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Title: A Modern Utopia

Author: H. G. Wells

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A MODERN UTOPIA

BY H. G. WELLS

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A NOTE TO THE READER

This book is in all probability the last of a series of writings, of which—disregarding certain earlier

disconnected essays—my Anticipations was the beginning. Originally I intended Anticipations to be

my sole digression from my art or trade (or what you will) of an imaginative writer. I wrote that

book in order to clear up the muddle in my own mind about innumerable social and political

questions, questions I could not keep out of my work, which it distressed me to touch upon in a

stupid haphazard way, and which no one, so far as I knew, had handled in a manner to satisfy my

needs. But Anticipations did not achieve its end. I have a slow constructive hesitating sort of mind,

and when I emerged from that undertaking I found I had still most of my questions to state and

solve. In Mankind in the Making, therefore, I tried to review the social organisation in a different

way, to consider it as an educational process instead of dealing with it as a thing with a future

history, and if I made this second book even less satisfactory from a literary standpoint than the

former (and this is my opinion), I blundered, I think, more edifyingly—at least from the point of

view of my own instruction. I ventured upon several themes with a greater frankness than I had

used in Anticipations, and came out of that second effort guilty of much rash writing, but with a

considerable development of formed opinion. In many matters I had shaped out at last a certain

personal certitude, upon which I feel I shall go for the rest of my days. In this present book I have

tried to settle accounts with a number of issues left over or opened up by its two predecessors, to

correct them in some particulars, and to give the general picture of a Utopia that has grown up in

my mind during the course of these speculations as a state of affairs at once possible and more

desirable than the world in which I live. But this book has brought me back to imaginative writing

again. In its two predecessors the treatment of social organisation had been purely objective; here

my intention has been a little wider and deeper, in that I have tried to present not simply an ideal,

but an ideal in reaction with two personalities. Moreover, since this may be the last book of the kind

I shall ever publish, I have written into it as well as I can the heretical metaphysical scepticism upon

which all my thinking rests, and I have inserted certain sections reflecting upon the established

methods of sociological and economic science....

The last four words will not attract the butterfly reader, I know. I have done my best to make the

whole of this book as lucid and entertaining as its matter permits, because I want it read by as many

people as possible, but I do not promise anything but rage and confusion to him who proposes to

glance through my pages just to see if I agree with him, or to begin in the middle, or to read without

a constantly alert attention. If you are not already a little interested and open-minded with regard to

social and political questions, and a little exercised in self-examination, you will find neither

interest nor pleasure here. If your mind is “made up” upon such issues your time will be wasted on

these pages. And even if you are a willing reader you may require a little patience for the peculiar

method I have this time adopted.

That method assumes an air of haphazard, but it is not so careless as it seems. I believe it to be—

even now that I am through with the book—the best way to a sort of lucid vagueness which has

always been my intention in this matter. I tried over several beginnings of a Utopian book before I

adopted this. I rejected from the outset the form of the argumentative essay, the form which appeals

most readily to what is called the “serious” reader, the reader who is often no more than the

solemnly impatient parasite of great questions. He likes everything in hard, heavy lines, black and

white, yes and no, because he does not understand how much there is that cannot be presented at all

in that way; wherever there is any effect of obliquity, of incommensurables, wherever there is any

levity or humour or difficulty of multiplex presentation, he refuses attention. Mentally he seems to

be built up upon an invincible assumption that the Spirit of Creation cannot count beyond two, he

deals only in alternatives. Such readers I have resolved not to attempt to please here. Even if I

presented all my tri-clinic crystals as systems of cubes―! Indeed I felt it would not be worth doing.

But having rejected the “serious” essay as a form, I was still greatly exercised, I spent some

vacillating months, over the scheme of this book. I tried first a recognised method of viewing

questions from divergent points that has always attracted me and which I have never succeeded in

ads:

using, the discussion novel, after the fashion of Peacock's (and Mr. Mallock's) development of the

ancient dialogue; but this encumbered me with unnecessary characters and the inevitable

complication of intrigue among them, and I abandoned it. After that I tried to cast the thing into a

shape resembling a little the double personality of Boswell's Johnson, a sort of interplay between

monologue and commentator; but that too, although it got nearer to the quality I sought, finally

failed. Then I hesitated over what one might call “hard narrative.” It will be evident to the

experienced reader that by omitting certain speculative and metaphysical elements and by

elaborating incident, this book might have been reduced to a straightforward story. But I did not

want to omit as much on this occasion. I do not see why I should always pander to the vulgar

appetite for stark stories. And in short, I made it this. I explain all this in order to make it clear to the

reader that, however queer this book appears at the first examination, it is the outcome of trial and

deliberation, it is intended to be as it is. I am aiming throughout at a sort of shot-silk texture

between philosophical discussion on the 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 a portrait of the author. And here,

indeed, because of a very natural misunderstanding this is the only course to take. Throughout

these papers sounds a note, a distinctive and personal note, a note that tends at times towards

stridency; and all that is not, as these words are, in Italics, is in one Voice. Now, this Voice, and this

is the peculiarity of the matter, is not to be taken as the Voice of the ostensible author who fathers

these pages. You have to clear your mind of any preconceptions in that respect. The Owner of the

Voice you must figure to yourself as a whitish plump man, a little under the middle size and age,

with such blue eyes as many Irishmen have, and agile in his movements and with a slight tonsorial

baldness—a penny might cover it—of the crown. His front is convex. He droops at times like most

of us, but for the greater part he bears himself as valiantly as a sparrow. Occasionally his hand

flies out with a fluttering gesture of illustration. And his Voice (which is our medium henceforth) is

an unattractive tenor that becomes at times aggressive. Him you must imagine as sitting at a table

reading a manuscript about Utopias, a manuscript he holds in two hands that are just a little fat at

the wrist. The curtain rises upon him so. But afterwards, if the devices of this declining art of

literature prevail, you will go with him through curious and interesting experiences. Yet, ever and

again, you will find him back at that little table, the manuscript in his hand, and the expansion of

his ratiocinations about Utopia conscientiously resumed. The entertainment before you is neither

the set drama of the work of fiction you are accustomed to read, nor the set lecturing of the essay

you are accustomed to evade, but a hybrid of these two. If you figure this owner of the Voice as

sitting, a little nervously, a little modestly, on a stage, with table, glass of water and all complete,

and myself as the intrusive chairman insisting with a bland ruthlessness upon his “few words” of

introduction before he recedes into the wings, and if furthermore you figure a sheet behind our

friend on which moving pictures intermittently appear, and if finally you suppose his subject to be

the story of the adventure of his soul among Utopian inquiries, you will be prepared for some at

least of the difficulties of this unworthy but unusual work.

But over against this writer here presented, there is also another earthly person in the book, who

gathers himself together into a distinct personality only after a preliminary complication with the

reader. This person is spoken of as the botanist, and he is a leaner, rather taller, graver and much

less garrulous man. His face is weakly handsome and done in tones of grey, he is fairish and grey-

eyed, and you would suspect him of dyspepsia. It is a justifiable suspicion. Men of this type, the

chairman remarks with a sudden intrusion of exposition, are romantic with a shadow of meanness,

they seek at once to conceal and shape their sensuous cravings beneath egregious sentimentalities,

they get into mighty tangles and troubles with women, and he has had his troubles. You will hear of

them, for that is the quality of his type. He gets no personal expression in this book, the Voice is

always that other's, but you gather much of the matter and something of the manner of his

interpolations from the asides and the tenour of the Voice.

So much by way of portraiture is necessary to present the explorers of the Modern Utopia, which

will unfold itself as a background to these two enquiring figures. The image of a cinematograph

entertainment is the one to grasp. There will be an effect of these two people going to and fro in

front of the circle of a rather defective lantern, which sometimes jams and sometimes gets out of

focus, but which does occasionally succeed in displaying on a screen a momentary moving picture

of Utopian conditions. Occasionally the picture goes out altogether, the Voice argues and argues,

and the footlights return, and then you find yourself listening again to the rather too plump little

man at his table laboriously enunciating propositions, upon whom the curtain rises now.

CHAPTER THE FIRST

Topographical

§ 1

The Utopia of a modern dreamer must needs differ in one fundamental aspect from the Nowheres

and Utopias men planned before Darwin quickened the thought of the world. Those were all perfect

and static States, a balance of happiness won for ever against the forces of unrest and disorder that

inhere in things. One beheld a healthy and simple generation enjoying the fruits of the earth in an

atmosphere of virtue and happiness, to be followed by other virtuous, happy, and entirely similar

generations, until the Gods grew weary. Change and development were dammed back by invincible

dams for ever. But the Modern Utopia must be not static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent

state but as a hopeful stage, leading to a long ascent of stages. Nowadays we do not resist and

overcome the great stream of things, but rather float upon it. We build now not citadels, but ships of

state. For one ordered arrangement of citizens rejoicing in an equality of happiness safe and assured

to them and their children for ever, we have to plan “a flexible common compromise, in which a

perpetually novel succession of individualities may converge most effectually upon a

comprehensive onward development.” That is the first, most generalised difference between a

Utopia based upon modern conceptions and all the Utopias that were written in the former time.

Our business here is to be Utopian, to make vivid and credible, if we can, first this facet and then

that, of an imaginary whole and happy world. Our deliberate intention is to be not, indeed,

impossible, but most distinctly impracticable, by every scale that reaches only between to-day and

to-morrow. We are to turn our backs for a space upon the insistent examination of the thing that is,

and face towards the freer air, the ampler spaces of the thing that perhaps might be, to the projection

of a State or city “worth while,” to designing upon the sheet of our imaginations the picture of a life

conceivably possible, and yet better worth living than our own. That is our present enterprise. We

are going to lay down certain necessary starting propositions, and then we shall proceed to explore

the sort of world these propositions give us....

It is no doubt an optimistic enterprise. But it is good for awhile to be free from the carping note that

must needs be audible when we discuss our present imperfections, to release ourselves from

practical difficulties and the tangle of ways and means. It is good to stop by the track for a space,

put aside the knapsack, wipe the brows, and talk a little of the upper slopes of the mountain we

think we are climbing, would but the trees let us see it.

There is to be no inquiry here of policy and method. This is to be a holiday from politics and

movements and methods. But for all that, we must needs define certain limitations. Were we free to

have our untrammelled desire, I suppose we should follow Morris to his Nowhere, we should

change the nature of man and the nature of things together; we should make the whole race wise,

tolerant, noble, perfect—wave our hands to a splendid anarchy, every man doing as it pleases him,

and none pleased to do evil, in a world as good in its essential nature, as ripe and sunny, as the

world before the Fall. But that golden age, that perfect world, comes out into the possibilities of

space and time. In space and time the pervading Will to Live sustains for evermore a perpetuity of

aggressions. Our proposal here is upon a more practical plane at least than that. We are to restrict

ourselves first to the limitations of human possibility as we know them in the men and women of

this world to-day, and then to all the inhumanity, all the insubordination of nature. We are to shape

our state in a world of uncertain seasons, sudden catastrophes, antagonistic diseases, and inimical

beasts and vermin, out of men and women with like passions, like uncertainties of mood and desire

to our own. And, moreover, we are going to accept this world of conflict, to adopt no attitude of

renunciation towards it, to face it in no ascetic spirit, but in the mood of the Western peoples, whose

purpose is to survive and overcome. So much we adopt in common with those who deal not in

Utopias, but in the world of Here and Now.

Certain liberties, however, following the best Utopian precedents, we may take with existing fact.

We assume that the tone of public thought may be entirely different from what it is in the present

world. We permit ourselves a free hand with the mental conflict of life, within the possibilities of

the human mind as we know it. We permit ourselves also a free hand with all the apparatus of

existence that man has, so to speak, made for himself, with houses, roads, clothing, canals,

machinery, with laws, boundaries, conventions, and traditions, with schools, with literature and

religious organisation, with creeds and customs, with everything, in fact, that it lies within man's

power to alter. That, indeed, is the cardinal assumption of all Utopian speculations old and new; the

Republic and Laws of Plato, and More's Utopia, Howells' implicit Altruria, and Bellamy's future

Boston, Comte's great Western Republic, Hertzka's Freeland, Cabet's Icaria, and Campanella's City

of the Sun, are built, just as we shall build, upon that, upon the hypothesis of the complete

emancipation of a community of men from tradition, from habits, from legal bonds, and that subtler

servitude possessions entail. And much of the essential value of all such speculations lies in this

assumption of emancipation, lies in that regard towards human freedom, in the undying interest of

the human power of self-escape, the power to resist the causation of the past, and to evade, initiate,

endeavour, and overcome.

§ 2

There are very definite artistic limitations also.

There must always be a certain effect of hardness and thinness about Utopian speculations. Their

common fault is to be comprehensively jejune. That which is the blood and warmth and reality of

life is largely absent; there are no individualities, but only generalised people. In almost every

Utopia—except, perhaps, Morris's “News from Nowhere”—one sees handsome but characterless

buildings, symmetrical and perfect cultivations, and a multitude of people, healthy, happy,

beautifully dressed, but without any personal distinction whatever. Too often the prospect resembles

the key to one of those large pictures of coronations, royal weddings, parliaments, conferences, and

gatherings so popular in Victorian times, in which, instead of a face, each figure bears a neat oval

with its index number legibly inscribed. This burthens us with an incurable effect of unreality, and I

do not see how it is altogether to be escaped. It is a disadvantage that has to be accepted. Whatever

institution has existed or exists, however irrational, however preposterous, has, by virtue of its

contact with individualities, an effect of realness and rightness no untried thing may share. It has

ripened, it has been christened with blood, it has been stained and mellowed by handling, it has

been rounded and dented to the softened contours that we associate with life; it has been salted,

maybe, in a brine of tears. But the thing that is merely proposed, the thing that is merely suggested,

however rational, however necessary, seems strange and inhuman in its clear, hard,

uncompromising lines, its unqualified angles and surfaces.

There is no help for it, there it is! The Master suffers with the last and least of his successors. For all

the humanity he wins to, through his dramatic device of dialogue, I doubt if anyone has ever been

warmed to desire himself a citizen in the Republic of Plato; I doubt if anyone could stand a month

of the relentless publicity of virtue planned by More.... No one wants to live in any community of

intercourse really, save for the sake of the individualities he would meet there. The fertilising

conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of the personal life, and all our Utopias no more

than schemes for bettering that interplay. At least, that is how life shapes itself more and more to

modern perceptions. Until you bring in individualities, nothing comes into being, and a Universe

ceases when you shiver the mirror of the least of individual minds.

§ 3

No less than a planet will serve the purpose of a modern Utopia. Time was when a mountain valley

or an island seemed to promise sufficient isolation for a polity to maintain itself intact from outward

force; the Republic of Plato stood armed ready for defensive war, and the New Atlantis and the

Utopia of More in theory, like China and Japan through many centuries of effectual practice, held

themselves isolated from intruders. Such late instances as Butler's satirical “Erewhon,” and Mr.

Stead's queendom of inverted sexual conditions in Central Africa, found the Tibetan method of

slaughtering the inquiring visitor a simple, sufficient rule. But the whole trend of modern thought is

against the permanence of any such enclosures. We are acutely aware nowadays that, however

subtly contrived a State may be, outside your boundary lines the epidemic, the breeding barbarian

or the economic power, will gather its strength to overcome you. The swift march of invention is all

for the invader. Now, perhaps you might still guard a rocky coast or a narrow pass; but what of that

near to-morrow when the flying machine soars overhead, free to descend at this point or that? A

state powerful enough to keep isolated under modern conditions would be powerful enough to rule

the world, would be, indeed, if not actively ruling, yet passively acquiescent in all other human

organisations, and so responsible for them altogether. World-state, therefore, it must be.

That leaves no room for a modern Utopia in Central Africa, or in South America, or round about the

pole, those last refuges of ideality. The floating isle of La Cité 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 all Utopists to perceive this—he joined his twin planets pole to pole by a

sort of umbilical cord. But the modern imagination, obsessed by physics, must travel further than

that.

Out beyond Sirius, far in the deeps of space, beyond the flight of a cannon-ball flying for a billion

years, beyond the range of unaided vision, blazes the star that is our Utopia's sun. To those who

know where to look, with a good opera-glass aiding good eyes, it and three fellows that seem in a

cluster with it—though they are incredible billions of miles nearer—make just the faintest speck of

light. About it go planets, even as our planets, but weaving a different fate, and in its place among

them is Utopia, with its sister mate, the Moon. It is a planet like our planet, the same continents, the

same islands, the same oceans and seas, another Fuji-Yama is beautiful there dominating another

Yokohama—and another Matterhorn overlooks the icy disorder of another Theodule. It is so like

our planet that a terrestrial botanist might find his every species there, even to the meanest

pondweed or the remotest Alpine blossom....

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

find his inn!

Suppose now that two of us were actually to turn about in just that fashion. Two, I think, for to face

a strange planet, even though it be a wholly civilised one, without some other familiar backing,

dashes the courage overmuch. Suppose that we were indeed so translated even as we stood. You

figure us upon some high pass in the Alps, and though I—being one easily made giddy by stooping

—am no botanist myself, if my companion were to have a specimen tin under his arm—so long as it

is not painted that abominable popular Swiss apple green—I would make it no occasion for quarrel!

We have tramped and botanised and come to a rest, and, sitting among rocks, we have eaten our

lunch and finished our bottle of Yvorne, and fallen into a talk of Utopias, and said such things as I

have been saying. I could figure it myself upon that little neck of the Lucendro Pass, upon the

shoulder of the Piz Lucendro, for there once I lunched and talked very pleasantly, and we are

looking down upon the Val Bedretto, and Villa and Fontana and Airolo try to hide from us under the

mountain side—three-quarters of a mile they are vertically below. (Lantern.) With that absurd

nearness of effect one gets in the Alps, we see the little train a dozen miles away, running down the

Biaschina to Italy, and the Lukmanier Pass beyond Piora left of us, and the San Giacomo right, mere

footpaths under our feet....

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

We should scarcely note the change. Not a cloud would have gone from the sky. It might be the

remote town below would take a different air, and my companion the botanist, with his educated

observation, might almost see as much, and the train, perhaps, would be gone out of the picture, and

the embanked straightness of the Ticino in the Ambri-Piotta meadows—that might be altered, but

that would be all the visible change. Yet I have an idea that in some obscure manner we should

come to feel at once a difference in things.

The botanist's glance would, under a subtle attraction, float back to Airolo. “It's queer,” he would

say quite idly, “but I never noticed that building there to the right before.”

“Which building?”

“That to the right—with a queer sort of thing―”

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

wonder―”

That would interrupt our Utopian speculations. We should both discover that the little towns below

had changed—but how, we should not have marked them well enough to know. It would be

indefinable, a change in the quality of their grouping, a change in the quality of their remote, small

shapes.

I should flick a few crumbs from my knee, perhaps. “It's odd,” I should say, for the tenth or eleventh

time, with a motion to rise, and we should get up and stretch ourselves, and, still a little puzzled,

turn our faces towards the path that clambers down over the tumbled rocks and runs round by the

still clear lake and down towards the Hospice of St. Gotthard—if perchance we could still find that

path.

Long before we got to that, before even we got to the great high road, we should have hints from

the stone cabin in the nape of the pass—it would be gone or wonderfully changed—from the very

goats upon the rocks, from the little hut by the rough bridge of stone, that a mighty difference had

come to the world of men.

And presently, amazed and amazing, we should happen on a man—no Swiss—dressed in unfamiliar

clothing and speaking an unfamiliar speech....

§ 4

Before nightfall we should be drenched in wonders, but still we should have wonder left for the

thing my companion, with his scientific training, would no doubt be the first to see. He would

glance up, with that proprietary eye of the man who knows his constellations down to the little

Greek letters. I imagine his exclamation. He would at first doubt his eyes. I should inquire the cause

of his consternation, and it would be hard to explain. He would ask me with a certain singularity of

manner for “Orion,” and I should not find him; for the Great Bear, and it would have vanished.

“Where?” I should ask, and “where?” seeking among that scattered starriness, and slowly I should

acquire the wonder that possessed him.

Then, for the first time, perhaps, we should realise from this unfamiliar heaven that not the world

had changed, but ourselves—that we had come into the uttermost deeps of space.

§ 5

We need suppose no linguistic impediments to intercourse. The whole world will surely have a

common language, that is quite elementarily Utopian, and since we are free of the trammels of

convincing story-telling, we may suppose that language to be sufficiently our own to understand.

Indeed, should we be in Utopia at all, if we could not talk to everyone? That accursed bar of

language, that hostile inscription in the foreigner's eyes, “deaf and dumb to you, sir, and so—your

enemy,” is the very first of the defects and complications one has fled the earth to escape.

But what sort of language would we have the world speak, if we were told the miracle of Babel was

presently to be reversed?

If I may take a daring image, a mediæval liberty, I would suppose that in this lonely place the Spirit

of Creation spoke to us on this matter. “You are wise men,” that Spirit might say—and I, being a

suspicious, touchy, over-earnest man for all my predisposition to plumpness, would instantly scent

the irony (while my companion, I fancy, might even plume himself), “and to beget your wisdom is

chiefly why the world was made. You are so good as to propose an acceleration of that tedious

multitudinous evolution upon which I am engaged. I gather, a universal tongue would serve you

there. While I sit here among these mountains—I have been filing away at them for this last aeon or

so, just to attract your hotels, you know—will you be so kind―? A few hints―?”

Then the Spirit of Creation might transiently smile, a smile that would be like the passing of a

cloud. All the mountain wilderness about us would be radiantly lit. (You know those swift moments,

when warmth and brightness drift by, in lonely and desolate places.)

Yet, after all, why should two men be smiled into apathy by the Infinite? Here we are, with our

knobby little heads, our eyes and hands and feet and stout hearts, and if not us or ours, still the

endless multitudes about us and in our loins are to come at last to the World State and a greater

fellowship and the universal tongue. Let us to the extent of our ability, if not answer that question,

at any rate try to think ourselves within sight of the best thing possible. That, after all, is our

purpose, to imagine our best and strive for it, and it is a worse folly and a worse sin than

presumption, to abandon striving because the best of all our bests looks mean amidst the suns.

Now you as a botanist would, I suppose, incline to something as they say, “scientific.” You wince

under that most offensive epithet—and I am able to give you my intelligent sympathy—though

“pseudo-scientific” and “quasi-scientific” are worse by far for the skin. You would begin to talk of

scientific languages, of Esperanto, La Langue Bleue, New Latin, Volapuk, and Lord Lytton, of the

philosophical language of Archbishop Whateley, Lady Welby's work upon Significs and the like.

You would tell me of the remarkable precisions, the encyclopædic quality of chemical terminology,

and at the word terminology I should insinuate a comment on that eminent American biologist,

Professor Mark Baldwin, who has carried the language biological to such heights of expressive

clearness as to be triumphantly and invincibly unreadable. (Which foreshadows the line of my

defence.)

You make your ideal clear, a scientific language you demand, without ambiguity, as precise as

mathematical formulæ, and with every term in relations of exact logical consistency with every

other. It will be a language with all the inflexions of verbs and nouns regular and all its

constructions inevitable, each word clearly distinguishable from every other word in sound as well

as spelling.

That, at any rate, is the sort of thing one hears demanded, and if only because the demand rests upon

implications that reach far beyond the region of language, it is worth considering here. It implies,

indeed, almost everything that we are endeavouring to repudiate in this particular work. It implies

that the whole intellectual basis of mankind is established, that the rules of logic, the systems of

counting and measurement, the general categories and schemes of resemblance and difference, are

established for the human mind for ever—blank Comte-ism, in fact, of the blankest description.

But, indeed, the science of logic and the whole framework of philosophical thought men have kept

since the days of Plato and Aristotle, has no more essential permanence as a final expression of the

human mind, than the Scottish Longer Catechism. Amidst the welter of modern thought, a

philosophy long lost to men rises again into being, like some blind and almost formless embryo,

that must presently develop sight, and form, and power, a philosophy in which this assumption is

denied. [Footnote: The serious reader may refer at leisure to Sidgwick's Use of Words in Reasoning

(particularly), and to Bosanquet's Essentials of Logic, Bradley's Principles of Logic, and Sigwart's

Logik; the lighter minded may read and mark the temper of Professor Case in the British

Encyclopædia, article Logic (Vol. XXX.). I have appended to his book a rude sketch of a philosophy

upon new lines, originally read by me to the Oxford Phil. Soc. in 1903.]

All through this Utopian excursion, I must warn you, you shall feel the thrust and disturbance of

that insurgent movement. In the reiterated use of “Unique,” you will, as it were, get the gleam of its

integument; in the insistence upon individuality, and the individual difference as the significance of

life, you will feel the texture of its shaping body. Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain

(except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal

inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being. Being, indeed!—there is no being, but

a universal becoming of individualities, and Plato turned his back on truth when he turned towards

his museum of specific ideals. Heraclitus, that lost and misinterpreted giant, may perhaps be coming

to his own....

There is no abiding thing in what we know. We change from weaker to stronger lights, and each

more powerful light pierces our hitherto opaque foundations and reveals fresh and different

opacities below. We can never foretell which of our seemingly assured fundamentals the next

change will not affect. What folly, then, to dream of mapping out our minds in however general

terms, of providing for the endless mysteries of the future a terminology and an idiom! We follow

the vein, we mine and accumulate our treasure, but who can tell which way the vein may trend?

Language is the nourishment of the thought of man, that serves only as it undergoes metabolism,

and becomes thought and lives, and in its very living passes away. You scientific people, with your

fancy of a terrible exactitude in language, of indestructible foundations built, as that Wordsworthian

doggerel on the title-page of Nature says, “for aye,” are marvellously without imagination!

The language of Utopia will no doubt be one and indivisible; all mankind will, in the measure of

their individual differences in quality, be brought into the same phase, into a common resonance of

thought, but the language they will speak will still be a living tongue, an animated system of

imperfections, which every individual man will infinitesimally modify. Through the universal

freedom of exchange and movement, the developing change in its general spirit will be a world-

wide change; that is the quality of its universality. I fancy it will be a coalesced language, a

synthesis of many. Such a language as English is a coalesced language; it is a coalescence of Anglo-

Saxon and Norman French and Scholar's Latin, welded into one speech more ample and more

powerful and beautiful than either. The Utopian tongue might well present a more spacious

coalescence, and hold in the frame of such an uninflected or slightly inflected idiom as English

already presents, a profuse vocabulary into which have been cast a dozen once separate tongues,

superposed and then welded together through bilingual and trilingual compromises. [Footnote: Vide

an excellent article, La Langue Française en l'an 2003, par Leon Bollack, in La Revue, 15 Juillet,

1903.] In the past ingenious men have speculated on the inquiry, “Which language will survive?”

The question was badly put. I think now that this wedding and survival of several in a common

offspring is a far more probable thing.

§ 6

This talk of languages, however, is a digression. We were on our way along the faint path that runs

round the rim of the Lake of Lucendro, and we were just upon the point of coming upon our first

Utopian man. He was, I said, no Swiss. Yet he would have been a Swiss on mother Earth, and here

he would have the same face, with some difference, maybe, in the expression; the same physique,

though a little better developed, perhaps—the same complexion. He would have different habits,

different traditions, different knowledge, different ideas, different clothing, and different appliances,

but, except for all that, he would be the same man. We very distinctly provided at the outset that the

modern Utopia must have people inherently the same as those in the world.

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

That proposition gives one characteristic difference between a modern Utopia and almost all its

predecessors. It is to be a world Utopia, we have agreed, no less; and so we must needs face the fact

that we are to have differences of race. Even the lower class of Plato's Republic was not specifically

of different race. But this is a Utopia as wide as Christian charity, and white and black, brown, red

and yellow, all tints of skin, all types of body and character, will be there. How we are to adjust

their differences is a master question, and the matter is not even to be opened in this chapter. It will

need a whole chapter even to glance at its issues. But here we underline that stipulation; every race

of this planet earth is to be found in the strictest parallelism there, in numbers the same—only, as I

say, with an entirely different set of traditions, ideals, ideas, and purposes, and so moving under

those different skies to an altogether different destiny.

There follows a curious development of this to anyone clearly impressed by the uniqueness and the

unique significance of individualities. Races are no hard and fast things, no crowd of identically

similar persons, but massed sub-races, and tribes and families, each after its kind unique, and these

again are clusterings of still smaller uniques and so down to each several person. So that our first

convention works out to this, that not only is every earthly mountain, river, plant, and beast in that

parallel planet beyond Sirius also, but every man, woman, and child alive has a Utopian parallel.

From now onward, of course, the fates of these two planets will diverge, men will die here whom

wisdom will 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 for the first and last occasion the populations of our planets are abreast.

We must in these days make some such supposition. The alternative is a Utopia of dolls in the

likeness of angels—imaginary laws to fit incredible people, an unattractive undertaking.

For example, we must assume there is a man such as I might have been, better informed, better

disciplined, better employed, thinner and more active—and I wonder what he is doing!—and you,

Sir or Madam, are in duplicate also, and all the men and women that you know and I. I doubt if we

shall meet our doubles, or if it would be pleasant for us to do so; but as we come down from these

lonely mountains to the roads and houses and living places of the Utopian world-state, we shall

certainly find, here and there, faces that will remind us singularly of those who have lived under our

eyes.

There are some you never wish to meet again, you say, and some, I gather, you do. “And One―!”

It is strange, but this figure of the botanist will not keep in place. It sprang up between us, dear

reader, as a passing illustrative invention. I do not know what put him into my head, and for the

moment, it fell in with my humour for a space to foist the man's personality upon you as yours and

call you scientific—that most abusive word. But here he is, indisputably, with me in Utopia, and

lapsing from our high speculative theme into halting but intimate confidences. He declares he has

not come to Utopia to meet again with his sorrows.

What sorrows?

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

He is a man, I should think, of thirty-nine, a man whose life has been neither tragedy nor a joyous

adventure, a man with one of those faces that have gained interest rather than force or nobility from

their commerce with life. He is something refined, with some knowledge, perhaps, of the minor

pains and all the civil self-controls; he has read more than he has suffered, and suffered rather than

done. He regards me with his blue-grey eye, from which all interest in this Utopia has faded.

“It is a trouble,” he says, “that has come into my life only for a month or so—at least acutely again.

I thought it was all over. There was someone―”

It is an amazing story to hear upon a mountain crest in Utopia, this Hampstead affair, this story of a

Frognal heart. “Frognal,” he says, is the place where they met, and it summons to my memory the

word on a board at the corner of a flint-dressed new road, an estate development road, with a vista

of villas up a hill. He had known her before he got his professorship, and neither her “people” nor

his—he speaks that detestable middle-class dialect in which aunts and things with money and the

right of intervention are called “people”!—approved of the affair. “She was, I think, rather easily

swayed,” he says. “But that's not fair to her, perhaps. She thought too much of others. If they

seemed distressed, or if they seemed to think a course right―” ...

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

§ 7

It is necessary to turn the botanist's thoughts into a worthier channel. It is necessary to override

these modest regrets, this intrusive, petty love story. Does he realise this is indeed Utopia? Turn

your mind, I insist, to this Utopia of mine, and leave these earthly troubles to their proper planet. Do

you realise just where the propositions necessary to a modern Utopia are taking us? Everyone on

earth will have to be here;—themselves, but with a difference. Somewhere here in this world is, for

example, Mr. Chamberlain, and the King is here (no doubt incognito), and all the Royal Academy,

and Sandow, and Mr. Arnold White.

But these famous names do not appeal to him.

My mind goes from this prominent and typical personage to that, and for a time I forget my

companion. I am distracted by the curious side issues this general proposition trails after it. There

will be so-and-so, and so-and-so. The name and figure of Mr. Roosevelt jerks into focus, and

obliterates an attempt to acclimatise the Emperor of the Germans. What, for instance, will Utopia do

with Mr. Roosevelt? There drifts across my inner vision the image of a strenuous struggle with

Utopian constables, the voice that has thrilled terrestrial millions in eloquent protest. The writ of

arrest, drifting loose in the conflict, comes to my feet; I impale the scrap of paper, and read—but

can it be?—“attempted disorganisation?... incitements to disarrange?... the balance of population?”

The trend of my logic for once has led us into a facetious alley. One might indeed keep in this key,

and write an agreeable little Utopia, that like the holy families of the mediæval artists (or Michael

Angelo's Last Judgement) should compliment one's friends in various degrees. Or one might

embark upon a speculative treatment of the entire Almanach de Gotha, something on the lines of

Epistemon's vision of the damned great, when

“Xerxes was a crier of mustard.

Romulus was a salter and a patcher of patterns....”

That incomparable catalogue! That incomparable catalogue! Inspired by the Muse of Parody, we

might go on to the pages of “Who's Who,” and even, with an eye to the obdurate republic, to

“Who's Who in America,” and make the most delightful and extensive arrangements. Now where

shall we put this most excellent man? And this?...

But, indeed, it is doubtful if we shall meet any of these doubles during our Utopian journey, or

know them when we meet them. I doubt if anyone will be making the best of both these worlds. The

great men in this still unexplored Utopia may be but village Hampdens in our own, and earthly

goatherds and obscure illiterates sit here in the seats of the mighty.

That again opens agreeable vistas left of us and right.

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

“I know,” he says, “that she will be happier here, and that they will value her better than she has

been valued upon earth.”

His interruption serves to turn me back from my momentary contemplation of those popular effigies

inflated by old newspapers and windy report, the earthly great. He sets me thinking of more

personal and intimate applications, of the human beings one knows with a certain approximation to

real knowledge, of the actual common substance of life. He turns me to the thought of rivalries and

tendernesses, of differences and disappointments. I am suddenly brought painfully against the

things that might have been. What if instead of that Utopia of vacant ovals we meet relinquished

loves here, and opportunities lost and faces as they might have looked to us?

I turn to my botanist almost reprovingly. “You know, she won't be quite the same lady here that you

knew in Frognal,” I say, and wrest myself from a subject that is no longer agreeable by rising to my

feet.

“And besides,” I say, standing above him, “the chances against our meeting her are a million to

one.... And we loiter! This is not the business we have come upon, but a mere incidental kink in our

larger plan. The fact remains, these people we have come to see are people with like infirmities to

our own—and only the conditions are changed. Let us pursue the tenour of our inquiry.”

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

(You figure him doing it.)

Down the mountain we shall go and down the passes, and as the valleys open the world will open,

Utopia, where men and women are happy and laws are wise, and where all that is tangled and

confused in human affairs has been unravelled and made right.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

Concerning Freedoms

§ 1

Now what sort of question would first occur to two men descending upon the planet of a Modern

Utopia? Probably grave solicitude about their personal freedom. Towards the Stranger, as I have

already remarked, the Utopias of the past displayed their least amiable aspect. Would this new sort

of Utopian State, spread to the dimensions of a world, be any less forbidding?

We should take comfort in the thought that universal Toleration is certainly a modern idea, and it is

upon modern ideas that this World State rests. But even suppose we are tolerated and admitted to

this unavoidable citizenship, there will still remain a wide range of possibility.... I think we should

try to work the problem out from an inquiry into first principles, and that we should follow the trend

of our time and kind by taking up the question as one of “Man versus the State,” and discussing the

compromise of Liberty.

The idea of individual liberty is one that has grown in importance and grows with every

development of modern thought. To the classical Utopists freedom was relatively trivial. Clearly

they considered virtue and happiness as entirely separable from liberty, and as being altogether

more important things. But the modern view, with its deepening insistence upon individuality and

upon the significance of its uniqueness, steadily intensifies the value of freedom, until at last we

begin to see liberty as the very substance of life, that indeed it is life, and that only the dead things,

the choiceless things, live in absolute obedience to law. To have free play for one's individuality is,

in the modern view, the subjective triumph of existence, as survival in creative work and offspring

is its objective triumph. But for all men, since man is a social creature, the play of will must fall

short of absolute freedom. Perfect human liberty is possible only to a despot who is absolutely and

universally obeyed. Then to will would be to command and achieve, and within the limits of natural

law we could at any moment do exactly as it pleased us to do. All other liberty is a compromise

between our own freedom of will and the wills of those with whom we come in contact. In an

organised state each one of us has a more or less elaborate code of what he may do to others and to

himself, and what others may do to him. He limits others by his rights, and is limited by the rights

of others, and by considerations affecting the welfare of the community as a whole.

Individual liberty in a community is not, as mathematicians would say, always of the same sign. To

ignore this is the essential fallacy of the cult called Individualism. But in truth, a general prohibition

in a state may increase the sum of liberty, and a general permission may diminish it. It does not

follow, as these people would have us believe, that a man is more free where there is least law and

more restricted where there is most law. A socialism or a communism is not necessarily a slavery,

and there is no freedom under Anarchy. Consider how much liberty we gain by the loss of the

common liberty to kill. Thereby one may go to and fro in all the ordered parts of the earth,

unencumbered by arms or armour, free of the fear of playful poison, whimsical barbers, or hotel

trap-doors. Indeed, it means freedom from a thousand fears and precautions. Suppose there existed

even the limited freedom to kill in vendetta, and think what would happen in our suburbs. Consider

the inconvenience of two households in a modern suburb estranged and provided with modern

weapons of precision, the inconvenience not only to each other, but to the neutral pedestrian, the

practical loss of freedoms all about them. The butcher, if he came at all, would have to come round

in an armoured cart....

It follows, therefore, in a modern Utopia, which finds the final hope of the world in the evolving

interplay of unique individualities, that the State will have effectually chipped away just all those

spendthrift liberties that waste liberty, and not one liberty more, and so have attained the maximum

general freedom.

There are two distinct and contrasting methods of limiting liberty; the first is Prohibition, “thou

shalt not,” and the second Command, “thou shalt.” There is, however, a sort of prohibition that

takes the form of a conditional command, and this one needs to bear in mind. It says if you do so-

and-so, you must also do so-and-so; if, for example, you go to sea with men you employ, you must

go in a seaworthy vessel. But the pure command is unconditional; it says, whatever you have done

or are doing or want to do, you are to do this, as when the social system, working through the base

necessities of base parents and bad laws, sends a child of thirteen into a factory. Prohibition takes

one definite thing from the indefinite liberty of a man, but it still leaves him an unbounded choice of

actions. He remains free, and you have merely taken a bucketful from the sea of his freedom. But

compulsion destroys freedom altogether. In this Utopia of ours there may be many prohibitions, but

no indirect compulsions—if one may so contrive it—and few or no commands. As far as I see it

now, in this present discussion, I think, indeed, there should be no positive compulsions at all in

Utopia, at any rate for the adult Utopian—unless they fall upon him as penalties incurred.

§ 2

What prohibitions should we be under, we two Uitlanders in this Utopian world? We should

certainly not be free to kill, assault, or threaten anyone we met, and in that we earth-trained men

would not be likely to offend. And until we knew more exactly the Utopian idea of property we

should be very chary of touching anything that might conceivably be appropriated. If it was not the

property of individuals it might be the property of the State. But beyond that we might have our

doubts. Are we right in wearing the strange costumes we do, in choosing the path that pleases us

athwart this rock and turf, in coming striding with unfumigated rücksacks and snow-wet hobnails

into what is conceivably an extremely neat and orderly world? We have passed our first Utopian

now, with an answered vague gesture, and have noted, with secret satisfaction, there is no access of

dismay; we have rounded a bend, and down the valley in the distance we get a glimpse of what

appears to be a singularly well-kept road....

I submit that to the modern minded man it can be no sort of Utopia worth desiring that does not

give the utmost freedom of going to and fro. Free movement is to many people one of the greatest

of life's privileges—to go wherever the spirit moves them, to wander and see—and though they

have every comfort, every security, every virtuous discipline, they will still be unhappy if that is

denied them. Short of damage to things cherished and made, the Utopians will surely have this

right, so we may expect no unclimbable walls and fences, nor the discovery of any laws we may

transgress in coming down these mountain places.

And yet, just as civil liberty itself is a compromise defended by prohibitions, so this particular sort

of liberty must also have its qualifications. Carried to the absolute pitch the right of free movement

ceases to be distinguishable from the right of free intrusion. We have already, in a comment on

More's Utopia, hinted at an agreement with Aristotle's argument against communism, that it flings

people into an intolerable continuity of contact. Schopenhauer carried out Aristotle in the vein of his

own bitterness and with the truest of images when he likened human society to hedgehogs

clustering for warmth, and unhappy when either too closely packed or too widely separated.

Empedocles found no significance in life whatever except as an unsteady play of love and hate, of

attraction and repulsion, of assimilation and the assertion of difference. So long as we ignore

difference, so long as we ignore individuality, and that I hold has been the common sin of all

Utopias hitherto, we can make absolute statements, prescribe communisms or individualisms, and

all sorts of hard theoretic arrangements. But in the world of reality, which—to modernise Heraclitus

and Empedocles—is nothing more nor less than the world of individuality, there are no absolute

rights and wrongs, there are no qualitative questions at all, but only quantitative adjustments.

Equally strong in the normal civilised man is the desire for freedom of movement and the desire for

a certain privacy, for a corner definitely his, and we have to consider where the line of

reconciliation comes.

The desire for absolute personal privacy is perhaps never a very strong or persistent craving. In the

great majority of human beings, the gregarious instinct is sufficiently powerful to render any but the

most temporary isolations not simply disagreeable, but painful. The savage has all the privacy he

needs within the compass of his skull; like dogs and timid women, he prefers ill-treatment to

desertion, and it is only a scarce and complex modern type that finds comfort and refreshment in

quite lonely places and quite solitary occupations. Yet such there are, men who can neither sleep

well nor think well, nor attain to a full perception of beautiful objects, who do not savour the best of

existence until they are securely alone, and for the sake of these even it would be reasonable to

draw some limits to the general right of free movement. But their particular need is only a special

and exceptional aspect of an almost universal claim to privacy among modern people, not so much

for the sake of isolation as for congenial companionship. We want to go apart from the great crowd,

not so much to be alone as to be with those who appeal to us particularly and to whom we

particularly appeal; we want to form households and societies with them, to give our individualities

play in intercourse with them, and in the appointments and furnishings of that intercourse. We want

gardens and enclosures and exclusive freedoms for our like and our choice, just as spacious as we

can get them—and it is only the multitudinous uncongenial, anxious also for similar developments

in some opposite direction, that checks this expansive movement of personal selection and

necessitates a compromise on privacy.

Glancing back from our Utopian mountain side down which this discourse marches, to the

confusions of old earth, we may remark that the need and desire for privacies there is exceptionally

great at the present time, that it was less in the past, that in the future it may be less again, and that

under the Utopian conditions to which we shall come when presently we strike yonder road, it may

be reduced to quite manageable dimensions. But this is to be effected not by the suppression of

individualities to some common pattern, [Footnote: More's Utopia. “Whoso will may go in, for

there is nothing within the houses that is private or anie man's owne.”] but by the broadening of

public charity and the general amelioration of mind and manners. It is not by assimilation, that is to

say, but by understanding that the modern Utopia achieves itself. The ideal community of man's

past was one with a common belief, with common customs and common ceremonies, common

manners and common formulæ; men of the same society dressed in the same fashion, each

according to his defined and understood grade, behaved in the same fashion, loved, worshipped, and

died in the same fashion. They did or felt little that did not find a sympathetic publicity. The natural

disposition of all peoples, white, black, or brown, a natural disposition that education seeks to

destroy, is to insist upon uniformity, to make publicity extremely unsympathetic to even the most

harmless departures from the code. To be dressed “odd,” to behave “oddly,” to eat in a different

manner or of different food, to commit, indeed, any breach of the established convention is to give

offence and to incur hostility among unsophisticated men. But the disposition of the more original

and enterprising minds at all times has been to make such innovations.

This is particularly in evidence in this present age. The almost cataclysmal development of new

machinery, the discovery of new materials, and the appearance of new social possibilities through

the organised pursuit of material science, has given enormous and unprecedented facilities to the

spirit of innovation. The old local order has been broken up or is now being broken up all over the

earth, and everywhere societies deliquesce, everywhere men are afloat amidst the wreckage of their

flooded conventions, and still tremendously unaware of the thing that has happened. The old local

orthodoxies of behaviour, of precedence, the old accepted amusements and employments, the old

ritual of conduct in the important small things of the daily life and the old ritual of thought in the

things that make discussion, are smashed up and scattered and mixed discordantly together, one use

with another, and no world-wide culture of toleration, no courteous admission of differences, no

wider understanding has yet replaced them. And so publicity in the modern earth has become

confusedly unsympathetic for everyone. Classes are intolerable to classes and sets to sets, contact

provokes aggressions, comparisons, persecutions and discomforts, and the subtler people are

excessively tormented by a sense of observation, unsympathetic always and often hostile. To live

without some sort of segregation from the general mass is impossible in exact proportion to one's

individual distinction.

Of course things will be very different in Utopia. Utopia will be saturated with consideration. To us,

clad as we are in mountain-soiled tweeds and with no money but British bank-notes negotiable only

at a practically infinite distance, this must needs be a reassuring induction. And Utopian manners

will not only be tolerant, but almost universally tolerable. Endless things will be understood

perfectly and universally that on earth are understood only by a scattered few; baseness of bearing,

grossness of manner, will be the distinctive mark of no section of the community whatever. The

coarser reasons for privacy, therefore, will not exist here. And that savage sort of shyness, too, that

makes so many half-educated people on earth recluse and defensive, that too the Utopians will have

escaped by their more liberal breeding. In the cultivated State we are assuming it will be ever so

much easier for people to eat in public, rest and amuse themselves in public, and even work in

public. Our present need for privacy in many things marks, indeed, a phase of transition from an

ease in public in the past due to homogeneity, to an ease in public in the future due to intelligence

and good breeding, and in Utopia that transition will be complete. We must bear that in mind

throughout the consideration of this question.

Yet, after this allowance has been made, there still remains a considerable claim for privacy in

Utopia. The room, or apartments, or home, or mansion, whatever it may be a man or woman

maintains, must be private, and under his or her complete dominion; it seems harsh and intrusive to

forbid a central garden plot or peristyle, such as one sees in Pompeii, within the house walls, and it

is almost as difficult to deny a little private territory beyond the house. Yet if we concede that, it is

clear that without some further provision we concede the possibility that the poorer townsman (if

there are to be rich and poor in the world) will be forced to walk through endless miles of high

fenced villa gardens before he may expand in his little scrap of reserved open country. Such is

already the poor Londoner's miserable fate.... Our Utopia will have, of course, faultless roads and

beautifully arranged inter-urban communications, swift trains or motor services or what not, to

diffuse its population, and without some anticipatory provisions, the prospect of the residential

areas becoming a vast area of defensively walled villa Edens is all too possible.

This is a quantitative question, be it remembered, and not to be dismissed by any statement of

principle. Our Utopians will meet it, I presume, by detailed regulations, very probably varying

locally with local conditions. Privacy beyond the house might be made a privilege to be paid for in

proportion to the area occupied, and the tax on these licences of privacy might increase as the

square of the area affected. A maximum fraction of private enclosure for each urban and suburban

square mile could be fixed. A distinction could be drawn between an absolutely private garden and a

garden private and closed only for a day or a couple of days a week, and at other times open to the

well-behaved public. Who, in a really civilised community, would grudge that measure of invasion?

Walls could be taxed by height and length, and the enclosure of really natural beauties, of rapids,

cascades, gorges, viewpoints, and so forth made impossible. So a reasonable compromise between

the vital and conflicting claims of the freedom of movement and the freedom of seclusion might be

attained....

And as we argue thus we draw nearer and nearer to the road that goes up and over the Gotthard

crest and down the Val Tremola towards Italy.

What sort of road would that be?

§ 3

Freedom of movement in a Utopia planned under modern conditions must involve something more

than unrestricted pedestrian wanderings, and the very proposition of a world-state speaking one

common tongue carries with it the idea of a world population travelled and travelling to an extent

quite beyond anything our native earth has seen. It is now our terrestrial experience that whenever

economic and political developments set a class free to travel, that class at once begins to travel; in

England, for example, above the five or six hundred pounds a year level, it is hard to find anyone

who is not habitually migratory, who has not been frequently, as people say, “abroad.” In the

Modern Utopia travel must be in the common texture of life. To go into fresh climates and fresh

scenery, to meet a different complexion of humanity and a different type of home and food and

apparatus, to mark unfamiliar trees and plants and flowers and beasts, to climb mountains, to see the

snowy night of the North and the blaze of the tropical midday, to follow great rivers, to taste

loneliness in desert places, to traverse the gloom of tropical forests and to cross the high seas, will

be an essential part of the reward and adventure of life, even for the commonest people.... This is a

bright and pleasant particular in which a modern Utopia must differ again, and differ diametrically,

from its predecessors.

We may conclude from what has been done in places upon our earth that the whole Utopian world

will be open and accessible and as safe for the wayfarer as France or England is to-day. The peace

of the world will be established for ever, and everywhere, except in remote and desolate places,

there will be convenient inns, at least as convenient and trustworthy as those of Switzerland to-day;

the touring clubs and hotel associations that have tariffed that country and France so effectually will

have had their fine Utopian equivalents, and the whole world will be habituated to the coming and

going of strangers. The greater part of the world will be as secure and cheaply and easily accessible

to everyone as is Zermatt or Lucerne to a Western European of the middle-class at the present time.

On this account alone no places will be so congested as these two are now on earth. With freedom

to go everywhere, with easy access everywhere, with no dread of difficulties about language,

coinage, custom, or law, why should everyone continue to go to just a few special places? Such

congestions are merely the measure of the general inaccessibility and insecurity and costliness of

contemporary life, an awkward transitory phase in the first beginnings of the travel age of mankind.

No doubt the Utopian will travel in many ways. It is unlikely there will be any smoke-disgorging

steam railway trains in Utopia, they are already doomed on earth, already threatened with that

obsolescence that will endear them to the Ruskins of to-morrow, but a thin spider's web of

inconspicuous special routes will cover the land of the world, pierce the mountain masses and

tunnel under the seas. These may be double railways or monorails or what not—we are no

engineers to judge between such devices—but by means of them the Utopian will travel about the

earth from one chief point to another at a speed of two or three hundred miles or more an hour. That

will abolish the greater distances.... One figures these main communications as something after the

manner of corridor trains, smooth-running and roomy, open from end to end, with cars in which one

may sit and read, cars in which one may take refreshment, cars into which the news of the day

comes printing itself from the wires beside the track; cars in which one may have privacy and sleep

if one is so disposed, bath-room cars, library cars; a train as comfortable as a good club. There will

be no distinctions of class in such a train, because in a civilised world there would be no offence

between one kind of man and another, and for the good of the whole world such travelling will be

as cheap as it can be, and well within the reach of any but the almost criminally poor.

