofoundly estranged. 

I regard the facade of the Utopian public offices of Lucerne--I hadmeant to call his attention to some of the architectural features ofthese--with a changed eye, with all the spirit gone out of myvision. I wish I had never brought this introspective carcass, thismental ingrate, with me. 

I incline to fatalistic submission. I suppose I had no power toleave him behind.... I wonder and I wonder. The old Utopists neverhad to encumber themselves with this sort of man. 

Section 2

How would things be "different" in the Modern Utopia? After all itis time we faced the riddle of the problems of marriage andmotherhood.... 

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 forall time, a State whose population continues to increase inobedience to unchecked instinct, can progress only from bad toworse. From the view of human comfort and happiness, the increase ofpopulation that occurs at each advance in human security is thegreatest evil of life. The way of Nature is for every species toincrease nearly to its possible maximum of numbers, and then toimprove through the pressure of that maximum against its limitingconditions by the crushing and killing of all the feeblerindividuals. The way of Nature has also been the way of humanity sofar, and except when a temporary alleviation is obtained through anexpansion of the general stock of sustenance by invention ordiscovery, the amount of starvation and of the physical misery ofprivation in the world, must vary almost exactly with the excess ofthe actual birth-rate over that required to sustain population at anumber compatible with a universal contentment. Neither has Natureevolved, nor has man so far put into operation, any device by whichpaying this price of progress, this misery of a multitude of starvedand unsuccessful lives can be evaded. A mere indiscriminatingrestriction of the birth-rate--an end practically attained in thehomely, old-fashioned civilisation of China by female infanticide, involves not only the cessation of distresses but stagnation, andthe minor good of a sort of comfort and social stability is won attoo great a sacrifice. Progress depends essentially on competitiveselection, and that we may not escape. 

But it is a conceivable and possible thing that this margin offutile struggling, pain and discomfort and death might be reduced tonearly nothing without checking physical and mental evolution, withindeed an acceleration of physical and mental evolution, bypreventing the birth of those who would in the unrestrictedinterplay of natural forces be born to suffer and fail. The methodof Nature "red in tooth and claw" is to degrade, thwart, torture, and kill the weakest and least adapted members of every species inexistence in each generation, and so keep the specific averagerising; the ideal of a scientific civilisation is to prevent thoseweaklings being born. There is no other way of evading Nature'spunishment of sorrow. The struggle for life among the beasts anduncivilised 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 theconditions of life tolerable for every living creature, provided theinferiors can be prevented from increasing and multiplying. But thislatter condition must be respected. Instead of competing to escapedeath and wretchedness, we may compete to give birth and we may heapevery sort of consolation prize upon the losers in that competition. The modern State tends to qualify inheritance, to insist uponeducation and nurture for children, to come in more and more in theinterests of the future between father and child. It is taking overthe responsibility of the general welfare of the children more andmore, and as it does so, its right to decide which children it willshelter becomes more and more reasonable. 

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

Let us set aside at once all nonsense of the sort one hears incertain quarters about the human stud farm. [Footnote: See Mankindin the Making, Ch. II. ] State breeding of the population was areasonable proposal for Plato to make, in view of the biologicalknowledge of his time and the purely tentative nature of hismetaphysics; but from anyone in the days after Darwin, it ispreposterous. Yet we have it given to us as the most brilliant ofmodern discoveries by a certain school of sociological writers, whoseem totally unable to grasp the modification of meaning "species"and "individual" have undergone in the last fifty years. They do notseem capable of the suspicion that the boundaries of species havevanished, and that individuality now carries with it the quality ofthe unique! To them individuals are still defective copies of aPlatonic ideal of the species, and the purpose of breeding no morethan an approximation to that perfection. Individuality is indeed anegligible difference to them, an impertinence, and the whole flowof modern biological ideas has washed over them in vain. 

But to the modern thinker individuality is the significant fact oflife, and the idea of the State, which is necessarily concerned withthe average and general, selecting individualities in order to pairthem and improve the race, an absurdity. It is like fixing a craneon the plain in order to raise the hill tops. In the initiative ofthe individual above the average, lies the reality of the future, which the State, presenting the average, may subserve but cannotcontrol. And the natural centre of the emotional life, the cardinalwill, 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 generallimiting conditions is another, and one well within the scope ofState activity. The State is justified in saying, before you may addchildren to the community for the community to educate and in partto support, you must be above a certain minimum of personalefficiency, and this you must show by holding a position of solvencyand independence in the world; you must be above a certain age, anda certain minimum of physical development, and free of anytransmissible disease. You must not be a criminal unless you haveexpiated your offence. Failing these simple qualifications, if youand some person conspire and add to the population of the State, wewill, for the sake of humanity, take over the innocent victim ofyour passions, but we shall insist that you are under a debt to theState of a peculiarly urgent sort, and one you will certainly pay, even if it is necessary to use restraint to get the payment out ofyou: it is a debt that has in the last resort your liberty as asecurity, and, moreover, if this thing happens a second time, or ifit is disease or imbecility you have multiplied, we will take anabsolutely effectual guarantee that neither you nor your partneroffend again in this matter. 

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

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

It may be urged that to permit conspicuously inferior people to haveone or two children in this way would be to fail to attain thedesired end, but, indeed, this is not so. A suitably qualifiedpermission, as every statesman knows, may produce the social effectswithout producing the irksome pressure of an absolute prohibition. Amidst bright and comfortable circumstances, and with an easy andpracticable alternative, people will exercise foresight andself-restraint to escape even the possibilities of hardship anddiscomfort; and free life in Utopia is to be well worth this troubleeven for inferior people. The growing comfort, self-respect, andintelligence of the English is shown, for example, in the fall inthe proportion of illegitimate births from 2. 2 per 1, 000 in 1846-50to 1. 2 per 1, 000 in 1890-1900, and this without any positivepreventive laws whatever. This most desirable result is prettycertainly not the consequence of any great exaltation of our moraltone, but simply of a rising standard of comfort and a liveliersense of consequences and responsibilities. If so marked a change ispossible in response to such progress as England has achieved in thepast fifty years, if discreet restraint can be so effectual as this, it seems reasonable to suppose that in the ampler knowledge and thecleaner, franker atmosphere of our Utopian planet the birth of achild to diseased or inferior parents, and contrary to the sanctionsof the State, will be the rarest of disasters. 

And the death of a child, too, that most tragic event, Utopia willrarely know. Children are not born to die in childhood. But in ourworld, at present, through the defects of our medical science andnursing methods, through defects in our organisation, throughpoverty and carelessness, and through the birth of children thatnever ought to have been born, one out of every five children borndies within five years. It may be the reader has witnessed this mostdistressful of all human tragedies. It is sheer waste of suffering. There is no reason why ninety-nine out of every hundred childrenborn should not live to a ripe age. Accordingly, in any ModernUtopia, it must be insisted they will. 

Section 3

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

Up to the beginning of this chapter, our Utopian speculations, likemany Acts of Parliament, have ignored the difference of sex. "He"indeed is to be read as "He and She" in all that goes before. Butwe may now come to the sexual aspects of the modern ideal ofa constitution of society in which, for all purposes of theindividual, women are to be as free as men. This will certainly berealised in the Modern Utopia, if it can be realised at all--notonly for woman's sake, but for man's. 

But women may be free in theory and not in practice, and as long asthey suffer from their economic inferiority, from the inability toproduce as much value as a man for the same amount of work--andthere can be no doubt of this inferiority--so long will their legaland technical equality be a mockery. It is a fact that almostevery point in which a woman differs from a man is an economicdisadvantage 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 incapacityfor organisation and combination, and the possibilities of emotionalcomplications whenever she is in economic dependence on men. So longas women are compared economically with men and boys they will beinferior in precisely the measure in which they differ from men. Allthat constitutes this difference they are supposed not to trade uponexcept in one way, and that is by winning or luring a man to marry, selling themselves in an almost irrevocable bargain, and thenfollowing and sharing his fortunes for "better or worse. "

But--do not let the proposition in its first crudity alarmyou--suppose the Modern Utopia equalises things between the sexes inthe only possible way, by insisting that motherhood is a service tothe State and a legitimate claim to a living; and that, since theState is to exercise the right of forbidding or sanctioningmotherhood, a woman who is, or is becoming, a mother, is as muchentitled to wages above the minimum wage, to support, to freedom, and to respect and dignity as a policeman, a solicitor-general, aking, a bishop in the State Church, a Government professor, oranyone else the State sustains. Suppose the State secures to everywoman who is, under legitimate sanctions, becoming or likely tobecome a mother, that is to say who is duly married, a certain wagefrom 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 keepher and her child in independent freedom, so long as the childkeeps up to the minimum standard of health and physical and mentaldevelopment. Suppose it pays more upon the child when it risesmarkedly above certain minimum qualifications, physical or mental, and, in fact, does its best to make thoroughly efficient motherhooda profession worth following. And suppose in correlation with thisit forbids the industrial employment of married women and of motherswho have children needing care, unless they are in a position toemploy qualified efficient substitutes to take care of theiroffspring. What differences from terrestrial conditions willensue?

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

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

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

Section 4

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

The trend of our reasoning has brought us to the conclusion that theUtopian State will feel justified in intervening between men andwomen on two accounts, first on account of paternity, and secondlyon account of the clash of freedoms that may otherwise arise. TheUtopian State will effectually interfere with and prescribeconditions for all sorts of contract, and for this sort of contractin particular it will be in agreement with almost every earthlyState, in defining in the completest fashion what things a man orwoman may be bound to do, and what they cannot be bound to do. Fromthe point of view of a statesman, marriage is the union of a manand woman in a manner so intimate as to involve the probability ofoffspring, and it is of primary importance to the State, first inorder to secure good births, and secondly good home conditions, thatthese unions should not be free, nor promiscuous, nor practicallyuniversal throughout the adult population. 

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

One imagines the parties to a projected marriage first obtaininglicenses which will testify that these conditions are satisfied. From the point of view of the theoretical Utopian State, theselicenses are the feature of primary importance. Then, no doubt, thatuniversal register at Paris would come into play. As a matter ofjustice, there must be no deception between the two people, and theState will ensure that in certain broad essentials this is so. Theywould have to communicate their joint intention to a public officeafter their personal licenses were granted, and each would besupplied with a copy of the index card of the projected mate, onwhich would be recorded his or her age, previous marriages, legallyimportant diseases, offspring, domiciles, public appointments, criminal convictions, registered assignments of property, and soforth. Possibly it might be advisable to have a little ceremony foreach party, for each in the absence of the other, in which thisrecord could be read over in the presence of witnesses, togetherwith some prescribed form of address of counsel in the matter. Therewould then be a reasonable interval for consideration and withdrawalon the part of either spouse. In the event of the two peoplepersisting in their resolution, they would after this minimuminterval signify as much to the local official and the necessaryentry would be made in the registers. These formalities would bequite independent of any religious ceremonial the contractingparties might choose, for with religious belief and procedure themodern State has no concern. 

So much for the preliminary conditions of matrimony. For those menand women who chose to ignore these conditions and to achieve anysort of union they liked the State would have no concern, unlessoffspring were born illegitimately. In that case, as we havealready suggested, it would be only reasonable to make the parentschargeable with every duty, with maintenance, education, and soforth, that in the normal course of things would fall to the State. It would be necessary to impose a life assurance payment upon theseparents, and to exact effectual guarantees against every possibleevasion of the responsibility they had incurred. But the furthercontrol of private morality, beyond the protection of the immaturefrom corruption and evil example, will be no concern of the State's. When a child comes in, the future of the species comes in; andthe State comes in as the guardian of interests wider than theindividual's; but the adult's private life is the entirely privatelife into which the State may not intrude. 

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

From the first of the two points of view named above, that ofparentage, it is obvious that one unavoidable condition will be thechastity of the wife. Her infidelity being demonstrated, must atonce terminate the marriage and release both her husband and theState from any liability for the support of her illegitimateoffspring. That, at any rate, is beyond controversy; a marriagecontract that does not involve that, is a triumph of metaphysicsover common sense. It will be obvious that under Utopian conditionsit is the State that will suffer injury by a wife's misconduct, andthat a husband who condones anything of the sort will participate inher offence. A woman, therefore, who is divorced on this accountwill be divorced as a public offender, and not in the key of apersonal quarrel; not as one who has inflicted a private andpersonal wrong. This, too, lies within the primary implications ofmarriage. 

Beyond that, what conditions should a marriage contract in Utopiainvolve?

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

A failure on either side to perform the elementary duties ofcompanionship, desertion, for example, should obviously give theother mate the right to relief, and clearly the development of anydisqualifying habit, drunkenness, or drug-taking, or the like, orany serious crime or acts of violence, should give grounds for afinal release. Moreover, the modern Utopian State intervenes betweenthe sexes only because of the coming generation, and for it tosustain restrictions upon conduct in a continually fruitlessmarriage is obviously to lapse into purely moral intervention. Itseems reasonable, therefore, to set a term to a marriage thatremains childless, to let it expire at the end of three or four orfive unfruitful years, but with no restriction upon the right ofthe husband and wife to marry each other again. 

These are the fairly easy primaries of this question. We now come tothe more difficult issues of the matter. The first of these is thequestion of the economic relationships of husband and wife, havingregard to the fact that even in Utopia women, at least until theybecome mothers, are likely to be on the average poorer than men. Thesecond is the question of the duration of a marriage. But the twointerlock, and are, perhaps, best treated together in one commonsection. And they both ramify in the most complicated manner intothe consideration of the general morale of the community. 

Section 5

This question of marriage is the most complicated and difficult inthe whole range of Utopian problems. But it is happily not the mosturgent necessity that it should be absolutely solved. The urgent andnecessary problem is the ruler. With rulers rightly contrived and aprovisional defective marriage law a Utopia may be conceived asexisting and studying to perfect itself, but without rulers a Utopiais impossible though the theory of its matrimony be complete. Andthe difficulty in this question is not simply the difficulty of acomplicated chess problem, for example, in which the whole tangleof considerations does at least lie in one plane, but a series ofproblems upon different levels and containing incommensurablefactors. 

It is very easy to repeat our initial propositions, to recall thatwe are on another planet, and that all the customs and traditions ofthe earth are set aside, but the faintest realisation of thatdemands a feat of psychological insight. We have all grown up intoan invincible mould of suggestion about sexual things; we regardthis with approval, that with horror, and this again with contempt, very largely because the thing has always been put to us in thislight or that. The more emancipated we think ourselves the moresubtle are our bonds. The disentanglement of what is inherent inthese feelings from what is acquired is an extraordinary complexundertaking. Probably all men and women have a more or less powerfuldisposition to jealousy, but what exactly they will be jealous aboutand what exactly they will suffer seems part of the superposedfactor. Probably all men and women are capable of ideal emotions andwishes beyond merely physical desires, but the shape these take arealmost entirely a reaction to external images. And you really cannotstrip the external off; you cannot get your stark natural man, jealous, but not jealous about anything in particular, imaginativewithout any imaginings, proud at large. Emotional dispositions canno more exist without form than a man without air. Only a veryobservant man who had lived all over the planet Earth, in all sortsof social strata, and with every race and tongue, and who wasendowed with great imaginative insight, could hope to understand thepossibilities and the limitations of human plasticity in thismatter, and say what any men and any women could be induced to dowillingly, and just exactly what no man and no woman could stand, provided one had the training of them. Though very young men willtell you readily enough. The proceedings of other races and otherages do not seem to carry conviction; what our ancestors did, orwhat the Greeks or Egyptians did, though it is the direct physicalcause of the modern young man or the modern young lady, is apt toimpress these remarkable consequences merely as an arrangement ofquaint, comical or repulsive proceedings. 

But there emerges to the modern inquirer certain ideals anddesiderata that at least go some way towards completing andexpanding the crude primaries of a Utopian marriage law set outin section 4. 

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

There are two lines of reasoning that go to establish a longerduration for marriage. The first of these rests upon the generalnecessity for a home and for individual attention in the case ofchildren. Children are the results of a choice between individuals;they grow well, as a rule, only in relation to sympathetic andkindred individualities, and no wholesale character-ignoring methodof dealing with them has ever had a shadow of the success of theindividualised home. Neither Plato nor Socrates, who repudiated thehome, seems ever to have had to do with anything younger than ayoung man. Procreation is only the beginning of parentage, and evenwhere the mother is not the direct nurse and teacher of her child, even where she delegates these duties, her supervision is, in thecommon case, essential to its welfare. Moreover, though the UtopianState will pay the mother, and the mother only, for the being andwelfare of her legitimate children, there will be a clear advantagein fostering the natural disposition of the father to associate hischild's welfare with his individual egotism, and to dispense some ofhis energies and earnings in supplementing the common provision ofthe State. It is an absurd disregard of a natural economy to leavethe innate philoprogenitiveness of either sex uncultivated. Unlessthe parents continue in close relationship, if each is passingthrough a series of marriages, the dangers of a conflict of rights, and of the frittering away of emotions, become very grave. Thefamily will lose homogeneity, and its individuals will have for themother varied and perhaps incompatible emotional associations. Thebalance of social advantage is certainly on the side of much morepermanent unions, on the side of an arrangement that, subject toample provisions for a formal divorce without disgrace in cases ofincompatibility, would bind, or at least enforce ideals that wouldtend to bind, a man and woman together for the whole term of hermaternal activity, until, that is, the last born of her children wasno longer in need of her help. 

The second system of considerations arises out of the artificialityof 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 orinferiority of women to men. But it is only the same quality thatcan be measured by degrees and ranged in ascending and descendingseries, and the things that are essentially feminine are differentqualitatively from and incommensurable with the distinctly masculinethings. The relationship is in the region of ideals and conventions, and a State is perfectly free to determine that men and women shallcome to intercourse on a footing of conventional equality or witheither the man or woman treated as the predominating individual. Aristotle's criticism of Plato in this matter, his insistence uponthe natural inferiority of slaves and women, is just the sort ofconfusion between inherent and imposed qualities that was his mostcharacteristic weakness. The spirit of the European people, ofalmost all the peoples now in the ascendant, is towards a conventionof equality; the spirit of the Mahometan world is towards theintensification of a convention that the man alone is a citizen andthat the woman is very largely his property. There can be no doubtthat the latter of these two convenient fictions is the moreprimitive way of regarding this relationship. It is quite unfruitfulto argue between these ideals as if there were a demonstrableconclusion, the adoption of either is an arbitrary act, and we shallsimply follow our age and time if we display a certain bias for theformer. 

If one looks closely into the various practical expansions of theseideas, we find their inherent falsity works itself out in a verynatural way so soon as reality is touched. Those who insist uponequality work in effect for assimilation, for a similar treatment ofthe sexes. Plato's women of the governing class, for example, wereto strip for gymnastics like men, to bear arms and go to war, andfollow most of the masculine occupations of their class. They wereto have the same education and to be assimilated to men at everydoubtful 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 naturalinferiority. The trend of evolutionary forces through long centuriesof human development has been on the whole in this second direction, has been towards differentiation. [Footnote: See Havelock Ellis'sMan and Woman. ] An adult white woman differs far more from a whiteman than a negress or pigmy woman from her equivalent male. Theeducation, the mental disposition, of a white or Asiatic woman, reeks of sex; her modesty, her decorum is not to ignore sex but torefine and put a point to it; her costume is clamorous with thedistinctive elements of her form. The white woman in the materiallyprosperous nations is more of a sexual specialist than her sister ofthe poor and austere peoples, of the prosperous classes more so thanthe peasant woman. The contemporary woman of fashion who sets thetone of occidental intercourse is a stimulant rather than acompanion for a man. Too commonly she is an unwholesome stimulantturning a man from wisdom to appearance, from beauty to beautifulpleasures, from form to colour, from persistent aims to belief andstirring triumphs. Arrayed in what she calls distinctly "dress, "scented, adorned, displayed, she achieves by artifice a sexualdifferentiation profounder than that of any other vertebratedanimal. She outshines the peacock's excess above his mate, one mustprobe among the domestic secrets of the insects and crustacea tofind her living parallel. And it is a question by no means easy andyet of the utmost importance, to determine how far the wide andwidening differences between the human sexes is inherent andinevitable, and how far it is an accident of social development thatmay be converted and reduced under a different social regimen. Arewe going to recognise and accentuate this difference and to arrangeour Utopian organisation to play upon it, are we to have two primaryclasses of human being, harmonising indeed and reacting, butfollowing essentially different lives, or are we going to minimisethis difference in every possible way?

The former alternative leads either to a romantic organisation ofsociety in which men will live and fight and die for wonderful, beautiful, exaggerated creatures, or it leads to the hareem. Itwould probably lead through one phase to the other. Women would beenigmas and mysteries and maternal dignitaries that one wouldapproach in a state of emotional excitement and seclude piously whenserious work was in hand. A girl would blossom from the totallynegligible to the mystically desirable at adolescence, and boyswould be removed from their mother's educational influence at asearly an age as possible. Whenever men and women met together, themen would be in a state of inflamed competition towards one another, and the women likewise, and the intercourse of ideas would be insuspense. Under the latter alternative the sexual relation would besubordinated to friendship and companionship; boys and girls wouldbe 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 adirectly personal attention would mingle, according to theirquality, in the counsels and intellectual development of men. Suchwomen would be fit to educate boys even up to adolescence. It isobvious that a marriage law embodying a decision between these twosets of ideas would be very different according to the alternativeadopted. In the former case a man would be expected to earn andmaintain in an adequate manner the dear delight that had favouredhim. He would tell her beautiful lies about her wonderful moraleffect upon him, and keep her sedulously from all responsibility andknowledge. And, since there is an undeniably greater imaginativeappeal to men in the first bloom of a woman's youth, she would havea distinct claim upon his energies for the rest of her life. In thelatter case a man would no more pay for and support his wife thanshe would do so for him. They would be two friends, differing inkind no doubt but differing reciprocally, who had linked themselvesin a matrimonial relationship. Our Utopian marriage so far as wehave discussed it, is indeterminate between these alternatives. 

We have laid it down as a general principle that the private moralsof an adult citizen are no concern for the State. But that involvesa decision to disregard certain types of bargain. A sanely contrivedState will refuse to sustain bargains wherein there is no plausiblyfair exchange, and if private morality is really to be outside thescope of the State then the affections and endearments mostcertainly must not be regarded as negotiable commodities. The State, therefore, will absolutely ignore the distribution of these favoursunless children, or at least the possibility of children, isinvolved. It follows that it will refuse to recognise any debts ortransfers of property that are based on such considerations. It willbe only consistent, therefore, to refuse recognition in the marriagecontract to any financial obligation between husband and wife, orany settlements qualifying that contract, except when they are inthe nature of accessory provision for the prospective children. [Footnote: Unqualified gifts for love by solvent people will, ofcourse, be quite possible and permissible, unsalaried services andthe like, provided the standard of life is maintained and the jointincome of the couple between whom the services hold does not sinkbelow twice the minimum wage. ] So far the Utopian State will throwits weight upon the side of those who advocate the independence ofwomen and their conventional equality with men. 

