A Modern Utopia

H. G. Wells

Published: 1905
Categorie(s): Fiction, Non-Fiction, Human Science, Philosophy, Science Fiction
Source: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6424
About Wells:
Herbert George Wells, better known as H. G. Wells, was an
English writer best known for such science fiction novels as
The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man
and The Island of Doctor Moreau. He was a prolific writer of
both fiction and non-fiction, and produced works in many
different genres, including contemporary novels, history, and
social commentary. He was also an outspoken socialist. His
later works become increasingly political and didactic, and
only his early science fiction novels are widely read today.
Wells, along with Hugo Gernsback and Jules Verne, is
sometimes referred to as “The Father of Science Fiction”.
Source: Wikipedia
Also available on Feedbooks Wells:

The War of the Worlds (1898)

The Time Machine (1895)
The Invisible Man (1897)
Tales of Space and Time (1900)
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896)
The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904)
The Sleeper Awakes (1910)
The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost (1902)
The First Men in the Moon (1901)
A Dream of Armageddon (1901)

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 A Note to the Reader

T his 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 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
 The Owner of the Voice

T here 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
Topographical
1
1.

T he 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.

T here 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.

N o 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.

B efore 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.

W e 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.

T his 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.

I t 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 2
Concerning Freedoms
1.

N ow 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.

W hat 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.

F reedom 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.

W ere 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.

L et 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.

B ut 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.

S o 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 3
Utopian Economics
1.

T hese 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.

N ow 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.

T he 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.

T he 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.

W ithin 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.

F rom 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.

T he 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.

W e 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 4
The Voice of Nature
1.

P resently 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.

A n 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 5
Failure in a Modern Utopia
1.

T he 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.

B ut 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.

W ill 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.

T he 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.

A fter 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.

T he 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.

A nd 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.

W hen 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 6
Women in a Modern Utopia
1.

B ut 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.

H ow 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.

A ll 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.

A nd 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.

T his 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.

I t 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 7
A Few Utopian Impressions
1.

B ut 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.

T he 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.

W rapped 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.

I t 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.

L ondon 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.

H ow 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
My Utopian Self
8
1.

I t 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.

O ur 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.

B ut 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.

F or 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 Samurai
9
1.

N either 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.

T he 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.

N ow 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.

“W e 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.

S o 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.

A fter 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.
 10
Chapter
Race in Utopia
1.

A bove 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.

D isregarding 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.

S uppose, 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.

W hat 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.
 11
Chapter
The Bubble Bursts
1.

A s 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.

T here 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.

W e 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.

“I sn’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.

B ut 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.)

I t 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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