Such great tramways as this will be used when the Utopians wish to travel fast and far; thereby you

will glide all over the land surface of the planet; and feeding them and distributing from them,

innumerable minor systems, clean little electric tramways I picture them, will spread out over the

land in finer reticulations, growing close and dense in the urban regions and thinning as the

population thins. And running beside these lighter railways, and spreading beyond their range, will

be the smooth minor high roads such as this one we now approach, upon which independent

vehicles, motor cars, cycles, and what not, will go. I doubt if we shall see any horses upon this fine,

smooth, clean road; I doubt if there will be many horses on the high roads of Utopia, and, indeed, if

they will use draught horses at all upon that planet. Why should they? Where the world gives turf or

sand, or along special tracts, the horse will perhaps be ridden for exercise and pleasure, but that will

be all the use for him; and as for the other beasts of burthen, on the remoter mountain tracks the

mule will no doubt still be a picturesque survival, in the desert men will still find a use for the

camel, and the elephant may linger to play a part in the pageant of the East. But the burthen of the

minor traffic, if not the whole of it, will certainly be mechanical. This is what we shall see even

while the road is still remote, swift and shapely motor-cars going past, cyclists, and in these

agreeable mountain regions there will also be pedestrians upon their way. Cycle tracks will abound

in Utopia, sometimes following beside the great high roads, but oftener taking their own more

agreeable line amidst woods and crops and pastures; and there will be a rich variety of footpaths

and minor ways. There will be many footpaths in Utopia. There will be pleasant ways over the

scented needles of the mountain pinewoods, primrose-strewn tracks amidst the budding thickets of

the lower country, paths running beside rushing streams, paths across the wide spaces of the corn

land, and, above all, paths through the flowery garden spaces amidst which the houses in the towns

will stand. And everywhere about the world, on road and path, by sea and land, the happy holiday

Utopians will go.

The population of Utopia will be a migratory population beyond any earthly precedent, not simply a

travelling population, but migratory. The old Utopias were all localised, as localised as a parish

councillor; but it is manifest that nowadays even quite ordinary people live over areas that would

have made a kingdom in those former days, would have filled the Athenian of the Laws with

incredulous astonishment. Except for the habits of the very rich during the Roman Empire, there

was never the slightest precedent for this modern detachment from place. It is nothing to us that we

go eighty or ninety miles from home to place of business, or take an hour's spin of fifty miles to our

week-end golf; every summer it has become a fixed custom to travel wide and far. Only the

clumsiness of communications limit us now, and every facilitation of locomotion widens not only

our potential, but our habitual range. Not only this, but we change our habitations with a growing

frequency and facility; to Sir Thomas More we should seem a breed of nomads. That old fixity was

of necessity and not of choice, it was a mere phase in the development of civilisation, a trick of

rooting man learnt for a time from his new-found friends, the corn and the vine and the hearth; the

untamed spirit of the young has turned for ever to wandering and the sea. The soul of man has never

yet in any land been willingly adscript to the glebe. Even Mr. Belloc, who preaches the happiness of

a peasant proprietary, is so much wiser than his thoughts that he sails about the seas in a little yacht

or goes afoot from Belgium to Rome. We are winning our freedom again once more, a freedom

renewed and enlarged, and there is now neither necessity nor advantage in a permanent life

servitude to this place or that. Men may settle down in our Modern Utopia for love and the family at

last, but first and most abundantly they will see the world.

And with this loosening of the fetters of locality from the feet of men, necessarily there will be all

sorts of fresh distributions of the factors of life. On our own poor haphazard earth, wherever men

work, wherever there are things to be grown, minerals to be won, power to be used, there,

regardless of all the joys and decencies of life, the households needs must cluster. But in Utopia

there will be wide stretches of cheerless or unhealthy or toilsome or dangerous land with never a

household; there will be regions of mining and smelting, black with the smoke of furnaces and

gashed and desolated by mines, with a sort of weird inhospitable grandeur of industrial desolation,

and the men will come thither and work for a spell and return to civilisation again, washing and

changing their attire in the swift gliding train. And by way of compensation there will be beautiful

regions of the earth specially set apart and favoured for children; in them the presence of children

will remit taxation, while in other less wholesome places the presence of children will be taxed; the

lower passes and fore hills of these very Alps, for example, will be populous with homes, serving

the vast arable levels of Upper Italy.

So we shall see, as we come down by our little lake in the lap of Lucendro, and even before we

reach the road, the first scattered chalets and households in which these migrant people live, the

upper summer homes. With the coming of summer, as the snows on the high Alps recede, a tide of

households and schools, teachers and doctors, and all such attendant services will flow up the

mountain masses, and ebb again when the September snows return. It is essential to the modern

ideal of life that the period of education and growth should be prolonged to as late a period as

possible and puberty correspondingly retarded, and by wise regulation the statesmen of Utopia will

constantly adjust and readjust regulations and taxation to diminish the proportion of children reared

in hot and stimulating conditions. These high mountains will, in the bright sweet summer, be

populous with youth. Even up towards this high place where the snow is scarce gone until July,

these households will extend, and below, the whole long valley of Urseren will be a scattered

summer town.

One figures one of the more urban highways, one of those along which the light railways of the

second order run, such as that in the valley of Urseren, into which we should presently come. I

figure it as one would see it at night, a band a hundred yards perhaps in width, the footpath on either

side shaded with high trees and lit softly with orange glowlights; while down the centre the

tramway of the road will go, with sometimes a nocturnal tram-car gliding, lit and gay but almost

noiselessly, past. Lantern-lit cyclists will flit along the track like fireflies, and ever and again some

humming motor-car will hurry by, to or from the Rhoneland or the Rhineland or Switzerland or

Italy. Away on either side the lights of the little country homes up the mountain slopes will glow.

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

We should come out from our mountain valley into the minor road that runs down the lonely rock

wilderness of the San Gotthard Pass, we should descend that nine miles of winding route, and so

arrive towards twilight among the clustering homes and upland unenclosed gardens of Realp and

Hospenthal and Andermatt. Between Realp and Andermatt, and down the Schoellenen gorge, the

greater road would run. By the time we reached it, we should be in the way of understanding our

adventure a little better. We should know already, when we saw those two familiar clusters of

chalets and hotels replaced by a great dispersed multitude of houses—we should see their window

lights, but little else—that we were the victims of some strange transition in space or time, and we

should come down by dimly-seen buildings into the part that would answer to Hospenthal,

wondering and perhaps a little afraid. We should come out into this great main roadway—this

roadway like an urban avenue—and look up it and down, hesitating whether to go along the valley

Furka-ward, or down by Andermatt through the gorge that leads to Göschenen....

People would pass us in the twilight, and then more people; we should see they walked well and

wore a graceful, unfamiliar dress, but more we should not distinguish.

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

scrutiny towards us.

We should answer out of our perplexity: “Good-night!”—for by the conventions established in the

beginning of this book, we are given the freedom of their tongue.

§ 4

Were this a story, I should tell at length how much we were helped by the good fortune of picking

up a Utopian coin of gold, how at last we adventured into the Utopian inn and found it all

marvellously easy. You see us the shyest and most watchful of guests; but of the food they put

before us and the furnishings of the house, and all our entertainment, it will be better to speak later.

We are in a migratory world, we know, one greatly accustomed to foreigners; our mountain clothes

are not strange enough to attract acute attention, though ill-made and shabby, no doubt, by Utopian

standards; we are dealt with as we might best wish to be dealt with, that is to say as rather untidy,

inconspicuous men. We look about us and watch for hints and examples, and, indeed, get through

with the thing. And after our queer, yet not unpleasant, dinner, in which we remark no meat figures,

we go out of the house for a breath of air and for quiet counsel one with another, and there it is we

discover those strange constellations overhead. It comes to us then, clear and full, that our

imagination has realised itself; we dismiss quite finally a Rip-Van-Winkle fancy we have

entertained, all the unfamiliarities of our descent from the mountain pass gather together into one

fullness of conviction, and we know, we know, we are in Utopia.

We wander under the trees by the main road, watching the dim passers-by as though they were the

phantoms of a dream. We say little to one another. We turn aside into a little pathway and come to a

bridge over the turbulent Reuss, hurrying down towards the Devil's Bridge in the gorge below. Far

away over the Furka ridge a pallid glow preludes the rising of the moon.

Two lovers pass us whispering, and we follow them with our eyes. This Utopia has certainly

preserved the fundamental freedom, to love. And then a sweet-voiced bell from somewhere high up

towards Oberalp chimes two-and-twenty times.

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

My companion leans upon the bridge and looks down into the dim river below. I become aware of

the keen edge of the moon like a needle of incandescent silver creeping over the crest, and suddenly

the river is alive with flashes.

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

“We two were boy and girl lovers like that,” he says, and jerks a head at the receding Utopians. “I

loved her first, and I do not think I have ever thought of loving anyone but her.”

It is a curiously human thing, and, upon my honour, not one I had designed, that when at last I stand

in the twilight in the midst of a Utopian township, when my whole being should be taken up with

speculative wonder, this man should be standing by my side, and lugging my attention persistently

towards himself, towards his limited futile self. This thing perpetually happens to me, this intrusion

of something small and irrelevant and alive, upon my great impressions. The time I first saw the

Matterhorn, that Queen among the Alpine summits, I was distracted beyond appreciation by the tale

of a man who could not eat sardines—always sardines did this with him and that; and my first

wanderings along the brown streets of Pompeii, an experience I had anticipated with a strange

intensity, was shot with the most stupidly intelligent discourse on vehicular tariffs in the chief

capitals of Europe that it is possible to imagine. And now this man, on my first night in Utopia,

talks and talks and talks of his poor little love affair.

It shapes itself as the most trite and feeble of tragedies, one of those stories of effortless submission

to chance and custom in which Mr. Hardy or George Gissing might have found a theme. I do but

half listen at first—watching the black figures in the moonlit roadway pacing to and fro. Yet—I

cannot trace how he conveys the subtle conviction to my mind—the woman he loves is beautiful.

They were boy and girl together, and afterwards they met again as fellow students in a world of

comfortable discretions. He seems to have taken the decorums of life with a confiding good faith, to

have been shy and innocent in a suppressed sort of way, and of a mental type not made for worldly

successes; but he must have dreamt about her and loved her well enough. How she felt for him I

could never gather; it seemed to be all of that fleshless friendliness into which we train our girls.

Then abruptly happened stresses. The man who became her husband appeared, with a very evident

passion. He was a year or so older than either of them, and he had the habit and quality of achieving

his ends; he was already successful, and with the promise of wealth, and I, at least, perceived, from

my botanist's phrasing, that his desire was for her beauty.

As my botanist talked I seemed to see the whole little drama, rather clearer than his words gave it

me, the actors all absurdly in Hampstead middle-class raiment, meetings of a Sunday after church

(the men in silk hats, frock coats, and tightly-rolled umbrellas), rare excursions into evening dress,

the decorously vulgar fiction read in their homes, its ambling sentimentalities of thought, the

amiably worldly mothers, the respectable fathers, the aunts, the “people”—his “people” and her

“people”—the piano music and the song, and in this setting our friend, “quite clever” at botany and

“going in” for it “as a profession,” and the girl, gratuitously beautiful; so I figured the arranged and

orderly environment into which this claw of an elemental force had thrust itself to grip.

The stranger who had come in got what he wanted; the girl considered that she thought she had

never loved the botanist, had had only friendship for him—though little she knew of the meaning of

those fine words—they parted a little incoherently and in tears, and it had not occurred to the young

man to imagine she was not going off to conventional life in some other of the endless Frognals he

imagined as the cellular tissue of the world.

But she wasn't.

He had kept her photograph and her memory sweet, and if ever he had strayed from the severest

constancy, it seemed only in the end to strengthen with the stuff of experience, to enhance by

comparative disappointment his imagination of what she might have meant to him.... Then eight

years afterwards they met again.

By the time he gets to this part of his story we have, at my initiative, left the bridge and are walking

towards the Utopian guest house. The Utopian guest house! His voice rises and falls, and sometimes

he holds my arm. My attention comes and goes. “Good-night,” two sweet-voiced Utopians cry to us

in their universal tongue, and I answer them “Good-night.”

“You see,” he persists, “I saw her only a week ago. It was in Lucerne, while I was waiting for you to

come on from England. I talked to her three or four times altogether. And her face—the change in

her! I can't get it out of my head—night or day. The miserable waste of her....”

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

He talks vaguely of ill-usage. “The husband is vain, boastful, dishonest to the very confines of the

law, and a drunkard. There are scenes and insults―”

“She told you?”

“Not much, but someone else did. He brings other women almost into her presence to spite her.”

“And it's going on?” I interrupt.

“Yes. Now.”

“Need it go on?”

“What do you mean?”

“Lady in trouble,” I say. “Knight at hand. Why not stop this dismal grizzling and carry her off?”

(You figure the heroic sweep of the arm that belongs to the Voice.) I positively forget for the

moment that we are in Utopia at all.

“You mean?”

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

Positively he seems aghast at me.

“Do you mean elope with her?”

“It seems a most suitable case.”

For a space he is silent, and we go on through the trees. A Utopian tram-car passes and I see his

face, poor bitted wretch! looking pinched and scared in its trailing glow of light.

“That's all very well in a novel,” he says. “But how could I go back to my laboratory, mixed classes

with young ladies, you know, after a thing like that? How could we live and where could we live?

We might have a house in London, but who would call upon us?... Besides, you don't know her. She

is not the sort of woman.... Don't think I'm timid or conventional. Don't think I don't feel.... Feel!

You don't know what it is to feel in a case of this sort....”

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

hands.”

Which is nonsense.

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

“My dear Man!” I say, and say no more.

For a moment I forget we are in Utopia altogether.

§ 5

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

Besides roadways and railways and tramways, for those who go to and fro in the earth the Modern

Utopians will have very many other ways of travelling. There will be rivers, for example, with a

vast variety of boats; canals with diverse sorts of haulage; there will be lakes and lagoons; and when

one comes at last to the borders of the land, the pleasure craft will be there, coming and going, and

the swift great passenger vessels, very big and steady, doing thirty knots an hour or more, will trace

long wakes as they go dwindling out athwart the restless vastness of the sea.

They will be just beginning to fly in Utopia. We owe much to M. Santos Dumont; the world is

immeasurably more disposed to believe this wonder is coming, and coming nearly, than it was five

years ago. But unless we are to suppose Utopian scientific knowledge far in advance of ours—and

though that supposition was not proscribed in our initial undertaking, it would be inconvenient for

us and not quite in the vein of the rest of our premises—they, too, will only be in the same

experimental stage as ourselves. In Utopia, however, they will conduct research by the army corps

while we conduct it—we don't conduct it! We let it happen. Fools make researches and wise men

exploit them—that is our earthly way of dealing with the question, and we thank Heaven for an

assumed abundance of financially impotent and sufficiently ingenious fools.

In Utopia, a great multitude of selected men, chosen volunteers, will be collaborating upon this new

step in man's struggle with the elements. Bacon's visionary House of Saloman [Footnote: In The

New Atlantis.] will be a thing realised, and it will be humming with this business. Every university

in the world will be urgently working for priority in this aspect of the problem or that. Reports of

experiments, as full and as prompt as the telegraphic reports of cricket in our more sportive

atmosphere, will go about the world. All this will be passing, as it were, behind the act drop of our

first experience, behind this first picture of the urbanised Urseren valley. The literature of the

subject will be growing and developing with the easy swiftness of an eagle's swoop as we come

down the hillside; unseen in that twilight, unthought of by us until this moment, a thousand men at a

thousand glowing desks, a busy specialist press, will be perpetually sifting, criticising, condensing,

and clearing the ground for further speculation. Those who are concerned with the problems of

public locomotion will be following these aeronautic investigations with a keen and enterprising

interest, and so will the physiologist and the sociologist. That Utopian research will, I say, go like

an eagle's swoop in comparison with the blind-man's fumbling of our terrestrial way. Even before

our own brief Utopian journey is out, we may get a glimpse of the swift ripening of all this activity

that will be in progress at our coming. To-morrow, perhaps, or in a day or so, some silent, distant

thing will come gliding into view over the mountains, will turn and soar and pass again beyond our

astonished sight....

§ 6

But my friend and his great trouble turn my mind from these questions of locomotion and the

freedoms that cluster about them. In spite of myself I find myself framing his case. He is a lover, the

most conventional of Anglican lovers, with a heart that has had its training, I should think, in the

clean but limited schoolroom of Mrs. Henry Wood....

In Utopia I think they will fly with stronger pinions, it will not be in the superficialities of life

merely that movement will be wide and free, they will mount higher and swoop more steeply than

he in his cage can believe. What will their range be, their prohibitions? what jars to our

preconceptions will he and I receive here?

My mind flows with the free, thin flow that it has at the end of an eventful day, and as we walk

along in silence towards our inn I rove from issue to issue, I find myself ranging amidst the

fundamental things of the individual life and all the perplexity of desires and passions. I turn my

questionings to the most difficult of all sets of compromises, those mitigations of spontaneous

freedom that constitute the marriage laws, the mystery of balancing justice against the good of the

future, amidst these violent and elusive passions. Where falls the balance of freedoms here? I pass

for a time from Utopianising altogether, to ask the question that, after all, Schopenhauer failed

completely to answer, why sometimes in the case of hurtful, pointless, and destructive things we

want so vehemently....

I come back from this unavailing glance into the deeps to the general question of freedoms in this

new relation. I find myself far adrift from the case of the Frognal botanist, and asking how far a

modern Utopia will deal with personal morals.

As Plato demonstrated long ago, the principles of the relation of State control to personal morals

may be best discussed in the case of intoxication, the most isolated and least complicated of all this

group of problems. But Plato's treatment of this issue as a question of who may or may not have the

use of wine, though suitable enough in considering a small State in which everybody was the

effectual inspector of everybody, is entirely beside the mark under modern conditions, in which we

are to have an extraordinarily higher standard of individual privacy and an amplitude and quantity

of migration inconceivable to the Academic imagination. We may accept his principle and put this

particular freedom (of the use of wine) among the distinctive privileges of maturity, and still find all

that a modern would think of as the Drink Question untouched.

That question in Utopia will differ perhaps in the proportion of its factors, but in no other respect,

from what it is upon earth. The same desirable ends will be sought, the maintenance of public order

and decency, the reduction of inducements to form this bad and wasteful habit to their lowest

possible minimum, and the complete protection of the immature. But the modern Utopians, having

systematised their sociology, will have given some attention to the psychology of minor officials, a

matter altogether too much neglected by the social reformer on earth. They will not put into the

hands of a common policeman powers direct and indirect that would be dangerous to the public in

the hands of a judge. And they will have avoided the immeasurable error of making their control of

the drink traffic a source of public revenue. Privacies they will not invade, but they will certainly

restrict the public consumption of intoxicants to specified licensed places and the sale of them to

unmistakable adults, and they will make the temptation of the young a grave offence. In so

migratory a population as the Modern Utopian, the licensing of inns and bars would be under the

same control as the railways and high roads. Inns exist for the stranger and not for the locality, and

we shall meet with nothing there to correspond with our terrestrial absurdity of Local Option.

The Utopians will certainly control this trade, and as certainly punish personal excesses. Public

drunkenness (as distinguished from the mere elation that follows a generous but controlled use of

wine) will be an offence against public decency, and will be dealt with in some very drastic manner.

It will, of course, be an aggravation of, and not an excuse for, crime.

But I doubt whether the State will go beyond that. Whether an adult shall use wine or beer or spirits,

or not, seems to me entirely a matter for his doctor and his own private conscience. I doubt if we

explorers shall meet any drunken men, and I doubt not we shall meet many who have never availed

themselves of their adult freedom in this respect. The conditions of physical happiness will be better

understood in Utopia, it will be worth while to be well there, and the intelligent citizen will watch

himself closely. Half and more of the drunkenness of earth is an attempt to lighten dull days and

hopelessly sordid and disagreeable lives, and in Utopia they do not suffer these things. Assuredly

Utopia will be temperate, not only drinking, but eating with the soundest discretion. Yet I do not

think wine and good ale will be altogether wanting there, nor good, mellow whisky, nor, upon

occasion, the engaging various liqueur. I do not think so. My botanist, who abstains altogether, is of

another opinion. We differ here and leave the question to the earnest reader. I have the utmost

respect for all Teetotalers, Prohibitionists, and Haters and Persecutors of Innkeepers, their energy of

reform awakens responsive notes in me, and to their species I look for a large part of the urgent

repair of our earth; yet for all that―

There is Burgundy, for example, a bottle of soft and kindly Burgundy, taken to make a sunshine on

one's lunch when four strenuous hours of toil have left one on the further side of appetite. Or ale, a

foaming tankard of ale, ten miles of sturdy tramping in the sleet and slush as a prelude, and then

good bread and good butter and a ripe hollow Stilton and celery and ale—ale with a certain

quantitative freedom. Or, again, where is the sin in a glass of tawny port three or four times, or it

may be five, a year, when the walnuts come round in their season? If you drink no port, then what

are walnuts for? Such things I hold for the reward of vast intervals of abstinence; they justify your

wide, immaculate margin, which is else a mere unmeaning blankness on the page of palate God has

given you! I write of these things as a fleshly man, confessedly and knowingly fleshly, and more

than usually aware of my liability to err; I know myself for a gross creature more given to sedentary

world-mending than to brisk activities, and not one-tenth as active as the dullest newspaper boy in

London. Yet still I have my uses, uses that vanish in monotony, and still I must ask why should we

bury the talent of these bright sensations altogether? Under no circumstances can I think of my

Utopians maintaining their fine order of life on ginger ale and lemonade and the ale that is Kops'.

Those terrible Temperance Drinks, solutions of qualified sugar mixed with vast volumes of gas, as,

for example, soda, seltzer, lemonade, and fire-extincteurs hand grenades—minerals, they call such

stuff in England—fill a man with wind and self-righteousness. Indeed they do! Coffee destroys

brain and kidney, a fact now universally recognised and advertised throughout America; and tea,

except for a kind of green tea best used with discretion in punch, tans the entrails and turns honest

stomachs into leather bags. Rather would I be Metchnikoffed [Footnote: See The Nature of Man, by

Professor Elie Metchnikoff.] at once and have a clean, good stomach of German silver. No! If we

are to have no ale in Utopia, give me the one clean temperance drink that is worthy to set beside

wine, and that is simple water. Best it is when not quite pure and with a trace of organic matter, for

then it tastes and sparkles....

My botanist would still argue.

Thank Heaven this is my book, and that the ultimate decision rests with me. It is open to him to

write his own Utopia and arrange that everybody shall do nothing except by the consent of the

savants of the Republic, either in his eating, drinking, dressing or lodging, even as Cabet proposed.

It is open to him to try a News from Nowhere Utopia with the wine left out. I have my short way

with him here quite effectually. I turn in the entrance of our inn to the civil but by no means

obsequious landlord, and with a careful ambiguity of manner for the thing may be considered an

outrage, and I try to make it possible the idea is a jest—put my test demand....

“You see, my dear Teetotaler?—he sets before me tray and glass and...” Here follows the necessary

experiment and a deep sigh.... “Yes, a bottle of quite excellent light beer! So there are also cakes and

ale in Utopia! Let us in this saner and more beautiful world drink perdition to all earthly excesses.

Let us drink more particularly to the coming of the day when men beyond there will learn to

distinguish between qualitative and quantitative questions, to temper good intentions with good

intelligence, and righteousness with wisdom. One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the

unteachable wildness of the Good.”

§ 7

So presently to bed and to sleep, but not at once to sleep. At first my brain, like a dog in unfamiliar

quarters, must turn itself round for a time or so before it lies down. This strange mystery of a world

of which I have seen so little as yet—a mountain slope, a twilit road, a traffic of ambiguous vehicles

and dim shapes, the window lights of many homes—fills me with curiosities. Figures and incidents

come and go, the people we have passed, our landlord, quietly attentive and yet, I feel, with the

keenest curiosity peeping from his eyes, the unfamiliar forms of the house parts and furnishings, the

unfamiliar courses of the meal. Outside this little bedroom is a world, a whole unimagined world. A

thousand million things lie outside in the darkness beyond this lit inn of ours, unthought-of

possibilities, overlooked considerations, surprises, riddles, incommensurables, a whole monstrous

intricate universe of consequences that I have to do my best to unravel. I attempt impossible

recapitulations and mingle the weird quality of dream stuff with my thoughts.

Athwart all this tumult of my memory goes this queer figure of my unanticipated companion, so

obsessed by himself and his own egotistical love that this sudden change to another world seems

only a change of scene for his gnawing, uninvigorating passion. It occurs to me that she also must

have an equivalent in Utopia, and then that idea and all ideas grow thin and vague, and are

dissolved at last in the rising tide of sleep....

CHAPTER THE THIRD

Utopian Economics

§ 1

These modern Utopians with the universally diffused good manners, the universal education, the

fine freedoms we shall ascribe to them, their world unity, world language, world-wide travellings,

world-wide freedom of sale and purchase, will remain mere dreamstuff, incredible even by twilight,

until we have shown that at that level the community will still sustain itself. At any rate, the

common liberty of the Utopians will not embrace the common liberty to be unserviceable, the most

perfect economy of organisation still leaves the fact untouched that all order and security in a State

rests on the certainty of getting work done. How will the work of this planet be done? What will be

the economics of a modern Utopia?

Now in the first place, a state so vast and complex as this world Utopia, and with so migratory a

people, will need some handy symbol to check the distribution of services and commodities. Almost

certainly they will need to have money. They will have money, and it is not inconceivable that, for

all his sorrowful thoughts, our botanist, with his trained observation, his habit of looking at little

things upon the ground, would be the one to see and pick up the coin that has fallen from some

wayfarer's pocket. (This, in our first hour or so before we reach the inn in the Urseren Thal.) You

figure us upon the high Gotthard road, heads together over the little disk that contrives to tell us so

much of this strange world.

It is, I imagine, of gold, and it will be a convenient accident if it is sufficient to make us solvent for

a day or so, until we are a little more informed of the economic system into which we have come. It

is, moreover, of a fair round size, and the inscription declares it one Lion, equal to “twaindy” bronze

Crosses. Unless the ratio of metals is very different here, this latter must be a token coin, and

therefore legal tender for but a small amount. (That would be pain and pleasure to Mr. Wordsworth

Donisthorpe if he were to chance to join us, for once he planned a Utopian coinage, [Footnote: A

System of Measures, by Wordsworth Donisthorpe.] and the words Lion and Cross are his. But a

token coinage and “legal tender” he cannot abide. They make him argue.) And being in Utopia, that

unfamiliar “twaindy” suggests at once we have come upon that most Utopian of all things, a

duodecimal system of counting.

My author's privilege of details serves me here. This Lion is distinctly a beautiful coin, admirably

made, with its value in fine, clear letters circling the obverse side, and a head thereon—of Newton,

as I live! One detects American influence here. Each year, as we shall find, each denomination of

coins celebrates a centenary. The reverse shows the universal goddess of the Utopian coinage—

Peace, as a beautiful woman, reading with a child out of a great book, and behind them are stars,

and an hour-glass, halfway run. Very human these Utopians, after all, and not by any means above

the obvious in their symbolism!

So for the first time we learn definitely of the World State, and we get our first clear hint, too, that

there is an end to Kings. But our coin raises other issues also. It would seem that this Utopia has no

simple community of goods, that there is, at any rate, a restriction upon what one may take, a need

for evidences of equivalent value, a limitation to human credit.

It dates—so much of this present Utopia of ours dates. Those former Utopists were bitterly against

gold. You will recall the undignified use Sir Thomas More would have us put it to, and how there

was no money at all in the Republic of Plato, and in that later community for which he wrote his

Laws an iron coinage of austere appearance and doubtful efficacy.... It may be these great

gentlemen were a little hasty with a complicated difficulty, and not a little unjust to a highly

respectable element.

Gold is abused and made into vessels of dishonour, and abolished from ideal society as though it

were the cause instead of the instrument of human baseness; but, indeed, there is nothing bad in

gold. Making gold into vessels of dishonour and banishing it from the State is punishing the hatchet

for the murderer's crime. Money, did you but use it right, is a good thing in life, a necessary thing in

civilised human life, as complicated, indeed, for its purposes, but as natural a growth as the bones in

a man's wrist, and I do not see how one can imagine anything at all worthy of being called a

civilisation without it. It is the water of the body social, it distributes and receives, and renders

growth and assimilation and movement and recovery possible. It is the reconciliation of human

interdependence with liberty. What other device will give a man so great a freedom with so strong

an inducement to effort? The economic history of the world, where it is not the history of the theory

of property, is very largely the record of the abuse, not so much of money as of credit devices to

supplement money, to amplify the scope of this most precious invention; and no device of labour

credits [Footnote: Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Ch. IX.] or free demand of commodities

from a central store [Footnote: More's Utopia and Cabet's Icaria.] or the like has ever been

suggested that does not give ten thousand times more scope for that inherent moral dross in man

that must be reckoned with in any sane Utopia we may design and plan.... Heaven knows where

progress may not end, but at any rate this developing State, into which we two men have fallen, this

Twentieth Century Utopia, has still not passed beyond money and the use of coins.

§ 2

Now if this Utopian world is to be in some degree parallel to contemporary thought, it must have

been concerned, it may be still concerned, with many unsettled problems of currency, and with the

problems that centre about a standard of value. Gold is perhaps of all material substances the best

adapted to the monetary purpose, but even at that best it falls far short of an imaginable ideal. It

undergoes spasmodic and irregular cheapening through new discoveries of gold, and at any time it

may undergo very extensive and sudden and disastrous depreciation through the discovery of some

way of transmuting less valuable elements. The liability to such depreciations introduces an

undesirable speculative element into the relations of debtor and creditor. When, on the one hand,

there is for a time a check in the increase of the available stores of gold, or an increase in the energy

applied to social purposes, or a checking of the public security that would impede the free exchange

of credit and necessitate a more frequent production of gold in evidence, then there comes an undue

appreciation of money as against the general commodities of life, and an automatic impoverishment

of the citizens in general as against the creditor class. The common people are mortgaged into the

bondage of debt. And on the other hand an unexpected spate of gold production, the discovery of a

single nugget as big as St. Paul's, let us say—a quite possible thing—would result in a sort of jail

delivery of debtors and a financial earthquake.

It has been suggested by an ingenious thinker that it is possible to use as a standard of monetary

value no substance whatever, but instead, force, and that value might be measured in units of

energy. An excellent development this, in theory, at any rate, of the general idea of the modern State

as kinetic and not static; it throws the old idea of the social order and the new into the sharpest

antithesis. The old order is presented as a system of institutions and classes ruled by men of

substance; the new, of enterprises and interests led by men of power.

Now I glance at this matter in the most incidental manner, as a man may skim through a specialist's

exposition in a popular magazine. You must figure me, therefore, finding from a casual periodical

paper in our inn, with a certain surprise at not having anticipated as much, the Utopian self of that

same ingenious person quite conspicuously a leader of thought, and engaged in organising the

discussion of the currency changes Utopia has under consideration. The article, as it presents itself

to me, contains a complete and lucid, though occasionally rather technical, explanation of his

newest proposals. They have been published, it seems, for general criticism, and one gathers that in

the modern Utopia the administration presents the most elaborately detailed schemes of any

proposed alteration in law or custom, some time before any measure is taken to carry it into effect,

and the possibilities of every detail are acutely criticised, flaws anticipated, side issues raised, and

the whole minutely tested and fined down by a planetful of critics, before the actual process of

legislation begins.

The explanation of these proposals involves an anticipatory glance at the local administration of a

Modern Utopia. To anyone who has watched the development of technical science during the last

decade or so, there will be no shock in the idea that a general consolidation of a great number of

common public services over areas of considerable size is now not only practicable, but very

desirable. In a little while heating and lighting and the supply of power for domestic and industrial

purposes and for urban and inter-urban communications will all be managed electrically from

common generating stations. And the trend of political and social speculation points decidedly to

the conclusion that so soon as it passes out of the experimental stage, the supply of electrical energy,

just like drainage and the supply of water, will fall to the local authority. Moreover, the local

authority will be the universal landowner. Upon that point so extreme an individualist as Herbert

Spencer was in agreement with the Socialist. In Utopia we conclude that, whatever other types of

property may exist, all natural sources of force, and indeed all strictly natural products, coal, water

power, and the like, are inalienably vested in the local authorities (which, in order to secure the

maximum of convenience and administrative efficiency, will probably control areas as large

sometimes as half England), they will generate electricity by water power, by combustion, by wind

or tide or whatever other natural force is available, and this electricity will be devoted, some of it to

the authority's lighting and other public works, some of it, as a subsidy, to the World-State authority

which controls the high roads, the great railways, the inns and other apparatus of world

communication, and the rest will pass on to private individuals or to distributing companies at a

uniform fixed rate for private lighting and heating, for machinery and industrial applications of all

sorts. Such an arrangement of affairs will necessarily involve a vast amount of book-keeping

between the various authorities, the World-State government and the customers, and this book-

keeping will naturally be done most conveniently in units of physical energy.

It is not incredible that the assessment of the various local administrations for the central world

government would be already calculated upon the estimated total of energy, periodically available

in each locality, and booked and spoken of in these physical units. Accounts between central and

local governments could be kept in these terms. Moreover, one may imagine Utopian local

authorities making contracts in which payment would be no longer in coinage upon the gold basis,

but in notes good for so many thousands or millions of units of energy at one or other of the

generating stations.

Now the problems of economic theory will have undergone an enormous clarification if, instead of

measuring in fluctuating money values, the same scale of energy units can be extended to their

discussion, if, in fact, the idea of trading could be entirely eliminated. In my Utopia, at any rate, this

has been done, the production and distribution of common commodities have been expressed as a

problem in the conversion of energy, and the scheme that Utopia was now discussing was the

application of this idea of energy as the standard of value to the entire Utopian coinage. Every one

of those giant local authorities was to be free to issue energy notes against the security of its surplus

of saleable available energy, and to make all its contracts for payment in those notes up to a certain

maximum defined by the amount of energy produced and disposed of in that locality in the previous

year. This power of issue was to be renewed just as rapidly as the notes came in for redemption. In a

world without boundaries, with a population largely migratory and emancipated from locality, the

price of the energy notes of these various local bodies would constantly tend to be uniform, because

employment would constantly shift into the areas where energy was cheap. Accordingly, the price

of so many millions of units of energy at any particular moment in coins of the gold currency would

be approximately the same throughout the world. It was proposed to select some particular day

when the economic atmosphere was distinctly equable, and to declare a fixed ratio between the gold

coinage and the energy notes; each gold Lion and each Lion of credit representing exactly the

number of energy units it could buy on that day. The old gold coinage was at once to cease to be

legal tender beyond certain defined limits, except to the central government, which would not

reissue it as it came in. It was, in fact, to become a temporary token coinage, a token coinage of full

value for the day of conversion at any rate, if not afterwards, under the new standard of energy, and

to be replaceable by an ordinary token coinage as time went on. The old computation by Lions and

the values of the small change of daily life were therefore to suffer no disturbance whatever.

The economists of Utopia, as I apprehended them, had a different method and a very different

system of theories from those I have read on earth, and this makes my exposition considerably more

difficult. This article upon which I base my account floated before me in an unfamiliar, perplexing,

and dream-like phraseology. Yet I brought away an impression that here was a rightness that earthly

economists have failed to grasp. Few earthly economists have been able to disentangle themselves

from patriotisms and politics, and their obsession has always been international trade. Here in

Utopia the World State cuts that away from beneath their feet; there are no imports but meteorites,

and no exports at all. Trading is the earthly economists' initial notion, and they start from perplexing

and insoluble riddles about exchange value, insoluble because all trading finally involves individual

preferences which are incalculable and unique. Nowhere do they seem to be handling really defined

standards, every economic dissertation and discussion reminds one more strongly than the last of

the game of croquet Alice played in Wonderland, when the mallets were flamingoes and the balls

were hedgehogs and crawled away, and the hoops were soldiers and kept getting up and walking

about. But economics in Utopia must be, it seems to me, not a theory of trading based on bad

psychology, but physics applied to problems in the theory of sociology. The general problem of

Utopian economics is to state the conditions of the most efficient application of the steadily

increasing quantities of material energy the progress of science makes available for human service,

to the general needs of mankind. Human labour and existing material are dealt with in relation to

that. Trading and relative wealth are merely episodical in such a scheme. The trend of the article I

read, as I understood it, was that a monetary system based upon a relatively small amount of gold,

upon which the business of the whole world had hitherto been done, fluctuated unreasonably and

supplied no real criterion of well-being, that the nominal values of things and enterprises had no

clear and simple relation to the real physical prosperity of the community, that the nominal wealth

of a community in millions of pounds or dollars or Lions, measured nothing but the quantity of

hope in the air, and an increase of confidence meant an inflation of credit and a pessimistic phase a

collapse of this hallucination of possessions. The new standards, this advocate reasoned, were to

alter all that, and it seemed to me they would.

I have tried to indicate the drift of these remarkable proposals, but about them clustered an elaborate

mass of keen and temperate discussion. Into the details of that discussion I will not enter now, nor

am I sure I am qualified to render the multitudinous aspect of this complicated question at all

precisely. I read the whole thing in the course of an hour or two of rest after lunch—it was either the

second or third day of my stay in Utopia—and we were sitting in a little inn at the end of the Lake

of Uri. We had loitered there, and I had fallen reading because of a shower of rain.... But certainly

as I read it the proposition struck me as a singularly simple and attractive one, and its exposition

opened out to me for the first time clearly, in a comprehensive outline, the general conception of the

economic nature of the Utopian State.

§ 3

The difference between the social and economic sciences as they exist in our world [Footnote: But

see Gidding's Principles of Sociology, a modern and richly suggestive American work, imperfectly

appreciated by the British student. See also Walter Bagehot's Economic Studies.] and in this Utopia

deserves perhaps a word or so more. I write with the utmost diffidence, because upon earth

economic science has been raised to a very high level of tortuous abstraction by the industry of its

professors, and I can claim neither a patient student's intimacy with their productions nor—what is

more serious—anything but the most generalised knowledge of what their Utopian equivalents have

achieved. The vital nature of economic issues to a Utopia necessitates, however, some attempt at

interpretation between the two.

In Utopia there is no distinct and separate science of economics. Many problems that we should

regard as economic come within the scope of Utopian psychology. My Utopians make two divisions

of the science of psychology, first, the general psychology of individuals, a sort of mental

physiology separated by no definite line from physiology proper, and secondly, the psychology of

relationship between individuals. This second is an exhaustive study of the reaction of people upon

each other and of all possible relationships. It is a science of human aggregations, of all possible

family groupings, of neighbours and neighbourhood, of companies, associations, unions, secret and

public societies, religious groupings, of common ends and intercourse, and of the methods of

intercourse and collective decision that hold human groups together, and finally of government and

the State. The elucidation of economic relationships, depending as it does on the nature of the

hypothesis of human aggregation actually in operation at any time, is considered to be subordinate

and subsequent to this general science of Sociology. Political economy and economics, in our world

now, consist of a hopeless muddle of social assumptions and preposterous psychology, and a few

geographical and physical generalisations. Its ingredients will be classified out and widely separated

in Utopian thought. On the one hand there will be the study of physical economies, ending in the

descriptive treatment of society as an organisation for the conversion of all the available energy in

nature to the material ends of mankind—a physical sociology which will be already at such a stage

of practical development as to be giving the world this token coinage representing energy—and on

the other there will be the study of economic problems as problems in the division of labour, having

regard to a social organisation whose main ends are reproduction and education in an atmosphere of

personal freedom. Each of these inquiries, working unencumbered by the other, will be continually

contributing fresh valid conclusions for the use of the practical administrator.

In no region of intellectual activity will our hypothesis of freedom from tradition be of more value

in devising a Utopia than here. From its beginning the earthly study of economics has been infertile

and unhelpful, because of the mass of unanalysed and scarcely suspected assumptions upon which it

rested. The facts were ignored that trade is a bye-product and not an essential factor in social life,

that property is a plastic and fluctuating convention, that value is capable of impersonal treatment

only in the case of the most generalised requirements. Wealth was measured by the standards of

exchange. Society was regarded as a practically unlimited number of avaricious adult units

incapable of any other subordinate groupings than business partnerships, and the sources of

competition were assumed to be inexhaustible. Upon such quicksands rose an edifice that aped the

securities of material science, developed a technical jargon and professed the discovery of “laws.”

Our liberation from these false presumptions through the rhetoric of Carlyle and Ruskin and the

activities of the Socialists, is more apparent than real. The old edifice oppresses us still, repaired

and altered by indifferent builders, underpinned in places, and with a slight change of name.

“Political Economy” has been painted out, and instead we read “Economics—under entirely new

management.” Modern Economics differs mainly from old Political Economy in having produced

no Adam Smith. The old “Political Economy” made certain generalisations, and they were mostly

wrong; new Economics evades generalisations, and seems to lack the intellectual power to make

them. The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes

nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by. Its most typical exponents display

a disposition to disavow generalisations altogether, to claim consideration as “experts,” and to make

immediate political application of that conceded claim. Now Newton, Darwin, Dalton, Davy, Joule,

and Adam Smith did not affect this “expert” hankey-pankey, becoming enough in a hairdresser or a

fashionable physician, but indecent in a philosopher or a man of science. In this state of impotent

expertness, however, or in some equally unsound state, economics must struggle on—a science that

is no science, a floundering lore wallowing in a mud of statistics—until either the study of the

material organisation of production on the one hand as a development of physics and geography, or

the study of social aggregation on the other, renders enduring foundations possible.

§ 4

The older Utopias were all relatively small states; Plato's Republic, for example, was to be smaller

than the average English borough, and no distinction was made between the Family, the Local

Government, and the State. Plato and Campanella—for all that the latter was a Christian priest—

carried communism to its final point and prescribed even a community of husbands and wives, an

idea that was brought at last to the test of effectual experiment in the Oneida Community of New

York State (1848-1879). This latter body did not long survive its founder, at least as a veritable

communism, by reason of the insurgent individualism of its vigorous sons. More, too, denied

privacy and ruled an absolute community of goods, at any rate, and so, coming to the Victorian

Utopias, did Cabet. But Cabet's communism was one of the “free store” type, and the goods were

yours only after you had requisitioned them. That seems the case in the “Nowhere” of Morris also.

Compared with the older writers Bellamy and Morris have a vivid sense of individual separation,

and their departure from the old homogeneity is sufficiently marked to justify a doubt whether there

will be any more thoroughly communistic Utopias for ever.

A Utopia such as this present one, written in the opening of the Twentieth Century, and after the

most exhaustive discussion—nearly a century long—between Communistic and Socialistic ideas on

the one hand, and Individualism on the other, emerges upon a sort of effectual conclusion to those

controversies. The two parties have so chipped and amended each other's initial propositions that,

indeed, except for the labels still flutteringly adhesive to the implicated men, it is hard to choose

between them. Each side established a good many propositions, and we profit by them all. We of

the succeeding generation can see quite clearly that for the most part the heat and zeal of these

discussions arose in the confusion of a quantitative for a qualitative question. To the onlooker, both

Individualism and Socialism are, in the absolute, absurdities; the one would make men the slaves of

the violent or rich, the other the slaves of the State official, and the way of sanity runs, perhaps even

sinuously, down the intervening valley. Happily the dead past buries its dead, and it is not our

function now to adjudicate the preponderance of victory. In the very days when our political and

economic order is becoming steadily more Socialistic, our ideals of intercourse turn more and more

to a fuller recognition of the claims of individuality. The State is to be progressive, it is no longer to

be static, and this alters the general condition of the Utopian problem profoundly; we have to

provide not only for food and clothing, for order and health, but for initiative. The factor that leads

the World State on from one phase of development to the next is the interplay of individualities; to

speak teleologically, the world exists for the sake of and through initiative, and individuality is the

method of initiative. Each man and woman, to the extent that his or her individuality is marked,

breaks the law of precedent, transgresses the general formula, and makes a new experiment for the

direction of the life force. It is impossible, therefore, for the State, which represents all and is

preoccupied by the average, to make effectual experiments and intelligent innovations, and so

supply the essential substance of life. As against the individual the state represents the species, in

the case of the Utopian World State it absolutely represents the species. The individual emerges

from the species, makes his experiment, and either fails, dies, and comes to an end, or succeeds and

impresses himself in offspring, in consequences and results, intellectual, material and moral, upon

the world.

Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since

the beginning, and the World State of the Modern Utopist will, in its economic aspect, be a

compendium of established economic experience, about which individual enterprise will be

continually experimenting, either to fail and pass, or to succeed and at last become incorporated

with the undying organism of the World State. This organism is the universal rule, the common

restriction, the rising level platform on which individualities stand.

The World State in this ideal presents itself as the sole landowner of the earth, with the great local

governments I have adumbrated, the local municipalities, holding, as it were, feudally under it as

landlords. The State or these subordinates holds all the sources of energy, and either directly or

through its tenants, farmers and agents, develops these sources, and renders the energy available for

the work of life. It or its tenants will produce food, and so human energy, and the exploitation of

coal and electric power, and the powers of wind and wave and water will be within its right. It will

pour out this energy by assignment and lease and acquiescence and what not upon its individual

citizens. It will maintain order, maintain roads, maintain a cheap and efficient administration of

justice, maintain cheap and rapid locomotion and be the common carrier of the planet, convey and

distribute labour, control, let, or administer all natural productions, pay for and secure healthy births

and a healthy and vigorous new generation, maintain the public health, coin money and sustain

standards of measurement, subsidise research, and reward such commercially unprofitable

undertakings as benefit the community as a whole; subsidise when needful chairs of criticism and

authors and publications, and collect and distribute information. The energy developed and the

employment afforded by the State will descend like water that the sun has sucked out of the sea to

fall upon a mountain range, and back to the sea again it will come at last, debouching in ground rent

and royalty and license fees, in the fees of travellers and profits upon carrying and coinage and the

like, in death duty, transfer tax, legacy and forfeiture, returning to the sea. Between the clouds and

the sea it will run, as a river system runs, down through a great region of individual enterprise and

interplay, whose freedom it will sustain. In that intermediate region between the kindred heights and

deeps those beginnings and promises will arise that are the essential significance, the essential

substance, of life. From our human point of view the mountains and sea are for the habitable lands

that lie between. So likewise the State is for Individualities. The State is for Individuals, the law is

for freedoms, the world is for experiment, experience, and change: these are the fundamental beliefs

upon which a modern Utopia must go.

§ 5

Within this scheme, which makes the State the source of all energy, and the final legatee, what will

be the nature of the property a man may own? Under modern conditions—indeed, under any

conditions—a man without some negotiable property is a man without freedom, and the extent of

his property is very largely the measure of his freedom. Without any property, without even shelter

or food, a man has no choice but to set about getting these things; he is in servitude to his needs

until he has secured property to satisfy them. But with a certain small property a man is free to do

many things, to take a fortnight's holiday when he chooses, for example, and to try this new

departure from his work or that; with so much more, he may take a year of freedom and go to the

ends of the earth; with so much more, he may obtain elaborate apparatus and try curious novelties,

build himself houses and make gardens, establish businesses and make experiments at large. Very

speedily, under terrestrial conditions, the property of a man may reach such proportions that his

freedom oppresses the freedom of others. Here, again, is a quantitative question, an adjustment of

conflicting freedoms, a quantitative question that too many people insist on making a qualitative

one.

The object sought in the code of property laws that one would find in operation in Utopia would be

the same object that pervades the whole Utopian organisation, namely, a universal maximum of

individual freedom. Whatever far-reaching movements the State or great rich men or private

corporations may make, the starvation by any complication of employment, the unwilling

deportation, the destruction of alternatives to servile submissions, must not ensue. Beyond such

qualifications, the object of Modern Utopian statesmanship will be to secure to a man the freedom

given by all his legitimate property, that is to say, by all the values his toil or skill or foresight and

courage have brought into being. Whatever he has justly made he has a right to keep, that is obvious

enough; but he will also have a right to sell and exchange, and so this question of what may be

property takes really the form of what may a man buy in Utopia?

A modern Utopian most assuredly must have a practically unqualified property in all those things

that become, as it were, by possession, extensions and expressions of his personality; his clothing,

his jewels, the tools of his employment, his books, the objects of art he may have bought or made,

his personal weapons (if Utopia have need of such things), insignia, and so forth. All such things

that he has bought with his money or acquired—provided he is not a professional or habitual dealer

in such property—will be inalienably his, his to give or lend or keep, free even from taxation. So

intimate is this sort of property that I have no doubt Utopia will give a man posthumous rights over

it—will permit him to assign it to a successor with at the utmost the payment of a small redemption.

A horse, perhaps, in certain districts, or a bicycle, or any such mechanical conveyance personally

used, the Utopians might find it well to rank with these possessions. No doubt, too, a house and

privacy owned and occupied by a man, and even a man's own household furniture, might be held to

stand as high or almost as high in the property scale, might be taxed as lightly and transferred under

only a slightly heavier redemption, provided he had not let these things on hire, or otherwise

alienated them from his intimate self. A thorough-going, Democratic Socialist will no doubt be

inclined at first to object that if the Utopians make these things a specially free sort of property in

this way, men would spend much more upon them than they would otherwise do, but indeed that

will be an excellent thing. We are too much affected by the needy atmosphere of our own

mismanaged world. In Utopia no one will have to hunger because some love to make and have

made and own and cherish beautiful things. To give this much of property to individuals will tend to

make clothing, ornamentation, implements, books, and all the arts finer and more beautiful, because

by buying such things a man will secure something inalienable—save in the case of bankruptcy—

for himself and for those who belong to him. Moreover, a man may in his lifetime set aside sums to

ensure special advantages of education and care for the immature children of himself and others,

and in this manner also exercise a posthumous right. [Footnote: But a Statute of Mortmain will set a

distinct time limit to the continuance of such benefactions. A periodic revision of endowments is a

necessary feature in any modern Utopia.]

For all other property, the Utopians will have a scantier respect; even money unspent by a man, and

debts to him that bear no interest, will at his death stand upon a lower level than these things. What

he did not choose to gather and assimilate to himself, or assign for the special education of his

children, the State will share in the lion's proportion with heir and legatee.

This applies, for example, to the property that a man creates and acquires in business enterprises,

which are presumably undertaken for gain, and as a means of living rather than for themselves. All

new machinery, all new methods, all uncertain and variable and non-universal undertakings, are no

business for the State; they commence always as experiments of unascertained value, and next after

the invention of money, there is no invention has so facilitated freedom and progress as the

invention of the limited liability company to do this work of trial and adventure. The abuses, the

necessary reforms of company law on earth, are no concern of ours here and now, suffice it that in a

Modern Utopia such laws must be supposed to be as perfect as mortal laws can possibly be made.