But to any further definition of the marriage relation the WorldState of Utopia will not commit itself. The wide range ofrelationships that are left possible, within and without themarriage code, are entirely a matter for the individual choice andimagination. Whether a man treat his wife in private as a goddess tobe propitiated, as a "mystery" to be adored, as an agreeableauxiliary, as a particularly intimate friend, or as the wholesomemother of his children, is entirely a matter for their privateintercourse: whether he keep her in Oriental idleness or activeco-operation, or leave her to live her independent life, rests withthe couple alone, and all the possible friendship and intimaciesoutside marriage also lie quite beyond the organisation of themodern State. Religious teaching and literature may affect these;customs may arise; certain types of relationship may involve socialisolation; the justice of the statesman is blind to such things. Itmay 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 humancommunity. In Utopia, nevertheless, love-making is no concern of theState's beyond the province that the protection of children covers. [Footnote: It cannot be made too clear that though the control ofmorality is outside the law the State must maintain a generaldecorum, 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 acontrol over morals. But this will be only part of a wider law tosafeguard the tender mind. For example, lying advertisements, andthe like, when they lean towards adolescent interests, willencounter a specially disagreeable disposition in the law, over andabove the treatment of their general dishonesty. ] Change of functionis one of the ruling facts in life, the sac that was in our remotestancestors a swimming bladder is now a lung, and the State which wasonce, perhaps, no more than the jealous and tyrannous will of thestrongest male in the herd, the instrument of justice and equality. The State intervenes now only where there is want of harmony betweenindividuals--individuals who exist or who may presently come intoexistence. 

Section 6

It must be reiterated that our reasoning still leaves Utopianmarriage an institution with wide possibilities of variation. Wehave tried to give effect to the ideal of a virtual equality, anequality of spirit between men and women, and in doing so we haveoverridden the accepted opinion of the great majority of mankind. Probably the first writer to do as much was Plato. His argument insupport of this innovation upon natural human feeling was thinenough--a mere analogy to illustrate the spirit of his propositions;it was his creative instinct that determined him. In the atmosphereof such speculations as this, Plato looms very large indeed, and inview of what we owe to him, it seems reasonable that we shouldhesitate before dismissing as a thing prohibited and evil, a type ofmarriage that he made almost the central feature in the organisationof the ruling class, at least, of his ideal State. He was persuadedthat the narrow monogamic family is apt to become illiberal andanti-social, to withdraw the imagination and energies of the citizenfrom the services of the community as a whole, and the RomanCatholic Church has so far endorsed and substantiated his opinion asto forbid family relations to its priests and significant servants. He conceived of a poetic devotion to the public idea, a devotion ofwhich the mind of Aristotle, as his criticisms of Plato show, wasincapable, as a substitute for the warm and tender but illiberalemotions of the home. But while the Church made the alternative tofamily ties celibacy [Footnote: The warm imagination of Campanella, that quaint Calabrian monastic, fired by Plato, reversed this aspectof the Church. ] and participation in an organisation, Plato was farmore in accordance with modern ideas in perceiving the disadvantagethat would result from precluding the nobler types of character fromoffspring. He sought a way to achieve progeny, therefore, withoutthe narrow concentration of the sympathies about the home, and hefound it in a multiple marriage in which every member of thegoverning class was considered to be married to all the others. Butthe detailed operation of this system he put tentatively and veryobscurely. His suggestions have the experimental inconsistency of anenquiring man. He left many things altogether open, and it is unfairto him to adopt Aristotle's forensic method and deal with hisdiscussion as though it was a fully-worked-out project. It is clearthat Plato intended every member of his governing class to be so"changed at birth" as to leave paternity untraceable; mothers werenot to know their children, nor children their parents, but there isnothing to forbid the supposition that he intended these people toselect and adhere to congenial mates within the great family. Aristotle's assertion that the Platonic republic left no scope forthe virtue of continence shows that he had jumped to just the sameconclusions a contemporary London errand boy, hovering a littleshamefacedly over Jowett in a public library, might be expected toreach. 

Aristotle obscures Plato's intention, it may be accidentally, byspeaking of his marriage institution as a community of wives. Whenreading Plato he could not or would not escape reading in his ownconception of the natural ascendency of men, his idea of property inwomen and children. But as Plato intended women to be conventionallyequal to men, this phrase belies him altogether; community ofhusbands and wives would be truer to his proposal. Aristotlecondemns Plato as roundly as any commercial room would condemn himto-day, and in much the same spirit; he asserts rather than provesthat such a grouping is against the nature of man. He wanted to havewomen property just as he wanted to have slaves property, he did notcare to ask why, and it distressed his conception of convenienceextremely to imagine any other arrangement. It is no doubt true thatthe natural instinct of either sex is exclusive of participators inintimacy during a period of intimacy, but it was probably Aristotlewho gave Plato an offensive interpretation in this matter. No onewould freely submit to such a condition of affairs as multiplemarriage carried out, in the spirit of the Aristotelianinterpretation, to an obscene completeness, but that is all the morereason why the modern Utopia should not refuse a grouped marriage tothree or more freely consenting persons. There is no sense inprohibiting institutions which no sane people could ever want toabuse. It is claimed--though the full facts are difficult toascertain--that a group marriage of over two hundred persons wassuccessfully organised by John Humphrey Noyes at Oneida Creek. [Footnote: See John H. Noyes's History of American Socialisms andhis writings generally. The bare facts of this and the otherAmerican experiments are given, together with more recent matter, byMorris 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, andoften for life, within the group. The documents are reasonably clearupon that point. This Oneida community was, in fact, a league of twohundred persons to regard their children as "common. " Choice andpreference were not abolished in the community, though in some casesthey were set aside--just as they are by many parents under ourpresent conditions. There seems to have been a premature attempt at"stirpiculture, " at what Mr. Francis Galton now calls "Eugenics, " inthe mating of the members, and there was also a limitation ofoffspring. Beyond these points the inner secrets of the community donot appear to be very profound; its atmosphere was almostcommonplace, it was made up of very ordinary people. There is nodoubt that it had a career of exceptional success throughout thewhole lifetime of its founder, and it broke down with the advent ofa new generation, with the onset of theological differences, and theloss of its guiding intelligence. The Anglo-Saxon spirit, it hasbeen said by one of the ablest children of the experiment, is tooindividualistic for communism. It is possible to regard thetemporary success of this complex family as a strange accident, asthe wonderful exploit of what was certainly a very exceptional man. Its final disintegration into frankly monogamic couples--it is stilla prosperous business association--may be taken as an experimentalverification of Aristotle's common-sense psychology, and wasprobably merely the public acknowledgment of conditions alreadypractically established. 

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

It must be remembered that a modern Utopia must differ from theUtopias of any preceding age in being world-wide; it is not, therefore, to be the development of any special race or type ofculture, 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 mustsuppose it a synthesis; politically it will be a synthesis of oncewidely different forms of government; socially and morally, asynthesis of a great variety of domestic traditions and ethicalhabits. Into the modern Utopia there must have entered the mentaltendencies and origins that give our own world the polygamy of theZulus and of Utah, the polyandry of Tibet, the latitudes ofexperiment permitted in the United States, and the divorcelesswedlock of Comte. The tendency of all synthetic processes in mattersof law and custom is to reduce and simplify the compulsory canon, toadmit alternatives and freedoms; what were laws before becometraditions of feeling and style, and in no matter will this be moreapparent than in questions affecting the relations of the sexes. 

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

A Few Utopian Impressions

Section 1

But now we are in a better position to describe the houses and waysof the Utopian townships about the Lake of Lucerne, and to glance alittle more nearly at the people who pass. You figure us ascuriously settled down in Utopia, as working for a low wage atwood-carving, until the authorities at the central registry in Pariscan solve the perplexing problem we have set them. We stay in an innlooking 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. Therest of our time is our own. 

Our inn is one of those inns and lodging houses which have a minimumtariff, inns which are partly regulated, and, in the defaultof private enterprise, maintained and controlled by the WorldState throughout the entire world. It is one of several suchestablishments in Lucerne. It possesses many hundreds of practicallyself-cleaning little bedrooms, equipped very much after the fashionof the rooms we occupied in the similar but much smaller inn atHospenthal, differing only a little in the decoration. There isthe same dressing-room recess with its bath, the same gracefulproportion in the succinct simplicity of its furniture. Thisparticular inn is a quadrangle after the fashion of an Oxfordcollege; it is perhaps forty feet high, and with about five storiesof bedrooms above its lower apartments; the windows of the roomslook either outward or inward to the quadrangle, and the doors giveupon artificially-lit passages with staircases passing up and down. These passages are carpeted with a sort of cork carpet, but areotherwise bare. The lower story is occupied by the equivalent of aLondon club, kitchens and other offices, dining-room, writing-room, smoking and assembly rooms, a barber's shop, and a library. Acolonnade with seats runs about the quadrangle, and in the middleis a grass-plot. In the centre of this a bronze figure, a sleepingchild, reposes above a little basin and fountain, in which waterlilies are growing. The place has been designed by an architecthappily 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 dullsurface and something of the tint of yellow ivory; the colour is alittle irregular, and a partial confession of girders and pillarsbreaks this front of tender colour with lines and mouldings ofgreenish gray, that blend with the tones of the leaden gutters andrain pipes from the light red roof. At one point only does anyexplicit effort towards artistic effect appear, and that is in thegreat arched gateway opposite my window. Two or three abundantyellow roses climb over the face of the building, and when I lookout of my window in the early morning--for the usual Utopian workingday commences within an hour of sunrise--I see Pilatus above thisoutlook, rosy in the morning sky. 

This quadrangle type of building is the prevalent element in UtopianLucerne, and one may go from end to end of the town along corridorsand covered colonnades without emerging by a gateway into the openroads at all. Small shops are found in these colonnades, but thelarger stores are usually housed in buildings specially adapted totheir needs. The majority of the residential edifices are far finerand more substantial than our own modest shelter, though we gatherfrom such chance glimpses as we get of their arrangements that thelabour-saving ideal runs through every grade of this servantlessworld; and what we should consider a complete house in earthlyEngland is hardly known here. 

The autonomy of the household has been reduced far below terrestrialconditions by hotels and clubs, and all sorts of co-operativeexpedients. People who do not live in hotels seem usually to live inclubs. The fairly prosperous Utopian belongs, in most cases, to oneor two residential clubs of congenial men and women. These clubsusually possess in addition to furnished bedrooms more or lesselaborate suites of apartments, and if a man prefers it one of theselatter can be taken and furnished according to his personal taste. Apleasant boudoir, a private library and study, a private gardenplot, are among the commonest of such luxuries. Devices to secureroof gardens, loggias, verandahs, and such-like open-air privaciesto the more sumptuous of these apartments, give interest and varietyto Utopian architecture. There are sometimes little cooking cornersin these flats--as one would call them on earth--but the ordinaryUtopian would no more think of a special private kitchen for hisdinners than he would think of a private flour mill or dairy farm. Business, private work, and professional practice go on sometimes inthe house apartments, but often in special offices in the greatwarren of the business quarter. A common garden, an infant school, play rooms, and a playing garden for children, are universalfeatures 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, wherethe public offices will stand in a group close to the two or threetheatres and the larger shops, and hither, too, in the case ofLucerne, the head of the swift railway to Paris and England andScotland, and to the Rhineland and Germany will run. And as onewalks out from the town centre one will come to that mingling ofhomesteads and open country which will be the common condition ofall 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 fromthe central force station, that will share the common water supply, will have their perfected telephonic connection with the rest ofthe world, with doctor, shop, and so forth, and may even havea pneumatic tube for books and small parcels to the nearestpost-office. But the solitary homestead, as a permanent residence, will be something of a luxury--the resort of rather wealthy gardenlovers; and most people with a bias for retirement will probably getas much residential solitude as they care for in the hire of aholiday chalet in a forest, by remote lagoons or high up themountain side. 

The solitary house may indeed prove to be very rare indeed inUtopia. The same forces, the same facilitation of communicationsthat will diffuse the towns will tend to little concentrations ofthe agricultural population over the country side. The field workerswill probably take their food with them to their work during theday, and for the convenience of an interesting dinner and ofcivilised intercourse after the working day is over, they will mostprobably live in a college quadrangle with a common room and club. Idoubt if there will be any agricultural labourers drawing wages inUtopia. I am inclined to imagine farming done by tenantassociations, by little democratic unlimited liability companiesworking under elected managers, and paying not a fixed rent but ashare of the produce to the State. Such companies could reconstructannually to weed out indolent members. [Footnote: Schemes for theco-operative association of producers will be found in Dr. Hertzka'sFreeland. ] A minimum standard of efficiency in farming would beinsured by fixing a minimum beneath which the rent must not fall, and perhaps by inspection. The general laws respecting the standardof life would, of course, apply to such associations. This type ofco-operation presents itself to me as socially the best arrangementfor productive agriculture and horticulture, but such enterprisesas stock breeding, seed farming and the stocking and loan ofagricultural implements are probably, and agricultural research andexperiment certainly, best handled directly by large companies orthe municipality or the State. 

But I should do little to investigate this question; these arepresented as quite incidental impressions. You must suppose that forthe most part our walks and observations keep us within the moreurban quarters of Lucerne. From a number of beautifully printedplacards at the street corners, adorned with caricatures ofconsiderable pungency, we discover an odd little election is inprogress. This is the selection, upon strictly democratic lines, with a suffrage that includes every permanent resident in theLucerne ward over the age of fifteen, of the ugliest local building. The old little urban and local governing bodies, we find, have longsince been superseded by great provincial municipalities for all themore serious administrative purposes, but they still survive todischarge a number of curious minor functions, and not the leastamong these is this sort of aesthetic ostracism. Every year everyminor local governing body pulls down a building selected by localplebiscite, and the greater Government pays a slight compensation tothe owner, and resumes possession of the land it occupies. The ideawould strike us at first as simply whimsical, but in practice itappears to work as a cheap and practical device for the aestheticeducation of builders, engineers, business men, opulent persons, andthe general body of the public. But when we come to consider itsapplication to our own world we should perceive it was the mostUtopian thing we had so far encountered. 

Section 2

The factory that employs us is something very different from theordinary earthly model. Our business is to finish making littlewooden toys--bears, cattle men, and the like--for children. Thethings are made in the rough by machinery, and then finished byhand, because the work of unskilful but interested men--and itreally is an extremely amusing employment--is found to give apersonality and interest to these objects no machine can everattain. 

We carvers--who are the riffraff of Utopia--work in a long shedtogether, nominally by time; we must keep at the job for the lengthof the spell, but we are expected to finish a certain number of toysfor each spell of work. The rules of the game as between employerand employed in this particular industry hang on the wall behind us;they are drawn up by a conference of the Common Council of WagesWorkers with the employers, a common council which has resulted inUtopia from a synthesis of the old Trades Unions, and which hasbecome a constitutional power; but any man who has skill or humouris presently making his own bargain with our employer more or lessabove that datum line. 

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

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

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

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

We should go our way with a curious contentment, for all that wewere earning scarcely more than the minimum wage. We should have, ofcourse, our uneasiness about the final decisions of that universaleye which has turned upon us, we should have those ridiculous shamnumbers on our consciences; but that general restlessness, thatbrooding stress that pursues the weekly worker on earth, that achinganxiety that drives him so often to stupid betting, stupid drinking, and violent and mean offences will have vanished out of mortalexperience. 

Section 3

I should find myself contrasting my position with my preconceptionsabout a Utopian visit. I had always imagined myself as standingoutside the general machinery of the State--in the distinguishedvisitors' gallery, as it were--and getting the new world in a seriesof comprehensive perspective views. But this Utopia, for all thesweeping floats of generalisation I do my best to maintain, isswallowing me up. I find myself going between my work and the roomin which I sleep and the place in which I dine, very much as I wentto and fro in that real world into which I fell five-and-forty yearsago. I find about me mountains and horizons that limit my view, institutions that vanish also without an explanation, beyond thelimit of sight, and a great complexity of things I do not understandand about which, to tell the truth, I do not formulate acutecuriosities. People, very unrepresentative people, people just ascasual as people in the real world, come into personal relationswith us, and little threads of private and immediate interest spinthemselves rapidly into a thickening grey veil across the generalview. I lose the comprehensive interrogation of my first arrival; Ifind myself interested in the grain of the wood I work, in birdsamong the tree branches, in little irrelevant things, and it is onlynow and then that I get fairly back to the mood that takes allUtopia for its picture. 

We spend our first surplus of Utopian money in the reorganisationof our wardrobes upon more Utopian lines; we develop acquaintancewith several of our fellow workers, and of those who share ourtable at the inn. We pass insensibly into acquaintanceships and thebeginnings of friendships. The World Utopia, I say, seems for a timeto be swallowing me up. At the thought of detail it looms too bigfor me. The question of government, of its sustaining ideas, ofrace, and the wider future, hang like the arch of the sky over thesedaily incidents, very great indeed, but very remote. These peopleabout me are everyday people, people not so very far from theminimum wage, accustomed much as the everyday people of earth areaccustomed to take their world as they find it. Such enquiries asI attempt are pretty obviously a bore to them, pass outside theirrange as completely as Utopian speculation on earth outranges astevedore or a member of Parliament or a working plumber. Even thelittle things of daily life interest them in a different way. SoI get on with my facts and reasoning rather slowly. I find myselflooking among the pleasant multitudes of the streets for types thatpromise congenial conversation. 

My sense of loneliness is increased during this interlude by thebetter social success of the botanist. I find him presently fallinginto conversation with two women who are accustomed to sit at atable near our own. They wear the loose, coloured robes of softmaterial that are the usual wear of common adult Utopian women; theyare both dark and sallow, and they affect amber and crimson in theirgarments. Their faces strike me as a little unintelligent, and thereis a faint touch of middle-aged coquetry in their bearing that I donot like. Yet on earth we should consider them women of exceptionalrefinement. But the botanist evidently sees in this direction scopefor the feelings that have wilted a little under my inattention, andhe begins that petty intercourse of a word, of a slight civility, ofvague enquiries and comparisons that leads at last to associationsand confidences. Such superficial confidences, that is to say, as hefinds satisfactory. 

This throws me back upon my private observations. 

The general effect of a Utopian population is vigour. Everyone onemeets seems to be not only in good health but in training; onerarely meets fat people, bald people, or bent or grey. People whowould be obese or bent and obviously aged on earth are here ingood repair, and as a consequence the whole effect of a crowdis livelier and more invigorating than on earth. The dress isvaried and graceful; that of the women reminds one most of theItalian fifteenth century; they have an abundance of soft andbeautifully-coloured stuffs, and the clothes, even of the poorest, fit admirably. Their hair is very simply but very carefully andbeautifully dressed, and except in very sunny weather they do notwear hats or bonnets. There is little difference in deportmentbetween one class and another; they all are graceful and bearthemselves with quiet dignity, and among a group of them a Europeanwoman of fashion in her lace and feathers, her hat and metalornaments, her mixed accumulations of "trimmings, " would look like abarbarian tricked out with the miscellaneous plunder of a museum. Boys and girls wear much the same sort of costume--brown leathershoes, then a sort of combination of hose and close-fitting trousersthat reaches from toe to waist, and over this a beltless jacketfitting very well, or a belted tunic. Many slender women wear thesame sort of costume. We should see them in it very often in sucha place as Lucerne, as they returned from expeditions in themountains. The older men would wear long robes very frequently, butthe greater proportion of the men would go in variations of much thesame costume as the children. There would certainly be hooded cloaksand umbrellas for rainy weather, high boots for mud and snow, andcloaks and coats and furry robes for the winter. There would be nodoubt a freer use of colour than terrestrial Europe sees in thesedays, but the costume of the women at least would be soberer andmore practical, and (in harmony with our discussion in the previouschapter) less differentiated from the men's. 

But these, of course, are generalisations. These are the meretranslation of the social facts we have hypotheticated into thelanguage of costume. There will be a great variety of costume andno compulsions. The doubles of people who are naturally foppish onearth will be foppish in Utopia, and people who have no naturaltaste on earth will have inartistic equivalents. Everyone will notbe quiet in tone, or harmonious, or beautiful. Occasionally, as I gothrough the streets to my work, I shall turn round to glance againat some robe shot with gold embroidery, some slashing of thesleeves, some eccentricity of cut, or some discord or untidiness. But these will be but transient flashes in a general flow ofharmonious graciousness; dress will have scarcely any of that effectof disorderly conflict, of self-assertion qualified by the fear ofridicule, that it has in the crudely competitive civilisations ofearth. 

I shall have the seeker's attitude of mind during those few days atLucerne. I shall become a student of faces. I shall be, as it were, looking for someone. I shall see heavy faces, dull faces, faces withan uncongenial animation, alien faces, and among these some with animmediate quality of appeal. I should see desirable men approachingme, and I should think; "Now, if I were to speak to _you_?" Many ofthese latter I should note wore the same clothing as the man whospoke to us at Wassen; I should begin to think of it as a sort ofuniform.... 

Then I should see grave-faced girls, girls of that budding age whentheir bearing becomes delusively wise, and the old deception ofmy youth will recur to me; "Could you and I but talk together?"I should think. Women will pass me lightly, women with open andinviting faces, but they will not attract me, and there will comebeautiful women, women with that touch of claustral preoccupationwhich forbids the thought of any near approach. They are private andsecret, 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 verbaland surprising, begins to take substance. The idea grows in my mindthat after all this is the "someone" I am seeking, this Utopian selfof mine. I had at first an idea of a grotesque encounter, as ofsomething happening in a looking glass, but presently it dawns on methat my Utopian self must be a very different person from me. Histraining will be different, his mental content different. Butbetween us there will be a strange link of essential identity, asympathy, an understanding. I find the thing rising suddenly to apreponderance in my mind. I find the interest of details dwindlingto the vanishing point. That I have come to Utopia is the lesserthing now; the greater is that I have come to meet myself. 

I spend hours trying to imagine the encounter, inventing littledialogues. I go alone to the Bureau to find if any news has come tohand from the Great Index in Paris, but I am told to wait anothertwenty-four hours. I cease absolutely to be interested in anythingelse, except so far as it leads towards intercourse with this beingwho 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 thebotanist who will notice the comparative absence of animals aboutus. 

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

He is a professed lover of dogs and there are none. We have seen nohorses and only one or two mules on the day of our arrival, andthere seems not a cat in the world. I bring my mind round to hissuggestion. "This follows, " I say. 

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

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

My botanist fails altogether to grasp what the disappearance ofdiseases means. His mind has no imaginative organ of that compass. As I talk his mind rests on one fixed image. This presents what thebotanist would probably call a "dear old doggie"--which the botanistwould make believe did not possess any sensible odour--and it hasfaithful brown eyes and understands everything you say. The botanistwould make believe it understood him mystically, and I figure hislong white hand--which seems to me, in my more jaundiced moments, toexist entirely for picking things and holding a lens--patting itshead, 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 bruteson the earth, and I can see, what the botanist I think cannot, thata life spent in the delightful atmosphere of many pet animals mayhave too dear a price.... 

I find myself back again at the comparison of the botanist andmyself. There is a profound difference in our imaginations, and Iwonder whether it is the consequence of innate character or oftraining and whether he is really the human type or I. I am notaltogether without imagination, but what imagination I have has themost insistent disposition to square itself with every fact in theuniverse. It hypothesises very boldly, but on the other hand it willnot gravely make believe. Now the botanist's imagination is alwaysbusy with the most impossible make-believe. That is the way with allchildren I know. But it seems to me one ought to pass out of it. Itisn't as though the world was an untidy nursery; it is a place ofsplendours indescribable for all who will lift its veils. It may behe is essentially different from me, but I am much more inclined tothink he is simply more childish. Always it is make-believe. Hebelieves that horses are beautiful creatures for example, dogs arebeautiful creatures, that some women are inexpressibly lovely, andhe makes believe that this is always so. Never a word of criticismof horse or dog or woman! Never a word of criticism of hisimpeccable friends! Then there is his botany. He makes believe thatall the vegetable kingdom is mystically perfect and exemplary, thatall flowers smell deliciously and are exquisitely beautiful, thatDrosera does not hurt flies very much, and that onions do not smell. Most of the universe does not interest this nature lover at all. ButI know, and I am querulously incapable of understanding why everyoneelse does not know, that a horse is beautiful in one way and quiteugly in another, that everything has this shot-silk quality, and isall the finer for that. When people talk of a horse as an uglyanimal I think of its beautiful moments, but when I hear a flow ofindiscriminate praise of its beauty I think of such an aspect as onegets for example from a dog-cart, the fiddle-shaped back, and thatdistressing blade of the neck, the narrow clumsy place between theears, and the ugly glimpse of cheek. There is, indeed, no beautywhatever save that transitory thing that comes and comes again; allbeauty is really the beauty of expression, is really kinetic andmomentary. That is true even of those triumphs of static endeavourachieved by Greece. The Greek temple, for example, is a barn with aface that at a certain angle of vision and in a certain light has agreat calm beauty. 

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

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

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

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

I never have had a pet animal, I confess, though I have been fairlypopular with kittens. But with regard to a certain petting ofmyself----?

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 sacrificeof the love of animals, which is, in its way, a very fine thingindeed, so much the more readily may it demand the sacrifice of manyother indulgences, some of which are not even fine in the lowestdegree. 

It is curious this haunting insistence upon sacrifice anddiscipline!

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

We lie in the petal-strewn grass under some Judas trees beside thelake 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 toan 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 ourUtopian selves and measure something of what we might havebeen?"

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

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

Section 5

It is pleasant to think of one's puzzling the organised wisdom ofso superior a planet as this Utopia, this moral monster State myFrankenstein of reasoning has made, and to that pitch we have come. When we are next in the presence of our Lucerne official, he has thebearing of a man who faces a mystification beyond his powers, anincredible disarrangement of the order of Nature. Here, for thefirst time in the records of Utopian science, are two cases--notsimply one but two, and these in each other's company!--ofduplicated thumb-marks. This, coupled with a cock-and-bull storyof an instantaneous transfer from some planet unknown to Utopianastronomy. That he and all his world exists only upon a hypothesisthat would explain everyone of these difficulties absolutely, isscarcely likely to occur to his obviously unphilosophic mind. 

The official eye is more eloquent than the official lips and asksalmost urgently, "What in this immeasurable universe have youmanaged to do to your thumbs? And why?" But he is only a veryinferior sort of official indeed, a mere clerk of the post, and hehas all the guarded reserve of your thoroughly unoriginal man. "Youare not the two persons I ascertained you were, " he says, with thenote of one resigned to communion with unreason; "because you"--heindicates me--"are evidently at your residence in London. " I smile. "That gentleman"--he points a pen at the botanist in a manner thatis intended to dismiss my smile once for all--"will be in Londonnext week. He will be returning next Friday from a special missionto investigate the fungoid parasites that have been attacking thecinchona 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 tobe. "

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 positionis too responsible a one for jesting, and both of us in our severalways enjoy the pleasure we poor humans have in meeting withintellectual inferiority. "The Standing Committee of Identification, "he says, with an eye on a memorandum, "has remitted your case to theResearch Professor of Anthropology in the University of London, andthey 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 herewill probably cease. Here----" he pushed the neat slips of papertowards us--"are your tickets for London, and a small but sufficientsupply of money, "--he indicates two piles of coins and paper oneither hand of him--"for a day or so there. " He proceeds in thesame dry manner to inform us we are invited to call at our earliestconvenience upon our doubles, and upon the Professor, who is toinvestigate 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, andshows us the palms of his hands. 

On earth, where there is nationality, this would have been aFrenchman--the inferior sort of Frenchman--the sort whose onlyhappiness 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 willbe 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 journeyby night. Perhaps I think so because the ideal of long-distancetravel is surely a restful translation less suitable for the activehours. 

We shall dine and gossip and drink coffee at the pretty littletables under the lantern-lit trees, we shall visit the theatre, anddecide to sup in the train, and so come at last to the station. There we shall find pleasant rooms with seats and books--luggageall neatly elsewhere--and doors that we shall imagine give upon aplatform. Our cloaks and hats and such-like outdoor impedimenta willbe taken in the hall and neatly labelled for London, we shallexchange our shoes for slippers there, and we shall sit down likemen in a club. An officious little bell will presently call ourattention to a label "London" on the doorway, and an excellentphonograph will enforce that notice with infinite civility. Thedoors will open, and we shall walk through into an equallycomfortable gallery. 

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

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

There will be a shutting of doors, and the botanist and I, tryingnot to feel too childish, will walk exploring through the capacioustrain. 

The resemblance to a club will strike us both. "A _good_ club, " thebotanist will correct me. 

When one travels beyond a certain speed, there is nothing butfatigue in looking out of a window, and this corridor train, twicethe width of its poor terrestrial brother, will have no need of thatdistraction. The simple device of abandoning any but a few windows, and those set high, gives the wall space of the long corridors tobooks; the middle part of the train is indeed a comfortable librarywith abundant armchairs and couches, each with its green-shadedlight, and soft carpets upon the soundproof floor. Further on willbe a news-room, with a noiseless but busy tape at one corner, printing off messages from the wires by the wayside, and furtherstill, rooms for gossip and smoking, a billiard room, and the diningcar. Behind we shall come to bedrooms, bathrooms, the hairdresser, and so forth. 

"When shall we start?" I ask presently, as we return, rather likebashful yokels, to the library, and the old gentleman reading theArabian Nights in the armchair in the corner glances up at me with asudden curiosity. 

The botanist touches my arm and nods towards a pretty littlelead-paned window, through which we see a village sleeping undercloudy moonlight go flashing by. Then a skylit lake, and then astring of swaying lights, gone with the leap of a camerashutter. 

Two hundred miles an hour!

We resort to a dignified Chinese steward and secure our berths. Itis perhaps terrestrial of us that we do not think of reading theUtopian literature that lines the middle part of the train. Ifind a bed of the simple Utopian pattern, and lie for a timethinking--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 andincoherent 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 isnot unpleasantly loud, merely a faint tinting of the quiet.... 

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

The train has been in London some time when I awake, for thesemarvellous Utopians have discovered that it is not necessary tobundle out passengers from a train in the small hours, simplybecause they have arrived. A Utopian train is just a peculiar kindof 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 thatdo not exist, for this world still does not dream of the things thatmay be done with thought and steel, when the engineer issufficiently educated to be an artist, and the artistic intelligencehas been quickened to the accomplishment of an engineer. How can onewrite of these things for a generation which rather admires thatinconvenient and gawky muddle of ironwork and Flemish architecture, the London Tower Bridge. When before this, temerarious anticipatorshave written of the mighty buildings that might someday be, theillustrator has blended with the poor ineffectual splutter of theauthor's words, his powerful suggestion that it amounted simply tosomething bulbous, florid and fluent in the vein of the onion, andL'Art Nouveau. But here, it may be, the illustrator will notintervene. 

Art has scarcely begun in the world. 

There have been a few forerunners and that is all. Leonardo, MichaelAngelo; how they would have exulted in the liberties of steel! Thereare no more pathetic documents in the archives of art thanLeonardo's memoranda. In these, one sees him again and againreaching out as it were, with empty desirous hands, towards theunborn possibilities of the engineer. And Durer, too, was a Modern, with the same turn towards creative invention. In our times thesemen would have wanted to make viaducts, to bridge wild andinaccessible places, to cut and straddle great railways athwart themountain masses of the world. You can see, time after time, inDurer's work, as you can see in the imaginary architecturallandscape of the Pompeian walls, the dream of structures, lighterand bolder than stone or brick can yield.... These Utopian townbuildings will be the realisation of such dreams. 

Here will be one of the great meeting places of mankind. Here--Ispeak of Utopian London--will be the traditional centre of one ofthe great races in the commonalty of the World State--and here willbe its social and intellectual exchange. There will be a mightyUniversity here, with thousands of professors and tens of thousandsof advanced students, and here great journals of thought andspeculation, mature and splendid books of philosophy and science, and a glorious fabric of literature will be woven and shaped, andwith a teeming leisureliness, put forth. Here will be stupendouslibraries, and a mighty organisation of museums. About these centreswill cluster a great swarm of people, and close at hand will beanother centre, for I who am an Englishman must needs stipulate thatWestminster shall still be a seat of world Empire, one of severalseats, if you will--where the ruling council of the world assembles. Then the arts will cluster round this city, as gold gathers aboutwisdom, and here Englishmen will weave into wonderful prose andbeautiful 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 widerspaces of the town, the slender beauty of the perfect metal-work faroverhead will be softened to a fairy-like unsubstantiality by themild London air. It will be the London air we know, clear of filthand all impurity, the same air that gives our October days theirunspeakable clarity and makes every London twilight mysteriouslybeautiful. We shall go along avenues of architecture that will beemancipated from the last memories of the squat temple boxes of theGreek, the buxom curvatures of Rome; the Goth in us will have takento steel and countless new materials as kindly as once he took tostone. The gay and swiftly moving platforms of the public ways willgo past on either hand, carrying sporadic groups of people, and veryspeedily we shall find ourselves in a sort of central space, richwith palms and flowering bushes and statuary. We shall look along anavenue of trees, down a wide gorge between the cliffs of crowdedhotels, the hotels that are still glowing with internal lights, towhere the shining morning river streams dawnlit out to sea. 

Great multitudes of people will pass softly to and fro in thiscentral space, beautiful girls and youths going to the Universityclasses that are held in the stately palaces about us, grave andcapable men and women going to their businesses, children meanderingalong to their schools, holiday makers, lovers, setting outupon a hundred quests; and here we shall ask for the two we moreparticularly seek. A graceful little telephone kiosk will put uswithin reach of them, and with a queer sense of unreality I shallfind myself talking to my Utopian twin. He has heard of me, he wantsto 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 ourhotel. "

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

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

"I can still hardly realise, " I say, "that I am going to seemyself--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 bringsme near to a double self-forgetfulness. 

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

"This is the place, " I say. 

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

My Utopian Self

Section 1

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

The whole fabric of that other universe sways for a moment as I comeinto 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, stumbleagainst a chair. Then, still without a word, we are claspinghands. 

I stand now so that the light falls upon him, and I can see his facebetter. He is a little taller than I, younger looking and sounderlooking; he has missed an illness or so, and there is no scar overhis eye. His training has been subtly finer than mine; he has madehimself a better face than mine.... These things I might havecounted upon. I can fancy he winces with a twinge of sympatheticunderstanding at my manifest inferiority. Indeed, I come, trailingclouds of earthly confusion and weakness; I bear upon me all thedefects of my world. He wears, I see, that white tunic with thepurple band that I have already begun to consider the proper Utopianclothing for grave men, and his face is clean shaven. We forget tospeak at first in the intensity of our mutual inspection. When atlast I do gain my voice it is to say something quite different fromthe fine, significant openings of my premeditated dialogues. 

"You have a pleasant room, " I remark, and look about a littledisconcerted because there is no fireplace for me to put my backagainst, or hearthrug to stand upon. He pushes me a chair, intowhich I plump, and we hang over an immensity of conversationalpossibilities. 

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

"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 worldbeyond 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 laughthat echoes mine. 

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

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

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

Section 2

Our conversation at that first encounter would do very little todevelop the Modern Utopia in my mind. Inevitably, it would bepersonal 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, Ishould have to explain things----. 

No, the conversation would contribute nothing to a modernUtopia. 

And so I leave it out. 

Section 3

But I should go back to my botanist in a state of emotionalrelaxation. At first I should not heed the fact that he, too, hadbeen 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, " hewould say, "I've seen someone. "

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, atonce. 

"I saw her, " he explains. 

"Saw her?"

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

He takes my arm. "You know I did not understand this, " he says. "Idid not really understand that when you said Utopia, you meant I wasto 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'verather hated this Utopia of yours at times. You mustn't mind mysaying 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 cansay about Herbert Spencer, vivisectors, materialistic Science orAtheists, applies without correction to me. Begbie away! But now youthink better of a modern Utopia? Was the lady looking well?"

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

"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 ourapartments open, and I point across the soft haze of the publicgardens to a tall white mass of University buildings that rises witha free and fearless gesture, to lift saluting pinnacles against theclear evening sky. "Don't you think that rather more beautifulthan--say--our National Gallery?"

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

I purred. "But, anyhow, whatever you can't see in that, you can, Isuppose, see that it is different from anything in your world--itlacks the kindly humanity of a red-brick Queen Anne villa residence, with its gables and bulges, and bow windows, and its stainedglass fanlight, and so forth. It lacks the self-complacentunreasonableness of Board of Works classicism. There's something inits proportions--as though someone with brains had taken a lot ofcare to get it quite right, someone who not only knew what metal cando, but what a University ought to be, somebody who had found theGothic spirit enchanted, petrified, in a cathedral, and had set itfree. "

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

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

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

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

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

"Probably under the Lesser Rule. "

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

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

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

"This world contains your double. But, conceivably, everything maybe different here. The whole romantic story may have run a differentcourse. It was as it was in our world, by the accidents of customand proximity. Adolescence is a defenceless plastic period. You area man to form great affections, --noble, great affections. You mighthave met anyone almost at that season and formed the sameattachment. "

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 strangeencounter with my Utopian double. I think of the confessions I havejust made to him, the strange admissions both to him and myself. Ihave stirred up the stagnations of my own emotional life, the pridethat has slumbered, the hopes and disappointments that have nottroubled me for years. There are things that happened to me in myadolescence that no discipline of reason will ever bring to a justproportion for me, the first humiliations I was made to suffer, thewaste of all the fine irrecoverable loyalties and passions of myyouth. The dull base caste of my little personal tragi-comedy--Ihave ostensibly forgiven, I have for the most part forgotten--andyet when I recall them I hate each actor still. Whenever it comesinto my mind--I do my best to prevent it--there it is, and thesedetestable people blot out the stars for me. 

I have told all that story to my double, and he has listened withunderstanding eyes. But for a little while those squalid memorieswill not sink back into the deeps. 

We lean, side by side, over our balcony, lost in such egotisticalabsorptions, quite heedless of the great palace of noble dreams towhich our first enterprise has brought us. 

Section 5

I can understand the botanist this afternoon; for once we are in thesame key. My own mental temper has gone for the day, and I know whatit means to be untempered. Here is a world and a glorious world, andit is for me to take hold of it, to have to do with it, here andnow, and behold! I can only think that I am burnt and scarred, andthere rankles that wretched piece of business, the meanunimaginative 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 noblein life does not, at times at least, if not always, seem secondaryto obscure rivalries and considerations, to the petty hates that arelike germs in the blood, to the lust for self-assertion, to dwarfishpride, to affections they gave in pledge even before they weremen. 

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

All this world before us, and its order and liberty, are no morethan a painted scene before which he is to meet Her at last, freedfrom "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 himwrong? Was his failure inherent, or did some net of cross purposestangle 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 ruthlessreminders--all that would mar his vague anticipations. That, too, ifI suggested it, he would overcome and disregard. He has the mostamazing power of resistance to uncongenial ideas; amazing that is, to me. He hates the idea of meeting his double, and consequently sosoon as I cease to speak of that, with scarcely an effort of hiswill, 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 athicket of flowering rhododendra, and then my eyes go back to thegreat facade 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 ofits creator and becoming the background of a personal drama--of sucha silly little drama?

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

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

CHAPTER THE NINTH

The Samurai

Section 1

Neither my Utopian double nor I love emotion sufficiently tocultivate it, and my feelings are in a state of seemly subordinationwhen we meet again. He is now in possession of some clear, generalideas about my own world, and I can broach almost at once thethoughts that have been growing and accumulating since my arrivalin this planet of my dreams. We find our interest in a humanisedstate-craft, makes us, in spite of our vast difference in trainingand habits, curiously akin. 

I put it to him that I came to Utopia with but very vague ideas ofthe method of government, biassed, perhaps, a little in favour ofcertain electoral devices, but for the rest indeterminate, andthat I have come to perceive more and more clearly that the largeintricacy of Utopian organisation demands more powerful andefficient method of control than electoral methods can give. I havecome to distinguish among the varied costumes and the innumerabletypes of personality Utopia presents, certain men and women of adistinctive costume and bearing, and I know now that these peopleconstitute an order, the samurai, the "voluntary nobility, " whichis essential in the scheme of the Utopian State. I know that thisorder is open to every physically and mentally healthy adult inthe Utopian State who will observe its prescribed austere rule ofliving, that much of the responsible work of the State is reservedfor it, and I am inclined now at the first onset of realisation toregard it as far more significant than it really is in the Utopianscheme, as being, indeed, in itself and completely the Utopianscheme. My predominant curiosity concerns the organisation of thisorder. As it has developed in my mind, it has reminded me more andmore closely of that strange class of guardians which constitutesthe essential substance of Plato's Republic, and it is with animplicit reference to Plato's profound intuitions that I and mydouble discuss this question. 

To clarify our comparison he tells me something of the history ofUtopia, and incidentally it becomes necessary to make a correctionin the assumptions upon which I have based my enterprise. We areassuming a world identical in every respect with the real planetEarth, except for the profoundest differences in the mentalcontent of life. This implies a different literature, a differentphilosophy, and a different history, and so soon as I come totalk to him I find that though it remains unavoidable that weshould assume the correspondence of the two populations, man forman--unless we would face unthinkable complications--we must assumealso that a great succession of persons of extraordinary characterand mental gifts, who on earth died in childhood or at birth, orwho never learnt to read, or who lived and died amidst savage orbrutalising surroundings that gave their gifts no scope, did inUtopia encounter happier chances, and take up the development andapplication of social theory--from the time of the first Utopists ina steady onward progress down to the present hour. [Footnote: Onemight assume as an alternative to this that amidst the four-fifthsof the Greek literature now lost to the world, there perished, neglected, some book of elementary significance, some earlierNovum Organum, that in Utopia survived to achieve the profoundestconsequences. ] The differences of condition, therefore, had widenedwith each successive year. Jesus Christ had been born into a liberaland progressive Roman Empire that spread from the Arctic Oceanto the Bight of Benin, and was to know no Decline and Fall, and Mahomet, instead of embodying the dense prejudices of Arabignorance, opened his eyes upon an intellectual horizon alreadynearly 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 wereconclusive wars that established new and more permanent relations, that swept aside obstructions, and abolished centres of decay; therewere prejudices tempered to an ordered criticism, and hatreds thatmerged at last in tolerant reactions. It was several hundred yearsago that the great organisation of the samurai came into its presentform. And it was this organisation's widely sustained activitiesthat 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 andcomplications, analogous to those of our own time on earth, and was, indeed, the last of a number of political and religious experimentsdating back to the first dawn of philosophical state-craft inGreece. That hasty despair of specialisation for government thatgave our poor world individualism, democratic liberalism, andanarchism, and that curious disregard of the fund of enthusiasm andself-sacrifice in men, which is the fundamental weakness of worldlyeconomics, do not appear in the history of Utopian thought. Allthat history is pervaded with the recognition of the factthat self-seeking is no more the whole of human life than thesatisfaction of hunger; that it is an essential of a man's existenceno doubt, and that under stress of evil circumstances it may asentirely obsess him as would the food hunt during famine, but thatlife may pass beyond to an illimitable world of emotions and effort. Every sane person consists of possibilities beyond the unavoidableneeds, is capable of disinterested feeling, even if it amounts onlyto enthusiasm for a sport or an industrial employment well done, for an art, or for a locality or class. In our world now, as inthe Utopian past, this impersonal energy of a man goes out intoreligious emotion and work, into patriotic effort, into artisticenthusiasms, into games and amateur employments, and an enormousproportion of the whole world's fund of effort wastes itself inreligious and political misunderstandings and conflicts, and inunsatisfying amusements and unproductive occupations. In a modernUtopia there will, indeed, be no perfection; in Utopia theremust also be friction, conflicts and waste, but the waste willbe enormously less than in our world. And the co-ordination ofactivities this relatively smaller waste will measure, will be theachieved end for which the order of the samurai was first devised. 

Inevitably such an order must have first arisen among a clash ofsocial forces and political systems as a revolutionary organisation. It must have set before itself the attainment of some such Utopianideal as this modern Utopia does, in the key of mortal imperfection, realise. At first it may have directed itself to research anddiscussion, to the elaboration of its ideal, to the discussion of aplan of campaign, but at some stage it must have assumed a moremilitant organisation, and have prevailed against and assimilatedthe pre-existing political organisations, and to all intents andpurposes have become this present synthesised World State. Traces ofthat militancy would, therefore, pervade it still, and a campaigningquality--no longer against specific disorders, but against universalhuman weaknesses, and the inanimate forces that trouble man--stillremain as its essential quality. 

"Something of this kind, " I should tell my double, "had arisen inour thought"--I jerk my head back to indicate an infinitely distantplanet--"just before I came upon these explorations. The idea hadreached me, for example, of something to be called a New Republic, which was to be in fact an organisation for revolution somethingafter the fashion of your samurai, as I understand them--only mostof the organisation and the rule of life still remained to beinvented. All sorts of people were thinking of something in that wayabout the time of my coming. The idea, as it reached me, was prettycrude in several respects. It ignored the high possibility of asynthesis 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 inhis proposals--it was to be a purely English-speaking movement. Andhis ideas were coloured too much by the peculiar opportunism of histime; he seemed to have more than half an eye for a prince or amillionaire of genius; he seemed looking here and there for supportand the structural elements of a party. Still, the idea of acomprehensive movement of disillusioned and illuminated men behindthe shams and patriotisms, the spites and personalities of theostensible world was there. "

I added some particulars. 

"Our movement had something of that spirit in the beginning, " saidmy Utopian double. "But while your men seem to be thinkingdisconnectedly, and upon a very narrow and fragmentary basis ofaccumulated conclusions, ours had a fairly comprehensive science ofhuman association, and a very careful analysis of the failures ofpreceding beginnings to draw upon. After all, your world must be asfull 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 nowthere are no new religions, no new orders, no new cults--nobeginnings 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 youmanage in Utopia. "

Section 2

The social theorists of Utopia, my double explained, did not basetheir schemes upon the classification of men into labour andcapital, the landed interest, the liquor trade, and the like. Theyesteemed these as accidental categories, indefinitely amenable tostatesmanship, and they looked for some practical and realclassification upon which to base organisation. [Footnote: In thatthey seem to have profited by a more searching criticism of earlysocial and political speculations than our earth has yet undertaken. The social speculations of the Greeks, for example, had just thesame primary defect as the economic speculations of the eighteenthcentury--they began with the assumption that the general conditionsof the prevalent state of affairs were permanent. ] But, on the otherhand, the assumption that men are unclassifiable, becausepractically homogeneous, which underlies modern democratic methodsand all the fallacies of our equal justice, is even more alien tothe Utopian mind. Throughout Utopia there is, of course, no otherthan provisional classifications, since every being is regarded asfinally unique, but for political and social purposes things havelong rested upon a classification of temperaments, which attendsmainly to differences in the range and quality and character of theindividual imagination. 

This Utopian classification was a rough one, but it served itspurpose to determine the broad lines of political organisation; itwas so far unscientific that many individuals fall between or withintwo or even three of its classes. But that was met by giving thecorrelated organisation a compensatory looseness of play. Four mainclasses of mind were distinguished, called, respectively, thePoietic, the Kinetic, the Dull, and the Base. The former two aresupposed to constitute the living tissue of the State; the latterare the fulcra and resistances, the bone and cover of its body. Theyare not hereditary classes, nor is there any attempt to develop anyclass by special breeding, simply because the intricate interplayof heredity is untraceable and incalculable. They are classes towhich people drift of their own accord. Education is uniform untildifferentiation becomes unmistakable, and each man (and woman) mustestablish his position with regard to the lines of this abstractclassification by his own quality, choice, and development.... 