Caveat vendor will be a sound qualification of Caveat emptor in the beautifully codified Utopian

law. Whether the Utopian company will be allowed to prefer this class of share to that or to issue

debentures, whether indeed usury, that is to say lending money at fixed rates of interest, will be

permitted at all in Utopia, one may venture to doubt. But whatever the nature of the shares a man

may hold, they will all be sold at his death, and whatever he has not clearly assigned for special

educational purposes will—with possibly some fractional concession to near survivors—lapse to

the State. The “safe investment,” that permanent, undying claim upon the community, is just one of

those things Utopia will discourage; which indeed the developing security of civilisation quite

automatically discourages through the fall in the rate of interest. As we shall see at a later stage, the

State will insure the children of every citizen, and those legitimately dependent upon him, against

the inconvenience of his death; it will carry out all reasonable additional dispositions he may have

made for them in the same event; and it will insure him against old age and infirmity; and the object

of Utopian economics will be to give a man every inducement to spend his surplus money in

intensifying the quality of his surroundings, either by economic adventures and experiments, which

may yield either losses or large profits, or in increasing the beauty, the pleasure, the abundance and

promise of life.

Besides strictly personal possessions and shares in business adventures, Utopia will no doubt permit

associations of its citizens to have a property in various sorts of contracts and concessions, in leases

of agricultural and other land, for example; in houses they may have built, factories and machinery

they may have made, and the like. And if a citizen prefer to adventure into business single-handed,

he will have all the freedoms of enterprise enjoyed by a company; in business affairs he will be a

company of one, and his single share will be dealt with at his death like any other shares.... So much

for the second kind of property. And these two kinds of property will probably exhaust the sorts of

property a Utopian may possess.

The trend of modern thought is entirely against private property in land or natural objects or

products, and in Utopia these things will be the inalienable property of the World State. Subject to

the rights of free locomotion, land will be leased out to companies or individuals, but—in view of

the unknown necessities of the future—never for a longer period than, let us say, fifty years.

The property of a parent in his children, and of a husband in his wife, seems to be undergoing a

steadily increasing qualification in the world of to-day, but the discussion of the Utopian state of

affairs in regard to such property may be better reserved until marriage becomes our topic. Suffice it

here to remark, that the increasing control of a child's welfare and upbringing by the community,

and the growing disposition to limit and tax inheritance are complementary aspects of the general

tendency to regard the welfare and free intraplay of future generations no longer as the concern of

parents and altruistic individuals, but as the predominant issue of statesmanship, and the duty and

moral meaning of the world community as a whole.

§ 6

From the conception of mechanical force as coming in from Nature to the service of man, a

conception the Utopian proposal of a coinage based on energy units would emphasise, arise

profound contrasts between the modern and the classical Utopias. Except for a meagre use of water

power for milling, and the wind for sailing—so meagre in the latter case that the classical world

never contrived to do without the galley slave—and a certain restricted help from oxen in

ploughing, and from horses in locomotion, all the energy that sustained the old-fashioned State was

derived from the muscular exertion of toiling men. They ran their world by hand. Continual bodily

labour was a condition of social existence. It is only with the coming of coal burning, of abundant

iron and steel, and of scientific knowledge that this condition has been changed. To-day, I suppose,

if it were possible to indicate, in units of energy, the grand total of work upon which the social

fabric of the United States or England rests, it would be found that a vastly preponderating moiety

is derived from non-human sources, from coal and liquid fuel, and explosives and wind and water.

There is every indication of a steady increase in this proportion of mechanical energy, in this

emancipation of men from the necessity of physical labour. There appears no limit to the invasion

of life by the machine.

Now it is only in the last three hundred years that any human being seems to have anticipated this. It

stimulates the imagination to remark how entirely it was overlooked as a modifying cause in human

development. [Footnote: It is interesting to note how little even Bacon seems to see of this, in his

New Atlantis.] Plato clearly had no ideas about machines at all as a force affecting social

organisation. There was nothing in his world to suggest them to him. I suppose there arose no

invention, no new mechanical appliance or method of the slightest social importance through all his

length of years. He never thought of a State that did not rely for its force upon human muscle, just

as he never thought of a State that was not primarily organised for warfare hand to hand. Political

and moral inventions he saw enough of and to spare, and in that direction he still stimulates the

imagination. But in regard to all material possibilities he deadens rather than stimulates. [Footnote:

The lost Utopia of Hippodamus provided rewards for inventors, but unless Aristotle misunderstood

him, and it is certainly the fate of all Utopias to be more or less misread, the inventions

contemplated were political devices.] An infinitude of nonsense about the Greek mind would never

have been written if the distinctive intellectual and artistic quality of Plato's time, its extraordinarily

clear definition of certain material conditions as absolutely permanent, coupled with its politico-

social instability, had been borne in mind. The food of the Greek imagination was the very

antithesis of our own nourishment. We are educated by our circumstances to think no revolution in

appliances and economic organisation incredible, our minds play freely about possibilities that

would have struck the men of the Academy as outrageous extravagance, and it is in regard to

politico-social expedients that our imaginations fail. Sparta, for all the evidence of history, is

scarcely more credible to us than a motor-car throbbing in the agora would have been to Socrates.

By sheer inadvertence, therefore, Plato commenced the tradition of Utopias without machinery, a

tradition we find Morris still loyally following, except for certain mechanical barges and such-like

toys, in his News from Nowhere. There are some foreshadowings of mechanical possibilities in the

New Atlantis, but it is only in the nineteenth century that Utopias appeared in which the fact is

clearly recognised that the social fabric rests no longer upon human labour. It was, I believe, Cabet

[Footnote: Cabet, Voyage en Icarie, 1848.] who first in a Utopian work insisted upon the escape of

man from irksome labours through the use of machinery. He is the great primitive of modern

Utopias, and Bellamy is his American equivalent. Hitherto, either slave labour (Phaleas), [Footnote:

Aristotle's Politics, Bk. II., Ch. VIII.] or at least class distinctions involving unavoidable labour in

the lower class, have been assumed—as Plato does, and as Bacon in the New Atlantis probably

intended to do (More gave his Utopians bondsmen sans phrase for their most disagreeable toil); or

there is—as in Morris and the outright Return-to-Nature Utopians—a bold make-believe that all toil

may be made a joy, and with that a levelling down of all society to an equal participation in labour.

But indeed this is against all the observed behaviour of mankind. It needed the Olympian

unworldliness of an irresponsible rich man of the shareholding type, a Ruskin or a Morris playing at

life, to imagine as much. Road-making under Mr. Ruskin's auspices was a joy at Oxford no doubt,

and a distinction, and it still remains a distinction; it proved the least contagious of practices. And

Hawthorne did not find bodily toil anything more than the curse the Bible says it is, at Brook Farm.

[Footnote: The Blythedale Experiment, and see also his Notebook.]

If toil is a blessing, never was blessing so effectually disguised, and the very people who tell us that,

hesitate to suggest more than a beautiful ease in the endless day of Heaven. A certain amount of

bodily or mental exercise, a considerable amount of doing things under the direction of one's free

imagination is quite another matter. Artistic production, for example, when it is at its best, when a

man is freely obeying himself, and not troubling to please others, is really not toil at all. It is quite a

different thing digging potatoes, as boys say, “for a lark,” and digging them because otherwise you

will starve, digging them day after day as a dull, unavoidable imperative. The essence of toil is that

imperative, and the fact that the attention must cramp itself to the work in hand—that it excludes

freedom, and not that it involves fatigue. So long as anything but a quasi-savage life depended upon

toil, so long was it hopeless to expect mankind to do anything but struggle to confer just as much of

this blessing as possible upon one another. But now that the new conditions physical science is

bringing about, not only dispense with man as a source of energy but supply the hope that all

routine work may be made automatic, it is becoming conceivable that presently there may be no

need for anyone to toil habitually at all; that a labouring class—that is to say, a class of workers

without personal initiative—will become unnecessary to the world of men.

The plain message physical science has for the world at large is this, that were our political and

social and moral devices only as well contrived to their ends as a linotype machine, an antiseptic

operating plant, or an electric tram-car, there need now at the present moment be no appreciable toil

in the world, and only the smallest fraction of the pain, the fear, and the anxiety that now makes

human life so doubtful in its value. There is more than enough for everyone alive. Science stands, a

too competent servant, behind her wrangling underbred masters, holding out resources, devices, and

remedies they are too stupid to use. [Footnote: See that most suggestive little book, Twentieth

Century Inventions, by Mr. George Sutherland.] And on its material side a modern Utopia must

needs present these gifts as taken, and show a world that is really abolishing the need of labour,

abolishing the last base reason for anyone's servitude or inferiority.

§ 7

The effectual abolition of a labouring and servile class will make itself felt in every detail of the inn

that will shelter us, of the bedrooms we shall occupy. You conceive my awakening to all these

things on the morning after our arrival. I shall lie for a minute or so with my nose peeping over the

coverlet, agreeably and gently coming awake, and with some vague nightmare of sitting at a

common table with an unavoidable dustman in green and gold called Boffin, [Footnote: Vide

William Morris's News from Nowhere.] fading out of my mind. Then I should start up. You figure

my apprehensive, startled inspection of my chamber. “Where am I?” that classic phrase, recurs.

Then I perceive quite clearly that I am in bed in Utopia.

Utopia! The word is enough to bring anyone out of bed, to the nearest window, but thence I see no

more than the great mountain mass behind the inn, a very terrestrial looking mountain mass. I return

to the contrivances about me, and make my examination as I dress, pausing garment in hand to

hover over first this thing of interest and then that.

The room is, of course, very clear and clean and simple; not by any means cheaply equipped, but

designed to economise the labour of redding and repair just as much as is possible. It is beautifully

proportioned, and rather lower than most rooms I know on earth. There is no fireplace, and I am

perplexed by that until I find a thermometer beside six switches on the wall. Above this switch-

board is a brief instruction: one switch warms the floor, which is not carpeted, but covered by a

substance like soft oilcloth; one warms the mattress (which is of metal with resistance coils

threaded to and fro in it); and the others warm the wall in various degrees, each directing current

through a separate system of resistances. The casement does not open, but above, flush with the

ceiling, a noiseless rapid fan pumps air out of the room. The air enters by a Tobin shaft. There is a

recess dressing-room, equipped with a bath and all that is necessary to one's toilette, and the water,

one remarks, is warmed, if one desires it warm, by passing it through an electrically heated spiral of

tubing. A cake of soap drops out of a store machine on the turn of a handle, and when you have

done with it, you drop that and your soiled towels and so forth, which also are given you by

machines, into a little box, through the bottom of which they drop at once, and sail down a smooth

shaft. A little notice tells you the price of your room, and you gather the price is doubled if you do

not leave the toilette as you found it. Beside the bed, and to be lit at night by a handy switch over

the pillow, is a little clock, its face flush with the wall. The room has no corners to gather dirt, wall

meets floor with a gentle curve, and the apartment could be swept out effectually by a few strokes

of a mechanical sweeper. The door frames and window frames are of metal, rounded and

impervious to draught. You are politely requested to turn a handle at the foot of your bed before

leaving the room, and forthwith the frame turns up into a vertical position, and the bedclothes hang

airing. You stand at the doorway and realise that there remains not a minute's work for anyone to do.

Memories of the fœtid disorder of many an earthly bedroom after a night's use float across your

mind.

And you must not imagine this dustless, spotless, sweet apartment as anything but beautiful. Its

appearance is a little unfamiliar of course, but all the muddle of dust-collecting hangings and witless

ornament that cover the earthly bedroom, the valances, the curtains to check the draught from the

ill-fitting wood windows, the worthless irrelevant pictures, usually a little askew, the dusty carpets,

and all the paraphernalia about the dirty, black-leaded fireplace are gone. But the faintly tinted walls

are framed with just one clear coloured line, as finely placed as the member of a Greek capital; the

door handles and the lines of the panels of the door, the two chairs, the framework of the bed, the

writing table, have all that final simplicity, that exquisite finish of contour that is begotten of

sustained artistic effort. The graciously shaped windows each frame a picture—since they are

draughtless the window seats are no mere mockeries as are the window seats of earth—and on the

sill, the sole thing to need attention in the room, is one little bowl of blue Alpine flowers.

The same exquisite simplicity meets one downstairs.

Our landlord sits down at table with us for a moment, and seeing we do not understand the

electrically heated coffee-pot before us, shows us what to do. Coffee and milk we have, in the

Continental fashion, and some excellent rolls and butter.

He is a swarthy little man, our landlord, and overnight we saw him preoccupied with other guests.

But we have risen either late or early by Utopian standards, we know not which, and this morning

he has us to himself. His bearing is kindly and inoffensive, but he cannot conceal the curiosity that

possesses him. His eye meets ours with a mute inquiry, and then as we fall to, we catch him

scrutinising our cuffs, our garments, our boots, our faces, our table manners. He asks nothing at

first, but says a word or so about our night's comfort and the day's weather, phrases that have an air

of being customary. Then comes a silence that is interrogative.

“Excellent coffee,” I say to fill the gap.

“And excellent rolls,” says my botanist.

Our landlord indicates his sense of our approval.

A momentary diversion is caused by the entry of an elfin-tressed little girl, who stares at us half

impudently, half shyly, with bright black eyes, hesitates at the botanist's clumsy smile and nod, and

then goes and stands by her father and surveys us steadfastly.

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

I glance at the botanist. “Yes,” I say, “we have.”

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

“The mountains?”

“Not only the mountains.”

“You came up out of the Ticino valley?”

“No—not that way.”

“By the Oberalp?”

“No.”

“The Furka?”

“No.”

“Not up from the lake?”

“No.”

He looks puzzled.

“We came,” I say, “from another world.”

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

needless message to her mother.

“Ah!” he says. “Another world—eh? Meaning―?”

“Another world—far in the deeps of space.”

Then at the expression of his face one realises that a Modern Utopia will probably keep its more

intelligent citizens for better work than inn-tending. He is evidently inaccessible to the idea we

think of putting before him. He stares at us a moment, and then remarks, “There's the book to sign.”

We find ourselves confronted with a book, a little after the fashion of the familiar hotel visitors'

book of earth. He places this before us, and beside it puts pen and ink and a slab, upon which ink

has been freshly smeared.

“Thumbmarks,” says my scientific friend hastily in English.

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

He signs first, and I look over his shoulder.

He is displaying more readiness than I should have expected. The book is ruled in broad transverse

lines, and has a space for a name, for a number, and a thumbmark. He puts his thumb upon the slab

and makes the thumbmark first with the utmost deliberation. Meanwhile he studies the other two

entries. The “numbers” of the previous guests above are complex muddles of letters and figures. He

writes his name, then with a calm assurance writes down his number, A.M.a.1607.2.αβ . I am⊕

wrung with momentary admiration. I follow his example, and fabricate an equally imposing

signature. We think ourselves very clever. The landlord proffers finger bowls for our thumbs, and

his eye goes, just a little curiously, to our entries.

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

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

bending over the book.

“Come on,” I say. “The most tiresome thing in the world is explanations, and I perceive that if we

do not get along, they will fall upon us now.”

I glance back to discover the landlord and a gracefully robed woman standing outside the pretty

simplicity of the Utopian inn, watching us doubtfully as we recede.

“Come on,” I insist.

§ 8

We should go towards the Schoellenen gorge, and as we went, our fresh morning senses would

gather together a thousand factors for our impression of this more civilised world. A Modern Utopia

will have done with yapping about nationality, and so the ugly fortifications, the barracks and

military defilements of the earthly vale of Urseren will be wanting. Instead there will be a great

multitude of gracious little houses clustering in college-like groups, no doubt about their common

kitchens and halls, down and about the valley slopes. And there will be many more trees, and a

great variety of trees—all the world will have been ransacked for winter conifers. Despite the height

of the valley there will be a double avenue along the road. This high road with its tramway would

turn with us to descend the gorge, and we should hesitate upon the adventure of boarding the train.

But now we should have the memory of our landlord's curious eye upon us, and we should decide at

last to defer the risk of explanations such an enterprise might precipitate.

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

and terrestrial engineering.

The tramway, the train road, the culverts, and bridges, the Urnerloch tunnel, into which the road

plunges, will all be beautiful things.

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and

engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection; a thing of

human making is for the most part ugly in proportion to the poverty of its constructive thought, to

the failure of its producer fully to grasp the purpose of its being. Everything to which men continue

to give thought and attention, which they make and remake in the same direction, and with a

continuing desire to do as well as they can, grows beautiful inevitably. Things made by mankind

under modern conditions are ugly, primarily because our social organisation is ugly, because we live

in an atmosphere of snatch and uncertainty, and do everything in an underbred strenuous manner.

This is the misfortune of machinery, and not its fault. Art, like some beautiful plant, lives on its

atmosphere, and when the atmosphere is good, it will grow everywhere, and when it is bad

nowhere. If we smashed and buried every machine, every furnace, every factory in the world, and

without any further change set ourselves to home industries, hand labour, spade husbandry, sheep-

folding and pig minding, we should still do things in the same haste, and achieve nothing but

dirtiness, inconvenience, bad air, and another gaunt and gawky reflection of our intellectual and

moral disorder. We should mend nothing.

But in Utopia a man who designs a tram road will be a cultivated man, an artist craftsman; he will

strive, as a good writer, or a painter strives, to achieve the simplicity of perfection. He will make his

girders and rails and parts as gracious as that first engineer, Nature, has made the stems of her plants

and the joints and gestures of her animals. To esteem him a sort of anti-artist, to count every man

who makes things with his unaided thumbs an artist, and every man who uses machinery as a brute,

is merely a passing phase of human stupidity. This tram road beside us will be a triumph of design.

The idea will be so unfamiliar to us that for a time it will not occur to us that it is a system of

beautiful objects at all. We shall admire its ingenious adaptation to the need of a district that is

buried half the year in snow, the hard bed below, curved and guttered to do its own clearing, the

great arched sleeper masses, raising the rails a good two yards above the ground, the easy, simple

standards and insulators. Then it will creep in upon our minds, “But, by Jove! This is designed!”

Indeed the whole thing will be designed.

Later on, perhaps, we may find students in an art school working in competition to design an

electric tram, students who know something of modern metallurgy, and something of electrical

engineering, and we shall find people as keenly critical of a signal box or an iron bridge as they are

on earth of―! Heavens! what are they critical about on earth?

The quality and condition of a dress tie!

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

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

The Voice of Nature

§ 1

Presently we recognise the fellow of the earthly Devil's Bridge, still intact as a footway, spanning

the gorge, and old memories turn us off the road down the steep ruin of an ancient mule track

towards it. It is our first reminder that Utopia too must have a history. We cross it and find the

Reuss, for all that it has already lit and warmed and ventilated and cleaned several thousands of

houses in the dale above, and for all that it drives those easy trams in the gallery overhead, is yet

capable of as fine a cascade as ever it flung on earth. So we come to a rocky path, wild as one could

wish, and descend, discoursing how good and fair an ordered world may be, but with a certain

unformulated qualification in our minds about those thumb marks we have left behind.

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

smoke?”

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

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

He overtakes us and begins talking forthwith in a fluty, but not unamiable, tenor. He is a great

talker, this man, and a fairly respectable gesticulator, and to him it is we make our first ineffectual

tentatives at explaining who indeed we are; but his flow of talk washes that all away again. He has a

face of that rubicund, knobby type I have heard an indignant mineralogist speak of as botryoidal,

and about it waves a quantity of disorderly blond hair. He is dressed in leather doublet and knee

breeches, and he wears over these a streaming woollen cloak of faded crimson that give him a fine

dramatic outline as he comes down towards us over the rocks. His feet, which are large and

handsome, but bright pink with the keen morning air, are bare, except for sandals of leather. (It was

the only time that we saw anyone in Utopia with bare feet.) He salutes us with a scroll-like waving

of his stick, and falls in with our slower paces.

“Climbers, I presume?” he says, “and you scorn these trams of theirs? I like you. So do I! Why a

man should consent to be dealt with as a bale of goods holding an indistinctive ticket—when God

gave him legs and a face—passes my understanding.”

As he speaks, his staff indicates the great mechanical road that runs across the gorge and high

overhead through a gallery in the rock, follows it along until it turns the corner, picks it up as a

viaduct far below, traces it until it plunges into an arcade through a jutting crag, and there dismisses

it with a spiral whirl. “No!” he says.

He seems sent by Providence, for just now we had been discussing how we should broach our

remarkable situation to these Utopians before our money is spent.

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

I do my best.

“You came from the other side of space!” says the man in the crimson cloak, interrupting me.

“Precisely! I like that—it's exactly my note! So do I! And you find this world strange! Exactly my

case! We are brothers! We shall be in sympathy. I am amazed, I have been amazed as long as I can

remember, and I shall die, most certainly, in a state of incredulous amazement, at this remarkable

world. Eh?... You found yourselves suddenly upon a mountain top! Fortunate men!” He chuckled.

“For my part I found myself in the still stranger position of infant to two parents of the most

intractable dispositions!”

“The fact remains,” I protest.

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

We desist for a space from the attempt to explain our remarkable selves, and for the rest of the time

this picturesque and exceptional Utopian takes the talk entirely under his control....

§ 2

An agreeable person, though a little distracting, he was, and he talked, we recall, of many things. He

impressed us, we found afterwards, as a poseur beyond question, a conscious Ishmaelite in the

world of wit, and in some subtly inexplicable way as a most consummate ass. He talked first of the

excellent and commodious trams that came from over the passes, and ran down the long valley

towards middle Switzerland, and of all the growth of pleasant homes and châlets amidst the heights

that made the opening gorge so different from its earthly parallel, with a fine disrespect. “But they

are beautiful,” I protested. “They are graciously proportioned, they are placed in well-chosen

positions; they give no offence to the eye.”

“What do we know of the beauty they replace? They are a mere rash. Why should we men play the

part of bacteria upon the face of our Mother?”

“All life is that!”

“No! not natural life, not the plants and the gentle creatures that live their wild shy lives in forest

and jungle. That is a part of her. That is the natural bloom of her complexion. But these houses and

tramways and things, all made from ore and stuff torn from her veins―! You can't better my image

of the rash. It's a morbid breaking out! I'd give it all for one—what is it?—free and natural

chamois.”

“You live at times in a house?” I asked.

He ignored my question. For him, untroubled Nature was the best, he said, and, with a glance at his

feet, the most beautiful. He professed himself a Nazarite, and shook back his Teutonic poet's shock

of hair. So he came to himself, and for the rest of our walk he kept to himself as the thread of his

discourse, and went over himself from top to toe, and strung thereon all topics under the sun by way

of illustrating his splendours. But especially his foil was the relative folly, the unnaturalness and

want of logic in his fellow men. He held strong views about the extreme simplicity of everything,

only that men, in their muddle-headedness, had confounded it all. “Hence, for example, these trams!

They are always running up and down as though they were looking for the lost simplicity of nature.

‘We dropped it here!’” He earned a living, we gathered, “some considerable way above the

minimum wage,” which threw a chance light on the labour problem—by perforating records for

automatic musical machines—no doubt of the Pianotist and Pianola kind—and he spent all the

leisure he could gain in going to and fro in the earth lecturing on “The Need of a Return to Nature,”

and on “Simple Foods and Simple Ways.” He did it for the love of it. It was very clear to us he had

an inordinate impulse to lecture, and esteemed us fair game. He had been lecturing on these topics

in Italy, and he was now going back through the mountains to lecture in Saxony, lecturing on the

way, to perforate a lot more records, lecturing the while, and so start out lecturing again. He was

undisguisedly glad to have us to lecture to by the way.

He called our attention to his costume at an early stage. It was the embodiment of his ideal of

Nature-clothing, and it had been made especially for him at very great cost. “Simply because

naturalness has fled the earth, and has to be sought now, and washed out from your crushed

complexities like gold.”

“I should have thought,” said I, “that any clothing whatever was something of a slight upon the

natural man.”

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

He was particularly severe on our artificial hoofs, as he called our boots, and our hats or hair

destructors. “Man is the real King of Beasts and should wear a mane. The lion only wears it by

consent and in captivity.” He tossed his head.

Subsequently while we lunched and he waited for the specific natural dishes he ordered—they taxed

the culinary resources of the inn to the utmost—he broached a comprehensive generalisation. “The

animal kingdom and the vegetable kingdom are easily distinguished, and for the life of me I see no

reason for confusing them. It is, I hold, a sin against Nature. I keep them distinct in my mind and I

keep them distinct in my person. No animal substance inside, no vegetable without;—what could be

simpler or more logical? Nothing upon me but leather and allwool garments, within, cereals, fruit,

nuts, herbs, and the like. Classification—order—man's function. He is here to observe and

accentuate Nature's simplicity. These people”—he swept an arm that tried not too personally to

include us—“are filled and covered with confusion.”

He ate great quantities of grapes and finished with a cigarette. He demanded and drank a great horn

of unfermented grape juice, and it seemed to suit him well.

We three sat about the board—it was in an agreeable little arbour on a hill hard by the place where

Wassen stands on earth, and it looked down the valley to the Uri Rothstock, and ever and again we

sought to turn his undeniable gift of exposition to the elucidation of our own difficulties.

But we seemed to get little, his style was so elusive. Afterwards, indeed, we found much

information and many persuasions had soaked into us, but at the time it seemed to us he told us

nothing. He indicated things by dots and dashes, instead of by good hard assertive lines. He would

not pause to see how little we knew. Sometimes his wit rose so high that he would lose sight of it

himself, and then he would pause, purse his lips as if he whistled, and then till the bird came back to

the lure, fill his void mouth with grapes. He talked of the relations of the sexes, and love—a passion

he held in great contempt as being in its essence complex and disingenuous—and afterwards we

found we had learnt much of what the marriage laws of Utopia allow and forbid.

“A simple natural freedom,” he said, waving a grape in an illustrative manner, and so we gathered

the Modern Utopia did not at any rate go to that. He spoke, too, of the regulation of unions, of

people who were not allowed to have children, of complicated rules and interventions. “Man,” he

said, “had ceased to be a natural product!”

We tried to check him with questions at this most illuminating point, but he drove on like a torrent,

and carried his topic out of sight. The world, he held, was overmanaged, and that was the root of all

evil. He talked of the overmanagement of the world, and among other things of the laws that would

not let a poor simple idiot, a “natural,” go at large. And so we had our first glimpse of what Utopia

did with the feeble and insane. “We make all these distinctions between man and man, we exalt this

and favour that, and degrade and seclude that; we make birth artificial, life artificial, death

artificial.”

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

“Not I! I'm not one of your samurai, your voluntary noblemen who have taken the world in hand. I

might be, of course, but I'm not.”

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

He whirled on to an attack on science, that stirred the botanist to controversy. He denounced with

great bitterness all specialists whatever, and particularly doctors and engineers.

“Voluntary noblemen!” he said, “voluntary Gods I fancy they think themselves,” and I was left

behind for a space in the perplexed examination of this parenthesis, while he and the botanist—who

is sedulous to keep his digestion up to date with all the newest devices—argued about the good of

medicine men.

“The natural human constitution,” said the blond-haired man, “is perfectly simple, with one simple

condition—you must leave it to Nature. But if you mix up things so distinctly and essentially

separated as the animal and vegetable kingdoms for example, and ram that in for it to digest, what

can you expect?

“Ill health! There isn't such a thing—in the course of Nature. But you shelter from Nature in houses,

you protect yourselves by clothes that are useful instead of being ornamental, you wash—with such

abstersive chemicals as soap for example—and above all you consult doctors.” He approved

himself with a chuckle. “Have you ever found anyone seriously ill without doctors and medicine

about? Never! You say a lot of people would die without shelter and medical attendance! No doubt

—but a natural death. A natural death is better than an artificial life, surely? That's—to be frank

with you—the very citadel of my position.”

That led him, and rather promptly, before the botanist could rally to reply, to a great tirade against

the laws that forbade “sleeping out.” He denounced them with great vigour, and alleged that for his

own part he broke that law whenever he could, found some corner of moss, shaded from an excess

of dew, and there sat up to sleep. He slept, he said, always in a sitting position, with his head on his

wrists, and his wrists on his knees—the simple natural position for sleep in man.... He said it would

be far better if all the world slept out, and all the houses were pulled down.

You will understand, perhaps, the subdued irritation I felt, as I sat and listened to the botanist

entangling himself in the logical net of this wild nonsense. It impressed me as being irrelevant.

When one comes to a Utopia one expects a Cicerone, one expects a person as precise and insistent

and instructive as an American advertisement—the advertisement of one of those land agents, for

example, who print their own engaging photographs to instil confidence and begin, “You want to

buy real estate.” One expects to find all Utopians absolutely convinced of the perfection of their

Utopia, and incapable of receiving a hint against its order. And here was this purveyor of

absurdities!

And yet now that I come to think it over, is not this too one of the necessary differences between a

Modern Utopia and those finite compact settlements of the older school of dreamers? It is not to be

a unanimous world any more, it is to have all and more of the mental contrariety we find in the

world of the real; it is no longer to be perfectly explicable, it is just our own vast mysterious welter,

with some of the blackest shadows gone, with a clearer illumination, and a more conscious and

intelligent will. Irrelevance is not irrelevant to such a scheme, and our blond-haired friend is exactly

just where he ought to be here.

Still―

§ 3

I ceased to listen to the argumentation of my botanist with this apostle of Nature. The botanist, in

his scientific way, was, I believe, defending the learned professions. (He thinks and argues like

drawing on squared paper.) It struck me as transiently remarkable that a man who could not be

induced to forget himself and his personal troubles on coming into a whole new world, who could

waste our first evening in Utopia upon a paltry egotistical love story, should presently become quite

heated and impersonal in the discussion of scientific professionalism. He was—absorbed. I can't

attempt to explain these vivid spots and blind spots in the imaginations of sane men; there they are!

“You say,” said the botanist, with a prevalent index finger, and the resolute deliberation of a big

siege gun being lugged into action over rough ground by a number of inexperienced men, “you

prefer a natural death to an artificial life. But what is your definition (stress) of artificial?...”

And after lunch too! I ceased to listen, flicked the end of my cigarette ash over the green trellis of

the arbour, stretched my legs with a fine restfulness, leant back, and gave my mind to the fields and

houses that lay adown the valley.

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

my own speculations....

The high road, with its tramways and its avenues on either side, ran in a bold curve, and with one

great loop of descent, down the opposite side of the valley, and below crossed again on a beautiful

viaduct, and dipped into an arcade in the side of the Bristenstock. Our inn stood out boldly, high

above the level this took. The houses clustered in their collegiate groups over by the high road, and

near the subordinate way that ran almost vertically below us and past us and up towards the valley

of the Meien Reuss. There were one or two Utopians cutting and packing the flowery mountain

grass in the carefully levelled and irrigated meadows by means of swift, light machines that ran on

things like feet and seemed to devour the herbage, and there were many children and a woman or

so, going to and fro among the houses near at hand. I guessed a central building towards the high

road must be the school from which these children were coming. I noted the health and cleanliness

of these young heirs of Utopia as they passed below.

The pervading quality of the whole scene was a sane order, the deliberate solution of problems, a

progressive intention steadily achieving itself, and the aspect that particularly occupied me was the

incongruity of this with our blond-haired friend.

On the one hand here was a state of affairs that implied a power of will, an organising and

controlling force, the co-operation of a great number of vigorous people to establish and sustain its

progress, and on the other this creature of pose and vanity, with his restless wit, his perpetual giggle

at his own cleverness, his manifest incapacity for comprehensive co-operation.

Now, had I come upon a hopeless incompatibility? Was this the reductio ad absurdum of my vision,

and must it even as I sat there fade, dissolve, and vanish before my eyes?

There was no denying our blond friend. If this Utopia is indeed to parallel our earth, man for man—

and I see no other reasonable choice to that—there must be this sort of person and kindred sorts of

persons in great abundance. The desire and gift to see life whole is not the lot of the great majority

of men, the service of truth is the privilege of the elect, and these clever fools who choke the

avenues of the world of thought, who stick at no inconsistency, who oppose, obstruct, confuse, will

find only the freer scope amidst Utopian freedoms.

(They argued on, these two, as I worried my brains with riddles. It was like a fight between a cock

sparrow and a tortoise; they both went on in their own way, regardless of each other's proceedings.

The encounter had an air of being extremely lively, and the moments of contact were few. “But you

mistake my point,” the blond man was saying, disordering his hair—which had become unruffled in

the preoccupation of dispute—with a hasty movement of his hand, “you don't appreciate the

position I take up.”)

“Ugh!” said I privately, and lighted another cigarette and went away into my own thoughts with

that.

The position he takes up! That's the way of your intellectual fool, the Universe over. He takes up a

position, and he's going to be the most brilliant, delightful, engaging and invincible of gay delicious

creatures defending that position you can possibly imagine. And even when the case is not so bad as

that, there still remains the quality. We “take up our positions,” silly little contentious creatures that

we are, we will not see the right in one another, we will not patiently state and restate, and honestly

accommodate and plan, and so we remain at sixes and sevens. We've all a touch of Gladstone in us,

and try to the last moment to deny we have made a turn. And so our poor broken-springed world

jolts athwart its trackless destiny. Try to win into line with some fellow weakling, and see the little

host of suspicions, aggressions, misrepresentations, your approach will stir—like summer flies on a

high road—the way he will try to score a point and claim you as a convert to what he has always

said, his fear lest the point should be scored to you.

It is not only such gross and palpable cases as our blond and tenoring friend. I could find the thing

negligible were it only that. But when one sees the same thread woven into men who are leaders,

men who sway vast multitudes, who are indeed great and powerful men; when one sees how unfair

they can be, how unteachable, the great blind areas in their eyes also, their want of generosity, then

one's doubts gather like mists across this Utopian valley, its vistas pale, its people become

unsubstantial phantoms, all its order and its happiness dim and recede....

If we are to have any Utopia at all, we must have a clear common purpose, and a great and steadfast

movement of will to override all these incurably egotistical dissentients. Something is needed wide

and deep enough to float the worst of egotisms away. The world is not to be made right by

acclamation and in a day, and then for ever more trusted to run alone. It is manifest this Utopia

could not come about by chance and anarchy, but by co-ordinated effort and a community of design,

and to tell of just land laws and wise government, a wisely balanced economic system, and wise

social arrangements without telling how it was brought about, and how it is sustained against the

vanity and self-indulgence, the moody fluctuations and uncertain imaginations, the heat and

aptitude for partisanship that lurk, even when they do not flourish, in the texture of every man alive,

is to build a palace without either door or staircase.

I had not this in mind when I began.

Somewhere in the Modern Utopia there must be adequate men, men the very antithesis of our

friend, capable of self-devotion, of intentional courage, of honest thought, and steady endeavour.

There must be a literature to embody their common idea, of which this Modern Utopia is merely the

material form; there must be some organisation, however slight, to keep them in touch one with the

other.

Who will these men be? Will they be a caste? a race? an organisation in the nature of a Church? ...

And there came into my mind the words of our acquaintance, that he was not one of these

“voluntary noblemen.”

At first that phrase struck me as being merely queer, and then I began to realise certain possibilities

that were wrapped up in it.

The animus of our chance friend, at any rate, went to suggest that here was his antithesis. Evidently

what he is not, will be the class to contain what is needed here. Evidently.

§ 4

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

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

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

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

“No,” I said bluntly.

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

“Your friend,” he said, “has been telling me, in spite of my sustained interruptions, a most

incredible story.”

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

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

“I know,” I said.

“It sounds absurd.”

“It is.”

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

“Quite.”

“He would tell it to me.”

“It's his way.”

“He interrupted me. And there's no point in it. Is he―” he hesitated, “mad?”

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

The perplexed expression of the blond-haired man intensified. It is vain to deny that he enlarged the

scope of his inquiry, visibly if not verbally. “Dear me!” he said, and took up something he had

nearly forgotten. “And you found yourselves suddenly on a mountain side?... I thought you were

joking.”

I turned round upon him with a sudden access of earnestness. At least I meant my manner to be

earnest, but to him it may have seemed wild.

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

were not joking.”

“But, my dear fellow!”

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

“No world could be more out of order―”

“You play at that and have your fun. But there's no limit to the extent to which a world of men may

get out of gear. In our world―”

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

“Men die of starvation; people die by the hundred thousand needlessly and painfully; men and

women are lashed together to make hell for each other; children are born—abominably, and reared

in cruelty and folly; there is a thing called war, a horror of blood and vileness. The whole thing

seems to me at times a cruel and wasteful wilderness of muddle. You in this decent world have no

means of understanding―”

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

“No! When I see you dandering through this excellent and hopeful world, objecting, obstructing,

and breaking the law, displaying your wit on science and order, on the men who toil so ingloriously

to swell and use the knowledge that is salvation, this salvation for which our poor world cries to

heaven―”

“You don't mean to say,” he said, “that you really come from some other world where things are

different and worse?”

“I do.”

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

“Yes.”

“Oh, nonsense!” he said abruptly. “You can't do it—really. I can assure you this present world

touches the nadir of imbecility. You and your friend, with his love for the lady who's so

mysteriously tied—you're romancing! People could not possibly do such things. It's—if you'll

excuse me—ridiculous. He began—he would begin. A most tiresome story—simply bore me down.

We'd been talking very agreeably before that, or rather I had, about the absurdity of marriage laws,

the interference with a free and natural life, and so on, and suddenly he burst like a dam. No!” He

paused. “It's really impossible. You behave perfectly well for a time, and then you begin to

interrupt.... And such a childish story, too!”

He spun round upon his chair, got up, glanced at me over his shoulder, and walked out of the

arbour. He stepped aside hastily to avoid too close an approach to the returning botanist.

“Impossible,” I heard him say. He was evidently deeply aggrieved by us. I saw him presently a little

way off in the garden, talking to the landlord of our inn, and looking towards us as he talked—they

both looked towards us—and after that, without the ceremony of a farewell, he disappeared, and we

saw him no more. We waited for him a little while, and then I expounded the situation to the

botanist....

“We are going to have a very considerable amount of trouble explaining ourselves,” I said in

conclusion. “We are here by an act of the imagination, and that is just one of those metaphysical

operations that are so difficult to make credible. We are, by the standard of bearing and clothing I

remark about us, unattractive in dress and deportment. We have nothing to produce to explain our

presence here, no bit of a flying machine or a space travelling sphere or any of the apparatus

customary on these occasions. We have no means beyond a dwindling amount of small change out

of a gold coin, upon which I suppose in ethics and the law some native Utopian had a better claim.

We may already have got ourselves into trouble with the authorities with that confounded number

of yours!”

“You did one too!”

“All the more bother, perhaps, when the thing is brought home to us. There's no need for

recriminations. The thing of moment is that we find ourselves in the position—not to put too fine a

point upon it—of tramps in this admirable world. The question of all others of importance to us at

present is what do they do with their tramps? Because sooner or later, and the balance of probability

seems to incline to sooner, whatever they do with their tramps that they will do with us.”

“Unless we can get some work.”

“Exactly—unless we can get some work.”

“Get work!”

The botanist leant forward on his arms and looked out of the arbour with an expression of

despondent discovery. “I say,” he remarked; “this is a strange world—quite strange and new. I'm

only beginning to realise just what it means for us. The mountains there are the same, the old

Bristenstock and all the rest of it; but these houses, you know, and that roadway, and the costumes,

and that machine that is licking up the grass there—only....”

He sought expression. “Who knows what will come in sight round the bend of the valley there?

Who knows what may happen to us anywhere? We don't know who rules over us even ... we don't

know that!”

“No,” I echoed, “we don't know that.”

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

Failure in a Modern Utopia

§ 1

The old Utopias—save for the breeding schemes of Plato and Campanella—ignored that

reproductive competition among individualities which is the substance of life, and dealt essentially

with its incidentals. The endless variety of men, their endless gradation of quality, over which the

hand of selection plays, and to which we owe the unmanageable complication of real life, is tacitly

set aside. The real world is a vast disorder of accidents and incalculable forces in which men

survive or fail. A Modern Utopia, unlike its predecessors, dare not pretend to change the last

condition; it may order and humanise the conflict, but men must still survive or fail.

Most Utopias present themselves as going concerns, as happiness in being; they make it an essential

condition that a happy land can have no history, and all the citizens one is permitted to see are well

looking and upright and mentally and morally in tune. But we are under the dominion of a logic that

obliges us to take over the actual population of the world with only such moral and mental and

physical improvements as lie within their inherent possibilities, and it is our business to ask what

Utopia will do with its congenital invalids, its idiots and madmen, its drunkards and men of vicious

mind, its cruel and furtive souls, its stupid people, too stupid to be of use to the community, its

lumpish, unteachable and unimaginative people? And what will it do with the man who is “poor” all

round, the rather spiritless, rather incompetent low-grade man who on earth sits in the den of the

sweater, tramps the streets under the banner of the unemployed, or trembles—in another man's cast-

off clothing, and with an infinity of hat-touching—on the verge of rural employment?

These people will have to be in the descendant phase, the species must be engaged in eliminating

them; there is no escape from that, and conversely the people of exceptional quality must be

ascendant. The better sort of people, so far as they can be distinguished, must have the fullest

freedom of public service, and the fullest opportunity of parentage. And it must be open to every

man to approve himself worthy of ascendency.

The way of Nature in this process is to kill the weaker and the sillier, to crush them, to starve them,

to overwhelm them, using the stronger and more cunning as her weapon. But man is the unnatural

animal, the rebel child of Nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and

fitful hand that reared him. He sees with a growing resentment the multitude of suffering ineffectual

lives over which his species tramples in its ascent. In the Modern Utopia he will have set himself to

change the ancient law. No longer will it be that failures must suffer and perish lest their breed

increase, but the breed of failure must not increase, lest they suffer and perish, and the race with

them.

Now we need not argue here to prove that the resources of the world and the energy of mankind,

were they organised sanely, are amply sufficient to supply every material need of every living

human being. And if it can be so contrived that every human being shall live in a state of reasonable

physical and mental comfort, without the reproduction of inferior types, there is no reason whatever

why that should not be secured. But there must be a competition in life of some sort to determine

who are to be pushed to the edge, and who are to prevail and multiply. Whatever we do, man will

remain a competitive creature, and though moral and intellectual training may vary and enlarge his

conception of success and fortify him with refinements and consolations, no Utopia will ever save

him completely from the emotional drama of struggle, from exultations and humiliations, from

pride and prostration and shame. He lives in success and failure just as inevitably as he lives in

space and time.

But we may do much to make the margin of failure endurable. On earth, for all the extravagance of

charity, the struggle for the mass of men at the bottom resolves itself into a struggle, and often a

very foul and ugly struggle, for food, shelter, and clothing. Deaths outright from exposure and

starvation are now perhaps uncommon, but for the multitude there are only miserable houses,

uncomfortable clothes, and bad and insufficient food; fractional starvation and exposure, that is to

say. A Utopia planned upon modern lines will certainly have put an end to that. It will insist upon

every citizen being being properly housed, well nourished, and in good health, reasonably clean and

clothed healthily, and upon that insistence its labour laws will be founded. In a phrasing that will be

familiar to everyone interested in social reform, it will maintain a standard of life. Any house,

unless it be a public monument, that does not come up to its rising standard of healthiness and

convenience, the Utopian State will incontinently pull down, and pile the material and charge the

owner for the labour; any house unduly crowded or dirty, it must in some effectual manner, directly

or indirectly, confiscate and clear and clean. And any citizen indecently dressed, or ragged and dirty,

or publicly unhealthy, or sleeping abroad homeless, or in any way neglected or derelict, must come

under its care. It will find him work if he can and will work, it will take him to it, it will register him

and lend him the money wherewith to lead a comely life until work can be found or made for him,

and it will give him credit and shelter him and strengthen him if he is ill. In default of private

enterprises it will provide inns for him and food, and it will—by itself acting as the reserve

employer—maintain a minimum wage which will cover the cost of a decent life. The State will

stand at the back of the economic struggle as the reserve employer of labour. This most excellent

idea does, as a matter of fact, underlie the British institution of the workhouse, but it is jumbled up

with the relief of old age and infirmity, it is administered parochially and on the supposition that all

population is static and localised whereas every year it becomes more migratory; it is administered

without any regard to the rising standards of comfort and self-respect in a progressive civilisation,

and it is administered grudgingly. The thing that is done is done as unwilling charity by

administrators who are often, in the rural districts at least, competing for low-priced labour, and

who regard want of employment as a crime. But if it were possible for any citizen in need of money

to resort to a place of public employment as a right, and there work for a week or month without

degradation upon certain minimum terms, it seems fairly certain that no one would work, except as

the victim of some quite exceptional and temporary accident, for less.

The work publicly provided would have to be toilsome, but not cruel or incapacitating. A choice of

occupations would need to be afforded, occupations adapted to different types of training and

capacity, with some residual employment of a purely laborious and mechanical sort for those who

were incapable of doing the things that required intelligence. Necessarily this employment by the

State would be a relief of economic pressure, but it would not be considered a charity done to the

individual, but a public service. It need not pay, any more than the police need pay, but it could

probably be done at a small margin of loss. There is a number of durable things bound finally to be

useful that could be made and stored whenever the tide of more highly paid employment ebbed and

labour sank to its minimum, bricks, iron from inferior ores, shaped and preserved timber, pins, nails,

plain fabrics of cotton and linen, paper, sheet glass, artificial fuel, and so on; new roads could be

made and public buildings reconstructed, inconveniences of all sorts removed, until under the

stimulus of accumulating material, accumulating investments or other circumstances, the tide of

private enterprise flowed again.

The State would provide these things for its citizen as though it was his right to require them; he

would receive as a shareholder in the common enterprise and not with any insult of charity. But on

the other hand it will require that the citizen who renders the minimum of service for these

concessions shall not become a parent until he is established in work at a rate above the minimum,

and free of any debt he may have incurred. The State will never press for its debt, nor put a limit to

its accumulation so long as a man or woman remains childless; it will not even grudge them

temporary spells of good fortune when they may lift their earnings above the minimum wage. It will

pension the age of everyone who cares to take a pension, and it will maintain special guest homes

for the very old to which they may come as paying guests, spending their pensions there. By such

obvious devices it will achieve the maximum elimination of its feeble and spiritless folk in every

generation with the minimum of suffering and public disorder.

§ 2

But the mildly incompetent, the spiritless and dull, the poorer sort who are ill, do not exhaust our

Utopian problem. There remain idiots and lunatics, there remain perverse and incompetent persons,

there are people of weak character who become drunkards, drug takers, and the like. Then there are

persons tainted with certain foul and transmissible diseases. All these people spoil the world for

others. They may become parents, and with most of them there is manifestly nothing to be done but

to seclude them from the great body of the population. You must resort to a kind of social surgery.

You cannot have social freedom in your public ways, your children cannot speak to whom they will,

your girls and gentle women cannot go abroad while some sorts of people go free. And there are

violent people, and those who will not respect the property of others, thieves and cheats, they, too,

so soon as their nature is confirmed, must pass out of the free life of our ordered world. So soon as

there can be no doubt of the disease or baseness of the individual, so soon as the insanity or other

disease is assured, or the crime repeated a third time, or the drunkenness or misdemeanour past its

seventh occasion (let us say), so soon must he or she pass out of the common ways of men.

The dreadfulness of all such proposals as this lies in the possibility of their execution falling into the

hands of hard, dull, and cruel administrators. But in the case of a Utopia one assumes the best

possible government, a government as merciful and deliberate as it is powerful and decisive. You

must not too hastily imagine these things being done—as they would be done on earth at present—

by a number of zealous half-educated people in a state of panic at a quite imaginary “Rapid

Multiplication of the Unfit.”

No doubt for first offenders, and for all offenders under five-and-twenty, the Modern Utopia will

attempt cautionary and remedial treatment. There will be disciplinary schools and colleges for the

young, fair and happy places, but with less confidence and more restraint than the schools and

colleges of the ordinary world. In remote and solitary regions these enclosures will lie, they will be

fenced in and forbidden to the common run of men, and there, remote from all temptation, the

defective citizen will be schooled. There will be no masking of the lesson; “which do you value

most, the wide world of humanity, or this evil trend in you?” From that discipline at last the

prisoners will return.

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

Our world is still vindictive, but the all-reaching State of Utopia will have the strength that begets

mercy. Quietly the outcast will go from among his fellow men. There will be no drumming of him

out of the ranks, no tearing off of epaulettes, no smiting in the face. The thing must be just public

enough to obviate secret tyrannies, and that is all.

There would be no killing, no lethal chambers. No doubt Utopia will kill all deformed and

monstrous and evilly diseased births, but for the rest, the State will hold itself accountable for their

being. There is no justice in Nature perhaps, but the idea of justice must be sacred in any good

society. Lives that statesmanship has permitted, errors it has not foreseen and educated against,

must not be punished by death. If the State does not keep faith, no one will keep faith. Crime and

bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.

Even for murder Utopia will not, I think, kill.

I doubt even if there will be jails. No men are quite wise enough, good enough and cheap enough to

staff jails as a jail ought to be staffed. Perhaps islands will be chosen, islands lying apart from the

highways of the sea, and to these the State will send its exiles, most of them thanking Heaven, no

doubt, to be quit of a world of prigs. The State will, of course, secure itself against any children

from these people, that is the primary object in their seclusion, and perhaps it may even be

necessary to make these island prisons a system of island monasteries and island nunneries. Upon

that I am not competent to speak, but if I may believe the literature of the subject—unhappily a not

very well criticised literature—it is not necessary to enforce this separation. [Footnote: See for

example Dr. W. A. Chapple's The Fertility of the Unfit.]

About such islands patrol boats will go, there will be no freedoms of boat building, and it may be

necessary to have armed guards at the creeks and quays. Beyond that the State will give these

segregated failures just as full a liberty as they can have. If it interferes any further it will be simply

to police the islands against the organisation of serious cruelty, to maintain the freedom of any of

the detained who wish it to transfer themselves to other islands, and so to keep a check upon

tyranny. The insane, of course, will demand care and control, but there is no reason why the islands

of the hopeless drunkard, for example, should not each have a virtual autonomy, have at the most a

Resident and a guard. I believe that a community of drunkards might be capable of organising even

its own bad habit to the pitch of tolerable existence. I do not see why such an island should not

build and order for itself and manufacture and trade. “Your ways are not our ways,” the World State

will say; “but here is freedom and a company of kindred souls. Elect your jolly rulers, brew if you

will, and distil; here are vine cuttings and barley fields; do as it pleases you to do. We will take care

of the knives, but for the rest—deal yourselves with God!”