The Poietic or creative class of mental individuality embraces awide range of types, but they agree in possessing imaginations thatrange beyond the known and accepted, and that involve the desire tobring the discoveries made in such excursions, into knowledge andrecognition. The scope and direction of the imaginative excursionmay vary very greatly. It may be the invention of something new orthe discovery of something hitherto unperceived. When the inventionor discovery is primarily beauty then we have the artistic type ofPoietic 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 ofWhistler or the science of a cytologist, or it may embrace a wideextent of relevance, until at last both artist or scientificinquirer merge in the universal reference of the true philosopher. To the accumulated activities of the Poietic type, reacted upon bycircumstances, are due almost all the forms assumed by human thoughtand feeling. All religious ideas, all ideas of what is good orbeautiful, entered life through the poietic inspirations of man. Except for processes of decay, the forms of the human future mustcome also through men of this same type, and it is a primaryessential to our modern idea of an abundant secular progress thatthese activities should be unhampered and stimulated. 

The Kinetic class consists of types, various, of course, and merginginsensibly along the boundary into the less representativeconstituents of the Poietic group, but distinguished by a morerestricted range of imagination. Their imaginations do not rangebeyond the known, experienced, and accepted, though within theselimits they may imagine as vividly or more vividly than members ofthe former group. They are often very clever and capable people, butthey do not do, and they do not desire to do, new things. The morevigorous individuals of this class are the most teachable people inthe world, and they are generally more moral and more trustworthythan the Poietic types. They live, --while the Poietics are alwayssomething of experimentalists with life. The characteristics ofeither of these two classes may be associated with a good or badphysique, with excessive or defective energy, with exceptionalkeenness of the senses in some determinate direction or such-like"bent, " and the Kinetic type, just as the Poietic type, may displayan imagination of restricted or of the most universal range. But afairly energetic Kinetic is probably the nearest thing to that idealour earthly anthropologists have in mind when they speak of the"Normal" human being. The very definition of the Poietic classinvolves a certain abnormality. 

The Utopians distinguished two extremes of this Kinetic classaccording to the quality of their imaginative preferences, the Danand Beersheba, as it were, of this division. At one end is themainly intellectual, unoriginal type, which, with energy ofpersonality, makes an admirable judge or administrator and withoutit an uninventive, laborious, common mathematician, or commonscholar, or common scientific man; while at the other end is themainly emotional, unoriginal man, the type to which--at a low levelof personal energy--my botanist inclines. The second type includes, amidst its energetic forms, great actors, and popular politiciansand preachers. Between these extremes is a long and wide region ofvarieties, into which one would put most of the people who form thereputable workmen, the men of substance, the trustworthy men andwomen, the pillars of society on earth. 

Below these two classes in the Utopian scheme of things, and merginginsensibly into them, come the Dull. The Dull are persons ofaltogether inadequate imagination, the people who never seem tolearn thoroughly, or hear distinctly, or think clearly. (I believeif everyone is to be carefully educated they would be considerablyin the minority in the world, but it is quite possible that will notbe the reader's opinion. It is clearly a matter of an arbitraryline. ) They are the stupid people, the incompetent people, theformal, imitative people, the people who, in any properly organisedState, should, as a class, gravitate towards and below the minimumwage that qualifies for marriage. The laws of heredity are far toomysterious for such offspring as they do produce to be excluded froma fair chance in the world, but for themselves, they count neitherfor work nor direction in the State. 

Finally, with a bold disregard of the logician's classificatoryrules, these Utopian statesmen who devised the World State, hewedout in theory a class of the Base. The Base may, indeed, be eitherpoietic, kinetic, or dull, though most commonly they are the last, and their definition concerns not so much the quality of theirimagination as a certain bias in it, that to a statesman makes it amatter for special attention. The Base have a narrower and morepersistent egoistic reference than the common run of humanity; theymay boast, but they have no frankness; they have relatively greatpowers of concealment, and they are capable of, and sometimes havean aptitude and inclination towards, cruelty. In the queer phrasingof earthly psychology with its clumsy avoidance of analysis, theyhave no "moral sense. " They count as an antagonism to the Stateorganisation. 

Obviously, this is the rudest of classifications, and no Utopian hasever 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 mingleand vary in every possible way. It is not a classification forTruth, but a classification to an end. Taking humanity as amultitude of unique individuals in mass, one may, for practicalpurposes, deal with it far more conveniently by disregarding itsuniquenesses and its mixed cases altogether, and supposing it to bean assembly of poietic, kinetic, dull, and base people. In manyrespects it behaves as if it were that. The State, dealing as itdoes only with non-individualised affairs, is not only justified indisregarding, but is bound to disregard, a man's specialdistinction, and to provide for him on the strength of his prevalentaspect as being on the whole poietic, kinetic, or what not. In aworld of hasty judgments and carping criticism, it cannot berepeated too often that the fundamental ideas of a modern Utopiaimply everywhere and in everything, margins and elasticities, acertain universal compensatory looseness of play. 

Section 3

Now these Utopian statesmen who founded the World State put theproblem of social organisation in the following fashion:--Tocontrive a revolutionary movement that shall absorb all existinggovernments and fuse them with itself, and that must be rapidlyprogressive and adaptable, and yet coherent, persistent, powerful, and efficient. 

The problem of combining progress with political stability had neverbeen accomplished in Utopia before that time, any more than it hasbeen accomplished on earth. Just as on earth, Utopian history was asuccession of powers rising and falling in an alternation ofefficient conservative with unstable liberal States. Just as onearth, so in Utopia, the kinetic type of men had displayed a more orless unintentional antagonism to the poietic. The generallife-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 inthis department of national life, and then that, and have givenplace to kinetic men of a high type--for it seems to be in theirnature that poietic men should be mutually repulsive, and notsucceed and develop one another consecutively--and a period ofexpansion and vigour has set in. The general poietic activity hasdeclined with the development of an efficient and settled social andpolitical organisation; the statesman has given way to thepolitician who has incorporated the wisdom of the statesman with hisown energy, the original genius in arts, letters, science, and everydepartment of activity to the cultivated and scholarly man. Thekinetic man of wide range, who has assimilated his poieticpredecessor, succeeds with far more readiness than his poieticcontemporary in almost every human activity. The latter is by hisvery nature undisciplined and experimental, and is positivelyhampered by precedents and good order. With this substitution of theefficient for the creative type, the State ceases to grow, first inthis department of activity, and then in that, and so long as itsconditions remain the same it remains orderly and efficient. But ithas lost its power of initiative and change; its power of adaptationis gone, and with that secular change of conditions which is the lawof life, stresses must arise within and without, and bring at lasteither through revolution or through defeat the release of freshpoietic power. The process, of course, is not in its entiretysimple; it may be masked by the fact that one department of activitymay be in its poietic stage, while another is in a phase ofrealisation. In the United States of America, for example, duringthe nineteenth century, there was great poietic activity inindustrial organisation, and none whatever in political philosophy;but a careful analysis of the history of any period will show therhythm almost invariably present, and the initial problem before theUtopian philosopher, therefore, was whether this was an inevitablealternation, whether human progress was necessarily a series ofdevelopments, collapses, and fresh beginnings, after an interval ofdisorder, unrest, and often great unhappiness, or whether it waspossible to maintain a secure, happy, and progressive State besidean unbroken flow of poietic activity. 

Clearly they decided upon the second alternative. If, indeed, I amlistening to my Utopian self, then they not only decided the problemcould be solved, but they solved it. 

He tells me how they solved it. 

A modern Utopia differs from all the older Utopias in itsrecognition of the need of poietic activities--one sees this newconsideration creeping into thought for the first time in thephrasing of Comte's insistence that "spiritual" must precedepolitical reconstruction, and in his admission of the necessity ofrecurrent books and poems about Utopias--and at first thisrecognition appears to admit only an added complication to a problemalready unmanageably complex. Comte's separation of the activitiesof a State into the spiritual and material does, to a certainextent, anticipate this opposition of poietic and kinetic, but theintimate texture of his mind was dull and hard, the conceptionslipped from him again, and his suppression of literary activities, and his imposition of a rule of life upon the poietic types, who areleast able to sustain it, mark how deeply he went under. To a largeextent he followed the older Utopists in assuming that thephilosophical and constructive problem could be done once for all, and he worked the results out simply under an organised kineticgovernment. But what seems to be merely an addition to thedifficulty may in the end turn out to be a simplification, just asthe introduction of a fresh term to an intricate irreduciblemathematical expression will at times bring it to unity. 

Now philosophers after my Utopian pattern, who find the ultimatesignificance in life in individuality, novelty and the undefined, would not only regard the poietic element as the most important inhuman society, but would perceive quite clearly the impossibility ofits organisation. This, indeed, is simply the application to themoral and intellectual fabric of the principles already applied indiscussing the State control of reproduction (in Chapter the Sixth, section 2). But just as in the case of births it was possible forthe State to frame limiting conditions within which individualityplays more freely than in the void, so the founders of this modernUtopia believed it possible to define conditions under which everyindividual born with poietic gifts should be enabled and encouragedto give them a full development, in art, philosophy, invention, or discovery. Certain general conditions presented themselves asobviously reasonable:--to give every citizen as good an educationas he or she could acquire, for example; to so frame it that thedirected educational process would never at any period occupy thewhole available time of the learner, but would provide throughouta marginal free leisure with opportunities for developingidiosyncrasies, and to ensure by the expedient of a minimum wagefor a specified amount of work, that leisure and opportunity didnot cease throughout life. 

But, in addition to thus making poietic activities universallypossible, the founders of this modern Utopia sought to supplyincentives, which was an altogether more difficult research, aproblem in its nature irresolvably complex, and admitting of nosystematic solution. But my double told me of a great variety ofdevices by which poietic men and women were given honour andenlarged freedoms, so soon as they produced an earnest of theirquality, and he explained to me how great an ambition they mightentertain. 

There were great systems of laboratories attached to every municipalforce station at which research could be conducted under the mostfavourable conditions, and every mine, and, indeed, almost everygreat industrial establishment, was saddled under its lease withsimilar obligations. So much for poietic ability and research inphysical science. The World State tried the claims of every livingcontributor to any materially valuable invention, and paid orcharged a royalty on its use that went partly to him personally, andpartly to the research institution that had produced him. In thematter of literature and the philosophical and sociologicalsciences, every higher educational establishment carried itsstudentships, its fellowships, its occasional lectureships, and toproduce a poem, a novel, a speculative work of force or merit, wasto become the object of a generous competition between rivalUniversities. In Utopia, any author has the option either ofpublishing his works through the public bookseller as a privatespeculation, or, if he is of sufficient merit, of accepting aUniversity endowment and conceding his copyright to the Universitypress. All sorts of grants in the hands of committees of the mostvaried constitution, supplemented these academic resources, andensured that no possible contributor to the wide flow of the Utopianmind slipped into neglect. Apart from those who engaged mainly inteaching and administration, my double told me that the world-wideHouse of Saloman [Footnote: The New Atlantis. ] thus createdsustained over a million men. For all the rarity of large fortunes, therefore, no original man with the desire and capacity for materialor mental experiments went long without resources and the stimulusof attention, criticism, and rivalry. 

"And finally, " said my double, "our Rules ensure a considerableunderstanding of the importance of poietic activities in themajority of the samurai, in whose hands as a class all the realpower 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 realbody of the State. All this time that I have spent going to and froin this planet, it has been growing upon me that this order of menand women, wearing such a uniform as you wear, and with facesstrengthened by discipline and touched with devotion, is theUtopian reality; but that for them, the whole fabric of these fairappearances would crumble and tarnish, shrink and shrivel, until atlast, back I should be amidst the grime and disorders of the lifeof earth. Tell me about these samurai, who remind me of Plato'sguardians, who look like Knights Templars, who bear a name thatrecalls the swordsmen of Japan ... And whose uniform you yourself arewearing. What are they? Are they an hereditary caste, a speciallyeducated order, an elected class? For, certainly, this world turnsupon 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 myown work is, in its nature, poietic; there is much dissatisfactionwith our isolation of criminals upon islands, and I am analysing thepsychology of prison officials and criminals in general with a viewto some better scheme. I am supposed to be ingenious with expedientsin this direction. Typically, the samurai are engaged inadministrative work. Practically the whole of the responsible ruleof the world is in their hands; all our head teachers anddisciplinary heads of colleges, our judges, barristers, employers oflabour 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 lotexclusively from them. The order is not hereditary--we know justenough of biology and the uncertainties of inheritance to know howsilly that would be--and it does not require an early consecrationor novitiate or ceremonies and initiations of that sort. The samuraiare, in fact, volunteers. Any intelligent adult in a reasonablyhealthy and efficient state may, at any age after five-and-twenty, become one of the samurai, and take a hand in the universalcontrol. "

"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 privilegedorder--open to the whole world. No one could complain of an unjustexclusion, for the only thing that could exclude from the order wasunwillingness or inability to follow the Rule. "

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

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

"And it has succeeded?"

"As well as anything finite can. Life is still imperfect, still athick felt of dissatisfactions and perplexing problems, but mostcertainly the quality of all its problems has been raised, and therehas been no war, no grinding poverty, not half the disease, and anenormous increase of the order, beauty, and resources of life sincethe samurai, who began as a private aggressive cult, won their wayto the rule of the world. "

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

"The Rule aims to exclude the dull and base altogether, todiscipline the impulses and emotions, to develop a moral habit andsustain a man in periods of stress, fatigue, and temptation, toproduce the maximum co-operation of all men of good intent, and, infact, to keep all the samurai in a state of moral and bodily healthand efficiency. It does as much of this as well as it can, but, ofcourse, like all general propositions, it does not do it in any casewith absolute precision. On the whole, it is so good that most menwho, like myself, are doing poietic work, and who would be just aswell off without obedience, find a satisfaction in adhesion. Atfirst, in the militant days, it was a trifle hard and uncompromising;it had rather too strong an appeal to the moral prig and harshlyrighteous man, but it has undergone, and still undergoes, revisionand expansion, and every year it becomes a little better adapted tothe 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 itme, then put it down again. 

"The Rule consists of three parts; there is the list of things thatqualify, the list of things that must not be done, and the list ofthings that must be done. Qualification exacts a little exertion, asevidence of good faith, and it is designed to weed out the dullerdull and many of the base. Our schooling period ends now aboutfourteen, and a small number of boys and girls--about three percent. --are set aside then as unteachable, as, in fact, nearlyidiotic; 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 areseveral different college courses, but one or other must be followedand a satisfactory examination passed at the end--perhaps ten percent. Fail--and the Rule requires that the candidate for the samuraimust have passed. "

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

"We admit that. And so anyone who has failed to pass the collegeleaving examination may at any time in later life sit for itagain--and again and again. Certain carefully specified thingsexcuse it altogether. "

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

"People of nervous instability----"

"But they may be people of great though irregular poieticgifts. "

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

"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 twoeducational qualifications, there are two others of a similar kindof more debateable value. One is practically not in operation now. Our Founders put it that a candidate for the samurai must possesswhat they called a Technique, and, as it operated in the beginning, he had to hold the qualification for a doctor, for a lawyer, for amilitary officer, or an engineer, or teacher, or have paintedacceptable pictures, or written a book, or something of the sort. Hehad, in fact, as people say, to 'be something, ' or to have 'donesomething. ' It was a regulation of vague intention even in thebeginning, and it became catholic to the pitch of absurdity. To playa violin skilfully has been accepted as sufficient for thisqualification. There may have been a reason in the past for thisprovision; in those days there were many daughters of prosperousparents--and even some sons--who did nothing whatever but idleuninterestingly in the world, and the organisation might havesuffered by their invasion, but that reason has gone now, and therequirement remains a merely ceremonial requirement. But, on theother hand, another has developed. Our Founders made a collection ofseveral volumes, which they called, collectively, the Book of theSamurai, a compilation of articles and extracts, poems and prosepieces, which were supposed to embody the idea of the order. It wasto play the part for the samurai that the Bible did for the ancientHebrews. To tell you the truth, the stuff was of very unequal merit;there was a lot of very second-rate rhetoric, and some nearlynamby-pamby verse. There was also included some very obscure verseand prose that had the trick of seeming wise. But for all suchdefects, much of the Book, from the very beginning, was splendid andinspiring matter. From that time to this, the Book of the Samuraihas been under revision, much has been added, much rejected, andsome deliberately rewritten. Now, there is hardly anything in itthat is not beautiful and perfect in form. The whole range of nobleemotions finds expression there, and all the guiding ideas of ourModern State. We have recently admitted some terse criticism of itscontents 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 greatred-faced man, with fiery hair, a noisy, intolerant maker ofenemies, 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 hewrote wine; red wine with the light shining through. "

"He was on the Committee that revised our Canon. For the revisingand 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 ... Itwould 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. Weput that in the Canon almost as soon as he died, " said mydouble. 

Section 5

"We have now a double Canon, a very fine First Canon, and a SecondCanon of work by living men and work of inferior quality, and asatisfactory knowledge of both of these is the fourth intellectualqualification 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 muchof it is read and learnt in the schools.... Next to the intellectualqualification comes the physical, the man must be in sound health, free from certain foul, avoidable, and demoralising diseases, and ingood training. We reject men who are fat, or thin and flabby, orwhose nerves are shaky--we refer them back to training. And finallythe 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 theminimum became twenty-five for men and twenty-one for women. Nowthere is a feeling that it ought to be raised. We don't want to takeadvantage 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 arerapidly pushing back old age and death, and keeping men hale andhearty to eighty and more. There's no need to hurry the young. Letthem have a chance of wine, love, and song; let them feel the biteof full-bodied desire, and know what devils they have to reckonwith. "

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

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

"And now, what is forbidden?"

"We forbid a good deal. Many small pleasures do no great harm, butwe think it well to forbid them, none the less, so that we can weedout the self-indulgent. We think that a constant resistance tolittle seductions is good for a man's quality. At any rate, it showsthat a man is prepared to pay something for his honour andprivileges. We prescribe a regimen of food, forbid tobacco, wine, orany alcoholic drink, all narcotic drugs----"

"Meat?"

"In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used tobe. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughter-houses. And, ina population that is all educated, and at about the same level ofphysical refinement, it is practically impossible to find anyone whowill hew a dead ox or pig. We never settled the hygienic question ofmeat-eating at all. This other aspect decided us. I can stillremember, as a boy, the rejoicings over the closing of the lastslaughter-house. "

"You eat fish. "

"It isn't a matter of logic. In our barbaric past horrible flayedcarcases of brutes dripping blood, were hung for sale in the publicstreets. " 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 whateverthought had passed across his mind. 

"Originally the samurai were forbidden usury, that is to say thelending of money at fixed rates of interest. They are still underthat interdiction, but since our commercial code practicallyprevents usury altogether, and our law will not recognise contractsfor interest upon private accommodation loans to unprosperousborrowers, it is now scarcely necessary. The idea of a man growingricher by mere inaction and at the expense of an impoverishingdebtor, is profoundly distasteful to Utopian ideas, and our Stateinsists pretty effectually now upon the participation of the lenderin the borrower's risks. This, however, is only one part of a seriesof limitations of the same character. It is felt that to buy simplyin order to sell again brings out many unsocial human qualities; itmakes a man seek to enhance profits and falsify values, and so thesamurai are forbidden to buy to sell on their own account or for anyemployer save the State, unless some process of manufacture changesthe nature of the commodity (a mere change in bulk or packing doesnot suffice), and they are forbidden salesmanship and all its arts. Consequently they cannot be hotel-keepers, or hotel proprietors, orhotel shareholders, and a doctor--all practising doctors must besamurai--cannot sell drugs except as a public servant of themunicipality or the State. "

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

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

"But these are exceptional cases. The bulk of your money-makingbusiness must be confined to men who are not samurai. You must havea 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 whohave called attention by intelligent, truthful advertisement to thepossibilities 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 unlessyou 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 ofpowers. You can, by subtle statesmanship, contrive what it shall buyand what it shall not. In your world it would seem you have madeleisure, movement, any sort of freedom, life itself, _purchaseable_. The more fools you! A poor working man with you is a man indiscomfort and fear. No wonder your rich have power. But here areasonable leisure, a decent life, is to be had by every man oneasier terms than by selling himself to the rich. And rich as menare here, there is no private fortune in the whole world that ismore than a little thing beside the wealth of the State. The samuraicontrol the State and the wealth of the State, and by their vowsthey may not avail themselves of any of the coarser pleasures wealthcan 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 areexceptionally weak or self-indulgent persons. "

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

"Acting, singing, or reciting are forbidden them, though they maylecture authoritatively or debate. But professional mimicry is notonly held to be undignified in a man or woman, but to weaken andcorrupt the soul; the mind becomes foolishly dependent on applause, over-skilful in producing tawdry and momentary illusions ofexcellence; it is our experience that actors and actresses as aclass are loud, ignoble, and insincere. If they have not suchflamboyant qualities then they are tepid and ineffectual players. Nor may the samurai do personal services, except in the matter ofmedicine or surgery; they may not be barbers, for example, nor innwaiters, nor boot cleaners. But, nowadays, we have scarcely anybarbers or boot cleaners; men do these things for themselves. Normay a man under the Rule be any man's servant, pledged to dowhatever he is told. He may neither be a servant nor keep one; hemust shave and dress and serve himself, carry his own food from thehelper's place to the table, redd his sleeping room, and leave itclean.... "

"That is all easy enough in a world as ordered as yours. I supposeno samurai may bet?"

"Absolutely not. He may insure his life and his old age for thebetter equipment of his children, or for certain other specifiedends, but that is all his dealings with chance. And he is alsoforbidden to play games in public or to watch them being played. Certain dangerous and hardy sports and exercises are prescribed forhim, but not competitive sports between man and man or side andside. That lesson was learnt long ago before the coming of thesamurai. Gentlemen of honour, according to the old standards, rodehorses, raced chariots, fought, and played competitive games ofskill, and the dull, cowardly and base came in thousands to admire, and howl, and bet. The gentlemen of honour degenerated fast enoughinto a sort of athletic prostitute, with all the defects, all thevanity, trickery, and self-assertion of the common actor, and witheven less intelligence. Our Founders made no peace with thisorganisation of public sports. They did not spend their lives tosecure for all men and women on the earth freedom, health, andleisure, in order that they might waste lives in such folly. "

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

"Our boys play that, and men too. But it is thought rather puerileto give very much time to it; men should have graver interests. Itwas undignified and unpleasant for the samurai to play conspicuouslyill, and impossible for them to play so constantly as to keep handand eye in training against the man who was fool enough and cheapenough to become an expert. Cricket, tennis, fives, billiards----. You will find clubs and a class of men to play all these things inUtopia, but not the samurai. And they must play their games asgames, not as displays; the price of a privacy for playing cricket, so that they could charge for admission, would be overwhelminglyhigh.... Negroes are often very clever at cricket. For a time, mostof 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 theopen, carrying provisions, and sham fighting over unfamiliar grounddotted with disappearing targets. There was a curious inability inour 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 yourprohibitions? You have forbidden alcohol, drugs, smoking, betting, and usury, games, trade, servants. But isn't there a vow ofChastity?"

"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 knowquite clearly that civilisation is an artificial arrangement, andthat all the physical and emotional instincts of man are too strong, and his natural instinct of restraint too weak, for him to liveeasily in the civilised State. Civilisation has developed far morerapidly than man has modified. Under the unnatural perfection ofsecurity, liberty and abundance our civilisation has attained, thenormal untrained human being is disposed to excess in almost everydirection; he tends to eat too much and too elaborately, to drinktoo much, to become lazy faster than his work can be reduced, towaste his interest upon displays, and to make love too much and tooelaborately. He gets out of training, and concentrates upon egoisticor erotic broodings. The past history of our race is very largely ahistory of social collapses due to demoralisation by indulgencesfollowing security and abundance. In the time of our Founders thesigns of a world-wide epoch of prosperity and relaxation wereplentiful. Both sexes drifted towards sexual excesses, the mentowards sentimental extravagances, imbecile devotions, and thecomplication and refinement of physical indulgences; the womentowards those expansions and differentiations of feeling that findexpression in music and costly and distinguished dress. Both sexesbecame unstable and promiscuous. The whole world seemed disposed todo exactly the same thing with its sexual interest as it had donewith 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 motivesfrom all sorts of sources, but I think the chief force to give menself-control is Pride. Pride may not be the noblest thing in thesoul, but it is the best King there, for all that. They looked to itto keep a man clean and sound and sane. In this matter, as in allmatters of natural desire, they held no appetite must be glutted, noappetite must have artificial whets, and also and equally that noappetite should be starved. A man must come from the tablesatisfied, but not replete. And, in the matter of love, a straightand clean desire for a clean and straight fellow-creature was ourFounders' ideal. They enjoined marriage between equals as thesamurai's duty to the race, and they framed directions of theprecisest sort to prevent that uxorious inseparableness, thatconnubiality which will reduce a couple of people to somethingjointly less than either. That Canon is too long to tell you now. Aman under the Rule who loves a woman who does not follow it, musteither leave the samurai to marry her, or induce her to accept whatis called the Woman's Rule, which, while it excepts her from theseverer qualifications and disciplines, brings her regimen of lifeinto 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? Imean--may she dress as she pleases?"

"Not a bit of it, " said my double. "Every woman who could commandmoney used it, we found, to make underbred aggressions on otherwomen. As men emerged to civilisation, women seemed going backto savagery--to paint and feathers. But the samurai, both menand women, and the women under the Lesser Rule also, all have aparticular dress. No difference is made between women under eitherthe Great or the Lesser Rule. You have seen the men's dress--alwayslike this I wear. The women may wear the same, either with the haircut short or plaited behind them, or they may have a high-waisteddress of very fine, soft woollen material, with their hair coiled upbehind. "

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

I had a thought, and added, "Don't they sometimes, well--take a gooddeal 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 consciouslybeautiful, if you like, " he added. "The more real beauty of form andface we have, the finer our world. But costly sexualisedtrappings----"

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

"There are such women. But for all that the Rule sets the key ofeveryday dress. If a woman is possessed by the passion for gorgeousraiment she usually satisfies it in her own private circle, or withrare occasional onslaughts upon the public eye. Her everyday moodand the disposition of most people is against being conspicuousabroad. And I should say there are little liberties under the LesserRule; a discreet use of fine needlework and embroidery, a widerchoice 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 atime towards the mysterious philosophy of dress. "Beauty? That isn'ttheir 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 ofthe last portion of the Rule, of the things that the samurai areobliged to do. 

There would be many precise directions regarding his health, andrules that would aim at once at health and that constant exercise ofwill that makes life good. Save in specified exceptionalcircumstances, the samurai must bathe in cold water, and the menmust shave every day; they have the precisest directions in suchmatters; the body must be in health, the skin and muscles and nervesin perfect tone, or the samurai must go to the doctors of the order, and give implicit obedience to the regimen prescribed. They mustsleep alone at least four nights in five; and they must eat with andtalk to anyone in their fellowship who cares for their conversationfor an hour, at least, at the nearest club-house of the samurai onceon three chosen days in every week. Moreover, they must read aloudfrom the Book of the Samurai for at least ten minutes every day. Every month they must buy and read faithfully through at least onebook that has been published during the past five years, and theonly intervention with private choice in that matter is theprescription of a certain minimum of length for the monthly book orbooks. But the full Rule in these minor compulsory matters isvoluminous and detailed, and it abounds with alternatives. Its aimis rather to keep before the samurai by a number of sample duties, as it were, the need of, and some of the chief methods towardshealth of body and mind, rather than to provide a comprehensiverule, and to ensure the maintenance of a community of feeling andinterests among the samurai through habit, intercourse, and a livingcontemporary literature. These minor obligations do not earmark morethan an hour in the day. Yet they serve to break down isolations ofsympathy, all sorts of physical and intellectual sluggishness andthe development of unsocial preoccupations of many sorts. 

Women samurai who are married, my double told me, must bearchildren--if they are to remain married as well as in theorder--before the second period for terminating a childless marriageis exhausted. I failed to ask for the precise figures from my doubleat the time, but I think it is beyond doubt that it is from samuraimothers of the Greater or Lesser Rule that a very large proportionof the future population of Utopia will be derived. There is oneliberty accorded to women samurai which is refused to men, and thatis to marry outside the Rule, and women married to men not under theRule are also free to become samurai. Here, too, it will be manifestthere is scope for novels and the drama of life. In practice, itseems that it is only men of great poietic distinction outside theRule, or great commercial leaders, who have wives under it. Thetendency of such unions is either to bring the husband under theRule, or take the wife out of it. There can be no doubt that thesemarriage limitations tend to make the samurai something of anhereditary class. Their children, as a rule, become samurai. But itis not an exclusive caste; subject to the most reasonablequalifications, anyone who sees fit can enter it at any time, andso, unlike all other privileged castes the world has seen, itincreases relatively to the total population, and may indeed at lastassimilate 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 willand motives at the centre that made men and women ready to undergodiscipline, to renounce the richness and elaboration of the sensuouslife, to master emotions and control impulses, to keep in the key ofeffort while they had abundance about them to rouse and satisfy alldesires, 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 ofthe doctrine of original sin; the Utopians hold that man, on thewhole, is good. That is their cardinal belief. Man has pride andconscience, they hold, that you may refine by training as you refinehis eye and ear; he has remorse and sorrow in his being, coming onthe heels of all inconsequent enjoyments. How can one think of himas bad? He is religious; religion is as natural to him as lust andanger, less intense, indeed, but coming with a wide-sweepinginevitableness as peace comes after all tumults and noises. And inUtopia they understand this, or, at least, the samurai do, clearly. They accept Religion as they accept Thirst, as something inseparablyin the mysterious rhythms of life. And just as thirst and pride andall desires may be perverted in an age of abundant opportunities, and men may be degraded and wasted by intemperance in drinking, bydisplay, or by ambition, so too the nobler complex of desires thatconstitutes religion may be turned to evil by the dull, the base, and the careless. Slovenly indulgence in religious inclinations, afailure to think hard and discriminate as fairly as possible inreligious matters, is just as alien to the men under the Rule as itwould be to drink deeply because they were thirsty, eat untilglutted, evade a bath because the day was chilly, or make love toany 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 itsactresses and wine, but the samurai will be forbidden the religionof dramatically lit altars, organ music, and incense, as distinctlyas they are forbidden the love of painted women, or the consolationsof brandy. And to all the things that are less than religion andthat seek to comprehend it, to cosmogonies and philosophies, tocreeds and formulae, to catechisms and easy explanations, theattitude of the samurai, the note of the Book of Samurai, will bedistrust. These things, the samurai will say, are part of theindulgences that should come before a man submits himself to theRule; they are like the early gratifications of young men, experiences to establish renunciation. The samurai will have emergedabove these things. 

The theology of the Utopian rulers will be saturated with that samephilosophy of uniqueness, that repudiation of anything beyondsimilarities and practical parallelisms, that saturates all theirinstitutions. They will have analysed exhaustively those fallaciesand assumptions that arise between the One and the Many, that havetroubled philosophy since philosophy began. Just as they will haveescaped that delusive unification of every species under itsspecific definition that has dominated earthly reasoning, so theywill have escaped the delusive simplification of God that vitiatesall terrestrial theology. They will hold God to be complex and of anendless variety of aspects, to be expressed by no universal formulanor approved in any uniform manner. Just as the language of Utopiawill be a synthesis, even so will its God be. The aspect of God isdifferent in the measure of every man's individuality, and theintimate thing of religion must, therefore, exist in human solitude, between man and God alone. Religion in its quintessence is arelation between God and man; it is perversion to make it a relationbetween man and man, and a man may no more reach God through apriest than love his wife through a priest. But just as a man inlove may refine the interpretation of his feelings and borrowexpression from the poems and music of poietic men, so an individualman may at his discretion read books of devotion and hear music thatis in harmony with his inchoate feelings. Many of the samurai, therefore, will set themselves private regimens that will help theirsecret religious life, will pray habitually, and read books ofdevotion, but with these things the Rule of the order will havenothing 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 theState, and the order and progress of the world, so far, by theirdiscipline and denial, by their public work and effort, they worshipGod together. But the fount of motives lies in the individual life, it lies in silent and deliberate reflections, and at this, the moststriking of all the rules of the samurai aims. For seven consecutivedays in the year, at least, each man or woman under the Rule must goright 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 withmankind. They must go bookless and weaponless, without pen or paper, or money. Provisions must be taken for the period of the journey, arug or sleeping sack--for they must sleep under the open sky--butno means of making a fire. They may study maps beforehand to guidethem, showing any difficulties and dangers in the journey, butthey may not carry such helps. They must not go by beaten ways orwherever there are inhabited houses, but into the bare, quiet placesof the globe--the regions set apart for them. 

This discipline, my double said, was invented to secure a certainstoutness of heart and body in the members of the order, whichotherwise might have lain open to too many timorous, merelyabstemious, men and women. Many things had been suggested, swordplayand tests that verged on torture, climbing in giddy places and thelike, before this was chosen. Partly, it is to ensure good trainingand sturdiness of body and mind, but partly, also, it is to drawtheir minds for a space from the insistent details of life, from theintricate arguments and the fretting effort to work, from personalquarrels 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 pilgrimagesbeyond the securities of the State. There are thousands of squaremiles of sandy desert in Africa and Asia set apart; much of theArctic and Antarctic circles; vast areas of mountain land and frozenmarsh; secluded reserves of forest, and innumerable unfrequentedlines upon the sea. Some are dangerous and laborious routes; somemerely desolate; and there are even some sea journeys that one maytake in the halcyon days as one drifts through a dream. Upon theseas one must go in a little undecked sailing boat, that may berowed in a calm; all the other journeys one must do afoot, noneaiding. There are, about all these desert regions and along mostcoasts, little offices at which the samurai says good-bye to theworld of men, and at which they arrive after their minimum time ofsilence is overpast. For the intervening days they must be alonewith Nature, necessity, and their own thoughts. 

"It is good?" I said. 

"It is good, " my double answered. "We civilised men go back to thestark Mother that so many of us would have forgotten were it not forthis Rule. And one thinks.... Only two weeks ago I did my journeyfor the year. I went with my gear by sea to Tromso, and then inlandto a starting-place, and took my ice-axe and rucksack, and saidgood-bye to the world. I crossed over four glaciers; I climbed threehigh mountain passes, and slept on moss in desolate valleys. I sawno human being for seven days. Then I came down through pine woodsto the head of a road that runs to the Baltic shore. Altogether itwas thirteen days before I reported myself again, and had speechwith fellow creatures. "

"And the women do this?"

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

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

"There is always a sense of effort for me, " he said, "when I leavethe 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 firstday and night I'm a little disposed to shirk the job--every yearit's the same--a little disposed, for example, to sling my pack frommy back, and sit down, and go through its contents, and make sureI've got all my equipment. "

"There's no chance of anyone overtaking you?"

"Two men mustn't start from the same office on the same route withinsix hours of each other. If they come within sight of each other, they must shun an encounter, and make no sign--unless life is indanger. 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 beginto 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, ofcourse we should be worrying with maps the whole time. But I'm onlysure of being a man after the second night, and sure of my power togo through. "

"And then?"

"Then one begins to get into it. The first two days one is apt tohave the events of one's journey, little incidents of travel, andthoughts of one's work and affairs, rising and fading and comingagain; but then the perspectives begin. I don't sleep much at nightson these journeys; I lie awake and stare at the stars. About dawn, perhaps, and in the morning sunshine, I sleep! The nights this lasttime were very short, never more than twilight, and I saw the glowof the sun always, just over the edge of the world. But I had chosenthe days of the new moon, so that I could have a glimpse of thestars.... Years ago, I went from the Nile across the Libyan Deserteast, and then the stars--the stars in the later days of thatjourney--brought me near weeping.... You begin to feel alone on thethird day, when you find yourself out on some shining snowfield, andnothing of mankind visible in the whole world save one landmark, oneremote thin red triangle of iron, perhaps, in the saddle of theridge against the sky. All this busy world that has done so much andso marvellously, and is still so little--you see it little as itis--and far off. All day long you go and the night comes, and itmight be another planet. Then, in the quiet, waking hours, onethinks of one's self and the great external things, of space andeternity, and what one means by God. "

He mused. 

"You think of death?"

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

"You don't believe that?"

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

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

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

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

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

"You know, after these solitudes, I feel just the same queerdisinclination to go back to the world of men that I feel when Ihave to leave it. I think of dusty roads and hot valleys, and beinglooked at by many people. I think of the trouble of working withcolleagues and opponents. This last journey I outstayed my time, camping in the pine woods for six days. Then my thoughts came roundto my proper work again. I got keen to go on with it, and so I cameback into the world. You come back physically clean--as though youhad had your arteries and veins washed out. And your brain has beencleaned, 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 oldmen do. Only last year one of the great leaders of the samurai--awhite-haired man, who followed the Rule in spite of his one hundredand 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 adoctor jabbing you with injections, and distressful people hoveringabout you. "

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

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

I saw more clearly now something I had seen dimly already, in thebearing and the faces of this Utopian chivalry, a faint persistenttinge of detachment from the immediate heats and hurries, the littlegraces and delights, the tensions and stimulations of the dailyworld. It pleased me strangely to think of this steadfast yearlypilgrimage of solitude, and how near men might come then to the highdistances 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 doubtfulcases--for, though a man may resign with due notice and be freeafter a certain time to rejoin again, one deliberate breach mayexclude a man for ever--of the system of law that has grown up aboutsuch trials, and of the triennial council that revises and altersthe Rule. From that we passed to the discussion of the generalconstitution of this World State. Practically all political powervests in the samurai. Not only are they the only administrators, lawyers, practising doctors, and public officials of almost allkinds, but they are the only voters. Yet, by a curious exception, the supreme legislative assembly must have one-tenth, and may haveone-half of its members outside the order, because, it is alleged, there is a sort of wisdom that comes of sin and laxness, which isnecessary to the perfect ruling of life. My double quoted me a versefrom the Canon on this matter that my unfortunate verbal memory didnot retain, but it was in the nature of a prayer to save the worldfrom "unfermented men. " It would seem that Aristotle's idea of arotation of rulers, an idea that crops up again in Harrington'sOceana, that first Utopia of "the sovereign people" (a Utopia that, through Danton's readings in English, played a disastrous part inthe French Revolution), gets a little respect in Utopia. Thetendency is to give a practically permanent tenure to good men. Every ruler and official, it is true, is put on his trial everythree years before a jury drawn by lot, according to the range ofhis activities, either from the samurai of his municipal area orfrom the general catalogue of the samurai, but the business of thisjury is merely to decide whether to continue him in office or ordera new election. In the majority of cases the verdict iscontinuation. Even if it is not so the official may still appear asa candidate before the second and separate jury which fills thevacant post.... 

My double mentioned a few scattered details of the electoralmethods, but as at that time I believed we were to have a number offurther conversations, I did not exhaust my curiosities upon thissubject. Indeed, I was more than a little preoccupied andinattentive. The religion of the samurai was after my heart, and ithad taken hold of me very strongly.... But presently I fellquestioning him upon the complications that arise in the ModernUtopia through the differences between the races of men, and foundmy attention returning. But the matter of that discussion I shallput apart into a separate chapter. In the end we came back to theparticulars of this great Rule of Life that any man desiring ofjoining the samurai must follow. 

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

My double lived in an apartment in a great building--I should judgeabout where, in our London, the Tate Gallery squats, and, as the daywas fine, and I had no reason for hurry, I went not by the coveredmechanical way, but on foot along the broad, tree-set terraces thatfollow the river on either side. 

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

No Utopians wear black, and for all the frequency of the samuraiuniform along the London ways the general effect is of agaily-coloured population. You never see anyone noticeably ragged ordirty; the police, who answer questions and keep order (and arequite distinct from the organisation for the pursuit of criminals)see to that; and shabby people are very infrequent. People who wantto save money for other purposes, or who do not want much botherwith their clothing, seem to wear costumes of rough woven cloth, dyed an unobtrusive brown or green, over fine woollen underclothing, and so achieve a decent comfort in its simplest form. Others outsidethe Rule of the samurai range the spectrum for colour, and haveevery variety of texture; the colours attained by the Utopian dyersseem to me to be fuller and purer than the common range of stuffs onearth; and the subtle folding of the woollen materials witness thatUtopian Bradford is no whit behind her earthly sister. White isextraordinarily frequent; white woollen tunics and robes into whichare woven bands of brilliant colour, abound. Often these ape the cutand purple edge that distinguishes the samurai. In Utopian Londonthe 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 thetown; there are no horses or dogs, and so there is not a suspicionof smoke and scarcely a particle of any sort of dirt to render whiteimpossible. 

The radiated influence of the uniform of the samurai has been tokeep costume simple, and this, perhaps, emphasises the generaleffect of vigorous health, of shapely bodies. Everyone is well grownand well nourished; everyone seems in good condition; everyone walkswell, and has that clearness of eye that comes with cleanness ofblood. In London I am apt to consider myself of a passable size andcarriage; here I feel small and mean-looking. The faint suspicionsof spinal curvatures, skew feet, unequal legs, and ill-grown bones, that haunt one in a London crowd, the plain intimations--in yellowfaces, puffy faces, spotted and irregular complexions, in nervousmovements and coughs and colds--of bad habits and an incompetent ordisregarded medical profession, do not appear here. I notice few oldpeople, but there seems to be a greater proportion of men and womenat or near the prime of life. 

I hang upon that. I have seen one or two fat people here--they areall 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 oursto bear upon regimen. People know better what to do and what toavoid, how to foresee and forestall coming trouble, and how to evadeand suppress the subtle poisons that blunt the edge of sensation. They have put off the years of decay. They keep their teeth, theykeep their digestions, they ward off gout and rheumatism, neuralgiaand influenza and all those cognate decays that bend and wrinkle menand women in the middle years of existence. They have extended thelevel years far into the seventies, and age, when it comes, comesswiftly and easily. The feverish hurry of our earth, the decay thatbegins before growth has ceased, is replaced by a ripe prolongedmaturity. This modern Utopia is an adult world. The flushed romance, the predominant eroticisms, the adventurous uncertainty of a worldin which youth prevails, gives place here to a grave deliberation, to a fuller and more powerful emotion, to a broader handling oflife. 

Yet youth is here. 

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

For everyone in Utopia who is sane enough to benefit, study andtraining last until twenty; then comes the travel year, and many arestill students until twenty-four or twenty-five. Most are still, ina sense, students throughout life, but it is thought that, unlessresponsible action is begun in some form in the early twenties, willundergoes a partial atrophy. But the full swing of adult life ishardly attained until thirty is reached. Men marry before the middlethirties, and the women rather earlier, few are mothers beforefive-and-twenty. The majority of those who become samurai do sobetween twenty-seven and thirty-five. And, between seventeen andthirty, the Utopians have their dealings with love, and the play andexcitement of love is a chief interest in life. Much freedom of actis allowed them so that their wills may grow freely. For the mostpart they end mated, and love gives place to some special and moreenduring interest, though, indeed, there is love between older menand fresh girls, and between youths and maturer women. It is inthese most graceful and beautiful years of life that such freedomsof dress as the atmosphere of Utopia permits are to be seen, and thecrude bright will and imagination of youth peeps out in ornament andcolour. 

Figures come into my sight and possess me for a moment and pass, andgive place to others; there comes a dusky little Jewess, red-lippedand amber-clad, with a deep crimson flower--I know not whether realor sham--in the dull black of her hair. She passes me with anunconscious disdain; and then I am looking at a brightly-smiling, blue-eyed girl, tall, ruddy, and freckled warmly, clad like a stageRosalind, and talking gaily to a fair young man, a novice under theRule. A red-haired mother under the Lesser Rule goes by, green-gowned, with dark green straps crossing between her breasts, and her twoshock-headed children, bare-legged and lightly shod, tug at herhands on either side. Then a grave man in a long, fur-trimmed robe, a merchant, maybe, debates some serious matter with a white-tunickedclerk. 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, whopractise, perhaps, some art--and then one of the samurai, incheerful altercation with a blue-robed girl of eight. "But you_could_ have come back yesterday, Dadda, " she persists. He is deeplysunburnt, and suddenly there passes before my mind the picture of asnowy mountain waste at night-fall and a solitary small figure underthe stars.... 

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

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

CHAPTER THE TENTH

Race in Utopia

Section 1

Above the sphere of the elemental cravings and necessities, the soulof man is in a perpetual vacillation between two conflictingimpulses: the desire to assert his individual differences, thedesire for distinction, and his terror of isolation. He wants tostand out, but not too far out, and, on the contrary, he wantsto merge himself with a group, with some larger body, but notaltogether. Through all the things of life runs this tortuouscompromise, men follow the fashions but resent ready-made uniformson every plane of their being. The disposition to form aggregationsand 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 ofthe aggregations and of the ideals of aggregations about which men'ssympathies will twine, and upon which they will base a largeproportion of their conduct and personal policy, is the legitimatedefinition of sociology. 

Now the sort of aggregation to which men and women will referthemselves is determined partly by the strength and idiosyncrasy ofthe individual imagination, and partly by the reek of ideas thatchances to be in the air at the time. Men and women may vary greatlyboth in their innate and their acquired disposition towards thissort of larger body or that, to which their social reference can bemade. The "natural" social reference of a man is probably to somerather vaguely conceived tribe, as the "natural" social reference ofa dog is to a pack. But just as the social reference of a dog may beeducated until the reference to a pack is completely replaced by areference to an owner, so on his higher plane of educability thesocial reference of the civilised man undergoes the most remarkabletransformations. But the power and scope of his imagination and theneed he has of response sets limits to this process. A highlyintellectualised mature mind may refer for its data veryconsistently to ideas of a higher being so remote and indefinable asGod, so comprehensive as humanity, so far-reaching as the purpose inthings. I write "may, " but I doubt if this exaltation of referenceis 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 himselfalways to his "Greater Being" Humanity, he narrows constantly to hisprojected "Western Republic" of civilised men, and quite frequentlyto the minute indefinite body of Positivist subscribers. And thehistory of the Christian Church, with its development of orders andcults, sects and dissents, the history of fashionable society withits cliques and sets and every political history with its cabals andinner cabinets, witness to the struggle that goes on in the minds ofmen to adjust themselves to a body larger indeed than themselves, but which still does not strain and escape their imaginativegrasp. 

The statesman, both for himself and others, must recognise thisinadequacy of grasp, and the necessity for real and imaginaryaggregations to sustain men in their practical service of the orderof the world. He must be a sociologist; he must study the wholescience of aggregations in relation to that World State to which hisreason and his maturest thought direct him. He must lend himself tothe development of aggregatory ideas that favour the civilisingprocess, and he must do his best to promote the disintegration ofaggregations and the effacement of aggregatory ideas, that keep mennarrow and unreasonably prejudiced one against another. 