And you see the big convict steamship standing in to the Island of Incurable Cheats. The crew are

respectfully at their quarters, ready to lend a hand overboard, but wide awake, and the captain is

hospitably on the bridge to bid his guests good-bye and keep an eye on the movables. The new

citizens for this particular Alsatia, each no doubt with his personal belongings securely packed and

at hand, crowd the deck and study the nearing coast. Bright, keen faces would be there, and we,

were we by any chance to find ourselves beside the captain, might recognise the double of this great

earthly magnate or that, Petticoat Lane and Park Lane cheek by jowl. The landing part of the jetty is

clear of people, only a government man or so stands there to receive the boat and prevent a rush, but

beyond the gates a number of engagingly smart-looking individuals loiter speculatively. One figures

a remarkable building labelled Custom House, an interesting fiscal revival this population has

made, and beyond, crowding up the hill, the painted walls of a number of comfortable inns clamour

loudly. One or two inhabitants in reduced circumstances would act as hotel touts, there are several

hotel omnibuses and a Bureau de Change, certainly a Bureau de Change. And a small house with a

large board, aimed point-blank seaward, declares itself a Gratis Information Office, and next to it

rises the graceful dome of a small Casino. Beyond, great hoardings proclaim the advantages of

many island specialities, a hustling commerce, and the opening of a Public Lottery. There is a large

cheap-looking barrack, the school of Commercial Science for gentlemen of inadequate training....

Altogether a very go-ahead looking little port it would be, and though this disembarkation would

have none of the flow of hilarious good fellowship that would throw a halo of genial noise about the

Islands of Drink, it is doubtful if the new arrivals would feel anything very tragic in the moment.

Here at last was scope for adventure after their hearts.

This sounds more fantastic than it is. But what else is there to do, unless you kill? You must seclude,

but why should you torment? All modern prisons are places of torture by restraint, and the habitual

criminal plays the part of a damaged mouse at the mercy of the cat of our law. He has his little

painful run, and back he comes again to a state more horrible even than destitution. There are no

Alsatias left in the world. For my own part I can think of no crime, unless it is reckless begetting or

the wilful transmission of contagious disease, for which the bleak terrors, the solitudes and

ignominies of the modern prison do not seem outrageously cruel. If you want to go so far as that,

then kill. Why, once you are rid of them, should you pester criminals to respect an uncongenial

standard of conduct? Into such islands of exile as this a modern Utopia will have to purge itself.

There is no alternative that I can contrive.

§ 3

Will a Utopian be free to be idle?

Work has to be done, every day humanity is sustained by its collective effort, and without a constant

recurrence of effort in the single man as in the race as a whole, there is neither health nor happiness.

The permanent idleness of a human being is not only burthensome to the world, but his own secure

misery. But unprofitable occupation is also intended by idleness, and it may be considered whether

that freedom also will be open to the Utopian. Conceivably it will, like privacy, locomotion, and

almost all the freedoms of life, and on the same terms—if he possess the money to pay for it.

That last condition may produce a shock in minds accustomed to the proposition that money is the

root of all evil, and to the idea that Utopia necessarily implies something rather oaken and hand-

made and primitive in all these relations. Of course, money is not the root of any evil in the world;

the root of all evil in the world, and the root of all good too, is the Will to Live, and money becomes

harmful only when by bad laws and bad economic organisation it is more easily attained by bad

men than good. It is as reasonable to say food is the root of all disease, because so many people

suffer from excessive and unwise eating. The sane economic ideal is to make the possession of

money the clear indication of public serviceableness, and the more nearly that ideal is attained, the

smaller is the justification of poverty and the less the hardship of being poor. In barbaric and

disorderly countries it is almost honourable to be indigent and unquestionably virtuous to give to a

beggar, and even in the more or less civilised societies of earth, so many children come into life

hopelessly handicapped, that austerity to the poor is regarded as the meanest of mean virtues. But in

Utopia everyone will have had an education and a certain minimum of nutrition and training;

everyone will be insured against ill-health and accidents; there will be the most efficient

organisation for balancing the pressure of employment and the presence of disengaged labour, and

so to be moneyless will be clear evidence of unworthiness. In Utopia, no one will dream of giving

to a casual beggar, and no one will dream of begging.

There will need to be, in the place of the British casual wards, simple but comfortable inns with a

low tariff—controlled to a certain extent no doubt, and even in some cases maintained, by the State.

This tariff will have such a definite relation to the minimum permissible wage, that a man who has

incurred no liabilities through marriage or the like relationship, will be able to live in comfort and

decency upon that minimum wage, pay his small insurance premium against disease, death,

disablement, or ripening years, and have a margin for clothing and other personal expenses. But he

will get neither shelter nor food, except at the price of his freedom, unless he can produce money.

But suppose a man without money in a district where employment is not to be found for him;

suppose the amount of employment to have diminished in the district with such suddenness as to

have stranded him there. Or suppose he has quarrelled with the only possible employer, or that he

does not like his particular work. Then no doubt the Utopian State, which wants everyone to be just

as happy as the future welfare of the race permits, will come to his assistance. One imagines him

resorting to a neat and business-like post-office, and stating his case to a civil and intelligent

official. In any sane State the economic conditions of every quarter of the earth will be watched as

constantly as its meteorological phases, and a daily map of the country within a radius of three or

four hundred miles showing all the places where labour is needed will hang upon the post-office

wall. To this his attention will be directed. The man out of work will decide to try his luck in this

place or that, and the public servant, the official, will make a note of his name, verify his identity—

the freedom of Utopia will not be incompatible with the universal registration of thumb-marks—

and issue passes for travel and coupons for any necessary inn accommodation on his way to the

chosen destination. There he will seek a new employer.

Such a free change of locality once or twice a year from a region of restricted employment to a

region of labour shortage will be among the general privileges of the Utopian citizen.

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

Before we suppose that, we must take into consideration the general assumption one is permitted to

make in all Utopian speculations. All Utopians will be reasonably well educated upon Utopian

lines; there will be no illiterates unless they are unteachable imbeciles, no rule-of-thumb toilers as

inadaptable as trained beasts. The Utopian worker will be as versatile as any well-educated man is

on earth to-day, and no Trade Union will impose a limit to his activities. The world will be his

Union. If the work he does best and likes best is not to be found, there is still the work he likes

second best. Lacking his proper employment, he will turn to some kindred trade.

But even with that adaptability, it may be that sometimes he will not find work. Such a

disproportion between the work to be done and the people to do it may arise as to present a surplus

of labour everywhere. This disproportion may be due to two causes: to an increase of population

without a corresponding increase of enterprises, or to a diminution of employment throughout the

world due to the completion of great enterprises, to economies achieved, or to the operation of new

and more efficient labour-saving appliances. Through either cause, a World State may find itself

doing well except for an excess of citizens of mediocre and lower quality.

But the first cause may be anticipated by wise marriage laws.... The full discussion of these laws

will come later, but here one may insist that Utopia will control the increase of its population.

Without the determination and ability to limit that increase as well as to stimulate it whenever it is

necessary, no Utopia is possible. That was clearly demonstrated by Malthus for all time.

The second cause is not so easily anticipated, but then, though its immediate result in glutting the

labour market is similar, its final consequences are entirely different from those of the first. The

whole trend of a scientific mechanical civilisation is continually to replace labour by machinery and

to increase it in its effectiveness by organisation, and so quite independently of any increase in

population labour must either fall in value until it can compete against and check the cheapening

process, or if that is prevented, as it will be in Utopia, by a minimum wage, come out of

employment. There is no apparent limit to this process. But a surplus of efficient labour at the

minimum wage is exactly the condition that should stimulate new enterprises, and that in a State

saturated with science and prolific in invention will stimulate new enterprises. An increasing

surplus of available labour without an absolute increase of population, an increasing surplus of

labour due to increasing economy and not to proliferation, and which, therefore, does not press on

and disarrange the food supply, is surely the ideal condition for a progressive civilisation. I am

inclined to think that, since labour will be regarded as a delocalised and fluid force, it will be the

World State and not the big municipalities ruling the force areas that will be the reserve employer of

labour. Very probably it will be convenient for the State to hand over the surplus labour for

municipal purposes, but that is another question. All over the world the labour exchanges will be

reporting the fluctuating pressure of economic demand and transferring workers from this region of

excess to that of scarcity; and whenever the excess is universal, the World State—failing an

adequate development of private enterprise—will either reduce the working day and so absorb the

excess, or set on foot some permanent special works of its own, paying the minimum wage and

allowing them to progress just as slowly or just as rapidly as the ebb and flow of labour dictated.

But with sane marriage and birth laws there is no reason to suppose such calls upon the resources

and initiative of the world more than temporary and exceptional occasions.

§ 4

The existence of our blond bare-footed friend was evidence enough that in a modern Utopia a man

will be free to be just as idle or uselessly busy as it pleases him, after he has earned the minimum

wage. He must do that, of course, to pay for his keep, to pay his assurance tax against ill-health or

old age, and any charge or debt paternity may have brought upon him. The World State of the

modern Utopist is no state of moral compulsions. If, for example, under the restricted Utopian

scheme of inheritance, a man inherited sufficient money to release him from the need to toil, he

would be free to go where he pleased and do what he liked. A certain proportion of men at ease is

good for the world; work as a moral obligation is the morality of slaves, and so long as no one is

overworked there is no need to worry because some few are underworked. Utopia does not exist as

a solace for envy. From leisure, in a good moral and intellectual atmosphere, come experiments,

come philosophy and the new departures.

In any modern Utopia there must be many leisurely people. We are all too obsessed in the real

world by the strenuous ideal, by the idea that the vehement incessant fool is the only righteous man.

Nothing done in a hurry, nothing done under strain, is really well done. A State where all are

working hard, where none go to and fro, easily and freely, loses touch with the purpose of freedom.

But inherited independence will be the rarest and least permanent of Utopian facts, for the most part

that wider freedom will have to be earned, and the inducements to men and women to raise their

personal value far above the minimum wage will be very great indeed. Thereby will come privacies,

more space in which to live, liberty to go everywhere and do no end of things, the power and

freedom to initiate interesting enterprises and assist and co-operate with interesting people, and

indeed all the best things of life. The modern Utopia will give a universal security indeed, and

exercise the minimum of compulsions to toil, but it will offer some acutely desirable prizes. The

aim of all these devices, the minimum wage, the standard of life, provision for all the feeble and

unemployed and so forth, is not to rob life of incentives but to change their nature, to make life not

less energetic, but less panic-stricken and violent and base, to shift the incidence of the struggle for

existence from our lower to our higher emotions, so to anticipate and neutralise the motives of the

cowardly and bestial, that the ambitious and energetic imagination which is man's finest quality

may become the incentive and determining factor in survival.

§ 5

After we have paid for our lunch in the little inn that corresponds to Wassen, the botanist and I

would no doubt spend the rest of the forenoon in the discussion of various aspects and possibilities

of Utopian labour laws. We should examine our remaining change, copper coins of an appearance

ornamental rather than reassuring, and we should decide that after what we had gathered from the

man with the blond hair, it would, on the whole, be advisable to come to the point with the labour

question forthwith. At last we should draw the deep breath of resolution and arise and ask for the

Public Office. We should know by this time that the labour bureau sheltered with the post-office and

other public services in one building.

The public office of Utopia would of course contain a few surprises for two men from terrestrial

England. You imagine us entering, the botanist lagging a little behind me, and my first attempts to

be offhand and commonplace in a demand for work.

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

with a certain keenness of scrutiny.

“Where are your papers?” she asks.

I think for a moment of the documents in my pocket, my passport chequered with visas and

addressed in my commendation and in the name of her late Majesty by We, Robert Arthur Talbot

Gascoigne Cecil, Marquess of Salisbury, Earl of Salisbury, Viscount Cranborne, Baron Cecil, and

so forth, to all whom it may concern, my Carte d'Identité (useful on minor occasions) of the

Touring Club de France, my green ticket to the Reading Room of the British Museum, and my

Lettre d'Indication from the London and County Bank. A foolish humour prompts me to unfold all

these, hand them to her and take the consequences, but I resist.

“Lost,” I say, briefly.

“Both lost?” she asks, looking at my friend.

“Both,” I answer.

“How?”

I astonish myself by the readiness of my answer.

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

“And exactly the same thing happened to both of you?”

“No. He'd given me his to put with my own.” She raised her eyebrows. “His pocket is defective,” I

add, a little hastily.

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

“What are your numbers?” she asks, abruptly.

A vision of that confounded visitors' book at the inn above comes into my mind. “Let me see,” I

say, and pat my forehead and reflect, refraining from the official eye before me. “Let me see.”

“What is yours?” she asks the botanist.

“A. B.,” he says, slowly, “little a, nine four seven, I think―”

“Don't you know?”

“Not exactly,” says the botanist, very agreeably. “No.”

“Do you mean to say neither of you know your own numbers?” says the little post-mistress, with a

rising note.

“Yes,” I say, with an engaging smile and trying to keep up a good social tone. “It's queer, isn't it?

We've both forgotten.”

“You're joking,” she suggests.

“Well,” I temporise.

“I suppose you've got your thumbs?”

“The fact is―” I say and hesitate. “We've got our thumbs, of course.”

“Then I shall have to send a thumb-print down to the office and get your number from that. But are

you sure you haven't your papers or numbers? It's very queer.”

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

She turns thoughtfully for the thumb-marking slab, and as she does so, a man enters the office. At

the sight of him she asks with a note of relief, “What am I to do, sir, here?”

He looks from her to us gravely, and his eye lights to curiosity at our dress. “What is the matter,

madam?” he asks, in a courteous voice.

She explains.

So far the impression we have had of our Utopia is one of a quite unearthly sanity, of good

management and comprehensive design in every material thing, and it has seemed to us a little

incongruous that all the Utopians we have talked to, our host of last night, the post-mistress and our

garrulous tramp, have been of the most commonplace type. But suddenly there looks out from this

man's pose and regard a different quality, a quality altogether nearer that of the beautiful tramway

and of the gracious order of the mountain houses. He is a well-built man of perhaps five and thirty,

with the easy movement that comes with perfect physical condition, his face is clean shaven and

shows the firm mouth of a disciplined man, and his grey eyes are clear and steady. His legs are clad

in some woven stuff deep-red in colour, and over this he wears a white shirt fitting pretty closely,

and with a woven purple hem. His general effect reminds me somehow of the Knights Templars. On

his head is a cap of thin leather and still thinner steel, and with the vestiges of ear-guards—rather

like an attenuated version of the caps that were worn by Cromwell's Ironsides.

He looks at us and we interpolate a word or so as she explains and feel a good deal of

embarrassment at the foolish position we have made for ourselves. I determine to cut my way out of

this entanglement before it complicates itself further.

“The fact is―” I say.

“Yes?” he says, with a faint smile.

“We've perhaps been disingenuous. Our position is so entirely exceptional, so difficult to explain―”

“What have you been doing?”

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

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

I try to give the thing a quiet, matter-of-fact air. “You see,” I say, in the tone one adopts for really

lucid explanations, “we come from another world. Consequently, whatever thumb-mark registration

or numbering you have in this planet doesn't apply to us, and we don't know our numbers because

we haven't got any. We are really, you know, explorers, strangers―”

“But what world do you mean?”

“It's a different planet—a long way away. Practically at an infinite distance.”

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

“I know it sounds impossible,” I say, “but here is the simple fact—we appear in your world. We

appeared suddenly upon the neck of Lucendro—the Passo Lucendro—yesterday afternoon, and I

defy you to discover the faintest trace of us before that time. Down we marched into the San

Gotthard road and here we are! That's our fact. And as for papers―! Where in your world have you

seen papers like this?”

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

His expression has changed. He takes the document and examines it, turns it over, looks at me, and

smiles that faint smile of his again.

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

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

“You'll get found out,” he says, with my documents in his hand. “You've got your thumbs. You'll be

measured. They'll refer to the central registers, and there you'll be!”

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

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

documents.

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

The 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 have escaped from some island. How

you got so far as here I can't imagine, or what you think you'll do.... But anyhow, there's the stuff for

your thumbs.”

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

Presently we emerge from the office in a state between discomfiture and amusement, each with a

tramway ticket for Lucerne in his hand and with sufficient money to pay our expenses until the

morrow. We are to go to Lucerne because there there is a demand for comparatively unskilled

labour in carving wood, which seems to us a sort of work within our range and a sort that will not

compel our separation.

§ 6

The old Utopias are sessile organisations; the new must square itself to the needs of a migratory

population, to an endless coming and going, to a people as fluid and tidal as the sea. It does not

enter into the scheme of earthly statesmanship, but indeed all local establishments, all definitions of

place, are even now melting under our eyes. Presently all the world will be awash with anonymous

stranger men.

Now the simple laws of custom, the homely methods of identification that served in the little

communities of the past when everyone knew everyone, fail in the face of this liquefaction. If the

modern Utopia is indeed to be a world of responsible citizens, it must have devised some scheme by

which every person in the world can be promptly and certainly recognised, and by which anyone

missing can be traced and found.

This is by no means an impossible demand. The total population of the world is, on the most

generous estimate, not more than 1,500,000,000, and the effectual indexing of this number of

people, the record of their movement hither and thither, the entry of various material facts, such as

marriage, parentage, criminal convictions and the like, the entry of the new-born and the

elimination of the dead, colossal task though it would be, is still not so great as to be immeasurably

beyond comparison with the work of the post-offices in the world of to-day, or the cataloguing of

such libraries as that of the British Museum, or such collections as that of the insects in Cromwell

Road. Such an index could be housed quite comfortably on one side of Northumberland Avenue, for

example. It is only a reasonable tribute to the distinctive lucidity of the French mind to suppose the

central index housed in a vast series of buildings at or near Paris. The index would be classified

primarily by some unchanging physical characteristic, such as we are told the thumb-mark and

finger-mark afford, and to these would be added any other physical traits that were of material

value. The classification of thumb-marks and of inalterable physical characteristics goes on steadily,

and there is every reason for assuming it possible that each human being could be given a distinct

formula, a number or “scientific name,” under which he or she could be docketed. [Footnote: It is

quite possible that the actual thumb-mark may play only a small part in the work of identification,

but it is an obvious convenience to our thread of story to assume that it is the one sufficient feature.]

About the buildings in which this great main index would be gathered, would be a system of other

indices with cross references to the main one, arranged under names, under professional

qualifications, under diseases, crimes and the like.

These index cards might conceivably be transparent and so contrived as to give a photographic copy

promptly whenever it was needed, and they could have an attachment into which would slip a ticket

bearing the name of the locality in which the individual was last reported. A little army of attendants

would be at work upon this index day and night. From sub-stations constantly engaged in checking

back thumb-marks and numbers, an incessant stream of information would come, of births, of

deaths, of arrivals at inns, of applications to post-offices for letters, of tickets taken for long

journeys, of criminal convictions, marriages, applications for public doles and the like. A filter of

offices would sort the stream, and all day and all night for ever a swarm of clerks would go to and

fro correcting this central register, and photographing copies of its entries for transmission to the

subordinate local stations, in response to their inquiries. So the inventory of the State would watch

its every man and the wide world write its history as the fabric of its destiny flowed on. At last,

when the citizen died, would come the last entry of all, his age and the cause of his death and the

date and place of his cremation, and his card would be taken out and passed on to the universal

pedigree, to a place of greater quiet, to the ever-growing galleries of the records of the dead.

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

Yet at this, too, our blond-haired friend would no doubt rebel. One of the many things to which

some will make claim as a right, is that of going unrecognised and secret whither one will. But that,

so far as one's fellow wayfarers were concerned, would still be possible. Only the State would share

the secret of one's little concealment. To the eighteenth-century Liberal, to the old-fashioned

nineteenth-century Liberal, that is to say to all professed Liberals, brought up to be against the

Government on principle, this organised clairvoyance will be the most hateful of dreams. Perhaps,

too, the Individualist would see it in that light. But these are only the mental habits acquired in an

evil time. The old Liberalism assumed bad government, the more powerful the government the

worse it was, just as it assumed the natural righteousness of the free individual. Darkness and

secrecy were, indeed, the natural refuges of liberty when every government had in it the near

possibility of tyranny, and the Englishman or American looked at the papers of a Russian or a

German as one might look at the chains of a slave. You imagine that father of the old Liberalism,

Rousseau, slinking off from his offspring at the door of the Foundling Hospital, and you can

understand what a crime against natural virtue this quiet eye of the State would have seemed to him.

But suppose we do not assume that government is necessarily bad, and the individual necessarily

good—and the hypothesis upon which we are working practically abolishes either alternative—then

we alter the case altogether. The government of a modern Utopia will be no perfection of intentions

ignorantly ruling the world.... [Footnote: In the typical modern State of our own world, with its

population of many millions, and its extreme facility of movement, undistinguished men who adopt

an alias can make themselves untraceable with the utmost ease. The temptation of the opportunities

thus offered has developed a new type of criminality, the Deeming or Crossman type, base men who

subsist and feed their heavy imaginations in the wooing, betrayal, ill-treatment, and sometimes even

the murder of undistinguished women. This is a large, a growing, and, what is gravest, a prolific

class, fostered by the practical anonymity of the common man. It is only the murderers who attract

much public attention, but the supply of low-class prostitutes is also largely due to these free

adventures of the base. It is one of the bye products of State Liberalism, and at present it is very

probably drawing ahead in the race against the development of police organisation.]

Such is the eye of the State that is now slowly beginning to apprehend our existence as two queer

and inexplicable parties disturbing the fine order of its field of vision, the eye that will presently be

focussing itself upon us with a growing astonishment and interrogation. “Who in the name of

Galton and Bertillon,” one fancies Utopia exclaiming, “are you?”

I perceive I shall cut a queer figure in that focus. I shall affect a certain spurious ease of carriage no

doubt. “The fact is, I shall begin....”

§ 7

And now see how an initial hypothesis may pursue and overtake its maker. Our thumb-marks have

been taken, they have travelled by pneumatic tube to the central office of the municipality hard by

Lucerne, and have gone on thence to the headquarters of the index at Paris. There, after a rough

preliminary classification, I imagine them photographed on glass, and flung by means of a lantern

in colossal images upon a screen, all finely squared, and the careful experts marking and measuring

their several convolutions. And then off goes a brisk clerk to the long galleries of the index

building.

I have told them they will find no sign of us, but you see him going from gallery to gallery, from

bay to bay, from drawer to drawer, and from card to card. “Here he is!” he mutters to himself, and

he whips out a card and reads. “But that is impossible!” he says....

You figure us returning after a day or so of such Utopian experiences as I must presently describe,

to the central office in Lucerne, even as we have been told to do.

I make my way to the desk of the man who has dealt with us before. “Well?” I say, cheerfully, “have

you heard?”

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

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

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

“You've heard! You know who we are! Well—tell us! We had an idea, but we're beginning to

doubt.”

“You,” says the official, addressing the botanist, “are―!”

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

For a moment I am dumbfounded. Then I think of the entries we made at the inn in the Urserenthal,

and then in a flash I have the truth. I rap the desk smartly with my finger-tips and shake my index-

finger in my friend's face.

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

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

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

“I can't think why you keep it up,” he remarks, and then almost wearily tells me the facts about my

Utopian self. They are a little difficult to understand. He says I am one of the samurai, which

sounds Japanese, “but you will be degraded,” he says, with a gesture almost of despair. He describes

my position in this world in phrases that convey very little.

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

“I am there still. At least―. I'm sorry to be so much trouble to you, but do you mind following up

that last clue and inquiring if the person to whom the thumb-mark really belongs isn't in Norway

still?”

The idea needs explanation. He says something incomprehensible about a pilgrimage. “Sooner or

later,” I say, “you will have to believe there are two of us with the same thumb-mark. I won't trouble

you with any apparent nonsense about other planets and so forth again. Here I am. If I was in

Norway a few days ago, you ought to be able to trace my journey hither. And my friend?”

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

“It seems to me,” I say, “that the difficulties in this case are only just beginning. How did I get from

Norway hither? Does my friend look like hopping from India to the Saint Gotthard at one hop? The

situation is a little more difficult than that―”

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

“But we are not those individuals!”

“You are those individuals.”

“You will see,” I say.

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

“There is a mistake,” I maintain, “an unprecedented mistake. There's the difficulty. If you inquire

you will find it begin to unravel. What reason is there for us to remain casual workmen here, when

you allege we are men of position in the world, if there isn't something wrong? We shall stick to this

wood-carving work you have found us here, and meanwhile I think you ought to inquire again.

That's how the thing shapes to me.”

“Your case will certainly have to be considered further,” he says, with the faintest of threatening

notes in his tone. “But at the same time”—hand out to those copies from the index again—“there

you are, you know!”

§ 8

When my botanist and I have talked over and exhausted every possibility of our immediate position,

we should turn, I think, to more general questions.

I should tell him the thing that was becoming more and more apparent in my own mind. Here, I

should say, is a world, obviously on the face of it well organised. Compared with our world, it is

like a well-oiled engine beside a scrap-heap. It has even got this confounded visual organ swivelling

about in the most alert and lively fashion. But that's by the way.... You have only to look at all these

houses below. (We should be sitting on a seat on the Gütsch and looking down on the Lucerne of

Utopia, a Lucerne that would, I insist, quite arbitrarily, still keep the Wasserthurm and the

Kapellbrucke.) You have only to mark the beauty, the simple cleanliness and balance of this world,

you have only to see the free carriage, the unaffected graciousness of even the common people, to

understand how fine and complete the arrangements of this world must be. How are they made so?

We of the twentieth century are not going to accept the sweetish, faintly nasty slops of Rousseauism

that so gratified our great-great-grandparents in the eighteenth. We know that order and justice do

not come by Nature—“if only the policeman would go away.” These things mean intention, will,

carried to a scale that our poor vacillating, hot and cold earth has never known. What I am really

seeing more and more clearly is the will beneath this visible Utopia. Convenient houses, admirable

engineering that is no offence amidst natural beauties, beautiful bodies, and a universally gracious

carriage, these are only the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. Such an

order means discipline. It means triumph over the petty egotisms and vanities that keep men on our

earth apart; it means devotion and a nobler hope; it cannot exist without a gigantic process of

inquiry, trial, forethought and patience in an atmosphere of mutual trust and concession. Such a

world as this Utopia is not made by the chance occasional co-operations of self-indulgent men, by

autocratic rulers or by the bawling wisdom of the democratic leader. And an unrestricted

competition for gain, an enlightened selfishness, that too fails us....

I have compared the system of indexing humanity we have come upon to an eye, an eye so sensitive

and alert that two strangers cannot appear anywhere upon the planet without discovery. Now an eye

does not see without a brain, an eye does not turn round and look without a will and purpose. A

Utopia that deals only with appliances and arrangements is a dream of superficialities; the essential

problem here, the body within these garments, is a moral and an intellectual problem. Behind all

this material order, these perfected communications, perfected public services and economic

organisations, there must be men and women willing these things. There must be a considerable

number and a succession of these men and women of will. No single person, no transitory group of

people, could order and sustain this vast complexity. They must have a collective if not a common

width of aim, and that involves a spoken or written literature, a living literature to sustain the

harmony of their general activity. In some way they must have put the more immediate objects of

desire into a secondary place, and that means renunciation. They must be effectual in action and

persistent in will, and that means discipline. But in the modern world in which progress advances

without limits, it will be evident that whatever common creed or formula they have must be of the

simplest sort; that whatever organisation they have must be as mobile and flexible as a thing alive.

All this follows inevitably from the general propositions of our Utopian dream. When we made

those, we bound ourselves helplessly to come to this....

The botanist would nod an abstracted assent.

I should cease to talk. I should direct my mind to the confused mass of memories three days in

Utopia will have given us. Besides the personalities with whom we have come into actual contact,

our various hosts, our foreman and work-fellows, the blond man, the public officials and so on,

there will be a great multitude of other impressions. There will be many bright snapshots of little

children, for example, of girls and women and men, seen in shops and offices and streets, on quays,

at windows and by the wayside, people riding hither and thither and walking to and fro. A very

human crowd it has seemed to me. But among them were there any who might be thought of as

having a wider interest than the others, who seemed in any way detached from the rest by a purpose

that passed beyond the seen?

Then suddenly I recall that clean-shaven man who talked with us for a little while in the public

office at Wassen, the man who reminded me of my boyish conception of a Knight Templar, and

with him come momentary impressions of other lithe and serious-looking people dressed after the

same manner, words and phrases we have read in such scraps of Utopian reading as have come our

way, and expressions that fell from the loose mouth of the man with the blond hair....

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

Women in a Modern Utopia

§ 1

But though I have come to a point where the problem of a Utopia has resolved itself very simply

into the problem of government and direction, I find I have not brought the botanist with me.

Frankly he cannot think so steadily onward as I can. I feel to think, he thinks to feel. It is I and my

kind that have the wider range, because we can be impersonal as well as personal. We can escape

ourselves. In general terms, at least, I understand him, but he does not understand me in any way at

all. He thinks me an incomprehensible brute because his obsession is merely one of my incidental

interests, and wherever my reasoning ceases to be explicit and full, the slightest ellipsis, the most

transitory digression, he evades me and is back at himself again. He may have a personal liking for

me, though I doubt it, but also he hates me pretty distinctly, because of this bias he cannot

understand. My philosophical insistence that things shall be reasonable and hang together, that what

can be explained shall be explained, and that what can be done by calculation and certain methods

shall not be left to chance, he loathes. He just wants adventurously to feel. He wants to feel the

sunset, and he thinks that on the whole he would feel it better if he had not been taught the sun was

about ninety-two million miles away. He wants to feel free and strong, and he would rather feel so

than be so. He does not want to accomplish great things, but to have dazzling things occur to him.

He does not know that there are feelings also up in the clear air of the philosophic mountains, in the

long ascents of effort and design. He does not know that thought itself is only a finer sort of feeling

than his—good hock to the mixed gin, porter and treacle of his emotions, a perception of

similitudes and oppositions that carries even thrills. And naturally he broods on the source of all his

most copious feelings and emotions, women, and particularly upon the woman who has most made

him feel. He forces me also to that.

Our position is unfortunate for me. Our return to the Utopian equivalent of Lucerne revives in him

all the melancholy distresses that so preoccupied him when first we were transferred to this better

planet. One day, while we are still waiting there for the public office to decide about us, he broaches

the matter. It is early evening, and we are walking beside the lake after our simple dinner. “About

here,” he says, “the quays would run and all those big hotels would be along here, looking out on

the lake. It's so strange to have seen them so recently, and now not to see them at all.... Where have

they gone?”

“Vanished by hypothesis.”

“What?”

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

“Of course. I forgot. But still― You know, there was an avenue of little trees along this quay with

seats, and she was sitting looking out upon the lake.... I hadn't seen her for ten years.”

He looks about him still a little perplexed. “Now we are here,” he says, “it seems as though that

meeting and the talk we had must have been a dream.”

He falls musing.

Presently he says: “I knew her at once. I saw her in profile. But, you know, I didn't speak to her

directly. I walked past her seat and on for a little way, trying to control myself.... Then I turned back

and sat down beside her, very quietly. She looked up at me. Everything came back—everything. For

a moment or so I felt I was going to cry....”

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

“We talked for a time just like casual acquaintances—about the view and the weather, and things

like that.”

He muses again.

“In Utopia everything would have been different,” I say.

“I suppose it would.”

He goes on before I can say anything more.

“Then, you know, there was a pause. I had a sort of intuition that the moment was coming. So I

think had she. You may scoff, of course, at these intuitions―”

I don't, as a matter of fact. Instead, I swear secretly. Always this sort of man keeps up the pretence

of highly distinguished and remarkable mental processes, whereas—have not I, in my own

composition, the whole diapason of emotional fool? Is not the suppression of these notes my

perpetual effort, my undying despair? And then, am I to be accused of poverty?

But to his story.

“She said, quite abruptly, ‘I am not happy,’ and I told her, ‘I knew that the instant I saw you.’ Then,

you know, she began to talk to me very quietly, very frankly, about everything. It was only

afterwards I began to feel just what it meant, her talking to me like that.”

I cannot listen to this!

“Don't you understand,” I cry, “that we are in Utopia. She may be bound unhappily upon earth and

you may be bound, but not here. Here I think it will be different. Here the laws that control all these

things will be humane and just. So that all you said and did, over there, does not signify here—does

not signify here!”

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

“Yes,” he says, without interest, with something of the tone of an abstracted elder speaking to a

child, “I dare say it will be all very fine here.” And he lapses, thwarted from his confidences, into

musing.

There is something almost dignified in this withdrawal into himself. For a moment I entertain an

illusion that really I am unworthy to hear the impalpable inconclusiveness of what he said to her

and of what she said to him.

I am snubbed. I am also amazed to find myself snubbed. I become breathless with indignation. We

walk along side by side, but now profoundly estranged.

I regard the façade of the Utopian public offices of Lucerne—I had meant to call his attention to

some of the architectural features of these—with a changed eye, with all the spirit gone out of my

vision. I wish I had never brought this introspective carcass, this mental ingrate, with me.

I incline to fatalistic submission. I suppose I had no power to leave him behind.... I wonder and I

wonder. The old Utopists never had to encumber themselves with this sort of man.

§ 2

How would things be “different” in the Modern Utopia? After all it is time we faced the riddle of

the problems of marriage and motherhood....

The Modern Utopia is not only to be a sound and happy World State, but it is to be one progressing

from good to better. But as Malthus [Footnote: Essay on the Principles of Population.]

demonstrated for all time, a State whose population continues to increase in obedience to unchecked

instinct, can progress only from bad to worse. From the view of human comfort and happiness, the

increase of population that occurs at each advance in human security is the greatest evil of life. The

way of Nature is for every species to increase nearly to its possible maximum of numbers, and then

to improve through the pressure of that maximum against its limiting conditions by the crushing and

killing of all the feebler individuals. The way of Nature has also been the way of humanity so far,

and except when a temporary alleviation is obtained through an expansion of the general stock of

sustenance by invention or discovery, the amount of starvation and of the physical misery of

privation in the world, must vary almost exactly with the excess of the actual birth-rate over that

required to sustain population at a number compatible with a universal contentment. Neither has

Nature evolved, nor has man so far put into operation, any device by which paying this price of

progress, this misery of a multitude of starved and unsuccessful lives can be evaded. A mere

indiscriminating restriction of the birth-rate—an end practically attained in the homely, old-

fashioned civilisation of China by female infanticide, involves not only the cessation of distresses

but stagnation, and the minor good of a sort of comfort and social stability is won at too great a

sacrifice. Progress depends essentially on competitive selection, and that we may not escape.

But it is a conceivable and possible thing that this margin of futile struggling, pain and discomfort

and death might be reduced to nearly nothing without checking physical and mental evolution, with

indeed an acceleration of physical and mental evolution, by preventing the birth of those who would

in the unrestricted interplay of natural forces be born to suffer and fail. The method of Nature “red

in tooth and claw” is to degrade, thwart, torture, and kill the weakest and least adapted members of

every species in existence in each generation, and so keep the specific average rising; the ideal of a

scientific civilisation is to prevent those weaklings being born. There is no other way of evading

Nature's punishment of sorrow. The struggle for life among the beasts and uncivilised men means

misery and death for the inferior individuals, misery and death in order that they may not increase

and multiply; in the civilised State it is now clearly possible to make the conditions of life tolerable

for every living creature, provided the inferiors can be prevented from increasing and multiplying.

But this latter condition must be respected. Instead of competing to escape death and wretchedness,

we may compete to give birth and we may heap every sort of consolation prize upon the losers in

that competition. The modern State tends to qualify inheritance, to insist upon education and nurture

for children, to come in more and more in the interests of the future between father and child. It is

taking over the responsibility of the general welfare of the children more and more, and as it does

so, its right to decide which children it will shelter becomes more and more reasonable.

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

Let us set aside at once all nonsense of the sort one hears in certain quarters about the human stud

farm. [Footnote: See Mankind in the Making, Ch. II.] State breeding of the population was a

reasonable proposal for Plato to make, in view of the biological knowledge of his time and the

purely tentative nature of his metaphysics; but from anyone in the days after Darwin, it is

preposterous. Yet we have it given to us as the most brilliant of modern discoveries by a certain

school of sociological writers, who seem totally unable to grasp the modification of meaning

“species” and “individual” have undergone in the last fifty years. They do not seem capable of the

suspicion that the boundaries of species have vanished, and that individuality now carries with it the

quality of the unique! To them individuals are still defective copies of a Platonic ideal of the

species, and the purpose of breeding no more than an approximation to that perfection. Individuality

is indeed a negligible difference to them, an impertinence, and the whole flow of modern biological

ideas has washed over them in vain.

But to the modern thinker individuality is the significant fact of life, and the idea of the State, which

is necessarily concerned with the average and general, selecting individualities in order to pair them

and improve the race, an absurdity. It is like fixing a crane on the plain in order to raise the hill tops.

In the initiative of the individual above the average, lies the reality of the future, which the State,

presenting the average, may subserve but cannot control. And the natural centre of the emotional

life, the cardinal will, the supreme and significant expression of individuality, should lie in the

selection of a partner for procreation.

But compulsory pairing is one thing, and the maintenance of general limiting conditions is another,

and one well within the scope of State activity. The State is justified in saying, before you may add

children to the community for the community to educate and in part to support, you must be above a

certain minimum of personal efficiency, and this you must show by holding a position of solvency

and independence in the world; you must be above a certain age, and a certain minimum of physical

development, and free of any transmissible disease. You must not be a criminal unless you have

expiated your offence. Failing these simple qualifications, if you and some person conspire and add

to the population of the State, we will, for the sake of humanity, take over the innocent victim of

your passions, but we shall insist that you are under a debt to the State of a peculiarly urgent sort,

and one you will certainly pay, even if it is necessary to use restraint to get the payment out of you:

it is a debt that has in the last resort your liberty as a security, and, moreover, if this thing happens a

second time, or if it is disease or imbecility you have multiplied, we will take an absolutely

effectual guarantee that neither you nor your partner offend again in this matter.

“Harsh!” you say, and “Poor Humanity!”

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

It may be urged that to permit conspicuously inferior people to have one or two children in this way

would be to fail to attain the desired end, but, indeed, this is not so. A suitably qualified permission,

as every statesman knows, may produce the social effects without producing the irksome pressure

of an absolute prohibition. Amidst bright and comfortable circumstances, and with an easy and

practicable alternative, people will exercise foresight and self-restraint to escape even the

possibilities of hardship and discomfort; and free life in Utopia is to be well worth this trouble even

for inferior people. The growing comfort, self-respect, and intelligence of the English is shown, for

example, in the fall in the proportion of illegitimate births from 2.2 per 1,000 in 1846-50 to 1.2 per

1,000 in 1890-1900, and this without any positive preventive laws whatever. This most desirable

result is pretty certainly not the consequence of any great exaltation of our moral tone, but simply of

a rising standard of comfort and a livelier sense of consequences and responsibilities. If so marked a

change is possible in response to such progress as England has achieved in the past fifty years, if

discreet restraint can be so effectual as this, it seems reasonable to suppose that in the ampler

knowledge and the cleaner, franker atmosphere of our Utopian planet the birth of a child to diseased

or inferior parents, and contrary to the sanctions of the State, will be the rarest of disasters.

And the death of a child, too, that most tragic event, Utopia will rarely know. Children are not born

to die in childhood. But in our world, at present, through the defects of our medical science and

nursing methods, through defects in our organisation, through poverty and carelessness, and

through the birth of children that never ought to have been born, one out of every five children born

dies within five years. It may be the reader has witnessed this most distressful of all human

tragedies. It is sheer waste of suffering. There is no reason why ninety-nine out of every hundred

children born should not live to a ripe age. Accordingly, in any Modern Utopia, it must be insisted

they will.

§ 3

All former Utopias have, by modern standards, erred on the side of over regulation in these matters.

The amount of State interference with the marriage and birth of the citizens of a modern Utopia will

be much less than in any terrestrial State. Here, just as in relation to property and enterprise, the law

will regulate only in order to secure the utmost freedom and initiative.

Up to the beginning of this chapter, our Utopian speculations, like many Acts of Parliament, have

ignored the difference of sex. “He” indeed is to be read as “He and She” in all that goes before. But

we may now come to the sexual aspects of the modern ideal of a constitution of society in which,

for all purposes of the individual, women are to be as free as men. This will certainly be realised in

the Modern Utopia, if it can be realised at all—not only for woman's sake, but for man's.

But women may be free in theory and not in practice, and as long as they suffer from their

economic inferiority, from the inability to produce as much value as a man for the same amount of

work—and there can be no doubt of this inferiority—so long will their legal and technical equality

be a mockery. It is a fact that almost every point in which a woman differs from a man is an

economic disadvantage to her, her incapacity for great stresses of exertion, her frequent liability to

slight illnesses, her weaker initiative, her inferior invention and resourcefulness, her relative

incapacity for organisation and combination, and the possibilities of emotional complications

whenever she is in economic dependence on men. So long as women are compared economically

with men and boys they will be inferior in precisely the measure in which they differ from men. All

that constitutes this difference they are supposed not to trade upon except in one way, and that is by

winning or luring a man to marry, selling themselves in an almost irrevocable bargain, and then

following and sharing his fortunes for “better or worse.”

But—do not let the proposition in its first crudity alarm you—suppose the Modern Utopia equalises

things between the sexes in the only possible way, by insisting that motherhood is a service to the

State and a legitimate claim to a living; and that, since the State is to exercise the right of forbidding

or sanctioning motherhood, a woman who is, or is becoming, a mother, is as much entitled to wages

above the minimum wage, to support, to freedom, and to respect and dignity as a policeman, a

solicitor-general, a king, a bishop in the State Church, a Government professor, or anyone else the

State sustains. Suppose the State secures to every woman who is, under legitimate sanctions,

becoming or likely to become a mother, that is to say who is duly married, a certain wage from her

husband to secure her against the need of toil and anxiety, suppose it pays her a certain gratuity

upon the birth of a child, and continues to pay at regular intervals sums sufficient to keep her and

her child in independent freedom, so long as the child keeps up to the minimum standard of health

and physical and mental development. Suppose it pays more upon the child when it rises markedly

above certain minimum qualifications, physical or mental, and, in fact, does its best to make

thoroughly efficient motherhood a profession worth following. And suppose in correlation with this

it forbids the industrial employment of married women and of mothers who have children needing

care, unless they are in a position to employ qualified efficient substitutes to take care of their

offspring. What differences from terrestrial conditions will ensue?

This extent of intervention will at least abolish two or three salient hardships and evils of the

civilised life. It will abolish the hardship of the majority of widows, who on earth are poor and

encumbered exactly in proportion as they have discharged the chief distinctive duty of a woman,

and miserable, just in proportion as their standard of life and of education is high. It will abolish the

hardship of those who do not now marry on account of poverty, or who do not dare to have

children. The fear that often turns a woman from a beautiful to a mercenary marriage will vanish

from life. In Utopia a career of wholesome motherhood would be, under such conditions as I have

suggested, the normal and remunerative calling for a woman, and a capable woman who has borne,

bred, and begun the education of eight or nine well-built, intelligent, and successful sons and

daughters would be an extremely prosperous woman, quite irrespective of the economic fortunes of

the man she has married. She would need to be an exceptional woman, and she would need to have

chosen a man at least a little above the average as her partner in life. But his death, or misbehaviour,

or misfortunes would not ruin her.

Now such an arrangement is merely the completed induction from the starting propositions that

make some measure of education free and compulsory for every child in the State. If you prevent

people making profit out of their children—and every civilised State—even that compendium of

old-fashioned Individualism, the United States of America—is now disposed to admit the necessity

of that prohibition—and if you provide for the aged instead of leaving them to their children's sense

of duty, the practical inducements to parentage, except among very wealthy people, are greatly

reduced. The sentimental factor in the case rarely leads to more than a solitary child or at most two

to a marriage, and with a high and rising standard of comfort and circumspection it is unlikely that

the birth-rate will ever rise very greatly again. The Utopians will hold that if you keep the children

from profitable employment for the sake of the future, then, if you want any but the exceptionally

rich, secure, pious, unselfish, or reckless to bear children freely, you must be prepared to throw the

cost of their maintenance upon the general community.

In short, Utopia will hold that sound childbearing and rearing is a service done, not to a particular

man, but to the whole community, and all its legal arrangements for motherhood will be based on

that conception.

§ 4

And after these preliminaries we must proceed to ask, first, what will be the Utopian marriage law,

and then what sort of customs and opinions are likely to be superadded to that law?

The trend of our reasoning has brought us to the conclusion that the Utopian State will feel justified

in intervening between men and women on two accounts, first on account of paternity, and secondly

on account of the clash of freedoms that may otherwise arise. The Utopian State will effectually

interfere with and prescribe conditions for all sorts of contract, and for this sort of contract in

particular it will be in agreement with almost every earthly State, in defining in the completest

fashion what things a man or woman may be bound to do, and what they cannot be bound to do.

From the point of view of a statesman, marriage is the union of a man and woman in a manner so

intimate as to involve the probability of offspring, and it is of primary importance to the State, first

in order to secure good births, and secondly good home conditions, that these unions should not be

free, nor promiscuous, nor practically universal throughout the adult population.

Prolific marriage must be a profitable privilege. It must occur only under certain obvious

conditions, the contracting parties must be in health and condition, free from specific transmissible

taints, above a certain minimum age, and sufficiently intelligent and energetic to have acquired a

minimum education. The man at least must be in receipt of a net income above the minimum wage,

after any outstanding charges against him have been paid. All this much it is surely reasonable to

insist upon before the State becomes responsible for the prospective children. The age at which men

and women may contract to marry is difficult to determine. But if we are, as far as possible, to put

women on an equality with men, if we are to insist upon a universally educated population, and if

we are seeking to reduce the infantile death-rate to zero, it must be much higher than it is in any

terrestrial State. The woman should be at least one-and-twenty; the man twenty-six or twenty-seven.

One imagines the parties to a projected marriage first obtaining licenses which will testify that these

conditions are satisfied. From the point of view of the theoretical Utopian State, these licenses are

the feature of primary importance. Then, no doubt, that universal register at Paris would come into

play. As a matter of justice, there must be no deception between the two people, and the State will

ensure that in certain broad essentials this is so. They would have to communicate their joint

intention to a public office after their personal licenses were granted, and each would be supplied

with a copy of the index card of the projected mate, on which would be recorded his or her age,

previous marriages, legally important diseases, offspring, domiciles, public appointments, criminal

convictions, registered assignments of property, and so forth. Possibly it might be advisable to have

a little ceremony for each party, for each in the absence of the other, in which this record could be

read over in the presence of witnesses, together with some prescribed form of address of counsel in

the matter. There would then be a reasonable interval for consideration and withdrawal on the part

of either spouse. In the event of the two people persisting in their resolution, they would after this

minimum interval signify as much to the local official and the necessary entry would be made in the

registers. These formalities would be quite independent of any religious ceremonial the contracting

parties might choose, for with religious belief and procedure the modern State has no concern.

So much for the preliminary conditions of matrimony. For those men and women who chose to

ignore these conditions and to achieve any sort of union they liked the State would have no concern,

unless offspring were born illegitimately. In that case, as we have already suggested, it would be

only reasonable to make the parents chargeable with every duty, with maintenance, education, and

so forth, that in the normal course of things would fall to the State. It would be necessary to impose

a life assurance payment upon these parents, and to exact effectual guarantees against every

possible evasion of the responsibility they had incurred. But the further control of private morality,

beyond the protection of the immature from corruption and evil example, will be no concern of the

State's. When a child comes in, the future of the species comes in; and the State comes in as the

guardian of interests wider than the individual's; but the adult's private life is the entirely private life

into which the State may not intrude.

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

From the first of the two points of view named above, that of parentage, it is obvious that one

unavoidable condition will be the chastity of the wife. Her infidelity being demonstrated, must at

once terminate the marriage and release both her husband and the State from any liability for the

support of her illegitimate offspring. That, at any rate, is beyond controversy; a marriage contract

that does not involve that, is a triumph of metaphysics over common sense. It will be obvious that

under Utopian conditions it is the State that will suffer injury by a wife's misconduct, and that a

husband who condones anything of the sort will participate in her offence. A woman, therefore, who

is divorced on this account will be divorced as a public offender, and not in the key of a personal

quarrel; not as one who has inflicted a private and personal wrong. This, too, lies within the primary

implications of marriage.

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

A reciprocal restraint on the part of the husband is clearly of no importance whatever, so far as the

first end of matrimony goes, the protection of the community from inferior births. It is no wrong to

the State. But it does carry with it a variable amount of emotional offence to the wife; it may wound

her pride and cause her violent perturbations of jealousy; it may lead to her neglect, her solitude and

unhappiness, and it may even work to her physical injury. There should be an implication that it is

not to occur. She has bound herself to the man for the good of the State, and clearly it is reasonable

that she should look to the State for relief if it does occur. The extent of the offence given her is the

exact measure of her injury; if she does not mind nobody minds, and if her self-respect does not

suffer nothing whatever is lost to the world; and so it should rest with her to establish his

misconduct, and, if she thinks fit, to terminate the marriage.

A failure on either side to perform the elementary duties of companionship, desertion, for example,

should obviously give the other mate the right to relief, and clearly the development of any

disqualifying habit, drunkenness, or drug-taking, or the like, or any serious crime or acts of

violence, should give grounds for a final release. Moreover, the modern Utopian State intervenes

between the sexes only because of the coming generation, and for it to sustain restrictions upon

conduct in a continually fruitless marriage is obviously to lapse into purely moral intervention. It

seems reasonable, therefore, to set a term to a marriage that remains childless, to let it expire at the

end of three or four or five unfruitful years, but with no restriction upon the right of the husband

and wife to marry each other again.

These are the fairly easy primaries of this question. We now come to the more difficult issues of the

matter. The first of these is the question of the economic relationships of husband and wife, having

regard to the fact that even in Utopia women, at least until they become mothers, are likely to be on

the average poorer than men. The second is the question of the duration of a marriage. But the two

interlock, and are, perhaps, best treated together in one common section. And they both ramify in

the most complicated manner into the consideration of the general morale of the community.

§ 5

This question of marriage is the most complicated and difficult in the whole range of Utopian

problems. But it is happily not the most urgent necessity that it should be absolutely solved. The

urgent and necessary problem is the ruler. With rulers rightly contrived and a provisional defective

marriage law a Utopia may be conceived as existing and studying to perfect itself, but without

rulers a Utopia is impossible though the theory of its matrimony be complete. And the difficulty in

this question is not simply the difficulty of a complicated chess problem, for example, in which the

whole tangle of considerations does at least lie in one plane, but a series of problems upon different

levels and containing incommensurable factors.