He will, of course, know that few men are even rudely consistent insuch matters, that the same man in different moods and on differentoccasions, is capable of referring himself in perfect good faith, not only to different, but to contradictory larger beings, and thatthe more important thing about an aggregatory idea from the Statemaker's point of view is not so much what it explicitly involves aswhat it implicitly repudiates. The natural man does not feel he isaggregating at all, unless he aggregates _against something. Herefers himself to the tribe; he is loyal to the tribe, and quiteinseparably he fears or dislikes those others outside the tribe. Thetribe is always at least defensively hostile and usually activelyhostile to humanity beyond the aggregation. The Anti-idea, it wouldseem, is inseparable from the aggregatory idea; it is a necessity ofthe human mind. When we think of the class A as desirable, we thinkof Not-A as undesirable. The two things are as inevitably connectedas the tendons of our hands, so that when we flatten down our littlefingers on our palms, the fourth digit, whether we want it or not, comes down halfway. All real working gods, one may remark, all godsthat are worshipped emotionally, are tribal gods, and every attemptto universalise the idea of God trails dualism and the devil afterit as a moral necessity. 

When we inquire, as well as the unformed condition of terrestrialsociology permits, into the aggregatory ideas that seem to satisfymen, we find a remarkable complex, a disorderly complex, in theminds of nearly all our civilised contemporaries. For example, allsorts of aggregatory ideas come and go across the chameleon surfacesof my botanist's mind. He has a strong feeling for systematicbotanists as against plant physiologists, whom he regards as lewdand evil scoundrels in this relation, but he has a strong feelingfor all botanists, and, indeed, all biologists, as againstphysicists, and those who profess the exact sciences, all of whom heregards as dull, mechanical, ugly-minded scoundrels in thisrelation; but he has a strong feeling for all who profess what iscalled Science as against psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and literary men, whom he regards as wild, foolish, immoralscoundrels in this relation; but he has a strong feeling for alleducated men as against the working man, whom he regards as acheating, lying, loafing, drunken, thievish, dirty scoundrel in thisrelation; but so soon as the working man is comprehended togetherwith those others, as Englishmen--which includes, in this case, Imay remark, the Scottish and Welsh--he holds them superior to allother sorts of European, whom he regards, &c.... 

Now one perceives in all these aggregatory ideas and rearrangementsof the sympathies one of the chief vices of human thought, due toits obsession by classificatory suggestions. [Footnote: See Chapterthe First, section 5, and the Appendix. ] The necessity for markingour classes has brought with it a bias for false and excessivecontrast, and we never invent a term but we are at once cramming itwith implications beyond its legitimate content. There is no feat ofirrelevance that people will not perform quite easily in this way;there is no class, however accidental, to which they will not atonce ascribe deeply distinctive qualities. The seventh sons ofseventh sons have remarkable powers of insight; people with acertain sort of ear commit crimes of violence; people with red hairhave souls of fire; all democratic socialists are trustworthypersons; all people born in Ireland have vivid imaginations and allEnglishmen are clods; all Hindoos are cowardly liars; allcurly-haired people are good-natured; all hunch-backs are energeticand wicked, and all Frenchmen eat frogs. Such stupid generalisationshave been believed with the utmost readiness, and acted upon bygreat numbers of sane, respectable people. And when the class isone's own class, when it expresses one of the aggregations to whichone refers one's own activities, then the disposition to divide allqualities between this class and its converse, and to cram one's ownclass with every desirable distinction, becomes overwhelming. 

It is part of the training of the philosopher to regard all suchgeneralisations with suspicion; it is part of the training of theUtopist and statesman, and all good statesmen are Utopists, tomingle something very like animosity with that suspicion. For crudeclassifications and false generalisations are the curse of allorganised human life. 

Section 2

Disregarding classes, cliques, sets, castes, and the like minoraggregations, concerned for the most part with details and minoraspects of life, one finds among the civilised peoples of the worldcertain broad types of aggregatory idea. There are, firstly, thenational ideas, ideas which, in their perfection, require auniformity of physical and mental type, a common idiom, a commonreligion, a distinctive style of costume, decoration, and thought, and a compact organisation acting with complete external unity. Likethe Gothic cathedral, the national idea is never found complete withall its parts; but one has in Russia, with her insistence onpolitical and religious orthodoxy, something approaching it prettyclosely, and again in the inland and typical provinces of China, where even a strange pattern of hat arouses hostility. We had it invigorous struggle to exist in England under the earlier Georges inthe minds of those who supported the Established Church. The idea ofthe fundamental nature of nationality is so ingrained in thought, with all the usual exaggeration of implication, that no one laughsat talk about Swedish painting or American literature. And I willconfess and point out that my own detachment from these delusions isso imperfect and discontinuous that in another passage I havecommitted myself to a short assertion of the exceptionally noblequality of the English imagination. [Footnote: Chapter the Seventh, section 6. ] I am constantly gratified by flattering untruths aboutEnglish superiority which I should reject indignantly were theapplication bluntly personal, and I am ever ready to believe thescenery of England, the poetry of England, even the decoration andmusic of England, in some mystic and impregnable way, the best. Thishabit of intensifying all class definitions, and particularly thosein which one has a personal interest, is in the very constitution ofman's mind. It is part of the defect of that instrument. We maywatch against it and prevent it doing any great injustices, orleading us into follies, but to eradicate it is an altogetherdifferent matter. There it is, to be reckoned with, like the coccyx, the pineal eye, and the vermiform appendix. And a too consistentattack on it may lead simply to its inversion, to a vindictivelypro-foreigner attitude that is equally unwise. 

The second sort of aggregatory ideas, running very often across theboundaries of national ideas and in conflict with them, arereligious ideas. In Western Europe true national ideas only emergedto their present hectic vigour after the shock of the Reformationhad liberated men from the great tradition of a Latin-speakingChristendom, a tradition the Roman Catholic Church has sustained asits modification of the old Latin-speaking Imperialism in the ruleof the pontifex maximus. There was, and there remains to this day, aprofound disregard of local dialect and race in the Roman Catholictradition, which has made that Church a persistently disintegratinginfluence in national life. Equally spacious and equally regardlessof tongues and peoples is the great Arabic-speaking religion ofMahomet. Both Christendom and Islam are indeed on their secularsides imperfect realisations of a Utopian World State. But thesecular side was the weaker side of these cults; they produced nosufficiently great statesmen to realise their spiritual forces, andit is not in Rome under pontifical rule, nor in Munster under theAnabaptists, but rather in Thomas a Kempis and Saint Augustin's Cityof 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 tobreak up the isolations in which nationality perfected itsprejudices and so to render possible the extension and consolidationof such a world-wide culture as mediaeval Christendom and Islamforeshadowed. The first onset of these expansive developments hasbeen marked in the world of mind by an expansion of politicalideals--Comte's "Western Republic" (1848) was the first Utopia thatinvolved the synthesis of numerous States--by the development of"Imperialisms" in the place of national policies, and by the searchfor a basis for wider political unions in racial traditions andlinguistic affinities. Anglo-Saxonism, Pan-Germanism, and the likeare such synthetic ideas. Until the eighties, the general tendencyof progressive thought was at one with the older Christian traditionwhich ignored "race, " and the aim of the expansive liberalismmovement, so far as it had a clear aim, was to Europeanise theworld, to extend the franchise to negroes, put Polynesians intotrousers, and train the teeming myriads of India to appreciate theexquisite lilt of The Lady of the Lake. There is always someabsurdity mixed with human greatness, and we must not let the factthat the middle Victorians counted Scott, the suffrage andpantaloons among the supreme blessings of life, conceal from us thevery real nobility of their dream of England's mission to theworld.... 

We of this generation have seen a flood of reaction against suchuniversalism. The great intellectual developments that centre uponthe work of Darwin have exacerbated the realisation that life is aconflict between superior and inferior types, it has underlined theidea that specific survival rates are of primary significance in theworld's development, and a swarm of inferior intelligences hasapplied to human problems elaborated and exaggerated versions ofthese generalisations. These social and political followers ofDarwin have fallen into an obvious confusion between race andnationality, and into the natural trap of patriotic conceit. Thedissent of the Indian and Colonial governing class to the firstcrude applications of liberal propositions in India has found avoice of unparalleled penetration in Mr. Kipling, whose want ofintellectual deliberation is only equalled by his poietic power. Thesearch for a basis for a new political synthesis in adaptablesympathies based on linguistic affinities, was greatly influenced byMax Muller's unaccountable assumption that language indicatedkindred, and led straight to wildly speculative ethnology, to thediscovery that there was a Keltic race, a Teutonic race, anIndo-European race, and so forth. A book that has had enormousinfluence in this matter, because of its use in teaching, is J. R. Green's Short History of the English People, with its grotesqueinsistence upon Anglo-Saxonism. And just now, the world is in a sortof delirium about race and the racial struggle. The Britonforgetting his Defoe, [Footnote: The True-born Englishman. ] the Jewforgetting the very word proselyte, the German forgetting hisanthropometric variations, and the Italian forgetting everything, are obsessed by the singular purity of their blood, and the dangerof contamination the mere continuance of other races involves. Trueto the law that all human aggregation involves the development of aspirit 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 isbeing steadily exaggerated. The natural tendency of every humanbeing towards a stupid conceit in himself and his kind, a stupiddepreciation of all unlikeness, is traded upon by this bastardscience. With the weakening of national references, and with thepause before reconstruction in religious belief, these new arbitraryand unsubstantial race prejudices become daily more formidable. Theyare shaping policies and modifying laws, and they will certainly beresponsible for a large proportion of the wars, hardships, andcruelties the immediate future holds in store for our earth. 

No generalisations about race are too extravagant for the inflamedcredulity of the present time. No attempt is ever made todistinguish differences in inherent quality--the true racialdifferences--from artificial differences due to culture. No lessonseems ever to be drawn from history of the fluctuating incidence ofthe civilising process first upon this race and then upon that. Thepolitically ascendant peoples of the present phase are understood tobe the superior races, including such types as the Sussex farmlabourer, the Bowery tough, the London hooligan, and the Parisapache; the races not at present prospering politically, such as theEgyptians, the Greeks, the Spanish, the Moors, the Chinese, theHindoos, the Peruvians, and all uncivilised people are representedas the inferior races, unfit to associate with the former on termsof equality, unfit to intermarry with them on any terms, unfit forany decisive voice in human affairs. In the popular imagination ofWestern Europe, the Chinese are becoming bright gamboge in colour, and unspeakably abominable in every respect; the people who areblack--the people who have fuzzy hair and flattish noses, and nocalves to speak of--are no longer held to be within the pale ofhumanity. These superstitions work out along the obvious lines ofthe popular logic. The depopulation of the Congo Free State by theBelgians, the horrible massacres of Chinese by European soldieryduring the Pekin expedition, are condoned as a painful but necessarypart of the civilising process of the world. The world-widerepudiation of slavery in the nineteenth century was done against avast sullen force of ignorant pride, which, reinvigorated by thenew delusions, swings back again to power. 

"Science" is supposed to lend its sanction to race mania, but it isonly "science" as it is understood by very illiterate people thatdoes anything of the sort--"scientists'" science, in fact. Whatscience has to tell about "The Races of Man" will be found compactlyset forth by Doctor J. Deinker, in the book published under thattitle. [Footnote: See also an excellent paper in the AmericanJournal of Sociology for March, 1904, The Psychology of RacePrejudice, by W. I. Thomas. ] From that book one may learn thebeginnings of race charity. Save for a few isolated pools of savagehumanity, there is probably no pure race in the whole world. Thegreat continental populations are all complex mixtures of numerousand fluctuating types. Even the Jews present every kind of skullthat is supposed to be racially distinctive, a vast range ofcomplexion--from blackness in Goa, to extreme fairness inHolland--and a vast mental and physical diversity. Were the Jewsto discontinue all intermarriage with "other races" henceforthfor 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 overdiversity. And, without going beyond the natives of the BritishIsles, one can discover an enormous range of types, tall and short, straight-haired and curly, fair and dark, supremely intelligent andunteachably stupid, straightforward, disingenuous, and what not. Thenatural tendency is to forget all this range directly "race" comesunder discussion, to take either an average or some quite arbitraryideal as the type, and think only of that. The more difficult thingto do, but the thing that must be done if we are to get just resultsin this discussion, is to do one's best to bear the range inmind. 

Let us admit that the average Chinaman is probably different incomplexion, and, indeed, in all his physical and psychicalproportions, from the average Englishman. Does that render theirassociation upon terms of equality in a World State impossible? Whatthe average Chinaman or Englishman may be, is of no importancewhatever to our plan of a World State. It is not averages thatexist, but individuals. The average Chinaman will never meet theaverage Englishman anywhere; only individual Chinamen will meetindividual Englishmen. Now among Chinamen will be found a range ofvariety as extensive as among Englishmen, and there is no singletrait presented by all Chinamen and no Englishman, or vice versa. Even the oblique eye is not universal in China, and there areprobably many Chinamen who might have been "changed at birth, " takenaway and educated into quite passable Englishmen. Even after we haveseparated out and allowed for the differences in carriage, physique, moral prepossessions, and so forth, due to their entirely divergentcultures, there remains, no doubt, a very great difference betweenthe average Chinaman and the average Englishman; but would thatamount to a wider difference than is to be found between extremetypes of Englishmen?

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

Be it remembered how doubtful and tainted is the bulk of ourevidence in these matters. These are extraordinarily subtleinquiries, from which few men succeed in disentangling the threadsof their personal associations--the curiously interwoven strands ofself-love and self-interest that affect their inquiries. One mightalmost say that instinct fights against such investigations, as itdoes undoubtedly against many necessary medical researches. Butwhile a long special training, a high tradition and the possibilityof reward and distinction, enable the medical student to face manytasks that are at once undignified and physically repulsive, thepeople from whom we get our anthropological information are rarelymen of more than average intelligence, and of no mental training atall. And the problems are far more elusive. It surely needs at leastthe gifts and training of a first-class novelist, combined with asedulous patience that probably cannot be hoped for in combinationwith 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 seemto understand the servant class in England, or the working men!Except for Mr. Bart Kennedy's A Man Adrift, I know of scarcely anybook that shows a really sympathetic and living understanding of thenavvy, the longshore sailor man, the rough chap of our own race. Caricatures, luridly tragic or gaily comic, in which themisconceptions of the author blend with the preconceptions of thereader and achieve success, are, of course, common enough. And thenconsider the sort of people who pronounce judgments on the moral andintellectual capacity of the negro, the Malay, or the Chinaman. Youhave missionaries, native schoolmasters, employers of coolies, traders, simple downright men, who scarcely suspect the existenceof any sources of error in their verdicts, who are incapable ofunderstanding the difference between what is innate and what isacquired, much less of distinguishing them in their interplay. Nowand then one seems to have a glimpse of something really living--inMary Kingsley's buoyant work, for instance--and even that may be nomore than my illusion. 

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

In one matter the careless and prejudiced nature of accepted racialgeneralisations is particularly marked. A great and increasingnumber of people are persuaded that "half-breeds" are peculiarlyevil creatures--as hunchbacks and bastards were supposed to be inthe middle ages. The full legend of the wickedness of the half-breedis best to be learnt from a drunken mean white from Virginia or theCape. The half-breed, one hears, combines all the vices of eitherparent, he is wretchedly poor in health and spirit, but vindictive, powerful, and dangerous to an extreme degree, his morals--the meanwhite has high and exacting standards--are indescribable even inwhispers in a saloon, and so on, and so on. There is really not anatom of evidence an unprejudiced mind would accept to sustain anybelief of the sort. There is nothing to show that the children ofracial admixture are, as a class, inherently either better or worsein any respect than either parent. There is an equally baselesstheory that they are better, a theory displayed to a fine degree offoolishness in the article on Shakespeare in the EncyclopaediaBritannica. Both theories belong to the vast edifice of sham sciencethat smothers the realities of modern knowledge. It may be that most"half-breeds" are failures in life, but that proves nothing. Theyare, in an enormous number of cases, illegitimate and outcast fromthe normal education of either race; they are brought up in homesthat are the battle-grounds of conflicting cultures; they labourunder a heavy premium of disadvantage. There is, of course, apassing suggestion of Darwin's to account for atavism that might goto support the theory of the vileness of half-breeds, if it had everbeen proved. But, then, it never has been proved. There is no proofin 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 ina condition of tutelage? Whether there is a race so inferior I donot know, but certainly there is no race so superior as to betrusted with human charges. The true answer to Aristotle's plea forslavery, that there are "natural slaves, " lies in the fact thatthere are no "natural" masters. Power is no more to be committed tomen without discipline and restriction than alcohol. The trueobjection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior butthat it corrupts the superior. There is only one sane and logicalthing to be done with a really inferior race, and that is toexterminate it. 

Now there are various ways of exterminating a race, and most of themare cruel. You may end it with fire and sword after the old Hebrewfashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniardsdid the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowlywith deleterious commodities, as the Americans do with most of theirIndians; you may incite it to wear clothing to which it is notaccustomed and to live under new and strange conditions that willexpose it to infectious diseases to which you yourselves are immune, as the missionaries do the Polynesians; you may resort to honestsimple murder, as we English did with the Tasmanians; or you canmaintain such conditions as conduce to "race suicide, " as theBritish administration does in Fiji. Suppose, then, for a moment, that there is an all-round inferior race; a Modern Utopia is underthe hard logic of life, and it would have to exterminate such a raceas quickly as it could. On the whole, the Fijian device seems theleast cruel. But Utopia would do that without any clumsiness of racedistinction, in exactly the same manner, and by the same machinery, as it exterminates all its own defective and inferior strains; thatis to say, as we have already discussed in Chapter the Fifth, section 1, by its marriage laws, and by the laws of the minimumwage. That extinction need never be discriminatory. If any of therace did, after all, prove to be fit to survive, they wouldsurvive--they would be picked out with a sure and automatic justicefrom the over-ready condemnation of all their kind. 

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

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

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

Section 4

I had already discussed the question of race with the botanist atLucerne. 

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

"Of course, " said I, "when you say Chinaman, you think of a creaturewith a pigtail, long nails, and insanitary habits, and when you saynegro you think of a filthy-headed, black creature in an old hat. You do this because your imagination is too feeble to disentanglethe 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 aquestion of unequal cultures. You would not like your daughter tomarry the sort of negro who steals hens, but then you would also notlike 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 fewwell-bred English girls do commit that sort of indiscretion. But youdon't think it necessary to generalise against men of your own racebecause there are drunken cab touts, and why should you generaliseagainst negroes? Because the proportion of undesirables is higheramong negroes, that does not justify a sweeping condemnation. Youmay have to condemn most, but why _all_? There may be--neither of usknows 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 heartto spite the botanist by creating a modern Desdemona and her loversooty black to the lips, there before our eyes. But I am not so sureof my case as that, and for the moment there shall come nothing morethan a swart-faced, dusky Burmese woman in the dress of the GreaterRule, with her tall Englishman (as he might be on earth) at herside. That, however, is a digression from my conversation with thebotanist. 

"And the Chinaman?" said the botanist. 

"I think we shall have all the buff and yellow peoples interminglingpretty 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 and make the thing seem easier for him. "Do try, " I said, "tograsp a Modern Utopian's conditions. The Chinaman will speak thesame language as his wife--whatever her race may be--he will wearcostume of the common civilised fashion, he will have much the sameeducation as his European rival, read the same literature, bow tothe same traditions. And you must remember a wife in Utopia issingularly not subject to her husband.... "

The botanist proclaims his invincible conclusion: "Everyone wouldcut her!"

"This is Utopia, " I said, and then sought once more to tranquillisehis mind. "No doubt among the vulgar, coarse-minded people outsidethe Rule there may be something of the sort. Every earthly moralblockhead, a little educated, perhaps, is to be found in Utopia. Youwill, no doubt, find the 'cut' and the 'boycott, ' and all those nicelittle devices by which dull people get a keen edge on life, intheir 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, withsome temper and great emphasis: "Well, I'm jolly glad anyhow thatI'm not to be a permanent resident in this Utopia, if our daughtersare 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 inthis life. But, as I have already observed, the happy ancients wentto their Utopias without this sort of company. 

Section 5

What gives the botanist so great an advantage in all hisAnti-Utopian utterances is his unconsciousness of his ownlimitations. He thinks in little pieces that lie about loose, andnothing has any necessary link with anything else in his mind. Sothat I cannot retort upon him by asking him, if he objects to thissynthesis of all nations, tongues and peoples in a World State, whatalternative 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, andthings like that, they do not feel that there is a future. They areunencumbered by any baggage of convictions whatever, in relation tothat. That, at least, is the only way in which I can explain ourfriend's high intellectual mobility. Attempts to correlatestatesmanship, which they regard with interest as a dramaticinterplay of personalities, with any secular movement of humanity, they class with the differential calculus and Darwinism, as thingsfar 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 allcultures and polities and races into one World State as thedesirable end upon which all civilising efforts converge, what doyou regard as the desirable end? Synthesis, one may remark inpassing, does not necessarily mean fusion, nor does it meanuniformity. 

The alternatives fall roughly under three headings. The first is toassume there is a best race, to define as well as one can that bestrace, 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 insanityabout 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 tobe said for the Jew. On its premises, this is a perfectly sound andreasonable policy, and it opens out a brilliant prospect for thescientific inventor for what one might call Welt-Apparat in thefuture, for national harrowing and reaping machines, andrace-destroying fumigations. The great plain of China ("YellowPeril") lends itself particularly to some striking wholesaleundertaking; it might, for example, be flooded for a few days, andthen disinfected with volcanic chlorine. Whether, when all theinferior races have been stamped out, the superior race would notproceed at once, or after a brief millennial period of socialharmony, to divide itself into sub-classes, and begin the businessover again at a higher level, is an interesting residual questioninto 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 ofconfidence in the public imagination. We have, however, a veryaudible and influential school, the Modern Imperialist school, whichdistinguishes its own race--there is a German, a British, and anAnglo-Saxon section in the school, and a wider teaching whichembraces the whole "white race" in one remarkable tolerance--as thesuperior race, as one, indeed, superior enough to own slaves, collectively, if not individually; and the exponents of thisdoctrine look with a resolute, truculent, but slightly indistincteye to a future in which all the rest of the world will be insubjection to these elect. The ideals of this type are set forthpretty clearly in Mr. Kidd's Control of the Tropics. The whole worldis to be administered by the "white" Powers--Mr. Kidd did notanticipate Japan--who will see to it that their subjects do not"prevent the utilisation of the immense natural resources which theyhave in charge. " Those other races are to be regarded as children, recalcitrant children at times, and without any of the tenderemotions of paternity. It is a little doubtful whether the raceslacking "in the elementary qualities of social efficiency" areexpected to acquire them under the chastening hands of those raceswhich, 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 inEngland with official Liberalism. 

Liberalism in England is not quite the same thing as Liberalism inthe rest of the world; it is woven of two strands. There isWhiggism, the powerful tradition of seventeenth-century Protestantand republican England, with its great debt to republican Rome, itsstrong constructive and disciplinary bias, its broad and originallyvery living and intelligent outlook; and interwoven with this thereis the sentimental and logical Liberalism that sprang from thestresses of the eighteenth century, that finds its early scarcedifferentiated expression in Harrington's Oceana, and after freshdraughts of the tradition of Brutus and Cato and some eleganttrifling with noble savages, budded in La Cite Morellyste, floweredin the emotional democratic naturalism of Rousseau, and boreabundant fruit in the French Revolution. These are two very distinctstrands. Directly they were freed in America from the grip ofconflict with British Toryism, they came apart as the Republican andDemocratic parties respectively. Their continued union in GreatBritain is a political accident. Because of this mixture, the wholecareer of English-speaking Liberalism, though it has gone to oneunbroken strain of eloquence, has never produced a clear statementof policy in relation to other peoples politically less fortunate. It has developed no definite ideas at all about the future ofmankind. The Whig disposition, which once had some play in India, was certainly to attempt to anglicise the "native, " to assimilatehis culture, and then to assimilate his political status with thatof his temporary ruler. But interwoven with this anglicisingtendency, which was also, by the bye, a Christianising tendency, wasa strong disposition, derived from the Rousseau strand, to leaveother peoples alone, to facilitate even the separation and autonomyof detached portions of our own peoples, to disintegrate finallyinto perfect, because lawless, individuals. The official expositionof British "Liberalism" to-day still wriggles unstably because ofthese conflicting constituents, but on the whole the Whig strand nowseems the weaker. The contemporary Liberal politician offers cogentcriticism upon the brutality and conceit of modern imperialisms, butthat seems to be the limit of his service. Taking what they do notsay and do not propose as an indication of Liberal intentions, itwould seem that the ideal of the British Liberals and of theAmerican Democrats is to favour the existence of just as many petty, loosely allied, or quite independent nationalities as possible, justas many languages as possible, to deprecate armies and all controls, and to trust to the innate goodness of disorder and the powers of anardent sentimentality to keep the world clean and sweet. TheLiberals will not face the plain consequence that such a state ofaffairs is hopelessly unstable, that it involves the maximum risk ofwar with the minimum of permanent benefit and public order. Theywill not reflect that the stars in their courses rule inexorablyagainst it. It is a vague, impossible ideal, with a rude sort ofunworldly moral beauty, like the gospel of the Doukhobors. Besidesthat charm it has this most seductive quality to an official BritishLiberal, that it does not exact intellectual activity nor indeedactivity of any sort whatever. It is, by virtue of that alone, a farless mischievous doctrine than the crude and violent Imperialism ofthe popular Press. 

Neither of these two schools of policy, neither the internationallaisser faire of the Liberals, nor "hustle to the top" Imperialism, promise any reality of permanent progress for the world of men. Theyare the resort, the moral reference, of those who will not thinkfrankly and exhaustively over the whole field of this question. Dothat, insist upon solutions of more than accidental applicability, and you emerge with one or other of two contrasted solutions, as theconsciousness of kind or the consciousness of individuality prevailsin your mind. In the former case you will adopt aggressiveImperialism, but you will carry it out to its "thorough" degree ofextermination. You will seek to develop the culture and power ofyour kind of men and women to the utmost in order to shoulder allother kinds from the earth. If on the other hand you appreciate theunique, you will aim at such a synthesis as this Utopia displays, asynthesis far more credible and possible than any otherWelt-Politik. In spite of all the pageant of modern war, synthesisis in the trend of the world. To aid and develop it, could be madethe open and secure policy of any great modern empire now. Modernwar, modern international hostility is, I believe, possible onlythrough the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the conceit andintellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind. Were the will of the mass of men lit and conscious, I am firmlyconvinced it would now burn steadily for synthesis and peace. 

It would be so easy to bring about a world peace within a fewdecades, was there but the will for it among men! The great empiresthat exist need but a little speech and frankness one with another. Within, the riddles of social order are already half solved in booksand thought, there are the common people and the subject peoples tobe educated and drilled, to be led to a common speech and a commonliterature, to be assimilated and made citizens; without, there isthe possibility of treaties. Why, for example, should Britain andFrance, or either and the United States, or Sweden and Norway, orHolland, or Denmark, or Italy, fight any more for ever? And if thereis no reason, how foolish and dangerous it is still to sustainlinguistic differences and custom houses, and all sorts of foolishand irritating distinctions between their various citizens! Whyshould not all these peoples agree to teach some common language, French, for example, in their common schools, or to teach eachother's languages reciprocally? Why should they not aim at a commonliterature, and bring their various common laws, their marriagelaws, and so on, into uniformity? Why should they not work for auniform minimum of labour conditions through all their communities?Why, then, should they not--except in the interests of a few rascalplutocrats--trade freely and exchange their citizenship freelythroughout their common boundaries? No doubt there are difficultiesto be found, but they are quite finite difficulties. What is thereto prevent a parallel movement of all the civilised Powers in theworld towards a common ideal and assimilation?

Stupidity--nothing but stupidity, a stupid brute jealousy, aimlessand 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. Thereal and the immediate has us in its grip, the accidental personalthing. The little effort of thought, the brief sustained effort ofwill, is too much for the contemporary mind. Such treaties, suchsympathetic international movements, are but dream stuff yet onearth, though Utopia has realised them long since and already passedthem by. 

CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH

The Bubble Bursts

Section 1

As I walk back along the river terrace to the hotel where thebotanist awaits me, and observe the Utopians I encounter, I have nothought that my tenure of Utopia becomes every moment moreprecarious. There float in my mind vague anticipations of more talkswith my double and still more, of a steady elaboration of detail, ofinteresting journeys of exploration. I forget that a Utopia is athing of the imagination that becomes more fragile with every addedcircumstance, that, like a soap-bubble, it is most brilliantly andvariously coloured at the very instant of its dissolution. ThisUtopia is nearly done. All the broad lines of its socialorganisation are completed now, the discussion of all its generaldifficulties and problems. Utopian individuals pass me by, finebuildings tower on either hand; it does not occur to me that I maylook too closely. To find the people assuming the concrete andindividual, is not, as I fondly imagine, the last triumph ofrealisation, but the swimming moment of opacity before the filmgives way. To come to individual emotional cases, is to return tothe 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, "hopingI 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 haveconversation. "

"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, andthinking fragmentarily of those samurai and their Rules. I entertainsomething of the satisfaction of a man who has finished building abridge; I feel that I have joined together things that I had neverjoined before. My Utopia seems real to me, very real, I can believein it, until the metal chair-back gives to my shoulder blades, andUtopian sparrows twitter and hop before my feet. I have a pleasantmoment of unhesitating self-satisfaction; I feel a shamelessexultation to be there. For a moment I forget the consideration thebotanist demands; the mere pleasure of completeness, of holding andcontrolling all the threads possesses me. 

"You _will_ persist in believing, " I say, with an aggressiveexpository note, "that if you meet this lady she will be a personwith the memories and sentiments of her double on earth. You thinkshe will understand and pity, and perhaps love you. Nothing of thesort is the case. " I repeat with confident rudeness, "Nothing of thesort is the case. Things are different altogether here; you canhardly 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--andinstantly I guess what has happened. She it is arrests my attentionfirst--long ago I knew she was a sweetly beautiful woman. She isfair, with frank blue eyes, that look with a sort of tenderreceptivity into her companion's face. For a moment or so theyremain, greyish figures in the cool shadow, against the sunlitgreenery of the gardens beyond. 

"It is Mary, " the botanist whispers with white lips, but he staresat the form of the man. His face whitens, it becomes so transfiguredwith emotion that for a moment it does not look weak. Then I seethat 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 andtense as the two come into the clearer light of the courtyard. Theman, I see, is one of the samurai, a dark, strong-faced man, a man Ihave never seen before, and she is wearing the robe that shows her afollower of the Lesser Rule. 

Some glimmering of the botanist's feelings strikes through to myslow sympathies. Of course--a strange man! I put out a restraininghand towards his arm. "I told you, " I say, "that very probably, mostprobably, she would have met some other. I tried to prepareyou. "

"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 areyou standing up?"

He and I stand up quickly, I as soon as he. But now the full meaningof 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'scaught his pride somehow and made a man of him. Whatever troubledthem there----"

He turns a face of white wrath on me, of accusation, and for themoment of unexpected force. "This is _your_ doing, " he says. "Youhave done this to mock me. He--of all men!" For a moment speechfails 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 wasthe sort of man a disciplined world has a use for?"

He makes no answer, but he looks at me with eyes that are positivelybaleful, and in the instant I read his mute but mulish resolve thatUtopia must end. 

"Don't let that old quarrel poison all this, " I say almostentreatingly. "It happened all differently here--everything isdifferent 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 adouble? Double! What do I care if things have been different here?This----"

He thrusts me weakly back with his long, white hand. "My God!" hesays almost forcibly, "what nonsense all this is! All these dreams!All Utopias! There she is----! Oh, but I have dreamt of her! Andnow----"

A sob catches him. I am really frightened by this time. I still tryto keep between him and these Utopians, and to hide his gesturesfrom them. 

"It's different here, " I persist. "It's different here. The emotionyou feel has no place in it. It's a scar from the earth--the sorescar 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 withscars, we live to be scarred, we are scars! We are the scars of thepast! These _dreams_, these childish dreams----!"

He does not need to finish his sentence, he waves an unteachabledestructive arm. 

My Utopia rocks about me. 

For a moment the vision of that great courtyard hangs real. Therethe Utopians live real about me, going to and fro, and the greatarchway blazes with sunlight from the green gardens by theriverside. The man who is one of the samurai, and his lady, whom thebotanist loved on earth, pass out of sight behind the marbleflower-set Triton that spouts coolness in the middle of the place. For a moment I see two working men in green tunics sitting on amarble seat in the shadow of the colonnade, and a sweet littlesilver-haired old lady, clad all in violet, and carrying a book, comes towards us, and lifts a curious eye at the botanist'sgestures. And then----

"Scars of the past! Scars of the past! These fanciful, uselessdreams!"

Section 2

There is no jerk, no sound, no hint of material shock. We are inLondon, and clothed in the fashion of the town. The sullen roar ofLondon fills our ears.... 

I see that I am standing beside an iron seat of poor design in thatgrey and gawky waste of asphalte--Trafalgar Square, and thebotanist, with perplexity in his face, stares from me to a poor, shrivelled, dirt-lined old woman--my God! what a neglected thing sheis!--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. Thesedreams----"

His sentence does not complete itself. He looks nervous andirritated. 

"You have a trick at times, " he says instead, "of making yoursuggestions so vivid----"

He takes a plunge. "If you don't mind, " he says in a sort ofquavering ultimatum, "we won't discuss that aspect of thequestion--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 likewater from an oiled slab. Of course--we lunched at our club. We cameback from Switzerland by no dream train but by the ordinary Baleexpress. We have been talking of that Lucerne woman he harps upon, and I have made some novel comment on his story. I have touchedcertain possibilities. 

"You can't conceivably understand, " he says. 

"The fact remains, " he goes on, taking up the thread of his argumentagain with an air of having defined our field, "we are the scars ofthe 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. Itis your weakness--if you don't mind my being frank--it makes youseem harsh and dogmatic. Life has gone easily for you; you havenever been badly tried. You have been lucky--you do not understandthe other way about. You are--hard. "

I answer nothing. 

He pants for breath. I perceive that in our discussion of his case Imust have gone too far, and that he has rebelled. Clearly I musthave said something wounding about that ineffectual love story ofhis. 

"You don't allow for my position, " he says, and it occurs to me tosay, "I'm obliged to look at the thing from my own point ofview.... "

One or other of us makes a move. What a lot of filthy, torn paper isscattered about the world! We walk slowly side by side towards thedirt-littered basin of the fountain, and stand regarding two grimytramps who sit and argue on a further seat. One holds a horrible oldboot in his hand, and gesticulates with it, while his other handcaresses his rag-wrapped foot. "Wot does Cham'lain _si_?" his wordsdrift to us. "W'y, 'e says, wot's the good of 'nvesting your kepitalwhere these 'ere Americans may dump it flat any time theylike.... "

(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 astring of omnibuses. A newsvendor at the corner spreads a newspaperplacard 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 jostlesagainst us. "I'll knock his blooming young 'ed orf if 'e cheeks meagain. It's these 'ere brasted Board Schools----"

An omnibus passes, bearing on a board beneath an incorrectly drawnUnion Jack an exhortation to the true patriot to "Buy Bumper'sBritish-Boiled Jam. " ... 

I am stunned beyond the possibility of discussion for a space. Inthis very place it must have been that the high terrace ran with thegardens below it, along which I came from my double to our hotel. Iam going back, but now through reality, along the path I passed sohappily in my dream. And the people I saw then are the people I amlooking at now--with a difference. 

The botanist walks beside me, white and nervously jerky in hismovements, his ultimatum delivered. 

We start to cross the road. An open carriage drives by, and we see ajaded, red-haired woman, smeared with paint, dressed in furs, andpetulantly discontented. Her face is familiar to me, her face, witha 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 acab-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 flowerfor her hair, poor girl!--regards us with a momentary speculation, and we get a whiff of foul language from two newsboys on thekerb. 

"We can't go on talking, " the botanist begins, and ducks aside justin time to save his eye from the ferule of a stupidly held umbrella. He is going to treat our little tiff about that lady as closed. Hehas the air of picking up our conversation again at some earlierpoint. 

He steps into the gutter, walks round outside a negro hawker, justescapes 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 andcrowd 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, "inLondon.... 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 tacitproposal to drop the lady out of the question. 

"At times, " he says, with a queer laugh, "you've almost made me livethere too. "

He reflects. "It doesn't do, you know. _No_! And I don't knowwhether, after all, I want----"

We are separated again by half-a-dozen lifted flagstones, a burningbrazier, and two engineers concerned with some underground businessor 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 impossibleperfections. "

"I wish, " I shout against the traffic, "I could _smash_ the world ofeveryday. "

My note becomes quarrelsome. "You may accept _this_ as the world ofreality, _you_ may consent to be one scar in an ill-dressed compoundwound, 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, rathercarelessly dressed, her books in a carrying-strap, comes across myfield of vision. The westward sun of London glows upon her face. Shehas 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 thisworld, the motives that are developed and organised there stirdumbly here and stifle in ten thousand futile hearts.... 

I overtake the botanist, who got ahead at the crossing by theadvantage 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 firstof a multitude--between sleeping and waking--who will presently berubbing it out of their eyes. "

A pinched and dirty little girl, with sores upon her face, stretchesout a bunch of wilting violets, in a pitifully thin little fist, andinterrupts my speech. "Bunch o' vi'lets--on'y a penny. "

"No!" I say curtly, hardening my heart. 

A ragged and filthy nursing mother, with her last addition to ourImperial People on her arm, comes out of a drinkshop, and stands alittle unsteadily, and wipes mouth and nose comprehensively with theback of a red chapped hand.... 

Section 4

"Isn't _that_ reality?" says the botanist, almost triumphantly, andleaves 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 thelimits of our intercourse. 

"The world dreams things like that, " I say, "because it suffers froman indigestion of such people as you. "

His low-toned self-complacency, like the faded banner of anobstinate fort, still flies unconquered. And you know, he's not evena happy man with it all!

For ten seconds or more I am furiously seeking in my mind for aword, for a term of abuse, for one compendious verbal missile thatshall smash this man for ever. It has to express total inadequacy ofimagination and will, spiritual anaemia, dull respectability, grosssentimentality, a cultivated pettiness of heart.... 

That word will not come. But no other word will do. Indeed the worddoes not exist. There is nothing with sufficient vituperativeconcentration for this moral and intellectual stupidity of educatedpeople.... 

"Er----" he begins. 

No! I can't endure him. 

With a passionate rapidity of movement, I leave his side, dartbetween a carriage and a van, duck under the head of a cab-horse, and board a 'bus going westward somewhere--but anyhow, going inexactly the reverse direction to the botanist. I clamber up thesteps and thread my swaying way to the seat immediately behind thedriver. 

"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 worldoccasionally. 

But from the front seat on the top of an omnibus on a sunnySeptember afternoon, the Strand, and Charing Cross corner, andWhitehall, and the great multitude of people, the great uproar ofvehicles, streaming in all directions, is apt to look a worldaltogether too formidable. It has a glare, it has a tumult andvigour that shouts one down. It shouts one down, if shouting is tocarry it. What good was it to trot along the pavement through thisnoise and tumult of life, pleading Utopia to that botanist? Whatgood would it be to recommend Utopia in this driver's preoccupiedear?

There are moments in the life of every philosopher and dreamer whenhe feels himself the flimsiest of absurdities, when the Thing inBeing has its way with him, its triumphant way, when it asks in aroar, 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 diffidentspeculation of primitive man, peering from behind a tree at an angryelephant. 

(There is an omen in that image. On how many occasions must thatancestor of ours have had just the Utopist's feeling of ambitiousunreality, have decided that on the whole it was wiser to go veryquietly home again, and leave the big beast alone? But, in the end, men rode upon the elephant's head, and guided him this way orthat.... The Thing in Being that roars so tremendously about CharingCross corner seems a bigger antagonist than an elephant, but then wehave better weapons than chipped flint blades.... )

After all, in a very little time everything that impresses me somightily this September afternoon will have changed or passed awayfor ever, everything. These omnibuses, these great, stalwart, crowded, many-coloured things that jostle one another, and make sohandsome a clatter-clamour, will all have gone; they and theirhorses and drivers and organisation; you will come here and you willnot find them. Something else will be here, some different sort ofvehicle, that is now perhaps the mere germ of an idea in someengineer student's brain. And this road and pavement will havechanged, and these impressive great buildings; other buildings willbe here, buildings that are as yet more impalpable than this pageyou read, more formless and flimsy by far than anything that isreasoned here. Little plans sketched on paper, strokes of a pen orof a brush, will be the first materialisations of what will at lastobliterate every detail and atom of these re-echoing actualitiesthat overwhelm us now. And the clothing and gestures of theseinnumerable people, the character of their faces and bearing, thesetoo will be recast in the spirit of what are now obscure andimpalpable beginnings. 

The new things will be indeed of the substance of the thing that is, but differing just in the measure of the will and imagination thatgoes to make them. They will be strong and fair as the will issturdy and organised and the imagination comprehensive and bold;they will be ugly and smeared with wretchedness as the will isfluctuating 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 thatslumbers inertly, and all this roar and pulsation of life is no morethan its heavy breathing.... My mind runs on to the thought of anawakening. 

As my omnibus goes lumbering up Cockspur Street through the clatterrattle of the cabs and carriages, there comes another fancy in mymind.... Could one but realise an apocalyptic image and suppose anangel, 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 atowering figure of flame and colour, standing between earth and sky, with a trumpet in his hands, over there above the Haymarket, againstthe October glow; and when he sounds, all the samurai, all who aresamurai in Utopia, will know themselves and one another.... 

(Whup! says a motor brougham, and a policeman stays the traffic withhis hand. )

All of us who partake of the samurai would know ourselves and oneanother!

For a moment I have a vision of this resurrection of the living, ofa vague, magnificent answer, of countless myriads at attention, ofall that is fine in humanity at attention, round the compass of theearth. 

Then that philosophy of individual uniqueness resumes its sway overmy 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 nottheatrical, 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 oneretina. The picture of a solid thing, although it is flattened andsimplified, is not necessarily a lie. Surely, surely, in the end, bydegrees, and steps, something of this sort, some such understanding, as this Utopia must come. First here, then there, single men andthen groups of men will fall into line--not indeed with my poorfaulty hesitating suggestions--but with a great and comprehensiveplan wrought out by many minds and in many tongues. It is justbecause my plan is faulty, because it mis-states so much, and omitsso 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 sovariously and abundantly. We see as much as it is serviceable for usto see, and we see no further. But the fresh undaunted generationscome to take on our work beyond our utmost effort, beyond the rangeof our ideas. They will learn with certainty things that to us areguesses and riddles.... 

There will be many Utopias. Each generation will have its newversion of Utopia, a little more certain and complete and real, withits problems lying closer and closer to the problems of the Thingin Being. Until at last from dreams Utopias will have come to beworking drawings, and the whole world will be shaping the finalWorld State, the fair and great and fruitful World State, that willonly not be a Utopia because it will be this world. So surely itmust be----

The policeman drops his hand. "Come up, " says the 'bus driver, andthe horses strain; "Clitter, clatter, cluck, clak, " the line ofhurrying hansoms overtakes the omnibus going west. A dexterous ladon a bicycle with a bale of newspapers on his back dodges nimblyacross the head of the column and vanishes up a side street. 

The omnibus sways forward. Rapt and prophetic, his plump handsclasped round the handle of his umbrella, his billycock hat a trifleaskew, this irascible little man of the Voice, this impatientdreamer, this scolding Optimist, who has argued so rudely anddogmatically about economics and philosophy and decoration, andindeed about everything under the sun, who has been so hard on thebotanist and fashionable women, and so reluctant in the matter ofbeer, is carried onward, dreaming dreams, dreams that with all theinevitable ironies of difference, may be realities when you and Iare dreams. 

He passes, and for a little space we are left with his egoisms andidiosyncrasies more or less in suspense. 

But why was he intruded? you ask. Why could not a modern Utopia bediscussed without this impersonation--impersonally? It has confusedthe book, you say, made the argument hard to follow, and throwna quality of insincerity over the whole. Are we but mocking atUtopias, you demand, using all these noble and generalised hopesas the backcloth against which two bickering personalities jar andsquabble? Do I mean we are never to view the promised land againexcept through a foreground of fellow-travellers? There is a commonnotion that the reading of a Utopia should end with a swelling heartand clear resolves, with lists of names, formation of committees, and even the commencement of subscriptions. But this Utopia beganupon a philosophy of fragmentation, and ends, confusedly, amidst agross tumult of immediate realities, in dust and doubt, with, at thebest, one individual's aspiration. Utopias were once in good faith, projects for a fresh creation of the world and of a most unworldlycompleteness; this so-called Modern Utopia is a mere story ofpersonal adventures among Utopian philosophies. 

Indeed, that came about without the writer's intention. So it wasthe summoned vision came. For I see about me a great multitude oflittle souls and groups of souls as darkened, as derivative as myown; with the passage of years I understand more and more clearlythe quality of the motives that urge me and urge them to do whateverwe do.... Yet that is not all I see, and I am not altogether boundedby my littleness. Ever and again, contrasting with this immediatevision, come glimpses of a comprehensive scheme, in which thesepersonalities float, the scheme of a synthetic wider being, thegreat State, mankind, in which we all move and go, like bloodcorpuscles, like nerve cells, it may be at times like brain cells, in the body of a man. But the two visions are not seen consistentlytogether, at least by me, and I do not surely know that they existconsistently together. The motives needed for those wider issuescome not into the interplay of my vanities and wishes. That greaterscheme lies about the men and women I know, as I have tried to makethe vistas and spaces, the mountains, cities, laws, and order ofUtopia lie about my talking couple, too great for their sustainedcomprehension. When one focuses upon these two that wide landscapebecomes indistinct and distant, and when one regards that then thereal persons one knows grow vague and unreal. Nevertheless, I cannotseparate these two aspects of human life, each commenting on theother. In that incongruity between great and individual inheres theincompatibility I could not resolve, and which, therefore, I havehad to present in this conflicting form. At times that great schemedoes seem to me to enter certain men's lives as a passion, as a realand living motive; there are those who know it almost as if it was athing of desire; even for me, upon occasion, the little lures of theimmediate life are seen small and vain, and the soul goes out tothat mighty Being, to apprehend it and serve it and possess. Butthis is an illumination that passes as it comes, a rare transitorylucidity, leaving the soul's desire suddenly turned to presumptionand hypocrisy upon the lips. One grasps at the Universe andattains--Bathos. The hungers, the jealousies, the prejudices andhabits 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 inthese blinkers it is we are driven to an end we cannot understand. And then, for measured moments in the night watches or as one walksalone or while one sits in thought and speech with a friend, thewider aspirations glow again with a sincere emotion, with thecolours of attainable desire.... 