It is very easy to repeat our initial propositions, to recall that we are on another planet, and that all

the customs and traditions of the earth are set aside, but the faintest realisation of that demands a

feat of psychological insight. We have all grown up into an invincible mould of suggestion about

sexual things; we regard this with approval, that with horror, and this again with contempt, very

largely because the thing has always been put to us in this light or that. The more emancipated we

think ourselves the more subtle are our bonds. The disentanglement of what is inherent in these

feelings from what is acquired is an extraordinary complex undertaking. Probably all men and

women have a more or less powerful disposition to jealousy, but what exactly they will be jealous

about and what exactly they will suffer seems part of the superposed factor. Probably all men and

women are capable of ideal emotions and wishes beyond merely physical desires, but the shape

these take are almost entirely a reaction to external images. And you really cannot strip the external

off; you cannot get your stark natural man, jealous, but not jealous about anything in particular,

imaginative without any imaginings, proud at large. Emotional dispositions can no more exist

without form than a man without air. Only a very observant man who had lived all over the planet

Earth, in all sorts of social strata, and with every race and tongue, and who was endowed with great

imaginative insight, could hope to understand the possibilities and the limitations of human

plasticity in this matter, and say what any men and any women could be induced to do willingly,

and just exactly what no man and no woman could stand, provided one had the training of them.

Though very young men will tell you readily enough. The proceedings of other races and other ages

do not seem to carry conviction; what our ancestors did, or what the Greeks or Egyptians did,

though it is the direct physical cause of the modern young man or the modern young lady, is apt to

impress these remarkable consequences merely as an arrangement of quaint, comical or repulsive

proceedings.

But there emerges to the modern inquirer certain ideals and desiderata that at least go some way

towards completing and expanding the crude primaries of a Utopian marriage law set out in § 4.

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

marriage union?

There are two lines of reasoning that go to establish a longer duration for marriage. The first of

these rests upon the general necessity for a home and for individual attention in the case of children.

Children are the results of a choice between individuals; they grow well, as a rule, only in relation

to sympathetic and kindred individualities, and no wholesale character-ignoring method of dealing

with them has ever had a shadow of the success of the individualised home. Neither Plato nor

Socrates, who repudiated the home, seems ever to have had to do with anything younger than a

young man. Procreation is only the beginning of parentage, and even where the mother is not the

direct nurse and teacher of her child, even where she delegates these duties, her supervision is, in

the common case, essential to its welfare. Moreover, though the Utopian State will pay the mother,

and the mother only, for the being and welfare of her legitimate children, there will be a clear

advantage in fostering the natural disposition of the father to associate his child's welfare with his

individual egotism, and to dispense some of his energies and earnings in supplementing the

common provision of the State. It is an absurd disregard of a natural economy to leave the innate

philoprogenitiveness of either sex uncultivated. Unless the parents continue in close relationship, if

each is passing through a series of marriages, the dangers of a conflict of rights, and of the frittering

away of emotions, become very grave. The family will lose homogeneity, and its individuals will

have for the mother varied and perhaps incompatible emotional associations. The balance of social

advantage is certainly on the side of much more permanent unions, on the side of an arrangement

that, subject to ample provisions for a formal divorce without disgrace in cases of incompatibility,

would bind, or at least enforce ideals that would tend to bind, a man and woman together for the

whole term of her maternal activity, until, that is, the last born of her children was no longer in need

of her help.

The second system of considerations arises out of the artificiality of woman's position. It is a less

conclusive series than the first, and it opens a number of interesting side vistas.

A great deal of nonsense is talked about the natural equality or inferiority of women to men. But it

is only the same quality that can be measured by degrees and ranged in ascending and descending

series, and the things that are essentially feminine are different qualitatively from and

incommensurable with the distinctly masculine things. The relationship is in the region of ideals

and conventions, and a State is perfectly free to determine that men and women shall come to

intercourse on a footing of conventional equality or with either the man or woman treated as the

predominating individual. Aristotle's criticism of Plato in this matter, his insistence upon the natural

inferiority of slaves and women, is just the sort of confusion between inherent and imposed

qualities that was his most characteristic weakness. The spirit of the European people, of almost all

the peoples now in the ascendant, is towards a convention of equality; the spirit of the Mahometan

world is towards the intensification of a convention that the man alone is a citizen and that the

woman is very largely his property. There can be no doubt that the latter of these two convenient

fictions is the more primitive way of regarding this relationship. It is quite unfruitful to argue

between these ideals as if there were a demonstrable conclusion, the adoption of either is an

arbitrary act, and we shall simply follow our age and time if we display a certain bias for the former.

If one looks closely into the various practical expansions of these ideas, we find their inherent

falsity works itself out in a very natural way so soon as reality is touched. Those who insist upon

equality work in effect for assimilation, for a similar treatment of the sexes. Plato's women of the

governing class, for example, were to strip for gymnastics like men, to bear arms and go to war, and

follow most of the masculine occupations of their class. They were to have the same education and

to be assimilated to men at every doubtful point. The Aristotelian attitude, on the other hand, insists

upon specialisation. The men are to rule and fight and toil; the women are to support motherhood in

a state of natural inferiority. The trend of evolutionary forces through long centuries of human

development has been on the whole in this second direction, has been towards differentiation.

[Footnote: See Havelock Ellis's Man and Woman.] An adult white woman differs far more from a

white man than a negress or pigmy woman from her equivalent male. The education, the mental

disposition, of a white or Asiatic woman, reeks of sex; her modesty, her decorum is not to ignore

sex but to refine and put a point to it; her costume is clamorous with the distinctive elements of her

form. The white woman in the materially prosperous nations is more of a sexual specialist than her

sister of the poor and austere peoples, of the prosperous classes more so than the peasant woman.

The contemporary woman of fashion who sets the tone of occidental intercourse is a stimulant

rather than a companion for a man. Too commonly she is an unwholesome stimulant turning a man

from wisdom to appearance, from beauty to beautiful pleasures, from form to colour, from

persistent aims to belief and stirring triumphs. Arrayed in what she calls distinctly “dress,” scented,

adorned, displayed, she achieves by artifice a sexual differentiation profounder than that of any

other vertebrated animal. She outshines the peacock's excess above his mate, one must probe among

the domestic secrets of the insects and crustacea to find her living parallel. And it is a question by

no means easy and yet of the utmost importance, to determine how far the wide and widening

differences between the human sexes is inherent and inevitable, and how far it is an accident of

social development that may be converted and reduced under a different social regimen. Are we

going to recognise and accentuate this difference and to arrange our Utopian organisation to play

upon it, are we to have two primary classes of human being, harmonising indeed and reacting, but

following essentially different lives, or are we going to minimise this difference in every possible

way?

The former alternative leads either to a romantic organisation of society in which men will live and

fight and die for wonderful, beautiful, exaggerated creatures, or it leads to the hareem. It would

probably lead through one phase to the other. Women would be enigmas and mysteries and maternal

dignitaries that one would approach in a state of emotional excitement and seclude piously when

serious work was in hand. A girl would blossom from the totally negligible to the mystically

desirable at adolescence, and boys would be removed from their mother's educational influence at

as early an age as possible. Whenever men and women met together, the men would be in a state of

inflamed competition towards one another, and the women likewise, and the intercourse of ideas

would be in suspense. Under the latter alternative the sexual relation would be subordinated to

friendship and companionship; boys and girls would be co-educated—very largely under maternal

direction, and women, disarmed of their distinctive barbaric adornments, the feathers, beads, lace,

and trimmings that enhance their clamorous claim to a directly personal attention would mingle,

according to their quality, in the counsels and intellectual development of men. Such women would

be fit to educate boys even up to adolescence. It is obvious that a marriage law embodying a

decision between these two sets of ideas would be very different according to the alternative

adopted. In the former case a man would be expected to earn and maintain in an adequate manner

the dear delight that had favoured him. He would tell her beautiful lies about her wonderful moral

effect upon him, and keep her sedulously from all responsibility and knowledge. And, since there is

an undeniably greater imaginative appeal to men in the first bloom of a woman's youth, she would

have a distinct claim upon his energies for the rest of her life. In the latter case a man would no

more pay for and support his wife than she would do so for him. They would be two friends,

differing in kind no doubt but differing reciprocally, who had linked themselves in a matrimonial

relationship. Our Utopian marriage so far as we have discussed it, is indeterminate between these

alternatives.

We have laid it down as a general principle that the private morals of an adult citizen are no concern

for the State. But that involves a decision to disregard certain types of bargain. A sanely contrived

State will refuse to sustain bargains wherein there is no plausibly fair exchange, and if private

morality is really to be outside the scope of the State then the affections and endearments most

certainly must not be regarded as negotiable commodities. The State, therefore, will absolutely

ignore the distribution of these favours unless children, or at least the possibility of children, is

involved. It follows that it will refuse to recognise any debts or transfers of property that are based

on such considerations. It will be only consistent, therefore, to refuse recognition in the marriage

contract to any financial obligation between husband and wife, or any settlements qualifying that

contract, except when they are in the nature of accessory provision for the prospective children.

[Footnote: Unqualified gifts for love by solvent people will, of course, be quite possible and

permissible, unsalaried services and the like, provided the standard of life is maintained and the

joint income of the couple between whom the services hold does not sink below twice the minimum

wage.] So far the Utopian State will throw its weight upon the side of those who advocate the

independence of women and their conventional equality with men.

But to any further definition of the marriage relation the World State of Utopia will not commit

itself. The wide range of relationships that are left possible, within and without the marriage code,

are entirely a matter for the individual choice and imagination. Whether a man treat his wife in

private as a goddess to be propitiated, as a “mystery” to be adored, as an agreeable auxiliary, as a

particularly intimate friend, or as the wholesome mother of his children, is entirely a matter for their

private intercourse: whether he keep her in Oriental idleness or active co-operation, or leave her to

live her independent life, rests with the couple alone, and all the possible friendship and intimacies

outside marriage also lie quite beyond the organisation of the modern State. Religious teaching and

literature may affect these; customs may arise; certain types of relationship may involve social

isolation; the justice of the statesman is blind to such things. It may be urged that according to

Atkinson's illuminating analysis [Footnote: See Lang and Atkinson's Social Origins and Primal

Law.] the control of love-making was the very origin of the human community. In Utopia,

nevertheless, love-making is no concern of the State's beyond the province that the protection of

children covers. [Footnote: It cannot be made too clear that though the control of morality is outside

the law the State must maintain a general decorum, a systematic suppression of powerful and

moving examples, and of incitations and temptations of the young and inexperienced, and to that

extent it will, of course, in a sense, exercise a control over morals. But this will be only part of a

wider law to safeguard the tender mind. For example, lying advertisements, and the like, when they

lean towards adolescent interests, will encounter a specially disagreeable disposition in the law,

over and above the treatment of their general dishonesty.] Change of function is one of the ruling

facts in life, the sac that was in our remotest ancestors a swimming bladder is now a lung, and the

State which was once, perhaps, no more than the jealous and tyrannous will of the strongest male in

the herd, the instrument of justice and equality. The State intervenes now only where there is want

of harmony between individuals—individuals who exist or who may presently come into existence.

§ 6

It must be reiterated that our reasoning still leaves Utopian marriage an institution with wide

possibilities of variation. We have tried to give effect to the ideal of a virtual equality, an equality of

spirit between men and women, and in doing so we have overridden the accepted opinion of the

great majority of mankind. Probably the first writer to do as much was Plato. His argument in

support of this innovation upon natural human feeling was thin enough—a mere analogy to

illustrate the spirit of his propositions; it was his creative instinct that determined him. In the

atmosphere of such speculations as this, Plato looms very large indeed, and in view of what we owe

to him, it seems reasonable that we should hesitate before dismissing as a thing prohibited and evil,

a type of marriage that he made almost the central feature in the organisation of the ruling class, at

least, of his ideal State. He was persuaded that the narrow monogamic family is apt to become

illiberal and anti-social, to withdraw the imagination and energies of the citizen from the services of

the community as a whole, and the Roman Catholic Church has so far endorsed and substantiated

his opinion as to forbid family relations to its priests and significant servants. He conceived of a

poetic devotion to the public idea, a devotion of which the mind of Aristotle, as his criticisms of

Plato show, was incapable, as a substitute for the warm and tender but illiberal emotions of the

home. But while the Church made the alternative to family ties celibacy [Footnote: The warm

imagination of Campanella, that quaint Calabrian monastic, fired by Plato, reversed this aspect of

the Church.] and participation in an organisation, Plato was far more in accordance with modern

ideas in perceiving the disadvantage that would result from precluding the nobler types of character

from offspring. He sought a way to achieve progeny, therefore, without the narrow concentration of

the sympathies about the home, and he found it in a multiple marriage in which every member of

the governing class was considered to be married to all the others. But the detailed operation of this

system he put tentatively and very obscurely. His suggestions have the experimental inconsistency

of an enquiring man. He left many things altogether open, and it is unfair to him to adopt Aristotle's

forensic method and deal with his discussion as though it was a fully-worked-out project. It is clear

that Plato intended every member of his governing class to be so “changed at birth” as to leave

paternity untraceable; mothers were not to know their children, nor children their parents, but there

is nothing to forbid the supposition that he intended these people to select and adhere to congenial

mates within the great family. Aristotle's assertion that the Platonic republic left no scope for the

virtue of continence shows that he had jumped to just the same conclusions a contemporary London

errand boy, hovering a little shamefacedly over Jowett in a public library, might be expected to

reach.

Aristotle obscures Plato's intention, it may be accidentally, by speaking of his marriage institution

as a community of wives. When reading Plato he could not or would not escape reading in his own

conception of the natural ascendency of men, his idea of property in women and children. But as

Plato intended women to be conventionally equal to men, this phrase belies him altogether;

community of husbands and wives would be truer to his proposal. Aristotle condemns Plato as

roundly as any commercial room would condemn him to-day, and in much the same spirit; he

asserts rather than proves that such a grouping is against the nature of man. He wanted to have

women property just as he wanted to have slaves property, he did not care to ask why, and it

distressed his conception of convenience extremely to imagine any other arrangement. It is no doubt

true that the natural instinct of either sex is exclusive of participators in intimacy during a period of

intimacy, but it was probably Aristotle who gave Plato an offensive interpretation in this matter. No

one would freely submit to such a condition of affairs as multiple marriage carried out, in the spirit

of the Aristotelian interpretation, to an obscene completeness, but that is all the more reason why

the modern Utopia should not refuse a grouped marriage to three or more freely consenting persons.

There is no sense in prohibiting institutions which no sane people could ever want to abuse. It is

claimed—though the full facts are difficult to ascertain—that a group marriage of over two hundred

persons was successfully organised by John Humphrey Noyes at Oneida Creek. [Footnote: See John

H. Noyes's History of American Socialisms and his writings generally. The bare facts of this and the

other American experiments are given, together with more recent matter, by Morris Hillquirt, in The

History of Socialism in the United States.] It is fairly certain in the latter case that there was no

“promiscuity,” and that the members mated for variable periods, and often for life, within the group.

The documents are reasonably clear upon that point. This Oneida community was, in fact, a league

of two hundred persons to regard their children as “common.” Choice and preference were not

abolished in the community, though in some cases they were set aside—just as they are by many

parents under our present conditions. There seems to have been a premature attempt at

“stirpiculture,” at what Mr. Francis Galton now calls “Eugenics,” in the mating of the members, and

there was also a limitation of offspring. Beyond these points the inner secrets of the community do

not appear to be very profound; its atmosphere was almost commonplace, it was made up of very

ordinary people. There is no doubt that it had a career of exceptional success throughout the whole

lifetime of its founder, and it broke down with the advent of a new generation, with the onset of

theological differences, and the loss of its guiding intelligence. The Anglo-Saxon spirit, it has been

said by one of the ablest children of the experiment, is too individualistic for communism. It is

possible to regard the temporary success of this complex family as a strange accident, as the

wonderful exploit of what was certainly a very exceptional man. Its final disintegration into frankly

monogamic couples—it is still a prosperous business association—may be taken as an experimental

verification of Aristotle's common-sense psychology, and was probably merely the public

acknowledgment of conditions already practically established.

Out of respect for Plato we cannot ignore this possibility of multiple marriage altogether in our

Utopian theorising, but even if we leave this possibility open we are still bound to regard it as a

thing so likely to be rare as not to come at all under our direct observation during our Utopian

journeyings. But in one sense, of course, in the sense that the State guarantees care and support for

all properly born children, our entire Utopia is to be regarded as a comprehensive marriage group.

[Footnote: The Thelema of Rabelais, with its principle of “Fay ce que vouldras” within the limits of

the order, is probably intended to suggest a Platonic complex marriage after the fashion of our

interpretation.]

It must be remembered that a modern Utopia must differ from the Utopias of any preceding age in

being world-wide; it is not, therefore, to be the development of any special race or type of culture,

as Plato's developed an Athenian-Spartan blend, or More, Tudor England. The modern Utopia is to

be, before all things, synthetic. Politically and socially, as linguistically, we must suppose it a

synthesis; politically it will be a synthesis of once widely different forms of government; socially

and morally, a synthesis of a great variety of domestic traditions and ethical habits. Into the modern

Utopia there must have entered the mental tendencies and origins that give our own world the

polygamy of the Zulus and of Utah, the polyandry of Tibet, the latitudes of experiment permitted in

the United States, and the divorceless wedlock of Comte. The tendency of all synthetic processes in

matters of law and custom is to reduce and simplify the compulsory canon, to admit alternatives and

freedoms; what were laws before become traditions of feeling and style, and in no matter will this

be more apparent than in questions affecting the relations of the sexes.

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

A Few Utopian Impressions

§ 1

But now we are in a better position to describe the houses and ways of the Utopian townships about

the Lake of Lucerne, and to glance a little more nearly at the people who pass. You figure us as

curiously settled down in Utopia, as working for a low wage at wood-carving, until the authorities

at the central registry in Paris can solve the perplexing problem we have set them. We stay in an inn

looking out upon the lake, and go to and fro for our five hours' work a day, with a curious effect of

having been born Utopians. The rest of our time is our own.

Our inn is one of those inns and lodging houses which have a minimum tariff, inns which are partly

regulated, and, in the default of private enterprise, maintained and controlled by the World State

throughout the entire world. It is one of several such establishments in Lucerne. It possesses many

hundreds of practically self-cleaning little bedrooms, equipped very much after the fashion of the

rooms we occupied in the similar but much smaller inn at Hospenthal, differing only a little in the

decoration. There is the same dressing-room recess with its bath, the same graceful proportion in

the succinct simplicity of its furniture. This particular inn is a quadrangle after the fashion of an

Oxford college; it is perhaps forty feet high, and with about five stories of bedrooms above its lower

apartments; the windows of the rooms look either outward or inward to the quadrangle, and the

doors give upon artificially-lit passages with staircases passing up and down. These passages are

carpeted with a sort of cork carpet, but are otherwise bare. The lower story is occupied by the

equivalent of a London club, kitchens and other offices, dining-room, writing-room, smoking and

assembly rooms, a barber's shop, and a library. A colonnade with seats runs about the quadrangle,

and in the middle is a grass-plot. In the centre of this a bronze figure, a sleeping child, reposes

above a little basin and fountain, in which water lilies are growing. The place has been designed by

an architect happily free from the hampering traditions of Greek temple building, and of Roman and

Italian palaces; it is simple, unaffected, gracious. The material is some artificial stone with the dull

surface and something of the tint of yellow ivory; the colour is a little irregular, and a partial

confession of girders and pillars breaks this front of tender colour with lines and mouldings of

greenish gray, that blend with the tones of the leaden gutters and rain pipes from the light red roof.

At one point only does any explicit effort towards artistic effect appear, and that is in the great

arched gateway opposite my window. Two or three abundant yellow roses climb over the face of the

building, and when I look out of my window in the early morning—for the usual Utopian working

day commences within an hour of sunrise—I see Pilatus above this outlook, rosy in the morning

sky.

This quadrangle type of building is the prevalent element in Utopian Lucerne, and one may go from

end to end of the town along corridors and covered colonnades without emerging by a gateway into

the open roads at all. Small shops are found in these colonnades, but the larger stores are usually

housed in buildings specially adapted to their needs. The majority of the residential edifices are far

finer and more substantial than our own modest shelter, though we gather from such chance

glimpses as we get of their arrangements that the labour-saving ideal runs through every grade of

this servantless world; and what we should consider a complete house in earthly England is hardly

known here.

The autonomy of the household has been reduced far below terrestrial conditions by hotels and

clubs, and all sorts of co-operative expedients. People who do not live in hotels seem usually to live

in clubs. The fairly prosperous Utopian belongs, in most cases, to one or two residential clubs of

congenial men and women. These clubs usually possess in addition to furnished bedrooms more or

less elaborate suites of apartments, and if a man prefers it one of these latter can be taken and

furnished according to his personal taste. A pleasant boudoir, a private library and study, a private

garden plot, are among the commonest of such luxuries. Devices to secure roof gardens, loggias,

verandahs, and such-like open-air privacies to the more sumptuous of these apartments, give

interest and variety to Utopian architecture. There are sometimes little cooking corners in these flats

—as one would call them on earth—but the ordinary Utopian would no more think of a special

private kitchen for his dinners than he would think of a private flour mill or dairy farm. Business,

private work, and professional practice go on sometimes in the house apartments, but often in

special offices in the great warren of the business quarter. A common garden, an infant school, play

rooms, and a playing garden for children, are universal features of the club quadrangles.

Two or three main roads with their tramways, their cyclists' paths, and swift traffic paths, will

converge on the urban centre, where the public offices will stand in a group close to the two or three

theatres and the larger shops, and hither, too, in the case of Lucerne, the head of the swift railway to

Paris and England and Scotland, and to the Rhineland and Germany will run. And as one walks out

from the town centre one will come to that mingling of homesteads and open country which will be

the common condition of all the more habitable parts of the globe.

Here and there, no doubt, will stand quite solitary homesteads, homesteads that will nevertheless be

lit and warmed by cables from the central force station, that will share the common water supply,

will have their perfected telephonic connection with the rest of the world, with doctor, shop, and so

forth, and may even have a pneumatic tube for books and small parcels to the nearest post-office.

But the solitary homestead, as a permanent residence, will be something of a luxury—the resort of

rather wealthy garden lovers; and most people with a bias for retirement will probably get as much

residential solitude as they care for in the hire of a holiday châlet in a forest, by remote lagoons or

high up the mountain side.

The solitary house may indeed prove to be very rare indeed in Utopia. The same forces, the same

facilitation of communications that will diffuse the towns will tend to little concentrations of the

agricultural population over the country side. The field workers will probably take their food with

them to their work during the day, and for the convenience of an interesting dinner and of civilised

intercourse after the working day is over, they will most probably live in a college quadrangle with

a common room and club. I doubt if there will be any agricultural labourers drawing wages in

Utopia. I am inclined to imagine farming done by tenant associations, by little democratic unlimited

liability companies working under elected managers, and paying not a fixed rent but a share of the

produce to the State. Such companies could reconstruct annually to weed out indolent members.

[Footnote: Schemes for the co-operative association of producers will be found in Dr. Hertzka's

Freeland.] A minimum standard of efficiency in farming would be insured by fixing a minimum

beneath which the rent must not fall, and perhaps by inspection. The general laws respecting the

standard of life would, of course, apply to such associations. This type of co-operation presents

itself to me as socially the best arrangement for productive agriculture and horticulture, but such

enterprises as stock breeding, seed farming and the stocking and loan of agricultural implements are

probably, and agricultural research and experiment certainly, best handled directly by large

companies or the municipality or the State.

But I should do little to investigate this question; these are presented as quite incidental

impressions. You must suppose that for the most part our walks and observations keep us within the

more urban quarters of Lucerne. From a number of beautifully printed placards at the street corners,

adorned with caricatures of considerable pungency, we discover an odd little election is in progress.

This is the selection, upon strictly democratic lines, with a suffrage that includes every permanent

resident in the Lucerne ward over the age of fifteen, of the ugliest local building. The old little

urban and local governing bodies, we find, have long since been superseded by great provincial

municipalities for all the more serious administrative purposes, but they still survive to discharge a

number of curious minor functions, and not the least among these is this sort of æsthetic ostracism.

Every year every minor local governing body pulls down a building selected by local plebiscite, and

the greater Government pays a slight compensation to the owner, and resumes possession of the

land it occupies. The idea would strike us at first as simply whimsical, but in practice it appears to

work as a cheap and practical device for the æsthetic education of builders, engineers, business

men, opulent persons, and the general body of the public. But when we come to consider its

application to our own world we should perceive it was the most Utopian thing we had so far

encountered.

§ 2

The factory that employs us is something very different from the ordinary earthly model. Our

business is to finish making little wooden toys—bears, cattle men, and the like—for children. The

things are made in the rough by machinery, and then finished by hand, because the work of

unskilful but interested men—and it really is an extremely amusing employment—is found to give

a personality and interest to these objects no machine can ever attain.

We carvers—who are the riffraff of Utopia—work in a long shed together, nominally by time; we

must keep at the job for the length of the spell, but we are expected to finish a certain number of

toys for each spell of work. The rules of the game as between employer and employed in this

particular industry hang on the wall behind us; they are drawn up by a conference of the Common

Council of Wages Workers with the employers, a common council which has resulted in Utopia

from a synthesis of the old Trades Unions, and which has become a constitutional power; but any

man who has skill or humour is presently making his own bargain with our employer more or less

above that datum line.

Our employer is a quiet blue-eyed man with a humorous smile. He dresses wholly in an indigo blue,

that later we come to consider a sort of voluntary uniform for Utopian artists. As he walks about the

workshop, stopping to laugh at this production or praise that, one is reminded inevitably of an art

school. Every now and then he carves a little himself or makes a sketch or departs to the machinery

to order some change in the rough shapes it is turning out. Our work is by no means confined to

animals. After a time I am told to specialise in a comical little Roman-nosed pony; but several of the

better paid carvers work up caricature images of eminent Utopians. Over these our employer is most

disposed to meditate, and from them he darts off most frequently to improve the type.

It is high summer, and our shed lies open at either end. On one hand is a steep mountain side down

which there comes, now bridging a chasm, now a mere straight groove across a meadow, now

hidden among green branches, the water-slide that brings our trees from the purple forest overhead.

Above us, but nearly hidden, hums the machine shed, but we see a corner of the tank into which,

with a mighty splash, the pine trees are delivered. Every now and then, bringing with him a gust of

resinous smell, a white-clad machinist will come in with a basketful of crude, unwrought little

images, and will turn them out upon the table from which we carvers select them.

(Whenever I think of Utopia that faint and fluctuating smell of resin returns to me, and whenever I

smell resin, comes the memory of the open end of the shed looking out upon the lake, the blue-

green lake, the boats mirrored in the water, and far and high beyond floats the atmospheric fairyland

of the mountains of Glarus, twenty miles away.)

The cessation of the second and last spell of work comes about midday, and then we walk home,

through this beautiful intricacy of a town to our cheap hotel beside the lake.

We should go our way with a curious contentment, for all that we were earning scarcely more than

the minimum wage. We should have, of course, our uneasiness about the final decisions of that

universal eye which has turned upon us, we should have those ridiculous sham numbers on our

consciences; but that general restlessness, that brooding stress that pursues the weekly worker on

earth, that aching anxiety that drives him so often to stupid betting, stupid drinking, and violent and

mean offences will have vanished out of mortal experience.

§ 3

I should find myself contrasting my position with my preconceptions about a Utopian visit. I had

always imagined myself as standing outside the general machinery of the State—in the

distinguished visitors' gallery, as it were—and getting the new world in a series of comprehensive

perspective views. But this Utopia, for all the sweeping floats of generalisation I do my best to

maintain, is swallowing me up. I find myself going between my work and the room in which I sleep

and the place in which I dine, very much as I went to and fro in that real world into which I fell

five-and-forty years ago. I find about me mountains and horizons that limit my view, institutions

that vanish also without an explanation, beyond the limit of sight, and a great complexity of things I

do not understand and about which, to tell the truth, I do not formulate acute curiosities. People,

very unrepresentative people, people just as casual as people in the real world, come into personal

relations with us, and little threads of private and immediate interest spin themselves rapidly into a

thickening grey veil across the general view. I lose the comprehensive interrogation of my first

arrival; I find myself interested in the grain of the wood I work, in birds among the tree branches, in

little irrelevant things, and it is only now and then that I get fairly back to the mood that takes all

Utopia for its picture.

We spend our first surplus of Utopian money in the reorganisation of our wardrobes upon more

Utopian lines; we develop acquaintance with several of our fellow workers, and of those who share

our table at the inn. We pass insensibly into acquaintanceships and the beginnings of friendships.

The World Utopia, I say, seems for a time to be swallowing me up. At the thought of detail it looms

too big for me. The question of government, of its sustaining ideas, of race, and the wider future,

hang like the arch of the sky over these daily incidents, very great indeed, but very remote. These

people about me are everyday people, people not so very far from the minimum wage, accustomed

much as the everyday people of earth are accustomed to take their world as they find it. Such

enquiries as I attempt are pretty obviously a bore to them, pass outside their range as completely as

Utopian speculation on earth outranges a stevedore or a member of Parliament or a working

plumber. Even the little things of daily life interest them in a different way. So I get on with my

facts and reasoning rather slowly. I find myself looking among the pleasant multitudes of the streets

for types that promise congenial conversation.

My sense of loneliness is increased during this interlude by the better social success of the botanist.

I find him presently falling into conversation with two women who are accustomed to sit at a table

near our own. They wear the loose, coloured robes of soft material that are the usual wear of

common adult Utopian women; they are both dark and sallow, and they affect amber and crimson in

their garments. Their faces strike me as a little unintelligent, and there is a faint touch of middle-

aged coquetry in their bearing that I do not like. Yet on earth we should consider them women of

exceptional refinement. But the botanist evidently sees in this direction scope for the feelings that

have wilted a little under my inattention, and he begins that petty intercourse of a word, of a slight

civility, of vague enquiries and comparisons that leads at last to associations and confidences. Such

superficial confidences, that is to say, as he finds satisfactory.

This throws me back upon my private observations.

The general effect of a Utopian population is vigour. Everyone one meets seems to be not only in

good health but in training; one rarely meets fat people, bald people, or bent or grey. People who

would be obese or bent and obviously aged on earth are here in good repair, and as a consequence

the whole effect of a crowd is livelier and more invigorating than on earth. The dress is varied and

graceful; that of the women reminds one most of the Italian fifteenth century; they have an

abundance of soft and beautifully-coloured stuffs, and the clothes, even of the poorest, fit

admirably. Their hair is very simply but very carefully and beautifully dressed, and except in very

sunny weather they do not wear hats or bonnets. There is little difference in deportment between

one class and another; they all are graceful and bear themselves with quiet dignity, and among a

group of them a European woman of fashion in her lace and feathers, her hat and metal ornaments,

her mixed accumulations of “trimmings,” would look like a barbarian tricked out with the

miscellaneous plunder of a museum. Boys and girls wear much the same sort of costume—brown

leather shoes, then a sort of combination of hose and close-fitting trousers that reaches from toe to

waist, and over this a beltless jacket fitting very well, or a belted tunic. Many slender women wear

the same sort of costume. We should see them in it very often in such a place as Lucerne, as they

returned from expeditions in the mountains. The older men would wear long robes very frequently,

but the greater proportion of the men would go in variations of much the same costume as the

children. There would certainly be hooded cloaks and umbrellas for rainy weather, high boots for

mud and snow, and cloaks and coats and furry robes for the winter. There would be no doubt a freer

use of colour than terrestrial Europe sees in these days, but the costume of the women at least would

be soberer and more practical, and (in harmony with our discussion in the previous chapter) less

differentiated from the men's.

But these, of course, are generalisations. These are the mere translation of the social facts we have

hypotheticated into the language of costume. There will be a great variety of costume and no

compulsions. The doubles of people who are naturally foppish on earth will be foppish in Utopia,

and people who have no natural taste on earth will have inartistic equivalents. Everyone will not be

quiet in tone, or harmonious, or beautiful. Occasionally, as I go through the streets to my work, I

shall turn round to glance again at some robe shot with gold embroidery, some slashing of the

sleeves, some eccentricity of cut, or some discord or untidiness. But these will be but transient

flashes in a general flow of harmonious graciousness; dress will have scarcely any of that effect of

disorderly conflict, of self-assertion qualified by the fear of ridicule, that it has in the crudely

competitive civilisations of earth.

I shall have the seeker's attitude of mind during those few days at Lucerne. I shall become a student

of faces. I shall be, as it were, looking for someone. I shall see heavy faces, dull faces, faces with an

uncongenial animation, alien faces, and among these some with an immediate quality of appeal. I

should see desirable men approaching me, and I should think; “Now, if I were to speak to you?”

Many of these latter I should note wore the same clothing as the man who spoke to us at Wassen; I

should begin to think of it as a sort of uniform....

Then I should see grave-faced girls, girls of that budding age when their bearing becomes

delusively wise, and the old deception of my youth will recur to me; “Could you and I but talk

together?” I should think. Women will pass me lightly, women with open and inviting faces, but

they will not attract me, and there will come beautiful women, women with that touch of claustral

preoccupation which forbids the thought of any near approach. They are private and secret, and I

may not enter, I know, into their thoughts....

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

I shall find a quality of dissatisfaction throughout all these days. I shall come to see this period more

and more distinctly as a pause, as a waiting interlude, and the idea of an encounter with my double,

which came at first as if it were a witticism, as something verbal and surprising, begins to take

substance. The idea grows in my mind that after all this is the “someone” I am seeking, this Utopian

self of mine. I had at first an idea of a grotesque encounter, as of something happening in a looking

glass, but presently it dawns on me that my Utopian self must be a very different person from me.

His training will be different, his mental content different. But between us there will be a strange

link of essential identity, a sympathy, an understanding. I find the thing rising suddenly to a

preponderance in my mind. I find the interest of details dwindling to the vanishing point. That I

have come to Utopia is the lesser thing now; the greater is that I have come to meet myself.

I spend hours trying to imagine the encounter, inventing little dialogues. I go alone to the Bureau to

find if any news has come to hand from the Great Index in Paris, but I am told to wait another

twenty-four hours. I cease absolutely to be interested in anything else, except so far as it leads

towards intercourse with this being who is to be at once so strangely alien and so totally mine.

§ 4

Wrapped up in these preoccupations as I am, it will certainly be the botanist who will notice the

comparative absence of animals about us.

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

He is a professed lover of dogs and there are none. We have seen no horses and only one or two

mules on the day of our arrival, and there seems not a cat in the world. I bring my mind round to his

suggestion. “This follows,” I say.

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

Utopian pets.

I try to explain that a phase in the world's development is inevitable when a systematic world-wide

attempt will be made to destroy for ever a great number of contagious and infectious diseases, and

that this will involve, for a time at any rate, a stringent suppression of the free movement of familiar

animals. Utopian houses, streets and drains will be planned and built to make rats, mice, and such-

like house parasites impossible; the race of cats and dogs—providing, as it does, living fastnesses to

which such diseases as plague, influenza, catarrhs and the like, can retreat to sally forth again—

must pass for a time out of freedom, and the filth made by horses and the other brutes of the

highway vanish from the face of the earth. These things make an old story to me, and perhaps

explicitness suffers through my brevity.

My botanist fails altogether to grasp what the disappearance of diseases means. His mind has no

imaginative organ of that compass. As I talk his mind rests on one fixed image. This presents what

the botanist would probably call a “dear old doggie”—which the botanist would make believe did

not possess any sensible odour—and it has faithful brown eyes and understands everything you say.

The botanist would make believe it understood him mystically, and I figure his long white hand—

which seems to me, in my more jaundiced moments, to exist entirely for picking things and holding

a lens—patting its head, while the brute looked things unspeakable....

The botanist shakes his head after my explanation and says quietly, “I do not like your Utopia, if

there are to be no dogs.”

Perhaps that makes me a little malicious. Indeed I do not hate dogs, but I care ten thousand times

more for a man than for all the brutes on the earth, and I can see, what the botanist I think cannot,

that a life spent in the delightful atmosphere of many pet animals may have too dear a price....

I find myself back again at the comparison of the botanist and myself. There is a profound

difference in our imaginations, and I wonder whether it is the consequence of innate character or of

training and whether he is really the human type or I. I am not altogether without imagination, but

what imagination I have has the most insistent disposition to square itself with every fact in the

universe. It hypothesises very boldly, but on the other hand it will not gravely make believe. Now

the botanist's imagination is always busy with the most impossible make-believe. That is the way

with all children I know. But it seems to me one ought to pass out of it. It isn't as though the world

was an untidy nursery; it is a place of splendours indescribable for all who will lift its veils. It may

be he is essentially different from me, but I am much more inclined to think he is simply more

childish. Always it is make-believe. He believes that horses are beautiful creatures for example,

dogs are beautiful creatures, that some women are inexpressibly lovely, and he makes believe that

this is always so. Never a word of criticism of horse or dog or woman! Never a word of criticism of

his impeccable friends! Then there is his botany. He makes believe that all the vegetable kingdom is

mystically perfect and exemplary, that all flowers smell deliciously and are exquisitely beautiful,

that Drosera does not hurt flies very much, and that onions do not smell. Most of the universe does

not interest this nature lover at all. But I know, and I am querulously incapable of understanding

why everyone else does not know, that a horse is beautiful in one way and quite ugly in another, that

everything has this shot-silk quality, and is all the finer for that. When people talk of a horse as an

ugly animal I think of its beautiful moments, but when I hear a flow of indiscriminate praise of its

beauty I think of such an aspect as one gets for example from a dog-cart, the fiddle-shaped back,

and that distressing blade of the neck, the narrow clumsy place between the ears, and the ugly

glimpse of cheek. There is, indeed, no beauty whatever save that transitory thing that comes and

comes again; all beauty is really the beauty of expression, is really kinetic and momentary. That is

true even of those triumphs of static endeavour achieved by Greece. The Greek temple, for

example, is a barn with a face that at a certain angle of vision and in a certain light has a great calm

beauty.

But where are we drifting? All such things, I hold, are cases of more and less, and of the right

moment and the right aspect, even the things I most esteem. There is no perfection, there is no

enduring treasure. This pet dog's beautiful affection, I say, or this other sensuous or imaginative

delight, is no doubt good, but it can be put aside if it is incompatible with some other and wider

good. You cannot focus all good things together.

All right action and all wise action is surely sound judgment and courageous abandonment in the

matter of such incompatibilities. If I cannot imagine thoughts and feelings in a dog's brain that

cannot possibly be there, at least I can imagine things in the future of men that might be there had

we the will to demand them....

“I don't like this Utopia,” the botanist repeats. “You don't understand about dogs. To me they're

human beings—and more! There used to be such a jolly old dog at my aunt's at Frognal when I was

a boy―”

But I do not heed his anecdote. Something—something of the nature of conscience—has suddenly

jerked back the memory of that beer I drank at Hospenthal, and puts an accusing finger on the

memory.

I never have had a pet animal, I confess, though I have been fairly popular with kittens. But with

regard to a certain petting of myself―?

Perhaps I was premature about that beer. I have had no pet animals, but I perceive if the Modern

Utopia is going to demand the sacrifice of the love of animals, which is, in its way, a very fine thing

indeed, so much the more readily may it demand the sacrifice of many other indulgences, some of

which are not even fine in the lowest degree.

It is curious this haunting insistence upon sacrifice and discipline!

It is slowly becoming my dominant thought that the sort of people whose will this Utopia embodies

must be people a little heedless of small pleasures. You cannot focus all good things at the same

time. That is my chief discovery in these meditations at Lucerne. Much of the rest of this Utopia I

had in a sort of way anticipated, but not this. I wonder if I shall see my Utopian self for long and be

able to talk to him freely....

We lie in the petal-strewn grass under some Judas trees beside the lake shore, as I meander among

these thoughts, and each of us, disregardful of his companion, follows his own associations.

“Very remarkable,” I say, discovering that the botanist has come to an end with his story of that

Frognal dog.

“You'd wonder how he knew,” he says.

“You would.”

I nibble a green blade.

“Do you realise quite,” I ask, “that within a week we shall face our Utopian selves and measure

something of what we might have been?”

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

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

§ 5

It is pleasant to think of one's puzzling the organised wisdom of so superior a planet as this Utopia,

this moral monster State my Frankenstein of reasoning has made, and to that pitch we have come.

When we are next in the presence of our Lucerne official, he has the bearing of a man who faces a

mystification beyond his powers, an incredible disarrangement of the order of Nature. Here, for the

first time in the records of Utopian science, are two cases—not simply one but two, and these in

each other's company!—of duplicated thumb-marks. This, coupled with a cock-and-bull story of an

instantaneous transfer from some planet unknown to Utopian astronomy. That he and all his world

exists only upon a hypothesis that would explain everyone of these difficulties absolutely, is

scarcely likely to occur to his obviously unphilosophic mind.

The official eye is more eloquent than the official lips and asks almost urgently, “What in this

immeasurable universe have you managed to do to your thumbs? And why?” But he is only a very

inferior sort of official indeed, a mere clerk of the post, and he has all the guarded reserve of your

thoroughly unoriginal man. “You are not the two persons I ascertained you were,” he says, with the

note of one resigned to communion with unreason; “because you”—he indicates me—“are

evidently at your residence in London.” I smile. “That gentleman”—he points a pen at the botanist

in a manner that is intended to dismiss my smile once for all—“will be in London next week. He

will be returning next Friday from a special mission to investigate the fungoid parasites that have

been attacking the cinchona trees in Ceylon.”

The botanist blesses his heart.

“Consequently”—the official sighs at the burthen of such nonsense, “you will have to go and

consult with—the people you ought to be.”

I betray a faint amusement.

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

He waggles a negation with his head. He would intimate his position is too responsible a one for

jesting, and both of us in our several ways enjoy the pleasure we poor humans have in meeting with

intellectual inferiority. “The Standing Committee of Identification,” he says, with an eye on a

memorandum, “has remitted your case to the Research Professor of Anthropology in the University

of London, and they want you to go there, if you will, and talk to him.”

“What else can we do?” says the botanist.

“There's no positive compulsion,” he remarks, “but your work here will probably cease. Here―” he

pushed the neat slips of paper towards us—“are your tickets for London, and a small but sufficient

supply of money,”—he indicates two piles of coins and paper on either hand of him—“for a day or

so there.” He proceeds in the same dry manner to inform us we are invited to call at our earliest

convenience upon our doubles, and upon the Professor, who is to investigate our case.

“And then?”

He pulls down the corners of his mouth in a wry deprecatory smile, eyes us obliquely under a

crumpled brow, shrugs his shoulders, and shows us the palms of his hands.

On earth, where there is nationality, this would have been a Frenchman—the inferior sort of

Frenchman—the sort whose only happiness is in the routine security of Government employment.

§ 6

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

We shall find ourselves there with not a little amazement. It will be our first experience of the swift

long distance travel of Utopia, and I have an idea—I know not why—that we should make the

journey by night. Perhaps I think so because the ideal of long-distance travel is surely a restful

translation less suitable for the active hours.

We shall dine and gossip and drink coffee at the pretty little tables under the lantern-lit trees, we

shall visit the theatre, and decide to sup in the train, and so come at last to the station. There we

shall find pleasant rooms with seats and books—luggage all neatly elsewhere—and doors that we

shall imagine give upon a platform. Our cloaks and hats and such-like outdoor impedimenta will be

taken in the hall and neatly labelled for London, we shall exchange our shoes for slippers there, and

we shall sit down like men in a club. An officious little bell will presently call our attention to a

label “London” on the doorway, and an excellent phonograph will enforce that notice with infinite

civility. The doors will open, and we shall walk through into an equally comfortable gallery.

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

“This is the train for London,” he will say.

There will be a shutting of doors, and the botanist and I, trying not to feel too childish, will walk

exploring through the capacious train.

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

When one travels beyond a certain speed, there is nothing but fatigue in looking out of a window,

and this corridor train, twice the width of its poor terrestrial brother, will have no need of that

distraction. The simple device of abandoning any but a few windows, and those set high, gives the

wall space of the long corridors to books; the middle part of the train is indeed a comfortable library

with abundant armchairs and couches, each with its green-shaded light, and soft carpets upon the

soundproof floor. Further on will be a news-room, with a noiseless but busy tape at one corner,

printing off messages from the wires by the wayside, and further still, rooms for gossip and

smoking, a billiard room, and the dining car. Behind we shall come to bedrooms, bathrooms, the

hairdresser, and so forth.

“When shall we start?” I ask presently, as we return, rather like bashful yokels, to the library, and

the old gentleman reading the Arabian Nights in the armchair in the corner glances up at me with a

sudden curiosity.

The botanist touches my arm and nods towards a pretty little lead-paned window, through which we

see a village sleeping under cloudy moonlight go flashing by. Then a skylit lake, and then a string of

swaying lights, gone with the leap of a camera shutter.

Two hundred miles an hour!

We resort to a dignified Chinese steward and secure our berths. It is perhaps terrestrial of us that we

do not think of reading the Utopian literature that lines the middle part of the train. I find a bed of

the simple Utopian pattern, and lie for a time thinking—quite tranquilly—of this marvellous

adventure.

I wonder why it is that to lie securely in bed, with the light out, seems ever the same place,

wherever in space one may chance to be? And asleep, there is no space for us at all. I become

drowsy and incoherent and metaphysical....

The faint and fluctuating drone of the wheels below the car, re-echoed by the flying track, is more

perceptible now, but it is not unpleasantly loud, merely a faint tinting of the quiet....

No sea crossing breaks our journey; there is nothing to prevent a Channel tunnel in that other

planet; and I wake in London.

The train has been in London some time when I awake, for these marvellous Utopians have

discovered that it is not necessary to bundle out passengers from a train in the small hours, simply

because they have arrived. A Utopian train is just a peculiar kind of hotel corridor that flies about

the earth while one sleeps.

§ 7

How will a great city of Utopia strike us?

To answer that question well one must needs be artist and engineer, and I am neither. Moreover, one

must employ words and phrases that do not exist, for this world still does not dream of the things

that may be done with thought and steel, when the engineer is sufficiently educated to be an artist,

and the artistic intelligence has been quickened to the accomplishment of an engineer. How can one

write of these things for a generation which rather admires that inconvenient and gawky muddle of

ironwork and Flemish architecture, the London Tower Bridge. When before this, temerarious

anticipators have written of the mighty buildings that might someday be, the illustrator has blended

with the poor ineffectual splutter of the author's words, his powerful suggestion that it amounted

simply to something bulbous, florid and fluent in the vein of the onion, and L'Art Nouveau. But

here, it may be, the illustrator will not intervene.

Art has scarcely begun in the world.

There have been a few forerunners and that is all. Leonardo, Michael Angelo; how they would have

exulted in the liberties of steel! There are no more pathetic documents in the archives of art than

Leonardo's memoranda. In these, one sees him again and again reaching out as it were, with empty

desirous hands, towards the unborn possibilities of the engineer. And Dürer, too, was a Modern,

with the same turn towards creative invention. In our times these men would have wanted to make

viaducts, to bridge wild and inaccessible places, to cut and straddle great railways athwart the

mountain masses of the world. You can see, time after time, in Dürer's work, as you can see in the

imaginary architectural landscape of the Pompeian walls, the dream of structures, lighter and bolder

than stone or brick can yield.... These Utopian town buildings will be the realisation of such dreams.

Here will be one of the great meeting places of mankind. Here—I speak of Utopian London—will

be the traditional centre of one of the great races in the commonalty of the World State—and here

will be its social and intellectual exchange. There will be a mighty University here, with thousands

of professors and tens of thousands of advanced students, and here great journals of thought and

speculation, mature and splendid books of philosophy and science, and a glorious fabric of literature

will be woven and shaped, and with a teeming leisureliness, put forth. Here will be stupendous

libraries, and a mighty organisation of museums. About these centres will cluster a great swarm of

people, and close at hand will be another centre, for I who am an Englishman must needs stipulate

that Westminster shall still be a seat of world Empire, one of several seats, if you will—where the

ruling council of the world assembles. Then the arts will cluster round this city, as gold gathers

about wisdom, and here Englishmen will weave into wonderful prose and beautiful rhythms and

subtly atmospheric forms, the intricate, austere and courageous imagination of our race.

One will come into this place as one comes into a noble mansion. They will have flung great arches

and domes of glass above the wider spaces of the town, the slender beauty of the perfect metal-work

far overhead will be softened to a fairy-like unsubstantiality by the mild London air. It will be the

London air we know, clear of filth and all impurity, the same air that gives our October days their

unspeakable clarity and makes every London twilight mysteriously beautiful. We shall go along

avenues of architecture that will be emancipated from the last memories of the squat temple boxes

of the Greek, the buxom curvatures of Rome; the Goth in us will have taken to steel and countless

new materials as kindly as once he took to stone. The gay and swiftly moving platforms of the

public ways will go past on either hand, carrying sporadic groups of people, and very speedily we

shall find ourselves in a sort of central space, rich with palms and flowering bushes and statuary. We

shall look along an avenue of trees, down a wide gorge between the cliffs of crowded hotels, the

hotels that are still glowing with internal lights, to where the shining morning river streams dawnlit

out to sea.

Great multitudes of people will pass softly to and fro in this central space, beautiful girls and youths

going to the University classes that are held in the stately palaces about us, grave and capable men

and women going to their businesses, children meandering along to their schools, holiday makers,

lovers, setting out upon a hundred quests; and here we shall ask for the two we more particularly

seek. A graceful little telephone kiosk will put us within reach of them, and with a queer sense of

unreality I shall find myself talking to my Utopian twin. He has heard of me, he wants to see me

and he gives me clear directions how to come to him.

I wonder if my own voice sounds like that.

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

We indulge in no eloquence upon this remarkable occasion. Yet I feel an unusual emotional stir. I

tremble greatly, and the telephonic mouthpiece rattles as I replace it.

And thence the botanist and I walk on to the apartments that have been set aside for us, and into

which the poor little rolls of the property that has accumulated about us in Utopia, our earthly

raiment, and a change of linen and the like, have already been delivered. As we go I find I have

little to say to my companion, until presently I am struck by a transitory wonder that he should have

so little to say to me.

“I can still hardly realise,” I say, “that I am going to see myself—as I might have been.”

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

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

forgetfulness.

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

“This is the place,” I say.

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

My Utopian Self

§ 1

It falls to few of us to interview our better selves. My Utopian self is, of course, my better self—

according to my best endeavours—and I must confess myself fully alive to the difficulties of the

situation. When I came to this Utopia I had no thought of any such intimate self-examination.

The whole fabric of that other universe sways for a moment as I come into his room, into his clear

and ordered work-room. I am trembling. A figure rather taller than myself stands against the light.

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

word, we are clasping hands.

I stand now so that the light falls upon him, and I can see his face better. He is a little taller than I,

younger looking and sounder looking; he has missed an illness or so, and there is no scar over his

eye. His training has been subtly finer than mine; he has made himself a better face than mine....

These things I might have counted upon. I can fancy he winces with a twinge of sympathetic

understanding at my manifest inferiority. Indeed, I come, trailing clouds of earthly confusion and

weakness; I bear upon me all the defects of my world. He wears, I see, that white tunic with the

purple band that I have already begun to consider the proper Utopian clothing for grave men, and

his face is clean shaven. We forget to speak at first in the intensity of our mutual inspection. When

at last I do gain my voice it is to say something quite different from the fine, significant openings of

my premeditated dialogues.

“You have a pleasant room,” I remark, and look about a little disconcerted because there is no

fireplace for me to put my back against, or hearthrug to stand upon. He pushes me a chair, into

which I plump, and we hang over an immensity of conversational possibilities.

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

“Not now that I have seen you. No.”

“Am I so like you?”

“Like me and your story—exactly.”

“You haven't any doubt left?” I ask.

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

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

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

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

“Well?” we say, simultaneously, and laugh together.

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

§ 2

Our conversation at that first encounter would do very little to develop the Modern Utopia in my

mind. Inevitably, it would be personal and emotional. He would tell me how he stood in his world,

and I how I stood in mine. I should have to tell him things, I should have to explain things―.

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

And so I leave it out.

§ 3

But I should go back to my botanist in a state of emotional relaxation. At first I should not heed the

fact that he, too, had been in some manner stirred. “I have seen him,” I should say, needlessly, and

seem to be on the verge of telling the untellable. Then I should fade off into: “It's the strangest

thing.”

He would interrupt me with his own preoccupation. “You know,” he would say, “I've seen

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, at once.

“I saw her,” he explains.

“Saw her?”

“I'm certain it was her. Certain. She was far away across those gardens near here—and before I had

recovered from my amazement she had gone! But it was Mary.”

He takes my arm. “You know I did not understand this,” he says. “I did not really understand that

when you said Utopia, you meant I was to meet her—in happiness.”

“I didn't.”

“It works out at that.”

“You haven't met her yet.”

“I shall. It makes everything different. To tell you the truth I've rather hated this Utopia of yours at

times. You mustn't mind my saying it, but there's something of the Gradgrind―”

Probably I should swear at that.

“What?” he says.

“Nothing.”

“But you spoke?”

“I was purring. I'm a Gradgrind—it's quite right—anything you can say about Herbert Spencer,

vivisectors, materialistic Science or Atheists, applies without correction to me. Begbie away! But

now you think better of a modern Utopia? Was the lady looking well?”

“It was her real self. Yes. Not the broken woman I met—in the real world.”

“And as though she was pining for you.”

He looks puzzled.

“Look there!” I say.

He looks.

We are standing high above the ground in the loggia into which our apartments open, and I point

across the soft haze of the public gardens to a tall white mass of University buildings that rises with

a free and fearless gesture, to lift saluting pinnacles against the clear evening sky. “Don't you think

that rather more beautiful than—say—our National Gallery?”

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

I purred. “But, anyhow, whatever you can't see in that, you can, I suppose, see that it is different

from anything in your world—it lacks the kindly humanity of a red-brick Queen Anne villa

residence, with its gables and bulges, and bow windows, and its stained glass fanlight, and so forth.

It lacks the self-complacent unreasonableness of Board of Works classicism. There's something in

its proportions—as though someone with brains had taken a lot of care to get it quite right, someone

who not only knew what metal can do, but what a University ought to be, somebody who had found

the Gothic spirit enchanted, petrified, in a cathedral, and had set it free.”

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

“Very much,” I say. “This is not the same world. If she is here, she will be younger in spirit and

wiser. She will be in many ways more refined―”

“No one―” he begins, with a note of indignation.

“No, no! She couldn't be. I was wrong there. But she will be different. Grant that at any rate. When

you go forward to speak to her, she may not remember—very many things you may remember.

Things that happened at Frognal—dear romantic walks through the Sunday summer evenings,

practically you two alone, you in your adolescent silk hat and your nice gentlemanly gloves....

Perhaps that did not happen here! And she may have other memories—of things—that down there

haven't happened. You noted her costume. She wasn't by any chance one of the samurai?”

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

“Probably under the Lesser Rule.”

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

“And, after all, you know—I keep on reminding you, and you keep on losing touch with the fact,

that this world contains your double.”

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

“This world contains your double. But, conceivably, everything may be different here. The whole

romantic story may have run a different course. It was as it was in our world, by the accidents of

custom and proximity. Adolescence is a defenceless plastic period. You are a man to form great

affections,—noble, great affections. You might have met anyone almost at that season and formed

the same attachment.”

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

“No,” he says, a little doubtfully. “No. It was herself.” ... Then, emphatically, “No!”

§ 4

For a time we say no more, and I fall musing about my strange encounter with my Utopian double. I

think of the confessions I have just made to him, the strange admissions both to him and myself. I

have stirred up the stagnations of my own emotional life, the pride that has slumbered, the hopes

and disappointments that have not troubled me for years. There are things that happened to me in

my adolescence that no discipline of reason will ever bring to a just proportion for me, the first

humiliations I was made to suffer, the waste of all the fine irrecoverable loyalties and passions of

my youth. The dull base caste of my little personal tragi-comedy—I have ostensibly forgiven, I

have for the most part forgotten—and yet when I recall them I hate each actor still. Whenever it

comes into my mind—I do my best to prevent it—there it is, and these detestable people blot out

the stars for me.

I have told all that story to my double, and he has listened with understanding eyes. But for a little

while those squalid memories will not sink back into the deeps.

We lean, side by side, over our balcony, lost in such egotistical absorptions, quite heedless of the

great palace of noble dreams to which our first enterprise has brought us.

§ 5

I can understand the botanist this afternoon; for once we are in the same key. My own mental

temper has gone for the day, and I know what it means to be untempered. Here is a world and a

glorious world, and it is for me to take hold of it, to have to do with it, here and now, and behold! I

can only think that I am burnt and scarred, and there rankles that wretched piece of business, the

mean unimaginative triumph of my antagonist―

I wonder how many men have any real freedom of mind, are, in truth, unhampered by such

associations, to whom all that is great and noble in life does not, at times at least, if not always,

seem secondary to obscure rivalries and considerations, to the petty hates that are like germs in the

blood, to the lust for self-assertion, to dwarfish pride, to affections they gave in pledge even before

they were men.

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

All this world before us, and its order and liberty, are no more than a painted scene before which he

is to meet Her at last, freed from “that scoundrel.”

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

I wonder if that man was a scoundrel. He has gone wrong on earth, no doubt, has failed and

degenerated, but what was it sent him wrong? Was his failure inherent, or did some net of cross

purposes tangle about his feet? Suppose he is not a failure in Utopia!...

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

He, with his vaguer mind, can overlook—spite of my ruthless reminders—all that would mar his

vague anticipations. That, too, if I suggested it, he would overcome and disregard. He has the most

amazing power of resistance to uncongenial ideas; amazing that is, to me. He hates the idea of

meeting his double, and consequently so soon as I cease to speak of that, with scarcely an effort of

his will, it fades again from his mind.

Down below in the gardens two children pursue one another, and one, near caught, screams aloud

and rouses me from my reverie.

I follow their little butterfly antics until they vanish beyond a thicket of flowering rhododendra, and

then my eyes go back to the great façade of the University buildings.

But I am in no mood to criticise architecture.

Why should a modern Utopia insist upon slipping out of the hands of its creator and becoming the

background of a personal drama—of such a silly little drama?

The botanist will not see Utopia in any other way. He tests it entirely by its reaction upon the

individual persons and things he knows; he dislikes it because he suspects it of wanting to lethal

chamber his aunt's “dear old doggie,” and now he is reconciled to it because a certain “Mary” looks

much younger and better here than she did on earth. And here am I, near fallen into the same way of

dealing!

We agreed to purge this State and all the people in it of traditions, associations, bias, laws, and

artificial entanglements, and begin anew; but we have no power to liberate ourselves. Our past, even

its accidents, its accidents above all, and ourselves, are one.

CHAPTER THE NINTH

The Samurai

§ 1

Neither my Utopian double nor I love emotion sufficiently to cultivate it, and my feelings are in a

state of seemly subordination when we meet again. He is now in possession of some clear, general

ideas about my own world, and I can broach almost at once the thoughts that have been growing

and accumulating since my arrival in this planet of my dreams. We find our interest in a humanised

state-craft, makes us, in spite of our vast difference in training and habits, curiously akin.

I put it to him that I came to Utopia with but very vague ideas of the method of government,

biassed, perhaps, a little in favour of certain electoral devices, but for the rest indeterminate, and

that I have come to perceive more and more clearly that the large intricacy of Utopian organisation

demands more powerful and efficient method of control than electoral methods can give. I have

come to distinguish among the varied costumes and the innumerable types of personality Utopia

presents, certain men and women of a distinctive costume and bearing, and I know now that these

people constitute an order, the samurai, the “voluntary nobility,” which is essential in the scheme of

the Utopian State. I know that this order is open to every physically and mentally healthy adult in

the Utopian State who will observe its prescribed austere rule of living, that much of the responsible

work of the State is reserved for it, and I am inclined now at the first onset of realisation to regard it

as far more significant than it really is in the Utopian scheme, as being, indeed, in itself and

completely the Utopian scheme. My predominant curiosity concerns the organisation of this order.

As it has developed in my mind, it has reminded me more and more closely of that strange class of

guardians which constitutes the essential substance of Plato's Republic, and it is with an implicit

reference to Plato's profound intuitions that I and my double discuss this question.

To clarify our comparison he tells me something of the history of Utopia, and incidentally it

becomes necessary to make a correction in the assumptions upon which I have based my enterprise.

We are assuming a world identical in every respect with the real planet Earth, except for the

profoundest differences in the mental content of life. This implies a different literature, a different

philosophy, and a different history, and so soon as I come to talk to him I find that though it remains

unavoidable that we should assume the correspondence of the two populations, man for man—

unless we would face unthinkable complications—we must assume also that a great succession of

persons of extraordinary character and mental gifts, who on earth died in childhood or at birth, or

who never learnt to read, or who lived and died amidst savage or brutalising surroundings that gave

their gifts no scope, did in Utopia encounter happier chances, and take up the development and

application of social theory—from the time of the first Utopists in a steady onward progress down

to the present hour. [Footnote: One might assume as an alternative to this that amidst the four-fifths

of the Greek literature now lost to the world, there perished, neglected, some book of elementary

significance, some earlier Novum Organum, that in Utopia survived to achieve the profoundest

consequences.] The differences of condition, therefore, had widened with each successive year.

Jesus Christ had been born into a liberal and progressive Roman Empire that spread from the Arctic

Ocean to the Bight of Benin, and was to know no Decline and Fall, and Mahomet, instead of

embodying the dense prejudices of Arab ignorance, opened his eyes upon an intellectual horizon

already nearly as wide as the world.

And through this empire the flow of thought, the flow of intention, poured always more abundantly.

There were wars, but they were conclusive wars that established new and more permanent relations,

that swept aside obstructions, and abolished centres of decay; there were prejudices tempered to an

ordered criticism, and hatreds that merged at last in tolerant reactions. It was several hundred years

ago that the great organisation of the samurai came into its present form. And it was this

organisation's widely sustained activities that had shaped and established the World State in Utopia.

This organisation of the samurai was a quite deliberate invention. It arose in the course of social

and political troubles and complications, analogous to those of our own time on earth, and was,

indeed, the last of a number of political and religious experiments dating back to the first dawn of

philosophical state-craft in Greece. That hasty despair of specialisation for government that gave

our poor world individualism, democratic liberalism, and anarchism, and that curious disregard of

the fund of enthusiasm and self-sacrifice in men, which is the fundamental weakness of worldly

economics, do not appear in the history of Utopian thought. All that history is pervaded with the

recognition of the fact that self-seeking is no more the whole of human life than the satisfaction of

hunger; that it is an essential of a man's existence no doubt, and that under stress of evil

circumstances it may as entirely obsess him as would the food hunt during famine, but that life may

pass beyond to an illimitable world of emotions and effort. Every sane person consists of

possibilities beyond the unavoidable needs, is capable of disinterested feeling, even if it amounts

only to enthusiasm for a sport or an industrial employment well done, for an art, or for a locality or

class. In our world now, as in the Utopian past, this impersonal energy of a man goes out into

religious emotion and work, into patriotic effort, into artistic enthusiasms, into games and amateur

employments, and an enormous proportion of the whole world's fund of effort wastes itself in

religious and political misunderstandings and conflicts, and in unsatisfying amusements and

unproductive occupations. In a modern Utopia there will, indeed, be no perfection; in Utopia there

must also be friction, conflicts and waste, but the waste will be enormously less than in our world.

And the co-ordination of activities this relatively smaller waste will measure, will be the achieved

end for which the order of the samurai was first devised.

Inevitably such an order must have first arisen among a clash of social forces and political systems

as a revolutionary organisation. It must have set before itself the attainment of some such Utopian

ideal as this modern Utopia does, in the key of mortal imperfection, realise. At first it may have

directed itself to research and discussion, to the elaboration of its ideal, to the discussion of a plan of

campaign, but at some stage it must have assumed a more militant organisation, and have prevailed

against and assimilated the pre-existing political organisations, and to all intents and purposes have

become this present synthesised World State. Traces of that militancy would, therefore, pervade it

still, and a campaigning quality—no longer against specific disorders, but against universal human

weaknesses, and the inanimate forces that trouble man—still remain as its essential quality.

“Something of this kind,” I should tell my double, “had arisen in our thought”—I jerk my head back

to indicate an infinitely distant planet—“just before I came upon these explorations. The idea had

reached me, for example, of something to be called a New Republic, which was to be in fact an

organisation for revolution something after the fashion of your samurai, as I understand them—only

most of the organisation and the rule of life still remained to be invented. All sorts of people were

thinking of something in that way about the time of my coming. The idea, as it reached me, was

pretty crude in several respects. It ignored the high possibility of a synthesis of languages in the

future; it came from a literary man, who wrote only English, and, as I read him—he was a little

vague in his proposals—it was to be a purely English-speaking movement. And his ideas were

coloured too much by the peculiar opportunism of his time; he seemed to have more than half an

eye for a prince or a millionaire of genius; he seemed looking here and there for support and the

structural elements of a party. Still, the idea of a comprehensive movement of disillusioned and

illuminated men behind the shams and patriotisms, the spites and personalities of the ostensible

world was there.”

I added some particulars.

“Our movement had something of that spirit in the beginning,” said my Utopian double. “But while

your men seem to be thinking disconnectedly, and upon a very narrow and fragmentary basis of

accumulated conclusions, ours had a fairly comprehensive science of human association, and a very

careful analysis of the failures of preceding beginnings to draw upon. After all, your world must be

as full as ours was of the wreckage and decay of previous attempts; churches, aristocracies, orders,

cults....”

“Only at present we seem to have lost heart altogether, and now there are no new religions, no new

orders, no new cults—no beginnings any more.”

“But that's only a resting phase, perhaps. You were saying―”

“Oh!—let that distressful planet alone for a time! Tell me how you manage in Utopia.”

§ 2

The social theorists of Utopia, my double explained, did not base their schemes upon the

classification of men into labour and capital, the landed interest, the liquor trade, and the like. They

esteemed these as accidental categories, indefinitely amenable to statesmanship, and they looked for

some practical and real classification upon which to base organisation. [Footnote: In that they seem

to have profited by a more searching criticism of early social and political speculations than our

earth has yet undertaken. The social speculations of the Greeks, for example, had just the same

primary defect as the economic speculations of the eighteenth century—they began with the

assumption that the general conditions of the prevalent state of affairs were permanent.] But, on the

other hand, the assumption that men are unclassifiable, because practically homogeneous, which

underlies modern democratic methods and all the fallacies of our equal justice, is even more alien to

the Utopian mind. Throughout Utopia there is, of course, no other than provisional classifications,

since every being is regarded as finally unique, but for political and social purposes things have

long rested upon a classification of temperaments, which attends mainly to differences in the range

and quality and character of the individual imagination.

This Utopian classification was a rough one, but it served its purpose to determine the broad lines of

political organisation; it was so far unscientific that many individuals fall between or within two or

even three of its classes. But that was met by giving the correlated organisation a compensatory

looseness of play. Four main classes of mind were distinguished, called, respectively, the Poietic,

the Kinetic, the Dull, and the Base. The former two are supposed to constitute the living tissue of

the State; the latter are the fulcra and resistances, the bone and cover of its body. They are not

hereditary classes, nor is there any attempt to develop any class by special breeding, simply because

the intricate interplay of heredity is untraceable and incalculable. They are classes to which people

drift of their own accord. Education is uniform until differentiation becomes unmistakable, and each

man (and woman) must establish his position with regard to the lines of this abstract classification

by his own quality, choice, and development....

The Poietic or creative class of mental individuality embraces a wide range of types, but they agree

in possessing imaginations that range beyond the known and accepted, and that involve the desire to

bring the discoveries made in such excursions, into knowledge and recognition. The scope and

direction of the imaginative excursion may vary very greatly. It may be the invention of something

new or the discovery of something hitherto unperceived. When the invention or discovery is

primarily beauty then we have the artistic type of Poietic mind; when it is not so, we have the true

scientific man. The range of discovery may be narrowed as it is in the art of Whistler or the science

of a cytologist, or it may embrace a wide extent of relevance, until at last both artist or scientific

inquirer merge in the universal reference of the true philosopher. To the accumulated activities of

the Poietic type, reacted upon by circumstances, are due almost all the forms assumed by human

thought and feeling. All religious ideas, all ideas of what is good or beautiful, entered life through

the poietic inspirations of man. Except for processes of decay, the forms of the human future must

come also through men of this same type, and it is a primary essential to our modern idea of an

abundant secular progress that these activities should be unhampered and stimulated.

The Kinetic class consists of types, various, of course, and merging insensibly along the boundary

into the less representative constituents of the Poietic group, but distinguished by a more restricted

range of imagination. Their imaginations do not range beyond the known, experienced, and

accepted, though within these limits they may imagine as vividly or more vividly than members of

the former group. They are often very clever and capable people, but they do not do, and they do

not desire to do, new things. The more vigorous individuals of this class are the most teachable

people in the world, and they are generally more moral and more trustworthy than the Poietic types.

They live,—while the Poietics are always something of experimentalists with life. The

characteristics of either of these two classes may be associated with a good or bad physique, with

excessive or defective energy, with exceptional keenness of the senses in some determinate

direction or such-like “bent,” and the Kinetic type, just as the Poietic type, may display an

imagination of restricted or of the most universal range. But a fairly energetic Kinetic is probably

the nearest thing to that ideal our earthly anthropologists have in mind when they speak of the

“Normal” human being. The very definition of the Poietic class involves a certain abnormality.

The Utopians distinguished two extremes of this Kinetic class according to the quality of their

imaginative preferences, the Dan and Beersheba, as it were, of this division. At one end is the

mainly intellectual, unoriginal type, which, with energy of personality, makes an admirable judge or

administrator and without it an uninventive, laborious, common mathematician, or common scholar,

or common scientific man; while at the other end is the mainly emotional, unoriginal man, the type

to which—at a low level of personal energy—my botanist inclines. The second type includes,

amidst its energetic forms, great actors, and popular politicians and preachers. Between these

extremes is a long and wide region of varieties, into which one would put most of the people who

form the reputable workmen, the men of substance, the trustworthy men and women, the pillars of

society on earth.

Below these two classes in the Utopian scheme of things, and merging insensibly into them, come

the Dull. The Dull are persons of altogether inadequate imagination, the people who never seem to

learn thoroughly, or hear distinctly, or think clearly. (I believe if everyone is to be carefully educated

they would be considerably in the minority in the world, but it is quite possible that will not be the

reader's opinion. It is clearly a matter of an arbitrary line.) They are the stupid people, the

incompetent people, the formal, imitative people, the people who, in any properly organised State,

should, as a class, gravitate towards and below the minimum wage that qualifies for marriage. The

laws of heredity are far too mysterious for such offspring as they do produce to be excluded from a

fair chance in the world, but for themselves, they count neither for work nor direction in the State.

Finally, with a bold disregard of the logician's classificatory rules, these Utopian statesmen who

devised the World State, hewed out in theory a class of the Base. The Base may, indeed, be either

poietic, kinetic, or dull, though most commonly they are the last, and their definition concerns not

so much the quality of their imagination as a certain bias in it, that to a statesman makes it a matter

for special attention. The Base have a narrower and more persistent egoistic reference than the

common run of humanity; they may boast, but they have no frankness; they have relatively great

powers of concealment, and they are capable of, and sometimes have an aptitude and inclination

towards, cruelty. In the queer phrasing of earthly psychology with its clumsy avoidance of analysis,

they have no “moral sense.” They count as an antagonism to the State organisation.

Obviously, this is the rudest of classifications, and no Utopian has ever supposed it to be a

classification for individual application, a classification so precise that one can say, this man is

“poietic,” and that man is “base.” In actual experience these qualities mingle and vary in every

possible way. It is not a classification for Truth, but a classification to an end. Taking humanity as a

multitude of unique individuals in mass, one may, for practical purposes, deal with it far more

conveniently by disregarding its uniquenesses and its mixed cases altogether, and supposing it to be

an assembly of poietic, kinetic, dull, and base people. In many respects it behaves as if it were that.

The State, dealing as it does only with non-individualised affairs, is not only justified in

disregarding, but is bound to disregard, a man's special distinction, and to provide for him on the

strength of his prevalent aspect as being on the whole poietic, kinetic, or what not. In a world of

hasty judgments and carping criticism, it cannot be repeated too often that the fundamental ideas of

a modern Utopia imply everywhere and in everything, margins and elasticities, a certain universal

compensatory looseness of play.

§ 3

Now these Utopian statesmen who founded the World State put the problem of social organisation

in the following fashion:—To contrive a revolutionary movement that shall absorb all existing

governments and fuse them with itself, and that must be rapidly progressive and adaptable, and yet

coherent, persistent, powerful, and efficient.

The problem of combining progress with political stability had never been accomplished in Utopia

before that time, any more than it has been accomplished on earth. Just as on earth, Utopian history

was a succession of powers rising and falling in an alternation of efficient conservative with

unstable liberal States. Just as on earth, so in Utopia, the kinetic type of men had displayed a more

or less unintentional antagonism to the poietic. The general life-history of a State had been the same

on either planet. First, through poietic activities, the idea of a community has developed, and the

State has shaped itself; poietic men have arisen first in this department of national life, and then

that, and have given place to kinetic men of a high type—for it seems to be in their nature that

poietic men should be mutually repulsive, and not succeed and develop one another consecutively

—and a period of expansion and vigour has set in. The general poietic activity has declined with the

development of an efficient and settled social and political organisation; the statesman has given

way to the politician who has incorporated the wisdom of the statesman with his own energy, the

original genius in arts, letters, science, and every department of activity to the cultivated and

scholarly man. The kinetic man of wide range, who has assimilated his poietic predecessor,

succeeds with far more readiness than his poietic contemporary in almost every human activity. The

latter is by his very nature undisciplined and experimental, and is positively hampered by

precedents and good order. With this substitution of the efficient for the creative type, the State

ceases to grow, first in this department of activity, and then in that, and so long as its conditions

remain the same it remains orderly and efficient. But it has lost its power of initiative and change;

its power of adaptation is gone, and with that secular change of conditions which is the law of life,

stresses must arise within and without, and bring at last either through revolution or through defeat

the release of fresh poietic power. The process, of course, is not in its entirety simple; it may be

masked by the fact that one department of activity may be in its poietic stage, while another is in a

phase of realisation. In the United States of America, for example, during the nineteenth century,

there was great poietic activity in industrial organisation, and none whatever in political philosophy;

but a careful analysis of the history of any period will show the rhythm almost invariably present,

and the initial problem before the Utopian philosopher, therefore, was whether this was an

inevitable alternation, whether human progress was necessarily a series of developments, collapses,

and fresh beginnings, after an interval of disorder, unrest, and often great unhappiness, or whether it

was possible to maintain a secure, happy, and progressive State beside an unbroken flow of poietic

activity.

Clearly they decided upon the second alternative. If, indeed, I am listening to my Utopian self, then

they not only decided the problem could be solved, but they solved it.

He tells me how they solved it.

A modern Utopia differs from all the older Utopias in its recognition of the need of poietic activities

—one sees this new consideration creeping into thought for the first time in the phrasing of Comte's

insistence that “spiritual” must precede political reconstruction, and in his admission of the

necessity of recurrent books and poems about Utopias—and at first this recognition appears to

admit only an added complication to a problem already unmanageably complex. Comte's separation

of the activities of a State into the spiritual and material does, to a certain extent, anticipate this

opposition of poietic and kinetic, but the intimate texture of his mind was dull and hard, the

conception slipped from him again, and his suppression of literary activities, and his imposition of a

rule of life upon the poietic types, who are least able to sustain it, mark how deeply he went under.

To a large extent he followed the older Utopists in assuming that the philosophical and constructive

problem could be done once for all, and he worked the results out simply under an organised kinetic

government. But what seems to be merely an addition to the difficulty may in the end turn out to be

a simplification, just as the introduction of a fresh term to an intricate irreducible mathematical

expression will at times bring it to unity.

Now philosophers after my Utopian pattern, who find the ultimate significance in life in

individuality, novelty and the undefined, would not only regard the poietic element as the most

important in human society, but would perceive quite clearly the impossibility of its organisation.

This, indeed, is simply the application to the moral and intellectual fabric of the principles already

applied in discussing the State control of reproduction (in Chapter the Sixth, § 2). But just as in the

case of births it was possible for the State to frame limiting conditions within which individuality

plays more freely than in the void, so the founders of this modern Utopia believed it possible to

define conditions under which every individual born with poietic gifts should be enabled and

encouraged to give them a full development, in art, philosophy, invention, or discovery. Certain

general conditions presented themselves as obviously reasonable:—to give every citizen as good an

education as he or she could acquire, for example; to so frame it that the directed educational

process would never at any period occupy the whole available time of the learner, but would

provide throughout a marginal free leisure with opportunities for developing idiosyncrasies, and to

ensure by the expedient of a minimum wage for a specified amount of work, that leisure and

opportunity did not cease throughout life.

But, in addition to thus making poietic activities universally possible, the founders of this modern

Utopia sought to supply incentives, which was an altogether more difficult research, a problem in

its nature irresolvably complex, and admitting of no systematic solution. But my double told me of

a great variety of devices by which poietic men and women were given honour and enlarged

freedoms, so soon as they produced an earnest of their quality, and he explained to me how great an

ambition they might entertain.

There were great systems of laboratories attached to every municipal force station at which research

could be conducted under the most favourable conditions, and every mine, and, indeed, almost

every great industrial establishment, was saddled under its lease with similar obligations. So much

for poietic ability and research in physical science. The World State tried the claims of every living

contributor to any materially valuable invention, and paid or charged a royalty on its use that went

partly to him personally, and partly to the research institution that had produced him. In the matter

of literature and the philosophical and sociological sciences, every higher educational establishment

carried its studentships, its fellowships, its occasional lectureships, and to produce a poem, a novel,

a speculative work of force or merit, was to become the object of a generous competition between

rival Universities. In Utopia, any author has the option either of publishing his works through the

public bookseller as a private speculation, or, if he is of sufficient merit, of accepting a University

endowment and conceding his copyright to the University press. All sorts of grants in the hands of

committees of the most varied constitution, supplemented these academic resources, and ensured

that no possible contributor to the wide flow of the Utopian mind slipped into neglect. Apart from

those who engaged mainly in teaching and administration, my double told me that the world-wide

House of Saloman [Footnote: The New Atlantis.] thus created sustained over a million men. For all

the rarity of large fortunes, therefore, no original man with the desire and capacity for material or

mental experiments went long without resources and the stimulus of attention, criticism, and rivalry.

“And finally,” said my double, “our Rules ensure a considerable understanding of the importance of

poietic activities in the majority of the samurai, in whose hands as a class all the real power of the

world resides.”

“Ah!” said I, “and now we come to the thing that interests me most. For it is quite clear, in my

mind, that these samurai form the real body of the State. All this time that I have spent going to and

fro in this planet, it has been growing upon me that this order of men and women, wearing such a

uniform as you wear, and with faces strengthened by discipline and touched with devotion, is the

Utopian reality; but that for them, the whole fabric of these fair appearances would crumble and

tarnish, shrink and shrivel, until at last, back I should be amidst the grime and disorders of the life

of earth. Tell me about these samurai, who remind me of Plato's guardians, who look like Knights

Templars, who bear a name that recalls the swordsmen of Japan ... and whose uniform you yourself

are wearing. What are they? Are they an hereditary caste, a specially educated order, an elected

class? For, certainly, this world turns upon them as a door upon its hinges.”

§ 4

“I follow the Common Rule, as many men do,” said my double, answering my allusion to his

uniform almost apologetically. “But my own work is, in its nature, poietic; there is much

dissatisfaction with our isolation of criminals upon islands, and I am analysing the psychology of

prison officials and criminals in general with a view to some better scheme. I am supposed to be

ingenious with expedients in this direction. Typically, the samurai are engaged in administrative

work. Practically the whole of the responsible rule of the world is in their hands; all our head

teachers and disciplinary heads of colleges, our judges, barristers, employers of labour beyond a

certain limit, practising medical men, legislators, must be samurai, and all the executive

committees, and so forth, that play so large a part in our affairs are drawn by lot exclusively from

them. The order is not hereditary—we know just enough of biology and the uncertainties of

inheritance to know how silly that would be—and it does not require an early consecration or

novitiate or ceremonies and initiations of that sort. The samurai are, in fact, volunteers. Any

intelligent adult in a reasonably healthy and efficient state may, at any age after five-and-twenty,

become one of the samurai, and take a hand in the universal control.”

“Provided he follows the Rule.”

“Precisely—provided he follows the Rule.”

“I have heard the phrase, ‘voluntary nobility.’”

“That was the idea of our Founders. They made a noble and privileged order—open to the whole

world. No one could complain of an unjust exclusion, for the only thing that could exclude from the

order was unwillingness or inability to follow the Rule.”

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

“That wasn't their intention. The Rule was planned to exclude the dull, to be unattractive to the

base, and to direct and co-ordinate all sound citizens of good intent.”

“And it has succeeded?”

“As well as anything finite can. Life is still imperfect, still a thick felt of dissatisfactions and

perplexing problems, but most certainly the quality of all its problems has been raised, and there has

been no war, no grinding poverty, not half the disease, and an enormous increase of the order,

beauty, and resources of life since the samurai, who began as a private aggressive cult, won their

way to the rule of the world.”

“I would like to have that history,” I said. “I expect there was fighting?” He nodded. “But first—tell

me about the Rule.”

“The Rule aims to exclude the dull and base altogether, to discipline the impulses and emotions, to

develop a moral habit and sustain a man in periods of stress, fatigue, and temptation, to produce the

maximum co-operation of all men of good intent, and, in fact, to keep all the samurai in a state of

moral and bodily health and efficiency. It does as much of this as well as it can, but, of course, like

all general propositions, it does not do it in any case with absolute precision. On the whole, it is so

good that most men who, like myself, are doing poietic work, and who would be just as well off

without obedience, find a satisfaction in adhesion. At first, in the militant days, it was a trifle hard

and uncompromising; it had rather too strong an appeal to the moral prig and harshly righteous

man, but it has undergone, and still undergoes, revision and expansion, and every year it becomes a

little better adapted to the need of a general rule of life that all men may try to follow. We have now

a whole literature, with many very fine things in it, written about the Rule.”

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

“The Rule consists of three parts; there is the list of things that qualify, the list of things that must

not be done, and the list of things that must be done. Qualification exacts a little exertion, as

evidence of good faith, and it is designed to weed out the duller dull and many of the base. Our

schooling period ends now about fourteen, and a small number of boys and girls—about three per

cent.—are set aside then as unteachable, as, in fact, nearly idiotic; the rest go on to a college or

upper school.”

“All your population?”

“With that exception.”

“Free?”

“Of course. And they pass out of college at eighteen. There are several different college courses, but

one or other must be followed and a satisfactory examination passed at the end—perhaps ten per

cent. fail—and the Rule requires that the candidate for the samurai must have passed.”

“But a very good man is sometimes an idle schoolboy.”

“We admit that. And so anyone who has failed to pass the college leaving examination may at any

time in later life sit for it again—and again and again. Certain carefully specified things excuse it

altogether.”

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

“People of nervous instability―”

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

“Exactly. That is quite possible. But we don't want that sort of people among our samurai. Passing

an examination is a proof of a certain steadiness of purpose, a certain self-control and

submission―”

“Of a certain ‘ordinariness.’”

“Exactly what is wanted.”

“Of course, those others can follow other careers.”

“Yes. That's what we want them to do. And, besides these two educational qualifications, there are

two others of a similar kind of more debateable value. One is practically not in operation now. Our

Founders put it that a candidate for the samurai must possess what they called a Technique, and, as

it operated in the beginning, he had to hold the qualification for a doctor, for a lawyer, for a military

officer, or an engineer, or teacher, or have painted acceptable pictures, or written a book, or

something of the sort. He had, in fact, as people say, to ‘be something,’ or to have ‘done something.’

It was a regulation of vague intention even in the beginning, and it became catholic to the pitch of

absurdity. To play a violin skilfully has been accepted as sufficient for this qualification. There may

have been a reason in the past for this provision; in those days there were many daughters of

prosperous parents—and even some sons—who did nothing whatever but idle uninterestingly in the

world, and the organisation might have suffered by their invasion, but that reason has gone now, and

the requirement remains a merely ceremonial requirement. But, on the other hand, another has

developed. Our Founders made a collection of several volumes, which they called, collectively, the

Book of the Samurai, a compilation of articles and extracts, poems and prose pieces, which were

supposed to embody the idea of the order. It was to play the part for the samurai that the Bible did

for the ancient Hebrews. To tell you the truth, the stuff was of very unequal merit; there was a lot of

very second-rate rhetoric, and some nearly namby-pamby verse. There was also included some very

obscure verse and prose that had the trick of seeming wise. But for all such defects, much of the

Book, from the very beginning, was splendid and inspiring matter. From that time to this, the Book

of the Samurai has been under revision, much has been added, much rejected, and some deliberately

rewritten. Now, there is hardly anything in it that is not beautiful and perfect in form. The whole

range of noble emotions finds expression there, and all the guiding ideas of our Modern State. We

have recently admitted some terse criticism of its contents by a man named Henley.”

“Old Henley!”

“A man who died a little time ago.”

“I knew that man on earth. And he was in Utopia, too! He was a great red-faced man, with fiery

hair, a noisy, intolerant maker of enemies, with a tender heart—and he was one of the samurai?”

“He defied the Rules.”

“He was a great man with wine. He wrote like wine; in our world he wrote wine; red wine with the

light shining through.”

“He was on the Committee that revised our Canon. For the revising and bracing of our Canon is

work for poietic as well as kinetic men. You knew him in your world?”

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

“Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever Gods may be,

For my unconquerable soul....”

“We have that here. All good earthly things are in Utopia also. We put that in the Canon almost as

soon as he died,” said my double.

§ 5

“We have now a double Canon, a very fine First Canon, and a Second Canon of work by living men

and work of inferior quality, and a satisfactory knowledge of both of these is the fourth intellectual

qualification for the samurai.”

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

“The Canon pervades our whole world. As a matter of fact, very much of it is read and learnt in the

schools.... Next to the intellectual qualification comes the physical, the man must be in sound

health, free from certain foul, avoidable, and demoralising diseases, and in good training. We reject

men who are fat, or thin and flabby, or whose nerves are shaky—we refer them back to training.

And finally the man or woman must be fully adult.”

“Twenty-one? But you said twenty-five!”

“The age has varied. At first it was twenty-five or over; then the minimum became twenty-five for

men and twenty-one for women. Now there is a feeling that it ought to be raised. We don't want to

take advantage of mere boy and girl emotions—men of my way of thinking, at any rate, don't—we

want to get our samurai with experiences, with a settled mature conviction. Our hygiene and

regimen are rapidly pushing back old age and death, and keeping men hale and hearty to eighty and

more. There's no need to hurry the young. Let them have a chance of wine, love, and song; let them

feel the bite of full-bodied desire, and know what devils they have to reckon with.”

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

“They may keep the Rule at any time—without its privileges. But a man who breaks the Rule after

his adult adhesion at five-and-twenty is no more in the samurai for ever. Before that age he is free

to break it and repent.”

“And now, what is forbidden?”

“We forbid a good deal. Many small pleasures do no great harm, but we think it well to forbid them,

none the less, so that we can weed out the self-indulgent. We think that a constant resistance to little

seductions is good for a man's quality. At any rate, it shows that a man is prepared to pay something

for his honour and privileges. We prescribe a regimen of food, forbid tobacco, wine, or any

alcoholic drink, all narcotic drugs―”

“Meat?”

“In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the

thought of slaughter-houses. And, in a population that is all educated, and at about the same level of

physical refinement, it is practically impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. We

never settled the hygienic question of meat-eating at all. This other aspect decided us. I can still

remember, as a boy, the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughter-house.”

“You eat fish.”

“It isn't a matter of logic. In our barbaric past horrible flayed carcases of brutes dripping blood,

were hung for sale in the public streets.” He shrugged his shoulders.

“They do that still in London—in my world,” I said.

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

mind.

“Originally the samurai were forbidden usury, that is to say the lending of money at fixed rates of

interest. They are still under that interdiction, but since our commercial code practically prevents

usury altogether, and our law will not recognise contracts for interest upon private accommodation

loans to unprosperous borrowers, it is now scarcely necessary. The idea of a man growing richer by

mere inaction and at the expense of an impoverishing debtor, is profoundly distasteful to Utopian

ideas, and our State insists pretty effectually now upon the participation of the lender in the

borrower's risks. This, however, is only one part of a series of limitations of the same character. It is

felt that to buy simply in order to sell again brings out many unsocial human qualities; it makes a

man seek to enhance profits and falsify values, and so the samurai are forbidden to buy to sell on

their own account or for any employer save the State, unless some process of manufacture changes

the nature of the commodity (a mere change in bulk or packing does not suffice), and they are

forbidden salesmanship and all its arts. Consequently they cannot be hotel-keepers, or hotel

proprietors, or hotel shareholders, and a doctor—all practising doctors must be samurai—cannot

sell drugs except as a public servant of the municipality or the State.”

“That, of course, runs counter to all our current terrestrial ideas,” I said. “We are obsessed by the

power of money. These rules will work out as a vow of moderate poverty, and if your samurai are

an order of poor men―”

“They need not be. Samurai who have invented, organised, and developed new industries, have

become rich men, and many men who have grown rich by brilliant and original trading have

subsequently become samurai.”

“But these are exceptional cases. The bulk of your money-making business must be confined to

men who are not samurai. You must have a class of rich, powerful outsiders―”

“Have we?”

“I don't see the evidences of them.”

“As a matter of fact, we have such people! There are rich traders, men who have made discoveries

in the economy of distribution, or who have called attention by intelligent, truthful advertisement to

the possibilities of neglected commodities, for example.”

“But aren't they a power?”

“Why should they be?”

“Wealth is power.”

I had to explain that phrase.

He protested. “Wealth,” he said, “is no sort of power at all unless you make it one. If it is so in your

world it is so by inadvertency. Wealth is a State-made thing, a convention, the most artificial of

powers. You can, by subtle statesmanship, contrive what it shall buy and what it shall not. In your

world it would seem you have made leisure, movement, any sort of freedom, life itself,

purchaseable. The more fools you! A poor working man with you is a man in discomfort and fear.

No wonder your rich have power. But here a reasonable leisure, a decent life, is to be had by every

man on easier terms than by selling himself to the rich. And rich as men are here, there is no private

fortune in the whole world that is more than a little thing beside the wealth of the State. The

samurai control the State and the wealth of the State, and by their vows they may not avail

themselves of any of the coarser pleasures wealth can still buy. Where, then, is the power of your

wealthy man?”

“But, then—where is the incentive―?”

“Oh! a man gets things for himself with wealth—no end of things. But little or no power over his

fellows—unless they are exceptionally weak or self-indulgent persons.”

I reflected. “What else may not the samurai do?”

“Acting, singing, or reciting are forbidden them, though they may lecture authoritatively or debate.

But professional mimicry is not only held to be undignified in a man or woman, but to weaken and

corrupt the soul; the mind becomes foolishly dependent on applause, over-skilful in producing

tawdry and momentary illusions of excellence; it is our experience that actors and actresses as a

class are loud, ignoble, and insincere. If they have not such flamboyant qualities then they are tepid

and ineffectual players. Nor may the samurai do personal services, except in the matter of medicine

or surgery; they may not be barbers, for example, nor inn waiters, nor boot cleaners. But, nowadays,

we have scarcely any barbers or boot cleaners; men do these things for themselves. Nor may a man

under the Rule be any man's servant, pledged to do whatever he is told. He may neither be a servant

nor keep one; he must shave and dress and serve himself, carry his own food from the helper's place

to the table, redd his sleeping room, and leave it clean....”

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

“Absolutely not. He may insure his life and his old age for the better equipment of his children, or

for certain other specified ends, but that is all his dealings with chance. And he is also forbidden to

play games in public or to watch them being played. Certain dangerous and hardy sports and

exercises are prescribed for him, but not competitive sports between man and man or side and side.

That lesson was learnt long ago before the coming of the samurai. Gentlemen of honour, according

to the old standards, rode horses, raced chariots, fought, and played competitive games of skill, and

the dull, cowardly and base came in thousands to admire, and howl, and bet. The gentlemen of

honour degenerated fast enough into a sort of athletic prostitute, with all the defects, all the vanity,

trickery, and self-assertion of the common actor, and with even less intelligence. Our Founders

made no peace with this organisation of public sports. They did not spend their lives to secure for

all men and women on the earth freedom, health, and leisure, in order that they might waste lives in

such folly.”

“We have those abuses,” I said, “but some of our earthly games have a fine side. There is a game

called cricket. It is a fine, generous game.”

“Our boys play that, and men too. But it is thought rather puerile to give very much time to it; men

should have graver interests. It was undignified and unpleasant for the samurai to play

conspicuously ill, and impossible for them to play so constantly as to keep hand and eye in training

against the man who was fool enough and cheap enough to become an expert. Cricket, tennis, fives,

billiards―. You will find clubs and a class of men to play all these things in Utopia, but not the

samurai. And they must play their games as games, not as displays; the price of a privacy for

playing cricket, so that they could charge for admission, would be overwhelmingly high.... Negroes

are often very clever at cricket. For a time, most of the samurai had their sword-play, but few do

those exercises now, and until about fifty years ago they went out for military training, a fortnight in

every year, marching long distances, sleeping in the open, carrying provisions, and sham fighting

over unfamiliar ground dotted with disappearing targets. There was a curious inability in our world

to realise that war was really over for good and all.”

“And now,” I said, “haven't we got very nearly to the end of your prohibitions? You have forbidden

alcohol, drugs, smoking, betting, and usury, games, trade, servants. But isn't there a vow of

Chastity?”

“That is the Rule for your earthly orders?”

“Yes—except, if I remember rightly, for Plato's Guardians.”

“There is a Rule of Chastity here—but not of Celibacy. We know quite clearly that civilisation is an

artificial arrangement, and that all the physical and emotional instincts of man are too strong, and

his natural instinct of restraint too weak, for him to live easily in the civilised State. Civilisation has

developed far more rapidly than man has modified. Under the unnatural perfection of security,

liberty and abundance our civilisation has attained, the normal untrained human being is disposed to

excess in almost every direction; he tends to eat too much and too elaborately, to drink too much, to

become lazy faster than his work can be reduced, to waste his interest upon displays, and to make

love too much and too elaborately. He gets out of training, and concentrates upon egoistic or erotic

broodings. The past history of our race is very largely a history of social collapses due to

demoralisation by indulgences following security and abundance. In the time of our Founders the

signs of a world-wide epoch of prosperity and relaxation were plentiful. Both sexes drifted towards

sexual excesses, the men towards sentimental extravagances, imbecile devotions, and the

complication and refinement of physical indulgences; the women towards those expansions and

differentiations of feeling that find expression in music and costly and distinguished dress. Both

sexes became unstable and promiscuous. The whole world seemed disposed to do exactly the same

thing with its sexual interest as it had done with its appetite for food and drink—make the most of

it.”

He paused.

“Satiety came to help you,” I said.

“Destruction may come before satiety. Our Founders organised motives from all sorts of sources,

but I think the chief force to give men self-control is Pride. Pride may not be the noblest thing in the

soul, but it is the best King there, for all that. They looked to it to keep a man clean and sound and

sane. In this matter, as in all matters of natural desire, they held no appetite must be glutted, no

appetite must have artificial whets, and also and equally that no appetite should be starved. A man

must come from the table satisfied, but not replete. And, in the matter of love, a straight and clean

desire for a clean and straight fellow-creature was our Founders' ideal. They enjoined marriage

between equals as the samurai's duty to the race, and they framed directions of the precisest sort to

prevent that uxorious inseparableness, that connubiality which will reduce a couple of people to

something jointly less than either. That Canon is too long to tell you now. A man under the Rule

who loves a woman who does not follow it, must either leave the samurai to marry her, or induce

her to accept what is called the Woman's Rule, which, while it excepts her from the severer

qualifications and disciplines, brings her regimen of life into a working harmony with his.”

“Suppose she breaks the Rule afterwards?”

“He must leave either her or the order.”

“There is matter for a novel or so in that.”

“There has been matter for hundreds.”

“Is the Woman's Rule a sumptuary law as well as a regimen? I mean—may she dress as she

pleases?”

“Not a bit of it,” said my double. “Every woman who could command money used it, we found, to

make underbred aggressions on other women. As men emerged to civilisation, women seemed

going back to savagery—to paint and feathers. But the samurai, both men and women, and the

women under the Lesser Rule also, all have a particular dress. No difference is made between

women under either the Great or the Lesser Rule. You have seen the men's dress—always like this I

wear. The women may wear the same, either with the hair cut short or plaited behind them, or they

may have a high-waisted dress of very fine, soft woollen material, with their hair coiled up behind.”

“I have seen it,” I said. Indeed, nearly all the women had seemed to be wearing variants of that

simple formula. “It seems to me a very beautiful dress. The other—I'm not used to. But I like it on

girls and slender women.”

I had a thought, and added, “Don't they sometimes, well—take a good deal of care, dressing their

hair?”

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

“And the Rule?”

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

“We don't want women to cease to be beautiful, and consciously beautiful, if you like,” he added.

“The more real beauty of form and face we have, the finer our world. But costly sexualised

trappings―”

“I should have thought,” I said, “a class of women who traded on their sex would have arisen,

women, I mean, who found an interest and an advantage in emphasising their individual womanly

beauty. There is no law to prevent it. Surely they would tend to counteract the severity of costume

the Rule dictates.”

“There are such women. But for all that the Rule sets the key of everyday dress. If a woman is

possessed by the passion for gorgeous raiment she usually satisfies it in her own private circle, or

with rare occasional onslaughts upon the public eye. Her everyday mood and the disposition of

most people is against being conspicuous abroad. And I should say there are little liberties under the

Lesser Rule; a discreet use of fine needlework and embroidery, a wider choice of materials.”

“You have no changing fashions?”

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

“Our women's dresses are not beautiful at all,” I said, forced for a time towards the mysterious

philosophy of dress. “Beauty? That isn't their concern.”

“Then what are they after?”

“My dear man! What is all my world after?”

§ 6

I should come to our third talk with a great curiosity to hear of the last portion of the Rule, of the

things that the samurai are obliged to do.

There would be many precise directions regarding his health, and rules that would aim at once at

health and that constant exercise of will that makes life good. Save in specified exceptional

circumstances, the samurai must bathe in cold water, and the men must shave every day; they have

the precisest directions in such matters; the body must be in health, the skin and muscles and nerves

in perfect tone, or the samurai must go to the doctors of the order, and give implicit obedience to

the regimen prescribed. They must sleep alone at least four nights in five; and they must eat with

and talk to anyone in their fellowship who cares for their conversation for an hour, at least, at the

nearest club-house of the samurai once on three chosen days in every week. Moreover, they must

read aloud from the Book of the Samurai for at least ten minutes every day. Every month they must

buy and read faithfully through at least one book that has been published during the past five years,

and the only intervention with private choice in that matter is the prescription of a certain minimum

of length for the monthly book or books. But the full Rule in these minor compulsory matters is

voluminous and detailed, and it abounds with alternatives. Its aim is rather to keep before the

samurai by a number of sample duties, as it were, the need of, and some of the chief methods

towards health of body and mind, rather than to provide a comprehensive rule, and to ensure the

maintenance of a community of feeling and interests among the samurai through habit, intercourse,

and a living contemporary literature. These minor obligations do not earmark more than an hour in

the day. Yet they serve to break down isolations of sympathy, all sorts of physical and intellectual

sluggishness and the development of unsocial preoccupations of many sorts.

Women samurai who are married, my double told me, must bear children—if they are to remain

married as well as in the order—before the second period for terminating a childless marriage is

exhausted. I failed to ask for the precise figures from my double at the time, but I think it is beyond

doubt that it is from samurai mothers of the Greater or Lesser Rule that a very large proportion of

the future population of Utopia will be derived. There is one liberty accorded to women samurai

which is refused to men, and that is to marry outside the Rule, and women married to men not under

the Rule are also free to become samurai. Here, too, it will be manifest there is scope for novels and

the drama of life. In practice, it seems that it is only men of great poietic distinction outside the

Rule, or great commercial leaders, who have wives under it. The tendency of such unions is either

to bring the husband under the Rule, or take the wife out of it. There can be no doubt that these

marriage limitations tend to make the samurai something of an hereditary class. Their children, as a

rule, become samurai. But it is not an exclusive caste; subject to the most reasonable qualifications,

anyone who sees fit can enter it at any time, and so, unlike all other privileged castes the world has

seen, it increases relatively to the total population, and may indeed at last assimilate almost the

whole population of the earth.

§ 7

So much my double told me readily.

But now he came to the heart of all his explanations, to the will and motives at the centre that made

men and women ready to undergo discipline, to renounce the richness and elaboration of the

sensuous life, to master emotions and control impulses, to keep in the key of effort while they had

abundance about them to rouse and satisfy all desires, and his exposition was more difficult.

He tried to make his religion clear to me.