That is my all about Utopia, and about the desire and need forUtopia, and how that planet lies to this planet that bears the dailylives 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 theVersion given in Mind, vol. Xiii. (N. S. ), No. 51. 

(See also Chapter I. , Section 6, and Chapter X. , Sections 1 and 2. )

It seems to me that I may most propitiously attempt to interest youthis evening by describing very briefly the particular metaphysicaland philosophical system in which I do my thinking, and moreparticularly by setting out for your consideration one or two pointsin which I seem to myself to differ most widely from currentaccepted philosophy. 

You must be prepared for things that will strike you as crude, for acertain difference of accent and dialect that you may not like, andyou must be prepared too to hear what may strike you as the clumsystatement of my ignorant rediscovery of things already beautifullythought out and said. But in the end you may incline to forgive mesome of this first offence.... It is quite unavoidable that, insetting out these intellectual foundations of mine, I should lapsefor a moment or so towards autobiography. 

A convergence of circumstances led to my having my knowledge ofconcrete things quite extensively developed before I came tophilosophical examination at all. I have heard someone say that asavage or an animal is mentally a purely objective being, and inthat respect I was like a savage or an animal until I was well overtwenty. I was extremely unaware of the subjective or introvertedelement in my being. I was a Positivist without knowing it. My earlyeducation was a feeble one; it was one in which my privateobservation, inquiry and experiment were far more important factorsthan any instruction, or rather perhaps the instruction I receivedwas less even than what I learnt for myself, and it terminated atthirteen. I had come into pretty intimate contact with the harderrealities of life, with hunger in various forms, and many base anddisagreeable necessities, before I was fifteen. About that age, following the indication of certain theological and speculativecuriosities, I began to learn something of what I will calldeliberately and justly, Elementary Science--stuff I got out ofCassell's Popular Educator and cheap text-books--and then, throughaccidents and ambitions that do not matter in the least to us now, Icame to three years of illuminating and good scientific work. Thecentral fact of those three years was Huxley's course in ComparativeAnatomy at the school in Exhibition Road. About that as a nucleus Iarranged a spacious digest of facts. At the end of that time I hadacquired what I still think to be a fairly clear, and complete andordered view of the ostensibly real universe. Let me try to give youthe chief things I had. I had man definitely placed in the greatscheme of space and time. I knew him incurably for what he was, finite and not final, a being of compromises and adaptations. I hadtraced his lungs, for example, from a swimming bladder, step bystep, with scalpel and probe, through a dozen types or more, I hadseen the ancestral caecum shrink to that disease nest, the appendixof to-day, I had watched the gill slit patched slowly to thepurposes of the ear and the reptile jaw suspension utilised to ekeout the needs of a sense organ taken from its native and naturalwater. I had worked out the development of those extraordinarilyunsatisfactory and untrustworthy instruments, man's teeth, from theskin scutes of the shark to their present function as a basis forgold stoppings, and followed the slow unfolding of the complex andpainful process of gestation through which man comes into the world. I had followed all these things and many kindred things bydissection and in embryology--I had checked the whole theory ofdevelopment again in a year's course of palaeontology, and I hadtaken the dimensions of the whole process, by the scale of thestars, in a course of astronomical physics. And all that amount ofobjective elucidation came before I had reached the beginnings ofany philosophical or metaphysical inquiry, any inquiry as to why Ibelieved, how I believed, what I believed, or what the fundamentalstuff of things was. 

Now following hard upon this interlude with knowledge, came a timewhen I had to give myself to teaching, and it became advisable toacquire one of those Teaching Diplomas that are so widely and sofoolishly despised, and that enterprise set me to a superficial, butsuggestive study of educational method, of educational theory, oflogic, of psychology, and so at last, when the little affair withthe diploma was settled, to philosophy. Now to come to logic overthe bracing uplands of comparative anatomy is to come to logic witha 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 haverealised to the marrow, that all the physical organs of man and allhis physical structure are what they are through a series ofadaptations and approximations, and that they are kept up to a levelof practical efficiency only by the elimination of death, and thatthis is true also of his brain and of his instincts and of many ofhis mental predispositions, you are not going to take his thinkingapparatus unquestioningly as being in any way mysteriously differentand better. And I had read only a little logic before I became awareof implications that I could not agree with, and assumptions thatseemed to me to be altogether at variance with the general scheme ofobjective fact established in my mind. 

I came to an examination of logical processes and of language withthe expectation that they would share the profoundly provisionalcharacter, the character of irregular limitation and adaptation thatpervades the whole physical and animal being of man. And I found thething I had expected. And as a consequence I found a sort ofintellectual hardihood about the assumptions of logic, that at firstconfused me and then roused all the latent scepticism in mymind. 

My first quarrel with the accepted logic I developed long ago in alittle paper that was printed in the Fortnightly Review in July1891. It was called the "Rediscovery of the Unique, " and re-readingit I perceive not only how bad and even annoying it was in manner--athing I have long known--but also how remarkably bad it was inexpression. I have good reason for doubting whether my powers ofexpression in these uses have very perceptibly improved, but at anyrate I am doing my best now with that previous failure beforeme. 

That unfortunate paper, among other oversights I can no longerregard as trivial, disregarded quite completely the fact that awhole literature upon the antagonism of the one and the many, of thespecific ideal and the individual reality, was already in existence. It defined no relations to other thought or thinkers. I understandnow, what I did not understand then, why it was totally ignored. Butthe idea underlying that paper I cling to to-day. I consider it anidea that will ultimately be regarded as one of primary importanceto human thought, and I will try and present the substance of thatearly paper again now very briefly, as the best opening of mygeneral case. My opening scepticism is essentially a doubt of theobjective reality of classification. I have no hesitation in sayingthat is the first and primary proposition of my philosophy. 

I have it in my mind that classification is a necessary condition ofthe working of the mental implement, but that it is a departure fromthe objective truth of things, that classification is veryserviceable for the practical purposes of life but a very doubtfulpreliminary to those fine penetrations the philosophical purpose, inits more arrogant moods, demands. All the peculiarities of my way ofthinking derive from that. 

A mind nourished upon anatomical study is of course permeated withthe suggestion of the vagueness and instability of biologicalspecies. A biological species is quite obviously a great number ofunique individuals which is separable from other biological speciesonly by the fact that an enormous number of other linkingindividuals are inaccessible in time--are in other words dead andgone--and each new individual in that species does, in thedistinction of its own individuality, break away in howeverinfinitesimal degree from the previous average properties of thespecies. There is no property of any species, even the propertiesthat constitute the specific definition, that is not a matter ofmore or less. If, for example, a species be distinguished by asingle large red spot on the back, you will find if you go over agreat 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, andso on. And this is true not only of biological species. It is trueof the mineral specimens constituting a mineral species, and Iremember as a constant refrain in the lectures of Prof. Judd uponrock classification, the words "they pass into one another byinsensible gradations. " That is true, I hold, of all things. 

You will think perhaps of atoms of the elements as instances ofidentically similar things, but these are things not of experiencebut of theory, and there is not a phenomenon in chemistry that isnot equally well explained on the supposition that it is merely theimmense quantities of atoms necessarily taken in any experiment thatmask by the operation of the law of averages the fact that each atomalso has its unique quality, its special individual difference. Thisidea of uniqueness in all individuals is not only true of theclassifications of material science; it is true, and still moreevidently true, of the species of common thought, it is true ofcommon terms. Take the word chair. When one says chair, one thinksvaguely of an average chair. But collect individual instances, thinkof armchairs and reading chairs, and dining-room chairs and kitchenchairs, chairs that pass into benches, chairs that cross theboundary and become settees, dentists' chairs, thrones, operastalls, seats of all sorts, those miraculous fungoid growths thatcumber the floor of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, and you willperceive what a lax bundle in fact is this simple straightforwardterm. In co-operation with an intelligent joiner I would undertaketo defeat any definition of chair or chairishness that you gave me. Chairs just as much as individual organisms, just as much as mineraland rock specimens, are unique things--if you know them well enoughyou will find an individual difference even in a set of machine-madechairs--and it is only because we do not possess minds of unlimitedcapacity, because our brain has only a limited number ofpigeon-holes for our correspondence with an unlimited universe ofobjective uniques, that we have to delude ourselves into the beliefthat there is a chairishness in this species common to anddistinctive of all chairs. 

Let me repeat; this is of the very smallest importance in all thepractical affairs of life, or indeed in relation to anything butphilosophy and wide generalisations. But in philosophy it mattersprofoundly. If I order two new-laid eggs for breakfast, up come twounhatched but still unique avian individuals, and the chances arethey serve my rude physiological purpose. I can afford to ignore thehens' eggs of the past that were not quite so nearly this sort ofthing, and the hens' eggs of the future that will accumulatemodification age by age; I can venture to ignore the rare chance ofan abnormality in chemical composition and of any startlingaberration in my physiological reaction; I can, with a confidencethat is practically perfect, say with unqualified simplicity "twoeggs, " but not if my concern is not my morning's breakfast but theutmost 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, thatall hard logical reasoning tends to imply and is apt to imply aconfidence in the objective reality of classification. Consequentlyin denying that I deny the absolute validity of logic. Classificationand number, which in truth ignore the fine differences of objectiverealities, have in the past of human thought been imposed uponthings. Let me for clearness' sake take a liberty here--commit, asyou may perhaps think, an unpardonable insolence. Hindoo thoughtand Greek thought alike impress me as being overmuch obsessed byan objective treatment of certain necessary preliminary conditionsof human thought--number and definition and class and abstractform. But these things, number, definition, class and abstractform, I hold, are merely unavoidable conditions of mentalactivity--regrettable conditions rather than essential facts. Theforceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth alittle in taking hold of it. 

It was about this difficulty that the mind of Plato played a littleinconclusively all his life. For the most part he tended to regardthe _idea_ as the something behind reality, whereas it seems to methat the idea is the more proximate and less perfect thing, thething by which the mind, by ignoring individual differences, attempts to comprehend an otherwise unmanageable number of uniquerealities. 

Let me give you a rough figure of what I am trying to convey in thisfirst attack upon the philosophical validity of general terms. Youhave seen the results of those various methods of black and whitereproduction that involve the use of a rectangular net. You know thesort of process picture I mean--it used to be employed veryfrequently in reproducing photographs. At a little distance youreally seem to have a faithful reproduction of the original picture, but when you peer closely you find not the unique form and masses ofthe original, but a multitude of little rectangles, uniform in shapeand size. The more earnestly you go into the thing, the closer youlook, the more the picture is lost in reticulations. I submit theworld of reasoned inquiry has a very similar relation to the world Icall objectively real. For the rough purposes of every day thenet-work picture will do, but the finer your purpose the less itwill serve, and for an ideally fine purpose, for absolute andgeneral knowledge that will be as true for a man at a distance witha telescope as for a man with a microscope it will not serve atall. 

It is true you can make your net of logical interpretation finer andfiner, you can fine your classification more and more--up to acertain limit. But essentially you are working in limits, and as youcome closer, as you look at finer and subtler things, as you leavethe practical purpose for which the method exists, the element oferror increases. Every species is vague, every term goes cloudy atits edges, and so in my way of thinking, relentless logic is onlyanother phrase for a stupidity, --for a sort of intellectualpigheadedness. If you push a philosophical or metaphysical inquirythrough a series of valid syllogisms--never committing any generallyrecognised fallacy--you nevertheless leave a certain rubbing andmarginal loss of objective truth and you get deflections that aredifficult to trace, at each phase in the process. Every specieswaggles about in its definition, every tool is a little loose in itshandle, every scale has its individual error. So long as you arereasoning for practical purposes about the finite things ofexperience, you can every now and then check your process, andcorrect your adjustments. But not when you make what are calledphilosophical and theological inquiries, when you turn yourimplement towards the final absolute truth of things. Doing that islike firing at an inaccessible, unmarkable and indestructible targetat an unknown distance, with a defective rifle and variablecartridges. 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 reasoningprocesses arising out of the fallacy of classification in what isquite conceivably a universe of uniques, forms only one introductoryaspect of my general scepticism of the Instrument of Thought. 

I have now to tell you of another aspect of this scepticism of theinstrument which concerns negative terms. 

Classes in logic are not only represented by circles with a hardfirm outline, whereas they have no such definite limits, but alsothere is a constant disposition to think of negative terms as ifthey represented positive classes. With words just as with numbersand abstract forms there are definite phases of human development. There is, you know, with regard to number, the phase when man canbarely count at all, or counts in perfect good faith and sanity uponhis fingers. Then there is the phase when he is struggling with thedevelopment of number, when he begins to elaborate all sorts ofideas about numbers, until at last he develops complex superstitionsabout perfect numbers and imperfect numbers, about threes and sevensand the like. The same is the case with abstracted forms, and evento-day we are scarcely more than heads out of the vast subtle muddleof thinking about spheres and ideally perfect forms and so on, thatwas the price of this little necessary step to clear thinking. Youknow better than I do how large a part numerical and geometricalmagic, numerical and geometrical philosophy has played in thehistory of the mind. And the whole apparatus of language and mentalcommunication is beset with like dangers. The language of the savageis, I suppose, purely positive; the thing has a name, the name has athing. This indeed is the tradition of language, and to-day even, we, when we hear a name, are predisposed--and sometimes it is a veryvicious disposition--to imagine forthwith something answering to thename. We are disposed, as an incurable mental vice, to accumulateintension in terms. If I say to you Wodget or Crump, you findyourself passing over the fact that these are nothings, these are, so to speak, mere blankety blanks, and trying to think what sort ofthing a Wodget or a Crump may be. And where this disposition hascome in, in its most alluring guise, is in the case of negativeterms. Our instrument of knowledge persists in handling even suchopenly negative terms as the Absolute, the Infinite, as though theywere real existences, and when the negative element is ever solittle disguised, as it is in such a word as Omniscience, then theillusion of positive reality may be complete. 

Please remember that I am trying to tell you my philosophy, and notarguing about yours. Let me try and express how in my mind thismatter of negative terms has shaped itself. I think of somethingwhich I may perhaps best describe as being off the stage or out ofcourt, or as the Void without Implications, or as Nothingness or asOuter Darkness. This is a sort of hypothetical Beyond to the visibleworld of human thought, and thither I think all negative terms reachat last, and merge and become nothing. Whatever positive class youmake, whatever boundary you draw, straight away from that boundarybegins the corresponding negative class and passes into theillimitable horizon of nothingness. You talk of pink things, youignore, if you are a trained logician, the more elusive shades ofpink, and draw your line. Beyond is the not pink, known andknowable, and still in the not pink region one comes to the OuterDarkness. Not blue, not happy, not iron, all the not classes meet inthat Outer Darkness. That same Outer Darkness and nothingness isinfinite space, and infinite time, and any being of infinitequalities, and all that region I rule out of court in my philosophyaltogether. I will neither affirm nor deny if I can help it aboutany not things. I will not deal with not things at all, except byaccident and inadvertence. If I use the word 'infinite' I use it asone often uses 'countless, ' "the countless hosts of the enemy"--or'immeasurable'--"immeasurable cliffs"--that is to say as the limitof measurement rather than as the limit of imaginary measurability, as a convenient equivalent to as many times this cloth yard as youcan, and as many again and so on and so on. Now a great number ofapparently positive terms are, or have become, practically negativeterms and are under the same ban with me. A considerable number ofterms that have played a great part in the world of thought, seem tome to be invalidated by this same defect, to have no content or anundefined content or an unjustifiable content. For example, thatword Omniscient, as implying infinite knowledge, impresses me asbeing a word with a delusive air of being solid and full, when it isreally hollow with no content whatever. I am persuaded that knowingis the relation of a conscious being to something not itself, thatthe thing known is defined as a system of parts and aspects andrelationships, that knowledge is comprehension, and so that onlyfinite things can know or be known. When you talk of a being ofinfinite extension and infinite duration, omniscient and omnipotentand Perfect, you seem to me to be talking in negatives of nothingwhatever. When you speak of the Absolute you speak to me of nothing. If however you talk of a great yet finite and thinkable being, abeing not myself, extending beyond my imagination in time and space, knowing all that I can think of as known and capable of doing allthat I can think of as done, you come into the sphere of my mentaloperations, and into the scheme of my philosophy.... 

These then are my first two charges against our Instrument ofKnowledge, firstly, that it can work only by disregardingindividuality and treating uniques as identically similar objects inthis respect or that, so as to group them under one term, and thatonce it has done so it tends automatically to intensify thesignificance of that term, and secondly, that it can only dealfreely with negative terms by treating them as though they werepositive. But I have a further objection to the Instrument of HumanThought, that is not correlated to these former objections and thatis also rather more difficult to convey. 

Essentially this idea is to present a sort of stratification inhuman ideas. I have it very much in mind that various terms in ourreasoning lie, as it were, at different levels and in differentplanes, and that we accomplish a large amount of error and confusionby reasoning terms together that do not lie or nearly lie in thesame plane. 

Let me endeavour to make myself a little less obscure by a mostflagrant instance from physical things. Suppose some one began totalk seriously of a man seeing an atom through a microscope, orbetter perhaps of cutting one in half with a knife. There are anumber of non-analytical people who would be quite prepared tobelieve that an atom could be visible to the eye or cut in thismanner. But any one at all conversant with physical conceptionswould almost as soon think of killing the square root of 2 with arook rifle as of cutting an atom in half with a knife. Ourconception of an atom is reached through a process of hypothesis andanalysis, and in the world of atoms there are no knives and nomen to cut. If you have thought with a strong consistent mentalmovement, then when you have thought of your atom under the knifeblade, your knife blade has itself become a cloud of swinginggrouped atoms, and your microscope lens a little universe ofoscillatory and vibratory molecules. If you think of the universe, thinking at the level of atoms, there is neither knife to cut, scaleto weigh nor eye to see. The universe at that plane to which themind of the molecular physicist descends has none of the shapes orforms of our common life whatever. This hand with which I write isin the universe of molecular physics a cloud of warring atoms andmolecules, combining and recombining, colliding, rotating, flyinghither and thither in the universal atmosphere of ether. 

You see, I hope, what I mean, when I say that the universe ofmolecular physics is at a different level from the universe ofcommon experience;--what we call stable and solid is in that world afreely moving system of interlacing centres of force, what we callcolour and sound is there no more than this length of vibration orthat. We have reached to a conception of that universe of molecularphysics by a great enterprise of organised analysis, and ouruniverse of daily experiences stands in relation to that elementalworld as if it were a synthesis of those elemental things. 

I would suggest to you that this is only a very extreme instance ofthe general state of affairs, that there may be finer and subtlerdifferences of level between one term and another, and that termsmay very well be thought of as lying obliquely and as being twistedthrough different levels. 

It will perhaps give a clearer idea of what I am seeking to conveyif I suggest a concrete image for the whole world of a man's thoughtand knowledge. Imagine a large clear jelly, in which at all anglesand in all states of simplicity or contortion his ideas areimbedded. They are all valid and possible ideas as they lie, none inreality incompatible with any. If you imagine the direction of up ordown in this clear jelly being as it were the direction in which onemoves by analysis or by synthesis, if you go down for example frommatter to atoms and centres of force and up to men and states andcountries--if you will imagine the ideas lying in that manner--youwill get the beginning of my intention. But our Instrument, ourprocess of thinking, like a drawing before the discovery ofperspective, appears to have difficulties with the third dimension, appears capable only of dealing with or reasoning about ideas byprojecting them upon the same plane. It will be obvious that a greatmultitude of things may very well exist together in a solid jelly, which would be overlapping and incompatible and mutuallydestructive, when projected together upon one plane. Through thebias in our Instrument to do this, through reasoning between termsnot in the same plane, an enormous amount of confusion, perplexityand mental deadlocking occurs. 

The old theological deadlock between predestination and free-willserves admirably as an example of the sort of deadlock I mean. Takelife at the level of common sensation and common experience andthere is no more indisputable fact than man's freedom of will, unless it is his complete moral responsibility. But make only theleast penetrating of analyses and you perceive a world of inevitableconsequences, a rigid succession of cause and effect. Insist upon aflat agreement between the two, and there you are! The Instrumentfails. 

It is upon these three objections, and upon an extreme suspicion ofabstract terms which arises materially out of my first and secondobjections, that I chiefly rest my case for a profound scepticism ofthe remoter possibilities of the Instrument of Thought. It is athing no more perfect than the human eye or the human ear, thoughlike those other instruments it may have undefined possibilities ofevolution towards increased range, and increased power. 

So much for my main contention. But before I conclude I may--since Iam here--say a little more in the autobiographical vein, and witha view to your discussion to show how I reconcile this fundamentalscepticism with the very positive beliefs about world-wide issues Ipossess, and the very definite distinction I make between right andwrong. 

I reconcile these things by simply pointing out to you that if thereis any validity in my image of that three dimensional jelly in whichour ideas are suspended, such a reconciliation as you demand inlogic, such a projection of the things as in accordance upon oneplane, is totally unnecessary and impossible. 

This insistence upon the element of uniqueness in being, thissubordination of the class to the individual difference, not onlydestroys the universal claim of philosophy, but the universal claimof ethical imperatives, the universal claim of any religiousteaching. If you press me back upon my fundamental position I mustconfess I put faith and standards and rules of conduct upon exactlythe same level as I put my belief of what is right in art, and whatI consider right practice in art. I have arrived at a certain sortof self-knowledge and there are, I find, very distinct imperativesfor me, but I am quite prepared to admit there is no proving themimperative on any one else. One's political proceedings, one's moralacts are, I hold, just as much self-expression as one's poetry orpainting or music. But since life has for its primordial elementsassimilation and aggression, I try not only to obey my imperatives, but to put them persuasively and convincingly into other minds, tobring about _my_ good and to resist and overcome _my_ evil as thoughthey were the universal Good and the universal Evil in whichunthinking men believe. And it is obviously in no way contradictoryto this philosophy, for me, if I find others respondingsympathetically to any notes of mine or if I find myself respondingsympathetically to notes sounding about me, to give that commonresemblance between myself and others a name, to refer these othersand myself in common to this thing as if it were externalised andspanned us all. 

Scepticism of the Instrument is for example not incompatible withreligious association and with organisation upon the basis of acommon faith. It is possible to regard God as a Being synthetic inrelation to men and societies, just as the idea of a universe ofatoms and molecules and inorganic relationships is analytical inrelation to human life. 

The repudiation of demonstration in any but immediate and verifiablecases that this Scepticism of the Instrument amounts to, theabandonment of any universal validity for moral and religiouspropositions, brings ethical, social and religious teaching into theprovince of poetry, and does something to correct the estrangementbetween knowledge and beauty that is a feature of so much mentalexistence at this time. All these things are self-expression. Suchan opinion sets a new and greater value on that penetrating andilluminating quality of mind we call insight, insight which when itfaces towards the contradictions that arise out of the imperfectionsof the mental instrument is called humour. In these innate, unteachable qualities I hold--in humour and the sense ofbeauty--lies such hope of intellectual salvation from the originalsin of our intellectual instrument as we may entertain in thisuncertain and fluctuating world of unique appearances.... 

So frankly I spread my little equipment of fundamental assumptionsbefore you, heartily glad of the opportunity you have given me oftaking them out, of looking at them with the particularity thepresence of hearers ensures, and of hearing the impression they makeupon you. Of course, such a sketch must have an inevitable crudityof effect. The time I had for it--I mean the time I was able to givein preparation--was altogether too limited for any exhaustive finishof presentation; but I think on the whole I have got the main linesof this sketch map of my mental basis true. Whether I have mademyself comprehensible is a different question altogether. It is foryou rather than me to say how this sketch map of mine lies withregard 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.