The leading principle of the Utopian religion is the repudiation of the doctrine of original sin; the

Utopians hold that man, on the whole, is good. That is their cardinal belief. Man has pride and

conscience, they hold, that you may refine by training as you refine his eye and ear; he has remorse

and sorrow in his being, coming on the heels of all inconsequent enjoyments. How can one think of

him as bad? He is religious; religion is as natural to him as lust and anger, less intense, indeed, but

coming with a wide-sweeping inevitableness as peace comes after all tumults and noises. And in

Utopia they understand this, or, at least, the samurai do, clearly. They accept Religion as they

accept Thirst, as something inseparably in the mysterious rhythms of life. And just as thirst and

pride and all desires may be perverted in an age of abundant opportunities, and men may be

degraded and wasted by intemperance in drinking, by display, or by ambition, so too the nobler

complex of desires that constitutes religion may be turned to evil by the dull, the base, and the

careless. Slovenly indulgence in religious inclinations, a failure to think hard and discriminate as

fairly as possible in religious matters, is just as alien to the men under the Rule as it would be to

drink deeply because they were thirsty, eat until glutted, evade a bath because the day was chilly, or

make love to any bright-eyed girl who chanced to look pretty in the dusk. Utopia, which is to have

every type of character that one finds on earth, will have its temples and its priests, just as it will

have its actresses and wine, but the samurai will be forbidden the religion of dramatically lit altars,

organ music, and incense, as distinctly as they are forbidden the love of painted women, or the

consolations of brandy. And to all the things that are less than religion and that seek to comprehend

it, to cosmogonies and philosophies, to creeds and formulæ, to catechisms and easy explanations,

the attitude of the samurai, the note of the Book of Samurai, will be distrust. These things, the

samurai will say, are part of the indulgences that should come before a man submits himself to the

Rule; they are like the early gratifications of young men, experiences to establish renunciation. The

samurai will have emerged above these things.

The theology of the Utopian rulers will be saturated with that same philosophy of uniqueness, that

repudiation of anything beyond similarities and practical parallelisms, that saturates all their

institutions. They will have analysed exhaustively those fallacies and assumptions that arise

between the One and the Many, that have troubled philosophy since philosophy began. Just as they

will have escaped that delusive unification of every species under its specific definition that has

dominated earthly reasoning, so they will have escaped the delusive simplification of God that

vitiates all terrestrial theology. They will hold God to be complex and of an endless variety of

aspects, to be expressed by no universal formula nor approved in any uniform manner. Just as the

language of Utopia will be a synthesis, even so will its God be. The aspect of God is different in the

measure of every man's individuality, and the intimate thing of religion must, therefore, exist in

human solitude, between man and God alone. Religion in its quintessence is a relation between God

and man; it is perversion to make it a relation between man and man, and a man may no more reach

God through a priest than love his wife through a priest. But just as a man in love may refine the

interpretation of his feelings and borrow expression from the poems and music of poietic men, so an

individual man may at his discretion read books of devotion and hear music that is in harmony with

his inchoate feelings. Many of the samurai, therefore, will set themselves private regimens that will

help their secret religious life, will pray habitually, and read books of devotion, but with these

things the Rule of the order will have nothing to do.

Clearly the God of the samurai is a transcendental and mystical God. So far as the samurai have a

purpose in common in maintaining the State, and the order and progress of the world, so far, by

their discipline and denial, by their public work and effort, they worship God together. But the fount

of motives lies in the individual life, it lies in silent and deliberate reflections, and at this, the most

striking of all the rules of the samurai aims. For seven consecutive days in the year, at least, each

man or woman under the Rule must go right out of all the life of man into some wild and solitary

place, must speak to no man or woman, and have no sort of intercourse with mankind. They must

go bookless and weaponless, without pen or paper, or money. Provisions must be taken for the

period of the journey, a rug or sleeping sack—for they must sleep under the open sky—but no

means of making a fire. They may study maps beforehand to guide them, showing any difficulties

and dangers in the journey, but they may not carry such helps. They must not go by beaten ways or

wherever there are inhabited houses, but into the bare, quiet places of the globe—the regions set

apart for them.

This discipline, my double said, was invented to secure a certain stoutness of heart and body in the

members of the order, which otherwise might have lain open to too many timorous, merely

abstemious, men and women. Many things had been suggested, swordplay and tests that verged on

torture, climbing in giddy places and the like, before this was chosen. Partly, it is to ensure good

training and sturdiness of body and mind, but partly, also, it is to draw their minds for a space from

the insistent details of life, from the intricate arguments and the fretting effort to work, from

personal quarrels and personal affections, and the things of the heated room. Out they must go,

clean out of the world.

Certain great areas are set apart for these yearly pilgrimages beyond the securities of the State.

There are thousands of square miles of sandy desert in Africa and Asia set apart; much of the Arctic

and Antarctic circles; vast areas of mountain land and frozen marsh; secluded reserves of forest, and

innumerable unfrequented lines upon the sea. Some are dangerous and laborious routes; some

merely desolate; and there are even some sea journeys that one may take in the halcyon days as one

drifts through a dream. Upon the seas one must go in a little undecked sailing boat, that may be

rowed in a calm; all the other journeys one must do afoot, none aiding. There are, about all these

desert regions and along most coasts, little offices at which the samurai says good-bye to the world

of men, and at which they arrive after their minimum time of silence is overpast. For the intervening

days they must be alone with Nature, necessity, and their own thoughts.

“It is good?” I said.

“It is good,” my double answered. “We civilised men go back to the stark Mother that so many of

us would have forgotten were it not for this Rule. And one thinks.... Only two weeks ago I did my

journey for the year. I went with my gear by sea to Tromso, and then inland to a starting-place, and

took my ice-axe and rücksack, and said good-bye to the world. I crossed over four glaciers; I

climbed three high mountain passes, and slept on moss in desolate valleys. I saw no human being

for seven days. Then I came down through pine woods to the head of a road that runs to the Baltic

shore. Altogether it was thirteen days before I reported myself again, and had speech with fellow

creatures.”

“And the women do this?”

“The women who are truly samurai—yes. Equally with the men. Unless the coming of children

intervenes.”

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

“There is always a sense of effort for me,” he said, “when I leave the world at the outset of the

journey. I turn back again and again, and look at the little office as I go up my mountain side. The

first day and night I'm a little disposed to shirk the job—every year it's the same—a little disposed,

for example, to sling my pack from my back, and sit down, and go through its contents, and make

sure I've got all my equipment.”

“There's no chance of anyone overtaking you?”

“Two men mustn't start from the same office on the same route within six hours of each other. If

they come within sight of each other, they must shun an encounter, and make no sign—unless life is

in danger. All that is arranged beforehand.”

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

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

day.”

“Don't you worry about losing your way?”

“No. There are cairns and skyline signs. If it wasn't for that, of course we should be worrying with

maps the whole time. But I'm only sure of being a man after the second night, and sure of my power

to go through.”

“And then?”

“Then one begins to get into it. The first two days one is apt to have the events of one's journey,

little incidents of travel, and thoughts of one's work and affairs, rising and fading and coming again;

but then the perspectives begin. I don't sleep much at nights on these journeys; I lie awake and stare

at the stars. About dawn, perhaps, and in the morning sunshine, I sleep! The nights this last time

were very short, never more than twilight, and I saw the glow of the sun always, just over the edge

of the world. But I had chosen the days of the new moon, so that I could have a glimpse of the

stars.... Years ago, I went from the Nile across the Libyan Desert east, and then the stars—the stars

in the later days of that journey—brought me near weeping.... You begin to feel alone on the third

day, when you find yourself out on some shining snowfield, and nothing of mankind visible in the

whole world save one landmark, one remote thin red triangle of iron, perhaps, in the saddle of the

ridge against the sky. All this busy world that has done so much and so marvellously, and is still so

little—you see it little as it is—and far off. All day long you go and the night comes, and it might be

another planet. Then, in the quiet, waking hours, one thinks of one's self and the great external

things, of space and eternity, and what one means by God.”

He mused.

“You think of death?”

“Not of my own. But when I go among snows and desolations—and usually I take my pilgrimage in

mountains or the north—I think very much of the Night of this World—the time when our sun will

be red and dull, and air and water will lie frozen together in a common snowfield where now the

forests of the tropics are steaming.... I think very much of that, and whether it is indeed God's

purpose that our kind should end, and the cities we have built, the books we have written, all that

we have given substance and a form, should lie dead beneath the snows.”

“You don't believe that?”

“No. But if it is not so―. I went threading my way among gorges and precipices, with my poor

brain dreaming of what the alternative should be, with my imagination straining and failing. Yet, in

those high airs and in such solitude, a kind of exaltation comes to men.... I remember that one night

I sat up and told the rascal stars very earnestly how they should not escape us in the end.”

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

“One becomes a personification up there,” he said. “One becomes the ambassador of mankind to

the outer world.

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

scales....

“Then there are hours when one is just exploring the wilderness like a child. Sometimes perhaps

one gets a glimpse from some precipice edge of the plains far away, and houses and roadways, and

remembers there is still a busy world of men. And at last one turns one's feet down some slope,

some gorge that leads back. You come down, perhaps, into a pine forest, and hear that queer clatter

reindeer make—and then, it may be, see a herdsman very far away, watching you. You wear your

pilgrim's badge, and he makes no sign of seeing you....

“You know, after these solitudes, I feel just the same queer disinclination to go back to the world of

men that I feel when I have to leave it. I think of dusty roads and hot valleys, and being looked at by

many people. I think of the trouble of working with colleagues and opponents. This last journey I

outstayed my time, camping in the pine woods for six days. Then my thoughts came round to my

proper work again. I got keen to go on with it, and so I came back into the world. You come back

physically clean—as though you had had your arteries and veins washed out. And your brain has

been cleaned, too.... I shall stick to the mountains now until I am old, and then I shall sail a boat in

Polynesia. That is what so many old men do. Only last year one of the great leaders of the samurai

—a white-haired man, who followed the Rule in spite of his one hundred and eleven years—was

found dead in his boat far away from any land, far to the south, lying like a child asleep....”

“That's better than a tumbled bed,” said I, “and some boy of a doctor jabbing you with injections,

and distressful people hovering about you.”

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

men die?”

It came to me suddenly as very strange that, even as we sat and talked, across deserted seas, on

burning sands, through the still aisles of forests, and in all the high and lonely places of the world,

beyond the margin where the ways and houses go, solitary men and women sailed alone or marched

alone, or clambered—quiet, resolute exiles; they stood alone amidst wildernesses of ice, on the

precipitous banks of roaring torrents, in monstrous caverns, or steering a tossing boat in the little

circle of the horizon amidst the tumbled, incessant sea, all in their several ways communing with

the emptiness, the enigmatic spaces and silences, the winds and torrents and soulless forces that lie

about the lit and ordered life of men.

I saw more clearly now something I had seen dimly already, in the bearing and the faces of this

Utopian chivalry, a faint persistent tinge of detachment from the immediate heats and hurries, the

little graces and delights, the tensions and stimulations of the daily world. It pleased me strangely to

think of this steadfast yearly pilgrimage of solitude, and how near men might come then to the high

distances of God.

§ 8

After that I remember we fell talking of the discipline of the Rule, of the Courts that try breaches of

it, and interpret doubtful cases—for, though a man may resign with due notice and be free after a

certain time to rejoin again, one deliberate breach may exclude a man for ever—of the system of

law that has grown up about such trials, and of the triennial council that revises and alters the Rule.

From that we passed to the discussion of the general constitution of this World State. Practically all

political power vests in the samurai. Not only are they the only administrators, lawyers, practising

doctors, and public officials of almost all kinds, but they are the only voters. Yet, by a curious

exception, the supreme legislative assembly must have one-tenth, and may have one-half of its

members outside the order, because, it is alleged, there is a sort of wisdom that comes of sin and

laxness, which is necessary to the perfect ruling of life. My double quoted me a verse from the

Canon on this matter that my unfortunate verbal memory did not retain, but it was in the nature of a

prayer to save the world from “unfermented men.” It would seem that Aristotle's idea of a rotation

of rulers, an idea that crops up again in Harrington's Oceana, that first Utopia of “the sovereign

people” (a Utopia that, through Danton's readings in English, played a disastrous part in the French

Revolution), gets a little respect in Utopia. The tendency is to give a practically permanent tenure to

good men. Every ruler and official, it is true, is put on his trial every three years before a jury drawn

by lot, according to the range of his activities, either from the samurai of his municipal area or from

the general catalogue of the samurai, but the business of this jury is merely to decide whether to

continue him in office or order a new election. In the majority of cases the verdict is continuation.

Even if it is not so the official may still appear as a candidate before the second and separate jury

which fills the vacant post....

My double mentioned a few scattered details of the electoral methods, but as at that time I believed

we were to have a number of further conversations, I did not exhaust my curiosities upon this

subject. Indeed, I was more than a little preoccupied and inattentive. The religion of the samurai

was after my heart, and it had taken hold of me very strongly.... But presently I fell questioning him

upon the complications that arise in the Modern Utopia through the differences between the races of

men, and found my attention returning. But the matter of that discussion I shall put apart into a

separate chapter. In the end we came back to the particulars of this great Rule of Life that any man

desiring of joining the samurai must follow.

I remember how, after our third bout of talking, I walked back through the streets of Utopian

London to rejoin the botanist at our hotel.

My double lived in an apartment in a great building—I should judge about where, in our London,

the Tate Gallery squats, and, as the day was fine, and I had no reason for hurry, I went not by the

covered mechanical way, but on foot along the broad, tree-set terraces that follow the river on either

side.

It was afternoon, and the mellow Thames Valley sunlight, warm and gentle, lit a clean and gracious

world. There were many people abroad, going to and fro, unhurrying, but not aimless, and I

watched them so attentively that were you to ask me for the most elementary details of the buildings

and terraces that lay back on either bank, or of the pinnacles and towers and parapets that laced the

sky, I could not tell you them. But of the people I could tell a great deal.

No Utopians wear black, and for all the frequency of the samurai uniform along the London ways

the general effect is of a gaily-coloured population. You never see anyone noticeably ragged or

dirty; the police, who answer questions and keep order (and are quite distinct from the organisation

for the pursuit of criminals) see to that; and shabby people are very infrequent. People who want to

save money for other purposes, or who do not want much bother with their clothing, seem to wear

costumes of rough woven cloth, dyed an unobtrusive brown or green, over fine woollen

underclothing, and so achieve a decent comfort in its simplest form. Others outside the Rule of the

samurai range the spectrum for colour, and have every variety of texture; the colours attained by the

Utopian dyers seem to me to be fuller and purer than the common range of stuffs on earth; and the

subtle folding of the woollen materials witness that Utopian Bradford is no whit behind her earthly

sister. White is extraordinarily frequent; white woollen tunics and robes into which are woven bands

of brilliant colour, abound. Often these ape the cut and purple edge that distinguishes the samurai.

In Utopian London the air is as clear and less dusty than it is among high mountains; the roads are

made of unbroken surfaces, and not of friable earth; all heating is done by electricity, and no coal

ever enters the town; there are no horses or dogs, and so there is not a suspicion of smoke and

scarcely a particle of any sort of dirt to render white impossible.

The radiated influence of the uniform of the samurai has been to keep costume simple, and this,

perhaps, emphasises the general effect of vigorous health, of shapely bodies. Everyone is well

grown and well nourished; everyone seems in good condition; everyone walks well, and has that

clearness of eye that comes with cleanness of blood. In London I am apt to consider myself of a

passable size and carriage; here I feel small and mean-looking. The faint suspicions of spinal

curvatures, skew feet, unequal legs, and ill-grown bones, that haunt one in a London crowd, the

plain intimations—in yellow faces, puffy faces, spotted and irregular complexions, in nervous

movements and coughs and colds—of bad habits and an incompetent or disregarded medical

profession, do not appear here. I notice few old people, but there seems to be a greater proportion of

men and women at or near the prime of life.

I hang upon that. I have seen one or two fat people here—they are all the more noticeable because

they are rare. But wrinkled age? Have I yet in Utopia set eyes on a bald head?

The Utopians have brought a sounder physiological science than ours to bear upon regimen. People

know better what to do and what to avoid, how to foresee and forestall coming trouble, and how to

evade and suppress the subtle poisons that blunt the edge of sensation. They have put off the years

of decay. They keep their teeth, they keep their digestions, they ward off gout and rheumatism,

neuralgia and influenza and all those cognate decays that bend and wrinkle men and women in the

middle years of existence. They have extended the level years far into the seventies, and age, when

it comes, comes swiftly and easily. The feverish hurry of our earth, the decay that begins before

growth has ceased, is replaced by a ripe prolonged maturity. This modern Utopia is an adult world.

The flushed romance, the predominant eroticisms, the adventurous uncertainty of a world in which

youth prevails, gives place here to a grave deliberation, to a fuller and more powerful emotion, to a

broader handling of life.

Yet youth is here.

Amidst the men whose faces have been made fine by thought and steadfast living, among the

serene-eyed women, comes youth, gaily-coloured, buoyantly healthy, with challenging eyes, with

fresh and eager face....

For everyone in Utopia who is sane enough to benefit, study and training last until twenty; then

comes the travel year, and many are still students until twenty-four or twenty-five. Most are still, in

a sense, students throughout life, but it is thought that, unless responsible action is begun in some

form in the early twenties, will undergoes a partial atrophy. But the full swing of adult life is hardly

attained until thirty is reached. Men marry before the middle thirties, and the women rather earlier,

few are mothers before five-and-twenty. The majority of those who become samurai do so between

twenty-seven and thirty-five. And, between seventeen and thirty, the Utopians have their dealings

with love, and the play and excitement of love is a chief interest in life. Much freedom of act is

allowed them so that their wills may grow freely. For the most part they end mated, and love gives

place to some special and more enduring interest, though, indeed, there is love between older men

and fresh girls, and between youths and maturer women. It is in these most graceful and beautiful

years of life that such freedoms of dress as the atmosphere of Utopia permits are to be seen, and the

crude bright will and imagination of youth peeps out in ornament and colour.

Figures come into my sight and possess me for a moment and pass, and give place to others; there

comes a dusky little Jewess, red-lipped and amber-clad, with a deep crimson flower—I know not

whether real or sham—in the dull black of her hair. She passes me with an unconscious disdain; and

then I am looking at a brightly-smiling, blue-eyed girl, tall, ruddy, and freckled warmly, clad like a

stage Rosalind, and talking gaily to a fair young man, a novice under the Rule. A red-haired mother

under the Lesser Rule goes by, green-gowned, with dark green straps crossing between her breasts,

and her two shock-headed children, bare-legged and lightly shod, tug at her hands on either side.

Then a grave man in a long, fur-trimmed robe, a merchant, maybe, debates some serious matter

with a white-tunicked clerk. And the clerk's face―? I turn to mark the straight, blue-black hair. The

man must be Chinese....

Then come two short-bearded men in careless indigo blue raiment, both of them convulsed with

laughter—men outside the Rule, who practise, perhaps, some art—and then one of the samurai, in

cheerful altercation with a blue-robed girl of eight. “But you could have come back yesterday,

Dadda,” she persists. He is deeply sunburnt, and suddenly there passes before my mind the picture

of a snowy mountain waste at night-fall and a solitary small figure under the stars....

When I come back to the present thing again, my eye is caught at once by a young negro, carrying

books in his hand, a prosperous-looking, self-respecting young negro, in a trimly-cut coat of purple-

blue and silver.

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

CHAPTER THE TENTH

Race in Utopia

§ 1

Above the sphere of the elemental cravings and necessities, the soul of man is in a perpetual

vacillation between two conflicting impulses: the desire to assert his individual differences, the

desire for distinction, and his terror of isolation. He wants to stand out, but not too far out, and, on

the contrary, he wants to merge himself with a group, with some larger body, but not altogether.

Through all the things of life runs this tortuous compromise, men follow the fashions but resent

ready-made uniforms on every plane of their being. The disposition to form aggregations and to

imagine aggregations is part of the incurable nature of man; it is one of the great natural forces the

statesman must utilise, and against which he must construct effectual defences. The study of the

aggregations and of the ideals of aggregations about which men's sympathies will twine, and upon

which they will base a large proportion of their conduct and personal policy, is the legitimate

definition of sociology.

Now the sort of aggregation to which men and women will refer themselves is determined partly by

the strength and idiosyncrasy of the individual imagination, and partly by the reek of ideas that

chances to be in the air at the time. Men and women may vary greatly both in their innate and their

acquired disposition towards this sort of larger body or that, to which their social reference can be

made. The “natural” social reference of a man is probably to some rather vaguely conceived tribe,

as the “natural” social reference of a dog is to a pack. But just as the social reference of a dog may

be educated until the reference to a pack is completely replaced by a reference to an owner, so on

his higher plane of educability the social reference of the civilised man undergoes the most

remarkable transformations. But the power and scope of his imagination and the need he has of

response sets limits to this process. A highly intellectualised mature mind may refer for its data very

consistently to ideas of a higher being so remote and indefinable as God, so comprehensive as

humanity, so far-reaching as the purpose in things. I write “may,” but I doubt if this exaltation of

reference is ever permanently sustained. Comte, in his Positive Polity, exposes his soul with great

freedom, and the curious may trace how, while he professes and quite honestly intends to refer

himself always to his “Greater Being” Humanity, he narrows constantly to his projected “Western

Republic” of civilised men, and quite frequently to the minute indefinite body of Positivist

subscribers. And the history of the Christian Church, with its development of orders and cults, sects

and dissents, the history of fashionable society with its cliques and sets and every political history

with its cabals and inner cabinets, witness to the struggle that goes on in the minds of men to adjust

themselves to a body larger indeed than themselves, but which still does not strain and escape their

imaginative grasp.

The statesman, both for himself and others, must recognise this inadequacy of grasp, and the

necessity for real and imaginary aggregations to sustain men in their practical service of the order of

the world. He must be a sociologist; he must study the whole science of aggregations in relation to

that World State to which his reason and his maturest thought direct him. He must lend himself to

the development of aggregatory ideas that favour the civilising process, and he must do his best to

promote the disintegration of aggregations and the effacement of aggregatory ideas, that keep men

narrow and unreasonably prejudiced one against another.

He will, of course, know that few men are even rudely consistent in such matters, that the same man

in different moods and on different occasions, is capable of referring himself in perfect good faith,

not only to different, but to contradictory larger beings, and that the more important thing about an

aggregatory idea from the State maker's point of view is not so much what it explicitly involves as

what it implicitly repudiates. The natural man does not feel he is aggregating at all, unless he

aggregates against something. He refers himself to the tribe; he is loyal to the tribe, and quite

inseparably he fears or dislikes those others outside the tribe. The tribe is always at least defensively

hostile and usually actively hostile to humanity beyond the aggregation. The Anti-idea, it would

seem, is inseparable from the aggregatory idea; it is a necessity of the human mind. When we think

of the class A as desirable, we think of Not-A as undesirable. The two things are as inevitably

connected as the tendons of our hands, so that when we flatten down our little fingers on our palms,

the fourth digit, whether we want it or not, comes down halfway. All real working gods, one may

remark, all gods that are worshipped emotionally, are tribal gods, and every attempt to universalise

the idea of God trails dualism and the devil after it as a moral necessity.

When we inquire, as well as the unformed condition of terrestrial sociology permits, into the

aggregatory ideas that seem to satisfy men, we find a remarkable complex, a disorderly complex, in

the minds of nearly all our civilised contemporaries. For example, all sorts of aggregatory ideas

come and go across the chameleon surfaces of my botanist's mind. He has a strong feeling for

systematic botanists as against plant physiologists, whom he regards as lewd and evil scoundrels in

this relation, but he has a strong feeling for all botanists, and, indeed, all biologists, as against

physicists, and those who profess the exact sciences, all of whom he regards as dull, mechanical,

ugly-minded scoundrels in this relation; but he has a strong feeling for all who profess what is

called Science as against psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and literary men, whom he

regards as wild, foolish, immoral scoundrels in this relation; but he has a strong feeling for all

educated men as against the working man, whom he regards as a cheating, lying, loafing, drunken,

thievish, dirty scoundrel in this relation; but so soon as the working man is comprehended together

with those others, as Englishmen—which includes, in this case, I may remark, the Scottish and

Welsh—he holds them superior to all other sorts of European, whom he regards, &c....

Now one perceives in all these aggregatory ideas and rearrangements of the sympathies one of the

chief vices of human thought, due to its obsession by classificatory suggestions. [Footnote: See

Chapter the First, § 5, and the Appendix.] The necessity for marking our classes has brought with it

a bias for false and excessive contrast, and we never invent a term but we are at once cramming it

with implications beyond its legitimate content. There is no feat of irrelevance that people will not

perform quite easily in this way; there is no class, however accidental, to which they will not at

once ascribe deeply distinctive qualities. The seventh sons of seventh sons have remarkable powers

of insight; people with a certain sort of ear commit crimes of violence; people with red hair have

souls of fire; all democratic socialists are trustworthy persons; all people born in Ireland have vivid

imaginations and all Englishmen are clods; all Hindoos are cowardly liars; all curly-haired people

are good-natured; all hunch-backs are energetic and wicked, and all Frenchmen eat frogs. Such

stupid generalisations have been believed with the utmost readiness, and acted upon by great

numbers of sane, respectable people. And when the class is one's own class, when it expresses one

of the aggregations to which one refers one's own activities, then the disposition to divide all

qualities between this class and its converse, and to cram one's own class with every desirable

distinction, becomes overwhelming.

It is part of the training of the philosopher to regard all such generalisations with suspicion; it is part

of the training of the Utopist and statesman, and all good statesmen are Utopists, to mingle

something very like animosity with that suspicion. For crude classifications and false

generalisations are the curse of all organised human life.

§ 2

Disregarding classes, cliques, sets, castes, and the like minor aggregations, concerned for the most

part with details and minor aspects of life, one finds among the civilised peoples of the world

certain broad types of aggregatory idea. There are, firstly, the national ideas, ideas which, in their

perfection, require a uniformity of physical and mental type, a common idiom, a common religion,

a distinctive style of costume, decoration, and thought, and a compact organisation acting with

complete external unity. Like the Gothic cathedral, the national idea is never found complete with

all its parts; but one has in Russia, with her insistence on political and religious orthodoxy,

something approaching it pretty closely, and again in the inland and typical provinces of China,

where even a strange pattern of hat arouses hostility. We had it in vigorous struggle to exist in

England under the earlier Georges in the minds of those who supported the Established Church. The

idea of the fundamental nature of nationality is so ingrained in thought, with all the usual

exaggeration of implication, that no one laughs at talk about Swedish painting or American

literature. And I will confess and point out that my own detachment from these delusions is so

imperfect and discontinuous that in another passage I have committed myself to a short assertion of

the exceptionally noble quality of the English imagination. [Footnote: Chapter the Seventh, § 6.] I

am constantly gratified by flattering untruths about English superiority which I should reject

indignantly were the application bluntly personal, and I am ever ready to believe the scenery of

England, the poetry of England, even the decoration and music of England, in some mystic and

impregnable way, the best. This habit of intensifying all class definitions, and particularly those in

which one has a personal interest, is in the very constitution of man's mind. It is part of the defect of

that instrument. We may watch against it and prevent it doing any great injustices, or leading us into

follies, but to eradicate it is an altogether different matter. There it is, to be reckoned with, like the

coccyx, the pineal eye, and the vermiform appendix. And a too consistent attack on it may lead

simply to its inversion, to a vindictively pro-foreigner attitude that is equally unwise.

The second sort of aggregatory ideas, running very often across the boundaries of national ideas and

in conflict with them, are religious ideas. In Western Europe true national ideas only emerged to

their present hectic vigour after the shock of the Reformation had liberated men from the great

tradition of a Latin-speaking Christendom, a tradition the Roman Catholic Church has sustained as

its modification of the old Latin-speaking Imperialism in the rule of the pontifex maximus. There

was, and there remains to this day, a profound disregard of local dialect and race in the Roman

Catholic tradition, which has made that Church a persistently disintegrating influence in national

life. Equally spacious and equally regardless of tongues and peoples is the great Arabic-speaking

religion of Mahomet. Both Christendom and Islam are indeed on their secular sides imperfect

realisations of a Utopian World State. But the secular side was the weaker side of these cults; they

produced no sufficiently great statesmen to realise their spiritual forces, and it is not in Rome under

pontifical rule, nor in Munster under the Anabaptists, but rather in Thomas à Kempis and Saint

Augustin's City of God that we must seek for the Utopias of Christianity.

In the last hundred years a novel development of material forces, and especially of means of

communication, has done very much to break up the isolations in which nationality perfected its

prejudices and so to render possible the extension and consolidation of such a world-wide culture as

mediæval Christendom and Islam foreshadowed. The first onset of these expansive developments

has been marked in the world of mind by an expansion of political ideals—Comte's “Western

Republic” (1848) was the first Utopia that involved the synthesis of numerous States—by the

development of “Imperialisms” in the place of national policies, and by the search for a basis for

wider political unions in racial traditions and linguistic affinities. Anglo-Saxonism, Pan-

Germanism, and the like are such synthetic ideas. Until the eighties, the general tendency of

progressive thought was at one with the older Christian tradition which ignored “race,” and the aim

of the expansive liberalism movement, so far as it had a clear aim, was to Europeanise the world, to

extend the franchise to negroes, put Polynesians into trousers, and train the teeming myriads of

India to appreciate the exquisite lilt of The Lady of the Lake. There is always some absurdity mixed

with human greatness, and we must not let the fact that the middle Victorians counted Scott, the

suffrage and pantaloons among the supreme blessings of life, conceal from us the very real nobility

of their dream of England's mission to the world....

We of this generation have seen a flood of reaction against such universalism. The great intellectual

developments that centre upon the work of Darwin have exacerbated the realisation that life is a

conflict between superior and inferior types, it has underlined the idea that specific survival rates

are of primary significance in the world's development, and a swarm of inferior intelligences has

applied to human problems elaborated and exaggerated versions of these generalisations. These

social and political followers of Darwin have fallen into an obvious confusion between race and

nationality, and into the natural trap of patriotic conceit. The dissent of the Indian and Colonial

governing class to the first crude applications of liberal propositions in India has found a voice of

unparalleled penetration in Mr. Kipling, whose want of intellectual deliberation is only equalled by

his poietic power. The search for a basis for a new political synthesis in adaptable sympathies based

on linguistic affinities, was greatly influenced by Max Müller's unaccountable assumption that

language indicated kindred, and led straight to wildly speculative ethnology, to the discovery that

there was a Keltic race, a Teutonic race, an Indo-European race, and so forth. A book that has had

enormous influence in this matter, because of its use in teaching, is J. R. Green's Short History of

the English People, with its grotesque insistence upon Anglo-Saxonism. And just now, the world is

in a sort of delirium about race and the racial struggle. The Briton forgetting his Defoe, [Footnote:

The True-born Englishman.] the Jew forgetting the very word proselyte, the German forgetting his

anthropometric variations, and the Italian forgetting everything, are obsessed by the singular purity

of their blood, and the danger of contamination the mere continuance of other races involves. True

to the law that all human aggregation involves the development of a spirit of opposition to whatever

is external to the aggregation, extraordinary intensifications of racial definition are going on; the

vileness, the inhumanity, the incompatibility of alien races is being steadily exaggerated. The

natural tendency of every human being towards a stupid conceit in himself and his kind, a stupid

depreciation of all unlikeness, is traded upon by this bastard science. With the weakening of

national references, and with the pause before reconstruction in religious belief, these new arbitrary

and unsubstantial race prejudices become daily more formidable. They are shaping policies and

modifying laws, and they will certainly be responsible for a large proportion of the wars, hardships,

and cruelties the immediate future holds in store for our earth.

No generalisations about race are too extravagant for the inflamed credulity of the present time. No

attempt is ever made to distinguish differences in inherent quality—the true racial differences—

from artificial differences due to culture. No lesson seems ever to be drawn from history of the

fluctuating incidence of the civilising process first upon this race and then upon that. The politically

ascendant peoples of the present phase are understood to be the superior races, including such types

as the Sussex farm labourer, the Bowery tough, the London hooligan, and the Paris apache; the

races not at present prospering politically, such as the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Spanish, the

Moors, the Chinese, the Hindoos, the Peruvians, and all uncivilised people are represented as the

inferior races, unfit to associate with the former on terms of equality, unfit to intermarry with them

on any terms, unfit for any decisive voice in human affairs. In the popular imagination of Western

Europe, the Chinese are becoming bright gamboge in colour, and unspeakably abominable in every

respect; the people who are black—the people who have fuzzy hair and flattish noses, and no calves

to speak of—are no longer held to be within the pale of humanity. These superstitions work out

along the obvious lines of the popular logic. The depopulation of the Congo Free State by the

Belgians, the horrible massacres of Chinese by European soldiery during the Pekin expedition, are

condoned as a painful but necessary part of the civilising process of the world. The world-wide

repudiation of slavery in the nineteenth century was done against a vast sullen force of ignorant

pride, which, reinvigorated by the new delusions, swings back again to power.

“Science” is supposed to lend its sanction to race mania, but it is only “science” as it is understood

by very illiterate people that does anything of the sort—“scientists'” science, in fact. What science

has to tell about “The Races of Man” will be found compactly set forth by Doctor J. Deinker, in the

book published under that title. [Footnote: See also an excellent paper in the American Journal of

Sociology for March, 1904, The Psychology of Race Prejudice, by W. I. Thomas.] From that book

one may learn the beginnings of race charity. Save for a few isolated pools of savage humanity,

there is probably no pure race in the whole world. The great continental populations are all complex

mixtures of numerous and fluctuating types. Even the Jews present every kind of skull that is

supposed to be racially distinctive, a vast range of complexion—from blackness in Goa, to extreme

fairness in Holland—and a vast mental and physical diversity. Were the Jews to discontinue all

intermarriage with “other races” henceforth for ever, it would depend upon quite unknown laws of

fecundity, prepotency, and variability, what their final type would be, or, indeed, whether any

particular type would ever prevail over diversity. And, without going beyond the natives of the

British Isles, one can discover an enormous range of types, tall and short, straight-haired and curly,

fair and dark, supremely intelligent and unteachably stupid, straightforward, disingenuous, and what

not. The natural tendency is to forget all this range directly “race” comes under discussion, to take

either an average or some quite arbitrary ideal as the type, and think only of that. The more difficult

thing to do, but the thing that must be done if we are to get just results in this discussion, is to do

one's best to bear the range in mind.

Let us admit that the average Chinaman is probably different in complexion, and, indeed, in all his

physical and psychical proportions, from the average Englishman. Does that render their association

upon terms of equality in a World State impossible? What the average Chinaman or Englishman

may be, is of no importance whatever to our plan of a World State. It is not averages that exist, but

individuals. The average Chinaman will never meet the average Englishman anywhere; only

individual Chinamen will meet individual Englishmen. Now among Chinamen will be found a

range of variety as extensive as among Englishmen, and there is no single trait presented by all

Chinamen and no Englishman, or vice versa. Even the oblique eye is not universal in China, and

there are probably many Chinamen who might have been “changed at birth,” taken away and

educated into quite passable Englishmen. Even after we have separated out and allowed for the

differences in carriage, physique, moral prepossessions, and so forth, due to their entirely divergent

cultures, there remains, no doubt, a very great difference between the average Chinaman and the

average Englishman; but would that amount to a wider difference than is to be found between

extreme types of Englishmen?

For my own part I do not think that it would. But it is evident that any precise answer can be made

only when anthropology has adopted much more exact and exhaustive methods of inquiry, and a far

more precise analysis than its present resources permit.

Be it remembered how doubtful and tainted is the bulk of our evidence in these matters. These are

extraordinarily subtle inquiries, from which few men succeed in disentangling the threads of their

personal associations—the curiously interwoven strands of self-love and self-interest that affect

their inquiries. One might almost say that instinct fights against such investigations, as it does

undoubtedly against many necessary medical researches. But while a long special training, a high

tradition and the possibility of reward and distinction, enable the medical student to face many tasks

that are at once undignified and physically repulsive, the people from whom we get our

anthropological information are rarely men of more than average intelligence, and of no mental

training at all. And the problems are far more elusive. It surely needs at least the gifts and training

of a first-class novelist, combined with a sedulous patience that probably cannot be hoped for in

combination with these, to gauge the all-round differences between man and man. Even where there

are no barriers of language and colour, understanding may be nearly impossible. How few educated

people seem to understand the servant class in England, or the working men! Except for Mr. Bart

Kennedy's A Man Adrift, I know of scarcely any book that shows a really sympathetic and living

understanding of the navvy, the longshore sailor man, the rough chap of our own race. Caricatures,

luridly tragic or gaily comic, in which the misconceptions of the author blend with the

preconceptions of the reader and achieve success, are, of course, common enough. And then

consider the sort of people who pronounce judgments on the moral and intellectual capacity of the

negro, the Malay, or the Chinaman. You have missionaries, native schoolmasters, employers of

coolies, traders, simple downright men, who scarcely suspect the existence of any sources of error

in their verdicts, who are incapable of understanding the difference between what is innate and what

is acquired, much less of distinguishing them in their interplay. Now and then one seems to have a

glimpse of something really living—in Mary Kingsley's buoyant work, for instance—and even that

may be no more than my illusion.

For my own part I am disposed to discount all adverse judgments and all statements of

insurmountable differences between race and race. I talk upon racial qualities to all men who have

had opportunities of close observation, and I find that their insistence upon these differences is

usually in inverse proportion to their intelligence. It may be the chance of my encounters, but that is

my clear impression. Common sailors will generalise in the profoundest way about Irishmen, and

Scotchmen, and Yankees, and Nova Scotians, and “Dutchies,” until one might think one talked of

different species of animal, but the educated explorer flings clear of all these delusions. To him men

present themselves individualised, and if they classify it is by some skin-deep accident of tint, some

trick of the tongue, or habit of gesture, or such-like superficiality. And after all there exists to-day

available one kind at least of unbiassed anthropological evidence. There are photographs. Let the

reader turn over the pages of some such copiously illustrated work as The Living Races of Mankind,

[Footnote: The Living Races of Mankind, by H. N. Hutchinson, J. W. Gregory, and R. Lydekker.

(Hutchinson.)] and look into the eyes of one alien face after another. Are they not very like the

people one knows? For the most part, one finds it hard to believe that, with a common language and

common social traditions, one would not get on very well with these people. Here or there is a

brutish or evil face, but you can find as brutish and evil in the Strand on any afternoon. There are

differences no doubt, but fundamental incompatibilities—no! And very many of them send out a ray

of special resemblance and remind one more strongly of this friend or that, than they do of their

own kind. One notes with surprise that one's good friend and neighbour X and an anonymous naked

Gold Coast negro belong to one type, as distinguished from one's dear friend Y and a beaming

individual from Somaliland, who as certainly belong to another.

In one matter the careless and prejudiced nature of accepted racial generalisations is particularly

marked. A great and increasing number of people are persuaded that “half-breeds” are peculiarly

evil creatures—as hunchbacks and bastards were supposed to be in the middle ages. The full legend

of the wickedness of the half-breed is best to be learnt from a drunken mean white from Virginia or

the Cape. The half-breed, one hears, combines all the vices of either parent, he is wretchedly poor in

health and spirit, but vindictive, powerful, and dangerous to an extreme degree, his morals—the

mean white has high and exacting standards—are indescribable even in whispers in a saloon, and so

on, and so on. There is really not an atom of evidence an unprejudiced mind would accept to sustain

any belief of the sort. There is nothing to show that the children of racial admixture are, as a class,

inherently either better or worse in any respect than either parent. There is an equally baseless

theory that they are better, a theory displayed to a fine degree of foolishness in the article on

Shakespeare in the Encyclopædia Britannica. Both theories belong to the vast edifice of sham

science that smothers the realities of modern knowledge. It may be that most “half-breeds” are

failures in life, but that proves nothing. They are, in an enormous number of cases, illegitimate and

outcast from the normal education of either race; they are brought up in homes that are the battle-

grounds of conflicting cultures; they labour under a heavy premium of disadvantage. There is, of

course, a passing suggestion of Darwin's to account for atavism that might go to support the theory

of the vileness of half-breeds, if it had ever been proved. But, then, it never has been proved. There

is no proof in the matter at all.

§ 3

Suppose, now, there is such a thing as an all-round inferior race. Is that any reason why we should

propose to preserve it for ever in a condition of tutelage? Whether there is a race so inferior I do not

know, but certainly there is no race so superior as to be trusted with human charges. The true

answer to Aristotle's plea for slavery, that there are “natural slaves,” lies in the fact that there are no

“natural” masters. Power is no more to be committed to men without discipline and restriction than

alcohol. The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the

superior. There is only one sane and logical thing to be done with a really inferior race, and that is to

exterminate it.

Now there are various ways of exterminating a race, and most of them are cruel. You may end it

with fire and sword after the old Hebrew fashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the

Spaniards did the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowly with deleterious

commodities, as the Americans do with most of their Indians; you may incite it to wear clothing to

which it is not accustomed and to live under new and strange conditions that will expose it to

infectious diseases to which you yourselves are immune, as the missionaries do the Polynesians;

you may resort to honest simple murder, as we English did with the Tasmanians; or you can

maintain such conditions as conduce to “race suicide,” as the British administration does in Fiji.

Suppose, then, for a moment, that there is an all-round inferior race; a Modern Utopia is under the

hard logic of life, and it would have to exterminate such a race as quickly as it could. On the whole,

the Fijian device seems the least cruel. But Utopia would do that without any clumsiness of race

distinction, in exactly the same manner, and by the same machinery, as it exterminates all its own

defective and inferior strains; that is to say, as we have already discussed in Chapter the Fifth, § 1,

by its marriage laws, and by the laws of the minimum wage. That extinction need never be

discriminatory. If any of the race did, after all, prove to be fit to survive, they would survive—they

would be picked out with a sure and automatic justice from the over-ready condemnation of all their

kind.

Is there, however, an all-round inferior race in the world? Even the Australian black-fellow is,

perhaps, not quite so entirely eligible for extinction as a good, wholesome, horse-racing, sheep-

farming Australian white may think. These queer little races, the black-fellows, the Pigmies, the

Bushmen, may have their little gifts, a greater keenness, a greater fineness of this sense or that, a

quaintness of the imagination or what not, that may serve as their little unique addition to the

totality of our Utopian civilisation. We are supposing that every individual alive on earth is alive in

Utopia, and so all the surviving “black-fellows” are there. Every one of them in Utopia has had

what none have had on earth, a fair education and fair treatment, justice, and opportunity. Suppose

that the common idea is right about the general inferiority of these people, then it would follow that

in Utopia most of them are childless, and working at or about the minimum wage, and some will

have passed out of all possibility of offspring under the hand of the offended law; but still—cannot

we imagine some few of these little people—whom you must suppose neither naked nor clothed in

the European style, but robed in the Utopian fashion—may have found some delicate art to practise,

some peculiar sort of carving, for example, that justifies God in creating them? Utopia has sound

sanitary laws, sound social laws, sound economic laws; what harm are these people going to do?

Some may be even prosperous and admired, may have married women of their own or some other

race, and so may be transmitting that distinctive thin thread of excellence, to take its due place in

the great synthesis of the future.

And, indeed, coming along that terrace in Utopia, I see a little figure, a little bright-eyed, bearded

man, inky black, frizzy haired, and clad in a white tunic and black hose, and with a mantle of lemon

yellow wrapped about his shoulders. He walks, as most Utopians walk, as though he had reason to

be proud of something, as though he had no reason to be afraid of anything in the world. He carries

a portfolio in his hand. It is that, I suppose, as much as his hair, that recalls the Quartier Latin to my

mind.

§ 4

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

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

“Of course,” said I, “when you say Chinaman, you think of a creature with a pigtail, long nails, and

insanitary habits, and when you say negro you think of a filthy-headed, black creature in an old hat.

You do this because your imagination is too feeble to disentangle the inherent qualities of a thing

from its habitual associations.”

“Insult isn't argument,” said the botanist.

“Neither is unsound implication. You make a question of race into a question of unequal cultures.

You would not like your daughter to marry the sort of negro who steals hens, but then you would

also not like your daughter to marry a pure English hunchback with a squint, or a drunken cab tout

of Norman blood. As a matter of fact, very few well-bred English girls do commit that sort of

indiscretion. But you don't think it necessary to generalise against men of your own race because

there are drunken cab touts, and why should you generalise against negroes? Because the proportion

of undesirables is higher among negroes, that does not justify a sweeping condemnation. You may

have to condemn most, but why all? There may be—neither of us knows enough to deny—negroes

who are handsome, capable, courageous.”

“Ugh!” said the botanist.

“How detestable you must find Othello!”

It is my Utopia, and for a moment I could almost find it in my heart to spite the botanist by creating

a modern Desdemona and her lover sooty black to the lips, there before our eyes. But I am not so

sure of my case as that, and for the moment there shall come nothing more than a swart-faced,

dusky Burmese woman in the dress of the Greater Rule, with her tall Englishman (as he might be on

earth) at her side. That, however, is a digression from my conversation with the botanist.

“And the Chinaman?” said the botanist.

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

“Chinamen and white women, for example.”

“Yes,” I said, “you've got to swallow that, anyhow; you shall swallow that.”

He finds the idea too revolting for comment.

I try and make the thing seem easier for him. “Do try,” I said, “to grasp a Modern Utopian's

conditions. The Chinaman will speak the same language as his wife—whatever her race may be—

he will wear costume of the common civilised fashion, he will have much the same education as his

European rival, read the same literature, bow to the same traditions. And you must remember a wife

in Utopia is singularly not subject to her husband....”

The botanist proclaims his invincible conclusion: “Everyone would cut her!”

“This is Utopia,” I said, and then sought once more to tranquillise his mind. “No doubt among the

vulgar, coarse-minded people outside the Rule there may be something of the sort. Every earthly

moral blockhead, a little educated, perhaps, is to be found in Utopia. You will, no doubt, find the

‘cut’ and the ‘boycott,’ and all those nice little devices by which dull people get a keen edge on life,

in their place here, and their place here is somewhere―”

I turned a thumb earthward. “There!”

The botanist did not answer for a little while. Then he said, with some temper and great emphasis:

“Well, I'm jolly glad anyhow that I'm not to be a permanent resident in this Utopia, if our daughters

are to be married to Hottentots by regulation. I'm jolly glad.”

He turned his back on me.

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

I had to bring him, I suppose; there's no getting away from him in this life. But, as I have already

observed, the happy ancients went to their Utopias without this sort of company.

§ 5

What gives the botanist so great an advantage in all his Anti-Utopian utterances is his

unconsciousness of his own limitations. He thinks in little pieces that lie about loose, and nothing

has any necessary link with anything else in his mind. So that I cannot retort upon him by asking

him, if he objects to this synthesis of all nations, tongues and peoples in a World State, what

alternative ideal he proposes.

People of this sort do not even feel the need of alternatives. Beyond the scope of a few personal

projects, meeting Her again, and things like that, they do not feel that there is a future. They are

unencumbered by any baggage of convictions whatever, in relation to that. That, at least, is the only

way in which I can explain our friend's high intellectual mobility. Attempts to correlate

statesmanship, which they regard with interest as a dramatic interplay of personalities, with any

secular movement of humanity, they class with the differential calculus and Darwinism, as things

far too difficult to be anything but finally and subtly wrong.

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

If you are not prepared to regard a world-wide synthesis of all cultures and polities and races into

one World State as the desirable end upon which all civilising efforts converge, what do you regard

as the desirable end? Synthesis, one may remark in passing, does not necessarily mean fusion, nor

does it mean uniformity.

The alternatives fall roughly under three headings. The first is to assume there is a best race, to

define as well as one can that best race, and to regard all other races as material for extermination.

This has a fine, modern, biological air (“Survival of the Fittest”). If you are one of those queer

German professors who write insanity about Welt-Politik, you assume the best race is the

“Teutonic”; Cecil Rhodes affected that triumph of creative imagination, the “Anglo-Saxon race”;

my friend, Moses Cohen, thinks there is much to be said for the Jew. On its premises, this is a

perfectly sound and reasonable policy, and it opens out a brilliant prospect for the scientific inventor

for what one might call Welt-Apparat in the future, for national harrowing and reaping machines,

and race-destroying fumigations. The great plain of China (“Yellow Peril”) lends itself particularly

to some striking wholesale undertaking; it might, for example, be flooded for a few days, and then

disinfected with volcanic chlorine. Whether, when all the inferior races have been stamped out, the

superior race would not proceed at once, or after a brief millennial period of social harmony, to

divide itself into sub-classes, and begin the business over again at a higher level, is an interesting

residual question into which we need not now penetrate.

That complete development of a scientific Welt-Politik is not, however, very widely advocated at

present, no doubt from a want of confidence in the public imagination. We have, however, a very

audible and influential school, the Modern Imperialist school, which distinguishes its own race—

there is a German, a British, and an Anglo-Saxon section in the school, and a wider teaching which

embraces the whole “white race” in one remarkable tolerance—as the superior race, as one, indeed,

superior enough to own slaves, collectively, if not individually; and the exponents of this doctrine

look with a resolute, truculent, but slightly indistinct eye to a future in which all the rest of the

world will be in subjection to these elect. The ideals of this type are set forth pretty clearly in Mr.

Kidd's Control of the Tropics. The whole world is to be administered by the “white” Powers—Mr.

Kidd did not anticipate Japan—who will see to it that their subjects do not “prevent the utilisation

of the immense natural resources which they have in charge.” Those other races are to be regarded

as children, recalcitrant children at times, and without any of the tender emotions of paternity. It is a

little doubtful whether the races lacking “in the elementary qualities of social efficiency” are

expected to acquire them under the chastening hands of those races which, through “strength and

energy of character, humanity, probity, and integrity, and a single-minded devotion to conceptions

of duty,” are developing “the resources of the richest regions of the earth” over their heads, or

whether this is the ultimate ideal.

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

Liberalism in England is not quite the same thing as Liberalism in the rest of the world; it is woven

of two strands. There is Whiggism, the powerful tradition of seventeenth-century Protestant and

republican England, with its great debt to republican Rome, its strong constructive and disciplinary

bias, its broad and originally very living and intelligent outlook; and interwoven with this there is

the sentimental and logical Liberalism that sprang from the stresses of the eighteenth century, that

finds its early scarce differentiated expression in Harrington's Oceana, and after fresh draughts of

the tradition of Brutus and Cato and some elegant trifling with noble savages, budded in La Cité

Morellyste, flowered in the emotional democratic naturalism of Rousseau, and bore abundant fruit

in the French Revolution. These are two very distinct strands. Directly they were freed in America

from the grip of conflict with British Toryism, they came apart as the Republican and Democratic

parties respectively. Their continued union in Great Britain is a political accident. Because of this

mixture, the whole career of English-speaking Liberalism, though it has gone to one unbroken

strain of eloquence, has never produced a clear statement of policy in relation to other peoples

politically less fortunate. It has developed no definite ideas at all about the future of mankind. The

Whig disposition, which once had some play in India, was certainly to attempt to anglicise the

“native,” to assimilate his culture, and then to assimilate his political status with that of his

temporary ruler. But interwoven with this anglicising tendency, which was also, by the bye, a

Christianising tendency, was a strong disposition, derived from the Rousseau strand, to leave other

peoples alone, to facilitate even the separation and autonomy of detached portions of our own

peoples, to disintegrate finally into perfect, because lawless, individuals. The official exposition of

British “Liberalism” to-day still wriggles unstably because of these conflicting constituents, but on

the whole the Whig strand now seems the weaker. The contemporary Liberal politician offers

cogent criticism upon the brutality and conceit of modern imperialisms, but that seems to be the

limit of his service. Taking what they do not say and do not propose as an indication of Liberal

intentions, it would seem that the ideal of the British Liberals and of the American Democrats is to

favour the existence of just as many petty, loosely allied, or quite independent nationalities as

possible, just as many languages as possible, to deprecate armies and all controls, and to trust to the

innate goodness of disorder and the powers of an ardent sentimentality to keep the world clean and

sweet. The Liberals will not face the plain consequence that such a state of affairs is hopelessly

unstable, that it involves the maximum risk of war with the minimum of permanent benefit and

public order. They will not reflect that the stars in their courses rule inexorably against it. It is a

vague, impossible ideal, with a rude sort of unworldly moral beauty, like the gospel of the

Doukhobors. Besides that charm it has this most seductive quality to an official British Liberal, that

it does not exact intellectual activity nor indeed activity of any sort whatever. It is, by virtue of that

alone, a far less mischievous doctrine than the crude and violent Imperialism of the popular Press.

Neither of these two schools of policy, neither the international laisser faire of the Liberals, nor

“hustle to the top” Imperialism, promise any reality of permanent progress for the world of men.

They are the resort, the moral reference, of those who will not think frankly and exhaustively over

the whole field of this question. Do that, insist upon solutions of more than accidental applicability,

and you emerge with one or other of two contrasted solutions, as the consciousness of kind or the

consciousness of individuality prevails in your mind. In the former case you will adopt aggressive

Imperialism, but you will carry it out to its “thorough” degree of extermination. You will seek to

develop the culture and power of your kind of men and women to the utmost in order to shoulder all

other kinds from the earth. If on the other hand you appreciate the unique, you will aim at such a

synthesis as this Utopia displays, a synthesis far more credible and possible than any other Welt-

Politik. In spite of all the pageant of modern war, synthesis is in the trend of the world. To aid and

develop it, could be made the open and secure policy of any great modern empire now. Modern war,

modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of

men and the conceit and intellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind. Were

the will of the mass of men lit and conscious, I am firmly convinced it would now burn steadily for

synthesis and peace.

It would be so easy to bring about a world peace within a few decades, was there but the will for it

among men! The great empires that exist need but a little speech and frankness one with another.

Within, the riddles of social order are already half solved in books and thought, there are the

common people and the subject peoples to be educated and drilled, to be led to a common speech

and a common literature, to be assimilated and made citizens; without, there is the possibility of

treaties. Why, for example, should Britain and France, or either and the United States, or Sweden

and Norway, or Holland, or Denmark, or Italy, fight any more for ever? And if there is no reason,

how foolish and dangerous it is still to sustain linguistic differences and custom houses, and all sorts

of foolish and irritating distinctions between their various citizens! Why should not all these peoples

agree to teach some common language, French, for example, in their common schools, or to teach

each other's languages reciprocally? Why should they not aim at a common literature, and bring

their various common laws, their marriage laws, and so on, into uniformity? Why should they not

work for a uniform minimum of labour conditions through all their communities? Why, then, should

they not—except in the interests of a few rascal plutocrats—trade freely and exchange their

citizenship freely throughout their common boundaries? No doubt there are difficulties to be found,

but they are quite finite difficulties. What is there to prevent a parallel movement of all the civilised

Powers in the world towards a common ideal and assimilation?

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

The coarser conceptions of aggregation are at hand, the hostile, jealous patriotisms, the blare of

trumpets and the pride of fools; they serve the daily need though they lead towards disaster. The real

and the immediate has us in its grip, the accidental personal thing. The little effort of thought, the

brief sustained effort of will, is too much for the contemporary mind. Such treaties, such

sympathetic international movements, are but dream stuff yet on earth, though Utopia has realised

them long since and already passed them by.

CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH

The Bubble Bursts

§ 1

As I walk back along the river terrace to the hotel where the botanist awaits me, and observe the

Utopians I encounter, I have no thought that my tenure of Utopia becomes every moment more

precarious. There float in my mind vague anticipations of more talks with my double and still more,

of a steady elaboration of detail, of interesting journeys of exploration. I forget that a Utopia is a

thing of the imagination that becomes more fragile with every added circumstance, that, like a soap-

bubble, it is most brilliantly and variously coloured at the very instant of its dissolution. This Utopia

is nearly done. All the broad lines of its social organisation are completed now, the discussion of all

its general difficulties and problems. Utopian individuals pass me by, fine buildings tower on either

hand; it does not occur to me that I may look too closely. To find the people assuming the concrete

and individual, is not, as I fondly imagine, the last triumph of realisation, but the swimming

moment of opacity before the film gives way. To come to individual emotional cases, is to return to

the earth.

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

“Well?” I say, standing before him.

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

“Nothing better to do?”

“Nothing in the world.”

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

“I don't want it,” he replies, compactly.

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

I let myself down into a seat beside him.

For a time I sit restfully enjoying his companionable silence, and thinking fragmentarily of those

samurai and their Rules. I entertain something of the satisfaction of a man who has finished

building a bridge; I feel that I have joined together things that I had never joined before. My Utopia

seems real to me, very real, I can believe in it, until the metal chair-back gives to my shoulder

blades, and Utopian sparrows twitter and hop before my feet. I have a pleasant moment of

unhesitating self-satisfaction; I feel a shameless exultation to be there. For a moment I forget the

consideration the botanist demands; the mere pleasure of completeness, of holding and controlling

all the threads possesses me.

“You will persist in believing,” I say, with an aggressive expository note, “that if you meet this lady

she will be a person with the memories and sentiments of her double on earth. You think she will

understand and pity, and perhaps love you. Nothing of the sort is the case.” I repeat with confident

rudeness, “Nothing of the sort is the case. Things are different altogether here; you can hardly tell

even now how different are―”

I discover he is not listening to me.

“What is the matter?” I ask abruptly.

He makes no answer, but his expression startles me.

“What is the matter?” and then I follow his eyes.

A woman and a man are coming through the great archway—and instantly I guess what has

happened. She it is arrests my attention first—long ago I knew she was a sweetly beautiful woman.

She is fair, with frank blue eyes, that look with a sort of tender receptivity into her companion's

face. For a moment or so they remain, greyish figures in the cool shadow, against the sunlit

greenery of the gardens beyond.

“It is Mary,” the botanist whispers with white lips, but he stares at the form of the man. His face

whitens, it becomes so transfigured with emotion that for a moment it does not look weak. Then I

see that his thin hand is clenched.

I realise how little I understand his emotions.

A sudden fear of what he will do takes hold of me. He sits white and tense as the two come into the

clearer light of the courtyard. The man, I see, is one of the samurai, a dark, strong-faced man, a man

I have never seen before, and she is wearing the robe that shows her a follower of the Lesser Rule.

Some glimmering of the botanist's feelings strikes through to my slow sympathies. Of course—a

strange man! I put out a restraining hand towards his arm. “I told you,” I say, “that very probably,

most probably, she would have met some other. I tried to prepare you.”

“Nonsense,” he whispers, without looking at me. “It isn't that. It's—that scoundrel―”

He has an impulse to rise. “That scoundrel,” he repeats.

“He isn't a scoundrel,” I say. “How do you know? Keep still! Why are you standing up?”

He and I stand up quickly, I as soon as he. But now the full meaning of the group has reached me. I

grip his arm. “Be sensible,” I say, speaking very quickly, and with my back to the approaching

couple. “He's not a scoundrel here. This world is different from that. It's caught his pride somehow

and made a man of him. Whatever troubled them there―”

He turns a face of white wrath on me, of accusation, and for the moment of unexpected force. “This

is your doing,” he says. “You have done this to mock me. He—of all men!” For a moment speech

fails him, then; “You—you have done this to mock me.”

I try to explain very quickly. My tone is almost propitiatory.

“I never thought of it until now. But he's― How did I know he was the sort of man a disciplined

world has a use for?”

He makes no answer, but he looks at me with eyes that are positively baleful, and in the instant I

read his mute but mulish resolve that Utopia must end.

“Don't let that old quarrel poison all this,” I say almost entreatingly. “It happened all differently here

—everything is different here. Your double will be back to-morrow. Wait for him. Perhaps then you

will understand―”

He shakes his head, and then bursts out with, “What do I want with a double? Double! What do I

care if things have been different here? This―”

He thrusts me weakly back with his long, white hand. “My God!” he says almost forcibly, “what

nonsense all this is! All these dreams! All Utopias! There she is―! Oh, but I have dreamt of her!

And now―”

A sob catches him. I am really frightened by this time. I still try to keep between him and these

Utopians, and to hide his gestures from them.

“It's different here,” I persist. “It's different here. The emotion you feel has no place in it. It's a scar

from the earth—the sore scar of your past―”

“And what are we all but scars? What is life but a scarring? It's you—you who don't understand! Of

course we are covered with scars, we live to be scarred, we are scars! We are the scars of the past!

These dreams, these childish dreams―!”

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

My Utopia rocks about me.

For a moment the vision of that great courtyard hangs real. There the Utopians live real about me,

going to and fro, and the great archway blazes with sunlight from the green gardens by the

riverside. The man who is one of the samurai, and his lady, whom the botanist loved on earth, pass

out of sight behind the marble flower-set Triton that spouts coolness in the middle of the place. For

a moment I see two working men in green tunics sitting on a marble seat in the shadow of the

colonnade, and a sweet little silver-haired old lady, clad all in violet, and carrying a book, comes

towards us, and lifts a curious eye at the botanist's gestures. And then―

“Scars of the past! Scars of the past! These fanciful, useless dreams!”

§ 2

There is no jerk, no sound, no hint of material shock. We are in London, and clothed in the fashion

of the town. The sullen roar of London fills our ears....

I see that I am standing beside an iron seat of poor design in that grey and gawky waste of asphalte

—Trafalgar Square, and the botanist, with perplexity in his face, stares from me to a poor,

shrivelled, dirt-lined old woman—my God! what a neglected thing she is!—who proffers a box of

matches....

He buys almost mechanically, and turns back to me.

“I was saying,” he says, “the past rules us absolutely. These dreams―”

His sentence does not complete itself. He looks nervous and irritated.

“You have a trick at times,” he says instead, “of making your suggestions so vivid―”

He takes a plunge. “If you don't mind,” he says in a sort of quavering ultimatum, “we won't discuss

that aspect of the question—the lady, I mean—further.”

He pauses, and there still hangs a faint perplexity between us.

“But―” I begin.

For a moment we stand there, and my dream of Utopia runs off me like water from an oiled slab. Of

course—we lunched at our club. We came back from Switzerland by no dream train but by the

ordinary Bâle express. We have been talking of that Lucerne woman he harps upon, and I have

made some novel comment on his story. I have touched certain possibilities.

“You can't conceivably understand,” he says.

“The fact remains,” he goes on, taking up the thread of his argument again with an air of having

defined our field, “we are the scars of the past. That's a thing one can discuss—without

personalities.”

“No,” I say rather stupidly, “no.”

“You are always talking as though you could kick the past to pieces; as though one could get right

out from oneself and begin afresh. It is your weakness—if you don't mind my being frank—it

makes you seem harsh and dogmatic. Life has gone easily for you; you have never been badly tried.

You have been lucky—you do not understand the other way about. You are—hard.”

I answer nothing.

He pants for breath. I perceive that in our discussion of his case I must have gone too far, and that

he has rebelled. Clearly I must have said something wounding about that ineffectual love story of

his.

“You don't allow for my position,” he says, and it occurs to me to say, “I'm obliged to look at the

thing from my own point of view....”

One or other of us makes a move. What a lot of filthy, torn paper is scattered about the world! We

walk slowly side by side towards the dirt-littered basin of the fountain, and stand regarding two

grimy tramps who sit and argue on a further seat. One holds a horrible old boot in his hand, and

gesticulates with it, while his other hand caresses his rag-wrapped foot. “Wot does Cham'lain si?”

his words drift to us. “W'y, 'e says, wot's the good of 'nvesting your kepital where these 'ere

Americans may dump it flat any time they like....”

(Were there not two men in green sitting on a marble seat?)

§ 3

We walk on, our talk suspended, past a ruthlessly clumsy hoarding, towards where men and women

and children are struggling about a string of omnibuses. A newsvendor at the corner spreads a

newspaper placard upon the wood pavement, pins the corners down with stones, and we glimpse

something about:—

MASSACRE IN ODESSA.

DISCOVERY OF HUMAN REMAINS AT CHERTSEY.

SHOCKING LYNCHING OUTRAGE IN NEW YORK STATE.

GERMAN INTRIGUES GET A SET-BACK.

THE BIRTHDAY HONOURS.—FULL LIST.

Dear old familiar world!

An angry parent in conversation with a sympathetic friend jostles against us. “I'll knock his

blooming young 'ed orf if 'e cheeks me again. It's these 'ere brasted Board Schools―”

An omnibus passes, bearing on a board beneath an incorrectly drawn Union Jack an exhortation to

the true patriot to “Buy Bumper's British-Boiled Jam.”...

I am stunned beyond the possibility of discussion for a space. In this very place it must have been

that the high terrace ran with the gardens below it, along which I came from my double to our hotel.

I am going back, but now through reality, along the path I passed so happily in my dream. And the

people I saw then are the people I am looking at now—with a difference.

The botanist walks beside me, white and nervously jerky in his movements, his ultimatum

delivered.

We start to cross the road. An open carriage drives by, and we see a jaded, red-haired woman,

smeared with paint, dressed in furs, and petulantly discontented. Her face is familiar to me, her face,

with a difference.

Why do I think of her as dressed in green?

Of course!—she it was I saw leading her children by the hand!

Comes a crash to our left, and a running of people to see a cab-horse down on the slippery, slanting

pavement outside St. Martin's Church.

We go on up the street.

A heavy-eyed young Jewess, a draggled prostitute—no crimson flower for her hair, poor girl!—

regards us with a momentary speculation, and we get a whiff of foul language from two newsboys

on the kerb.

“We can't go on talking,” the botanist begins, and ducks aside just in time to save his eye from the

ferule of a stupidly held umbrella. He is going to treat our little tiff about that lady as closed. He has

the air of picking up our conversation again at some earlier point.

He steps into the gutter, walks round outside a negro hawker, just escapes the wheel of a hansom,

and comes to my side again.

“We can't go on talking of your Utopia,” he says, “in a noise and crowd like this.”

We are separated by a portly man going in the opposite direction, and join again. “We can't go on

talking of Utopia,” he repeats, “in London.... Up in the mountains—and holiday-time—it was all

right. We let ourselves go!”

“I've been living in Utopia,” I answer, tacitly adopting his tacit proposal to drop the lady out of the

question.

“At times,” he says, with a queer laugh, “you've almost made me live there too.”

He reflects. “It doesn't do, you know. No! And I don't know whether, after all, I want―”

We are separated again by half-a-dozen lifted flagstones, a burning brazier, and two engineers

concerned with some underground business or other—in the busiest hour of the day's traffic.

“Why shouldn't it do?” I ask.

“It spoils the world of everyday to let your mind run on impossible perfections.”

“I wish,” I shout against the traffic, “I could smash the world of everyday.”

My note becomes quarrelsome. “You may accept this as the world of reality, you may consent to be

one scar in an ill-dressed compound wound, but so—not I! This is a dream too—this world. Your

dream, and you bring me back to it—out of Utopia―”

The crossing of Bow Street gives me pause again.

The face of a girl who is passing westward, a student girl, rather carelessly dressed, her books in a

carrying-strap, comes across my field of vision. The westward sun of London glows upon her face.

She has eyes that dream, surely no sensuous nor personal dream.

After all, after all, dispersed, hidden, disorganised, undiscovered, unsuspected even by themselves,

the samurai of Utopia are in this world, the motives that are developed and organised there stir

dumbly here and stifle in ten thousand futile hearts....

I overtake the botanist, who got ahead at the crossing by the advantage of a dust-cart.

“You think this is real because you can't wake out of it,” I say. “It's all a dream, and there are people

—I'm just one of the first of a multitude—between sleeping and waking—who will presently be

rubbing it out of their eyes.”

A pinched and dirty little girl, with sores upon her face, stretches out a bunch of wilting violets, in a

pitifully thin little fist, and interrupts my speech. “Bunch o' vi'lets—on'y a penny.”

“No!” I say curtly, hardening my heart.

A ragged and filthy nursing mother, with her last addition to our Imperial People on her arm, comes

out of a drinkshop, and stands a little unsteadily, and wipes mouth and nose comprehensively with

the back of a red chapped hand....

§ 4

“Isn't that reality?” says the botanist, almost triumphantly, and leaves me aghast at his triumph.

“That!” I say belatedly. “It's a thing in a nightmare!”

He shakes his head and smiles—exasperatingly.

I perceive quite abruptly that the botanist and I have reached the limits of our intercourse.

“The world dreams things like that,” I say, “because it suffers from an indigestion of such people as

you.”

His low-toned self-complacency, like the faded banner of an obstinate fort, still flies unconquered.

And you know, he's not even a happy man with it all!

For ten seconds or more I am furiously seeking in my mind for a word, for a term of abuse, for one

compendious verbal missile that shall smash this man for ever. It has to express total inadequacy of

imagination and will, spiritual anæmia, dull respectability, gross sentimentality, a cultivated

pettiness of heart....

That word will not come. But no other word will do. Indeed the word does not exist. There is

nothing with sufficient vituperative concentration for this moral and intellectual stupidity of

educated people....

“Er―” he begins.

No! I can't endure him.

With a passionate rapidity of movement, I leave his side, dart between a carriage and a van, duck

under the head of a cab-horse, and board a 'bus going westward somewhere—but anyhow, going in

exactly the reverse direction to the botanist. I clamber up the steps and thread my swaying way to

the seat immediately behind the driver.

“There!” I say, as I whack myself down on the seat and pant.

When I look round the botanist is out of sight.

§ 5

But I am back in the world for all that, and my Utopia is done.

It is good discipline for the Utopist to visit this world occasionally.

But from the front seat on the top of an omnibus on a sunny September afternoon, the Strand, and

Charing Cross corner, and Whitehall, and the great multitude of people, the great uproar of vehicles,

streaming in all directions, is apt to look a world altogether too formidable. It has a glare, it has a

tumult and vigour that shouts one down. It shouts one down, if shouting is to carry it. What good

was it to trot along the pavement through this noise and tumult of life, pleading Utopia to that

botanist? What good would it be to recommend Utopia in this driver's preoccupied ear?

There are moments in the life of every philosopher and dreamer when he feels himself the flimsiest

of absurdities, when the Thing in Being has its way with him, its triumphant way, when it asks in a

roar, unanswerably, with a fine solid use of the current vernacular, “What Good is all this—Rot

about Utopias?”

One inspects the Thing in Being with something of the diffident speculation of primitive man,

peering from behind a tree at an angry elephant.

(There is an omen in that image. On how many occasions must that ancestor of ours have had just

the Utopist's feeling of ambitious unreality, have decided that on the whole it was wiser to go very

quietly home again, and leave the big beast alone? But, in the end, men rode upon the elephant's

head, and guided him this way or that.... The Thing in Being that roars so tremendously about

Charing Cross corner seems a bigger antagonist than an elephant, but then we have better weapons

than chipped flint blades....)

After all, in a very little time everything that impresses me so mightily this September afternoon

will have changed or passed away for ever, everything. These omnibuses, these great, stalwart,

crowded, many-coloured things that jostle one another, and make so handsome a clatter-clamour,

will all have gone; they and their horses and drivers and organisation; you will come here and you

will not find them. Something else will be here, some different sort of vehicle, that is now perhaps

the mere germ of an idea in some engineer student's brain. And this road and pavement will have

changed, and these impressive great buildings; other buildings will be here, buildings that are as yet

more impalpable than this page you read, more formless and flimsy by far than anything that is

reasoned here. Little plans sketched on paper, strokes of a pen or of a brush, will be the first

materialisations of what will at last obliterate every detail and atom of these re-echoing actualities

that overwhelm us now. And the clothing and gestures of these innumerable people, the character of

their faces and bearing, these too will be recast in the spirit of what are now obscure and impalpable

beginnings.

The new things will be indeed of the substance of the thing that is, but differing just in the measure

of the will and imagination that goes to make them. They will be strong and fair as the will is sturdy

and organised and the imagination comprehensive and bold; they will be ugly and smeared with

wretchedness as the will is fluctuating and the imagination timid and mean.

Indeed Will is stronger than Fact, it can mould and overcome Fact. But this world has still to

discover its will, it is a world that slumbers inertly, and all this roar and pulsation of life is no more

than its heavy breathing.... My mind runs on to the thought of an awakening.

As my omnibus goes lumbering up Cockspur Street through the clatter rattle of the cabs and

carriages, there comes another fancy in my mind.... Could one but realise an apocalyptic image and

suppose an angel, such as was given to each of the seven churches of Asia, given for a space to the

service of the Greater Rule. I see him as a towering figure of flame and colour, standing between

earth and sky, with a trumpet in his hands, over there above the Haymarket, against the October

glow; and when he sounds, all the samurai, all who are samurai in Utopia, will know themselves

and one another....

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

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

For a moment I have a vision of this resurrection of the living, of a vague, magnificent answer, of

countless myriads at attention, of all that is fine in humanity at attention, round the compass of the

earth.

Then that philosophy of individual uniqueness resumes its sway over my thoughts, and my dream

of a world's awakening fades.

I had forgotten....

Things do not happen like that. God is not simple, God is not theatrical, the summons comes to each

man in its due time for him, with an infinite subtlety of variety....

If that is so, what of my Utopia?

This infinite world must needs be flattened to get it on one retina. The picture of a solid thing,

although it is flattened and simplified, is not necessarily a lie. Surely, surely, in the end, by degrees,

and steps, something of this sort, some such understanding, as this Utopia must come. First here,

then there, single men and then groups of men will fall into line—not indeed with my poor faulty

hesitating suggestions—but with a great and comprehensive plan wrought out by many minds and

in many tongues. It is just because my plan is faulty, because it mis-states so much, and omits so

much, that they do not now fall in. It will not be like my dream, the world that is coming. My dream

is just my own poor dream, the thing sufficient for me. We fail in comprehension, we fail so

variously and abundantly. We see as much as it is serviceable for us to see, and we see no further.

But the fresh undaunted generations come to take on our work beyond our utmost effort, beyond the

range of our ideas. They will learn with certainty things that to us are guesses and riddles....

There will be many Utopias. Each generation will have its new version of Utopia, a little more

certain and complete and real, with its problems lying closer and closer to the problems of the Thing

in Being. Until at last from dreams Utopias will have come to be working drawings, and the whole

world will be shaping the final World State, the fair and great and fruitful World State, that will only

not be a Utopia because it will be this world. So surely it must be―

The policeman drops his hand. “Come up,” says the 'bus driver, and the horses strain; “Clitter,

clatter, cluck, clak,” the line of hurrying hansoms overtakes the omnibus going west. A dexterous

lad on a bicycle with a bale of newspapers on his back dodges nimbly across the head of the

column and vanishes up a side street.

The omnibus sways forward. Rapt and prophetic, his plump hands clasped round the handle of his

umbrella, his billycock hat a trifle askew, this irascible little man of the Voice, this impatient

dreamer, this scolding Optimist, who has argued so rudely and dogmatically about economics and

philosophy and decoration, and indeed about everything under the sun, who has been so hard on

the botanist and fashionable women, and so reluctant in the matter of beer, is carried onward,

dreaming dreams, dreams that with all the inevitable ironies of difference, may be realities when

you and I are dreams.

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

suspense.

But why was he intruded? you ask. Why could not a modern Utopia be discussed without this

impersonation—impersonally? It has confused the book, you say, made the argument hard to

follow, and thrown a quality of insincerity over the whole. Are we but mocking at Utopias, you

demand, using all these noble and generalised hopes as the backcloth against which two bickering

personalities jar and squabble? Do I mean we are never to view the promised land again except

through a foreground of fellow-travellers? There is a common notion that the reading of a Utopia

should end with a swelling heart and clear resolves, with lists of names, formation of committees,

and even the commencement of subscriptions. But this Utopia began upon a philosophy of

fragmentation, and ends, confusedly, amidst a gross tumult of immediate realities, in dust and

doubt, with, at the best, one individual's aspiration. Utopias were once in good faith, projects for a

fresh creation of the world and of a most unworldly completeness; this so-called Modern Utopia is

a mere story of personal adventures among Utopian philosophies.

Indeed, that came about without the writer's intention. So it was the summoned vision came. For I

see about me a great multitude of little souls and groups of souls as darkened, as derivative as my

own; with the passage of years I understand more and more clearly the quality of the motives that

urge me and urge them to do whatever we do.... Yet that is not all I see, and I am not altogether

bounded by my littleness. Ever and again, contrasting with this immediate vision, come glimpses of

a comprehensive scheme, in which these personalities float, the scheme of a synthetic wider being,

the great State, mankind, in which we all move and go, like blood corpuscles, like nerve cells, it

may be at times like brain cells, in the body of a man. But the two visions are not seen consistently

together, at least by me, and I do not surely know that they exist consistently together. The motives

needed for those wider issues come not into the interplay of my vanities and wishes. That greater

scheme lies about the men and women I know, as I have tried to make the vistas and spaces, the

mountains, cities, laws, and order of Utopia lie about my talking couple, too great for their

sustained comprehension. When one focuses upon these two that wide landscape becomes indistinct

and distant, and when one regards that then the real persons one knows grow vague and unreal.

Nevertheless, I cannot separate these two aspects of human life, each commenting on the other. In

that incongruity between great and individual inheres the incompatibility I could not resolve, and

which, therefore, I have had to present in this conflicting form. At times that great scheme does

seem to me to enter certain men's lives as a passion, as a real and living motive; there are those

who know it almost as if it was a thing of desire; even for me, upon occasion, the little lures of the

immediate life are seen small and vain, and the soul goes out to that mighty Being, to apprehend it

and serve it and possess. But this is an illumination that passes as it comes, a rare transitory

lucidity, leaving the soul's desire suddenly turned to presumption and hypocrisy upon the lips. One

grasps at the Universe and attains—Bathos. The hungers, the jealousies, the prejudices and habits

have us again, and we are forced back to think that it is so, and not otherwise, that we are meant to

serve the mysteries; that in these blinkers it is we are driven to an end we cannot understand. And

then, for measured moments in the night watches or as one walks alone or while one sits in thought

and speech with a friend, the wider aspirations glow again with a sincere emotion, with the colours

of attainable desire....

That is my all about Utopia, and about the desire and need for Utopia, and how that planet lies to

this planet that bears the daily lives of men.

APPENDIX

SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT

A Portion of a Paper read to the Oxford Philosophical Society, November 8, 1903, and reprinted,

with some Revision, from the Version given in Mind, vol. xiii. (N.S.), No. 51.

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

It seems to me that I may most propitiously attempt to interest you this evening by describing very

briefly the particular metaphysical and philosophical system in which I do my thinking, and more

particularly by setting out for your consideration one or two points in which I seem to myself to

differ most widely from current accepted philosophy.

You must be prepared for things that will strike you as crude, for a certain difference of accent and

dialect that you may not like, and you must be prepared too to hear what may strike you as the

clumsy statement of my ignorant rediscovery of things already beautifully thought out and said. But

in the end you may incline to forgive me some of this first offence.... It is quite unavoidable that, in

setting out these intellectual foundations of mine, I should lapse for a moment or so towards

autobiography.

A convergence of circumstances led to my having my knowledge of concrete things quite

extensively developed before I came to philosophical examination at all. I have heard someone say

that a savage or an animal is mentally a purely objective being, and in that respect I was like a

savage or an animal until I was well over twenty. I was extremely unaware of the subjective or

introverted element in my being. I was a Positivist without knowing it. My early education was a

feeble one; it was one in which my private observation, inquiry and experiment were far more

important factors than any instruction, or rather perhaps the instruction I received was less even

than what I learnt for myself, and it terminated at thirteen. I had come into pretty intimate contact

with the harder realities of life, with hunger in various forms, and many base and disagreeable

necessities, before I was fifteen. About that age, following the indication of certain theological and

speculative curiosities, I began to learn something of what I will call deliberately and justly,

Elementary Science—stuff I got out of Cassell's Popular Educator and cheap text-books—and

then, through accidents and ambitions that do not matter in the least to us now, I came to three years

of illuminating and good scientific work. The central fact of those three years was Huxley's course

in Comparative Anatomy at the school in Exhibition Road. About that as a nucleus I arranged a

spacious digest of facts. At the end of that time I had acquired what I still think to be a fairly clear,

and complete and ordered view of the ostensibly real universe. Let me try to give you the chief

things I had. I had man definitely placed in the great scheme of space and time. I knew him

incurably for what he was, finite and not final, a being of compromises and adaptations. I had traced

his lungs, for example, from a swimming bladder, step by step, with scalpel and probe, through a

dozen types or more, I had seen the ancestral cæcum shrink to that disease nest, the appendix of to-

day, I had watched the gill slit patched slowly to the purposes of the ear and the reptile jaw

suspension utilised to eke out the needs of a sense organ taken from its native and natural water. I

had worked out the development of those extraordinarily unsatisfactory and untrustworthy

instruments, man's teeth, from the skin scutes of the shark to their present function as a basis for

gold stoppings, and followed the slow unfolding of the complex and painful process of gestation

through which man comes into the world. I had followed all these things and many kindred things

by dissection and in embryology—I had checked the whole theory of development again in a year's

course of palæontology, and I had taken the dimensions of the whole process, by the scale of the

stars, in a course of astronomical physics. And all that amount of objective elucidation came before

I had reached the beginnings of any philosophical or metaphysical inquiry, any inquiry as to why I

believed, how I believed, what I believed, or what the fundamental stuff of things was.

Now following hard upon this interlude with knowledge, came a time when I had to give myself to

teaching, and it became advisable to acquire one of those Teaching Diplomas that are so widely and

so foolishly despised, and that enterprise set me to a superficial, but suggestive study of educational

method, of educational theory, of logic, of psychology, and so at last, when the little affair with the

diploma was settled, to philosophy. Now to come to logic over the bracing uplands of comparative

anatomy is to come to logic with a lot of very natural preconceptions blown clean out of one's mind.

It is, I submit, a way of taking logic in the flank. When you have realised to the marrow, that all the

physical organs of man and all his physical structure are what they are through a series of

adaptations and approximations, and that they are kept up to a level of practical efficiency only by

the elimination of death, and that this is true also of his brain and of his instincts and of many of his

mental predispositions, you are not going to take his thinking apparatus unquestioningly as being in

any way mysteriously different and better. And I had read only a little logic before I became aware

of implications that I could not agree with, and assumptions that seemed to me to be altogether at

variance with the general scheme of objective fact established in my mind.

I came to an examination of logical processes and of language with the expectation that they would

share the profoundly provisional character, the character of irregular limitation and adaptation that

pervades the whole physical and animal being of man. And I found the thing I had expected. And as

a consequence I found a sort of intellectual hardihood about the assumptions of logic, that at first

confused me and then roused all the latent scepticism in my mind.

My first quarrel with the accepted logic I developed long ago in a little paper that was printed in the

Fortnightly Review in July 1891. It was called the “Rediscovery of the Unique,” and re-reading it I

perceive not only how bad and even annoying it was in manner—a thing I have long known—but

also how remarkably bad it was in expression. I have good reason for doubting whether my powers

of expression in these uses have very perceptibly improved, but at any rate I am doing my best now

with that previous failure before me.

That unfortunate paper, among other oversights I can no longer regard as trivial, disregarded quite

completely the fact that a whole literature upon the antagonism of the one and the many, of the

specific ideal and the individual reality, was already in existence. It defined no relations to other

thought or thinkers. I understand now, what I did not understand then, why it was totally ignored.

But the idea underlying that paper I cling to to-day. I consider it an idea that will ultimately be

regarded as one of primary importance to human thought, and I will try and present the substance of

that early paper again now very briefly, as the best opening of my general case. My opening

scepticism is essentially a doubt of the objective reality of classification. I have no hesitation in

saying that is the first and primary proposition of my philosophy.

I have it in my mind that classification is a necessary condition of the working of the mental

implement, but that it is a departure from the objective truth of things, that classification is very

serviceable for the practical purposes of life but a very doubtful preliminary to those fine

penetrations the philosophical purpose, in its more arrogant moods, demands. All the peculiarities

of my way of thinking derive from that.

A mind nourished upon anatomical study is of course permeated with the suggestion of the

vagueness and instability of biological species. A biological species is quite obviously a great

number of unique individuals which is separable from other biological species only by the fact that

an enormous number of other linking individuals are inaccessible in time—are in other words dead

and gone—and each new individual in that species does, in the distinction of its own individuality,

break away in however infinitesimal degree from the previous average properties of the species.

There is no property of any species, even the properties that constitute the specific definition, that is

not a matter of more or less. If, for example, a species be distinguished by a single large red spot on

the back, you will find if you go over a great number of specimens that red spot shrinking here to

nothing, expanding there to a more general redness, weakening to pink, deepening to russet and

brown, shading into crimson, and so on, and so on. And this is true not only of biological species. It

is true of the mineral specimens constituting a mineral species, and I remember as a constant refrain

in the lectures of Prof. Judd upon rock classification, the words “they pass into one another by

insensible gradations.” That is true, I hold, of all things.

You will think perhaps of atoms of the elements as instances of identically similar things, but these

are things not of experience but of theory, and there is not a phenomenon in chemistry that is not

equally well explained on the supposition that it is merely the immense quantities of atoms

necessarily taken in any experiment that mask by the operation of the law of averages the fact that

each atom also has its unique quality, its special individual difference. This idea of uniqueness in all

individuals is not only true of the classifications of material science; it is true, and still more

evidently true, of the species of common thought, it is true of common terms. Take the word chair.

When one says chair, one thinks vaguely of an average chair. But collect individual instances, think

of armchairs and reading chairs, and dining-room chairs and kitchen chairs, chairs that pass into

benches, chairs that cross the boundary and become settees, dentists' chairs, thrones, opera stalls,

seats of all sorts, those miraculous fungoid growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and Crafts

Exhibition, and you will perceive what a lax bundle in fact is this simple straightforward term. In

co-operation with an intelligent joiner I would undertake to defeat any definition of chair or

chairishness that you gave me. Chairs just as much as individual organisms, just as much as mineral

and rock specimens, are unique things—if you know them well enough you will find an individual

difference even in a set of machine-made chairs—and it is only because we do not possess minds of

unlimited capacity, because our brain has only a limited number of pigeon-holes for our

correspondence with an unlimited universe of objective uniques, that we have to delude ourselves

into the belief that there is a chairishness in this species common to and distinctive of all chairs.

Let me repeat; this is of the very smallest importance in all the practical affairs of life, or indeed in

relation to anything but philosophy and wide generalisations. But in philosophy it matters

profoundly. If I order two new-laid eggs for breakfast, up come two unhatched but still unique avian

individuals, and the chances are they serve my rude physiological purpose. I can afford to ignore the

hens' eggs of the past that were not quite so nearly this sort of thing, and the hens' eggs of the future

that will accumulate modification age by age; I can venture to ignore the rare chance of an

abnormality in chemical composition and of any startling aberration in my physiological reaction; I

can, with a confidence that is practically perfect, say with unqualified simplicity “two eggs,” but not

if my concern is not my morning's breakfast but the utmost possible truth.

Now let me go on to point out whither this idea of uniqueness tends. I submit to you that syllogism

is based on classification, that all hard logical reasoning tends to imply and is apt to imply a

confidence in the objective reality of classification. Consequently in denying that I deny the

absolute validity of logic. Classification and number, which in truth ignore the fine differences of

objective realities, have in the past of human thought been imposed upon things. Let me for

clearness' sake take a liberty here—commit, as you may perhaps think, an unpardonable insolence.

Hindoo thought and Greek thought alike impress me as being overmuch obsessed by an objective

treatment of certain necessary preliminary conditions of human thought—number and definition

and class and abstract form. But these things, number, definition, class and abstract form, I hold, are

merely unavoidable conditions of mental activity—regrettable conditions rather than essential facts.

The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

It was about this difficulty that the mind of Plato played a little inconclusively all his life. For the

most part he tended to regard the idea as the something behind reality, whereas it seems to me that

the idea is the more proximate and less perfect thing, the thing by which the mind, by ignoring

individual differences, attempts to comprehend an otherwise unmanageable number of unique

realities.

Let me give you a rough figure of what I am trying to convey in this first attack upon the

philosophical validity of general terms. You have seen the results of those various methods of black

and white reproduction that involve the use of a rectangular net. You know the sort of process

picture I mean—it used to be employed very frequently in reproducing photographs. At a little

distance you really seem to have a faithful reproduction of the original picture, but when you peer

closely you find not the unique form and masses of the original, but a multitude of little rectangles,

uniform in shape and size. The more earnestly you go into the thing, the closer you look, the more

the picture is lost in reticulations. I submit the world of reasoned inquiry has a very similar relation

to the world I call objectively real. For the rough purposes of every day the net-work picture will

do, but the finer your purpose the less it will serve, and for an ideally fine purpose, for absolute and

general knowledge that will be as true for a man at a distance with a telescope as for a man with a

microscope it will not serve at all.

It is true you can make your net of logical interpretation finer and finer, you can fine your

classification more and more—up to a certain limit. But essentially you are working in limits, and

as you come closer, as you look at finer and subtler things, as you leave the practical purpose for

which the method exists, the element of error increases. Every species is vague, every term goes

cloudy at its edges, and so in my way of thinking, relentless logic is only another phrase for a

stupidity,—for a sort of intellectual pigheadedness. If you push a philosophical or metaphysical

inquiry through a series of valid syllogisms—never committing any generally recognised fallacy—

you nevertheless leave a certain rubbing and marginal loss of objective truth and you get deflections

that are difficult to trace, at each phase in the process. Every species waggles about in its definition,

every tool is a little loose in its handle, every scale has its individual error. So long as you are

reasoning for practical purposes about the finite things of experience, you can every now and then

check your process, and correct your adjustments. But not when you make what are called

philosophical and theological inquiries, when you turn your implement towards the final absolute

truth of things. Doing that is like firing at an inaccessible, unmarkable and indestructible target at an

unknown distance, with a defective rifle and variable cartridges. Even if by chance you hit, you

cannot know that you hit, and so it will matter nothing at all.

This assertion of the necessary untrustworthiness of all reasoning processes arising out of the

fallacy of classification in what is quite conceivably a universe of uniques, forms only one

introductory aspect of my general scepticism of the Instrument of Thought.

I have now to tell you of another aspect of this scepticism of the instrument which concerns

negative terms.

Classes in logic are not only represented by circles with a hard firm outline, whereas they have no

such definite limits, but also there is a constant disposition to think of negative terms as if they

represented positive classes. With words just as with numbers and abstract forms there are definite

phases of human development. There is, you know, with regard to number, the phase when man can

barely count at all, or counts in perfect good faith and sanity upon his fingers. Then there is the

phase when he is struggling with the development of number, when he begins to elaborate all sorts

of ideas about numbers, until at last he develops complex superstitions about perfect numbers and

imperfect numbers, about threes and sevens and the like. The same is the case with abstracted

forms, and even to-day we are scarcely more than heads out of the vast subtle muddle of thinking

about spheres and ideally perfect forms and so on, that was the price of this little necessary step to

clear thinking. You know better than I do how large a part numerical and geometrical magic,

numerical and geometrical philosophy has played in the history of the mind. And the whole

apparatus of language and mental communication is beset with like dangers. The language of the

savage is, I suppose, purely positive; the thing has a name, the name has a thing. This indeed is the

tradition of language, and to-day even, we, when we hear a name, are predisposed—and sometimes

it is a very vicious disposition—to imagine forthwith something answering to the name. We are

disposed, as an incurable mental vice, to accumulate intension in terms. If I say to you Wodget or

Crump, you find yourself passing over the fact that these are nothings, these are, so to speak, mere

blankety blanks, and trying to think what sort of thing a Wodget or a Crump may be. And where this

disposition has come in, in its most alluring guise, is in the case of negative terms. Our instrument

of knowledge persists in handling even such openly negative terms as the Absolute, the Infinite, as

though they were real existences, and when the negative element is ever so little disguised, as it is in

such a word as Omniscience, then the illusion of positive reality may be complete.

Please remember that I am trying to tell you my philosophy, and not arguing about yours. Let me try

and express how in my mind this matter of negative terms has shaped itself. I think of something

which I may perhaps best describe as being off the stage or out of court, or as the Void without

Implications, or as Nothingness or as Outer Darkness. This is a sort of hypothetical Beyond to the

visible world of human thought, and thither I think all negative terms reach at last, and merge and

become nothing. Whatever positive class you make, whatever boundary you draw, straight away

from that boundary begins the corresponding negative class and passes into the illimitable horizon

of nothingness. You talk of pink things, you ignore, if you are a trained logician, the more elusive

shades of pink, and draw your line. Beyond is the not pink, known and knowable, and still in the not

pink region one comes to the Outer Darkness. Not blue, not happy, not iron, all the not classes meet

in that Outer Darkness. That same Outer Darkness and nothingness is infinite space, and infinite

time, and any being of infinite qualities, and all that region I rule out of court in my philosophy

altogether. I will neither affirm nor deny if I can help it about any not things. I will not deal with not

things at all, except by accident and inadvertence. If I use the word ‘infinite’ I use it as one often

uses ‘countless,’ “the countless hosts of the enemy”—or ‘immeasurable’—“immeasurable cliffs”—

that is to say as the limit of measurement rather than as the limit of imaginary measurability, as a

convenient equivalent to as many times this cloth yard as you can, and as many again and so on and

so on. Now a great number of apparently positive terms are, or have become, practically negative

terms and are under the same ban with me. A considerable number of terms that have played a great

part in the world of thought, seem to me to be invalidated by this same defect, to have no content or

an undefined content or an unjustifiable content. For example, that word Omniscient, as implying

infinite knowledge, impresses me as being a word with a delusive air of being solid and full, when

it is really hollow with no content whatever. I am persuaded that knowing is the relation of a

conscious being to something not itself, that the thing known is defined as a system of parts and

aspects and relationships, that knowledge is comprehension, and so that only finite things can know

or be known. When you talk of a being of infinite extension and infinite duration, omniscient and

omnipotent and Perfect, you seem to me to be talking in negatives of nothing whatever. When you

speak of the Absolute you speak to me of nothing. If however you talk of a great yet finite and

thinkable being, a being not myself, extending beyond my imagination in time and space, knowing

all that I can think of as known and capable of doing all that I can think of as done, you come into

the sphere of my mental operations, and into the scheme of my philosophy....

These then are my first two charges against our Instrument of Knowledge, firstly, that it can work

only by disregarding individuality and treating uniques as identically similar objects in this respect

or that, so as to group them under one term, and that once it has done so it tends automatically to

intensify the significance of that term, and secondly, that it can only deal freely with negative terms

by treating them as though they were positive. But I have a further objection to the Instrument of

Human Thought, that is not correlated to these former objections and that is also rather more

difficult to convey.

Essentially this idea is to present a sort of stratification in human ideas. I have it very much in mind

that various terms in our reasoning lie, as it were, at different levels and in different planes, and that

we accomplish a large amount of error and confusion by reasoning terms together that do not lie or

nearly lie in the same plane.

Let me endeavour to make myself a little less obscure by a most flagrant instance from physical

things. Suppose some one began to talk seriously of a man seeing an atom through a microscope, or

better perhaps of cutting one in half with a knife. There are a number of non-analytical people who

would be quite prepared to believe that an atom could be visible to the eye or cut in this manner.

But any one at all conversant with physical conceptions would almost as soon think of killing the

square root of 2 with a rook rifle as of cutting an atom in half with a knife. Our conception of an

atom is reached through a process of hypothesis and analysis, and in the world of atoms there are no

knives and no men to cut. If you have thought with a strong consistent mental movement, then

when you have thought of your atom under the knife blade, your knife blade has itself become a

cloud of swinging grouped atoms, and your microscope lens a little universe of oscillatory and

vibratory molecules. If you think of the universe, thinking at the level of atoms, there is neither

knife to cut, scale to weigh nor eye to see. The universe at that plane to which the mind of the

molecular physicist descends has none of the shapes or forms of our common life whatever. This

hand with which I write is in the universe of molecular physics a cloud of warring atoms and

molecules, combining and recombining, colliding, rotating, flying hither and thither in the universal

atmosphere of ether.

You see, I hope, what I mean, when I say that the universe of molecular physics is at a different

level from the universe of common experience;—what we call stable and solid is in that world a

freely moving system of interlacing centres of force, what we call colour and sound is there no more

than this length of vibration or that. We have reached to a conception of that universe of molecular

physics by a great enterprise of organised analysis, and our universe of daily experiences stands in

relation to that elemental world as if it were a synthesis of those elemental things.

I would suggest to you that this is only a very extreme instance of the general state of affairs, that

there may be finer and subtler differences of level between one term and another, and that terms

may very well be thought of as lying obliquely and as being twisted through different levels.

It will perhaps give a clearer idea of what I am seeking to convey if I suggest a concrete image for

the whole world of a man's thought and knowledge. Imagine a large clear jelly, in which at all

angles and in all states of simplicity or contortion his ideas are imbedded. They are all valid and

possible ideas as they lie, none in reality incompatible with any. If you imagine the direction of up

or down in this clear jelly being as it were the direction in which one moves by analysis or by

synthesis, if you go down for example from matter to atoms and centres of force and up to men and

states and countries—if you will imagine the ideas lying in that manner—you will get the beginning

of my intention. But our Instrument, our process of thinking, like a drawing before the discovery of

perspective, appears to have difficulties with the third dimension, appears capable only of dealing

with or reasoning about ideas by projecting them upon the same plane. It will be obvious that a

great multitude of things may very well exist together in a solid jelly, which would be overlapping

and incompatible and mutually destructive, when projected together upon one plane. Through the

bias in our Instrument to do this, through reasoning between terms not in the same plane, an

enormous amount of confusion, perplexity and mental deadlocking occurs.

The old theological deadlock between predestination and free-will serves admirably as an example

of the sort of deadlock I mean. Take life at the level of common sensation and common experience

and there is no more indisputable fact than man's freedom of will, unless it is his complete moral

responsibility. But make only the least penetrating of analyses and you perceive a world of

inevitable consequences, a rigid succession of cause and effect. Insist upon a flat agreement

between the two, and there you are! The Instrument fails.

It is upon these three objections, and upon an extreme suspicion of abstract terms which arises

materially out of my first and second objections, that I chiefly rest my case for a profound

scepticism of the remoter possibilities of the Instrument of Thought. It is a thing no more perfect

than the human eye or the human ear, though like those other instruments it may have undefined

possibilities of evolution towards increased range, and increased power.

So much for my main contention. But before I conclude I may—since I am here—say a little more

in the autobiographical vein, and with a view to your discussion to show how I reconcile this

fundamental scepticism with the very positive beliefs about world-wide issues I possess, and the

very definite distinction I make between right and wrong.

I reconcile these things by simply pointing out to you that if there is any validity in my image of

that three dimensional jelly in which our ideas are suspended, such a reconciliation as you demand

in logic, such a projection of the things as in accordance upon one plane, is totally unnecessary and

impossible.

This insistence upon the element of uniqueness in being, this subordination of the class to the

individual difference, not only destroys the universal claim of philosophy, but the universal claim of

ethical imperatives, the universal claim of any religious teaching. If you press me back upon my

fundamental position I must confess I put faith and standards and rules of conduct upon exactly the

same level as I put my belief of what is right in art, and what I consider right practice in art. I have

arrived at a certain sort of self-knowledge and there are, I find, very distinct imperatives for me, but

I am quite prepared to admit there is no proving them imperative on any one else. One's political

proceedings, one's moral acts are, I hold, just as much self-expression as one's poetry or painting or

music. But since life has for its primordial elements assimilation and aggression, I try not only to

obey my imperatives, but to put them persuasively and convincingly into other minds, to bring

about my good and to resist and overcome my evil as though they were the universal Good and the

universal Evil in which unthinking men believe. And it is obviously in no way contradictory to this

philosophy, for me, if I find others responding sympathetically to any notes of mine or if I find

myself responding sympathetically to notes sounding about me, to give that common resemblance

between myself and others a name, to refer these others and myself in common to this thing as if it

were externalised and spanned us all.

Scepticism of the Instrument is for example not incompatible with religious association and with

organisation upon the basis of a common faith. It is possible to regard God as a Being synthetic in

relation to men and societies, just as the idea of a universe of atoms and molecules and inorganic

relationships is analytical in relation to human life.

The repudiation of demonstration in any but immediate and verifiable cases that this Scepticism of

the Instrument amounts to, the abandonment of any universal validity for moral and religious

propositions, brings ethical, social and religious teaching into the province of poetry, and does

something to correct the estrangement between knowledge and beauty that is a feature of so much

mental existence at this time. All these things are self-expression. Such an opinion sets a new and

greater value on that penetrating and illuminating quality of mind we call insight, insight which

when it faces towards the contradictions that arise out of the imperfections of the mental instrument

is called humour. In these innate, unteachable qualities I hold—in humour and the sense of beauty

—lies such hope of intellectual salvation from the original sin of our intellectual instrument as we

may entertain in this uncertain and fluctuating world of unique appearances....

So frankly I spread my little equipment of fundamental assumptions before you, heartily glad of the

opportunity you have given me of taking them out, of looking at them with the particularity the

presence of hearers ensures, and of hearing the impression they make upon you. Of course, such a

sketch must have an inevitable crudity of effect. The time I had for it—I mean the time I was able to

give in preparation—was altogether too limited for any exhaustive finish of presentation; but I think

on the whole I have got the main lines of this sketch map of my mental basis true. Whether I have

made myself comprehensible is a different question altogether. It is for you rather than me to say

how this sketch map of mine lies with regard to your own more systematic cartography....

Here followed certain comments upon Personal Idealism, and Mr. F. C. S. Schiller's Humanism, of

no particular value.

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