A Modern Utopia Page 7 to 11

A Modern Utopia

Wells, H. G.

Published: 1905

Categorie(s): Fiction, Non-Fiction, Human Science, Philosophy,
Science Fiction

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Chapter 1

Topographical

1.

The Utopia of a modern dreamer must needs differ in one
fundamental aspect from the Nowheres and Utopias men
planned before Darwin quickened the thought of the world.
Those were all perfect and static States, a balance of happiness
won for ever against the forces of unrest and disorder that inhere
in things. One beheld a healthy and simple generation enjoying
the fruits of the earth in an atmosphere of virtue and
happiness, to be followed by other virtuous, happy, and entirely
similar generations, until the Gods grew weary. Change
and development were dammed back by invincible dams for
ever. But the Modern Utopia must be not static but kinetic,
must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage,
leading to a long ascent of stages. Nowadays we do not resist
and overcome the great stream of things, but rather float upon
it. We build now not citadels, but ships of state. For one
ordered arrangement of citizens rejoicing in an equality of happiness
safe and assured to them and their children for ever, we
have to plan “a flexible common compromise, in which a perpetually
novel succession of individualities may converge most
effectually upon a comprehensive onward development.” That
is the first, most generalised difference between a Utopia
based upon modern conceptions and all the Utopias that were
written in the former time.
Our business here is to be Utopian, to make vivid and credible,
if we can, first this facet and then that, of an imaginary
whole and happy world. Our deliberate intention is to be not,
indeed, impossible, but most distinctly impracticable, by every
scale that reaches only between to-day and to-morrow. We are
to turn our backs for a space upon the insistent examination of

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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

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 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.

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 Chapter 2.

There are very definite artistic limitations also.
There must always be a certain effect of hardness and
thinness about Utopian speculations. Their common fault is to
be comprehensively jejune. That which is the blood and
warmth and reality of life is largely absent; there are no individualities,
but only generalised people. In almost every Utopia—
except, perhaps, Morris's “News from Nowhere”—one
sees handsome but characterless buildings, symmetrical and
perfect cultivations, and a multitude of people, healthy, happy,
beautifully dressed, but without any personal distinction
whatever. Too often the prospect resembles the key to one of
those large pictures of coronations, royal weddings, parliaments,
conferences, and gatherings so popular in Victorian
times, in which, instead of a face, each figure bears a neat oval
with its index number legibly inscribed. This burthens us with
an incurable effect of unreality, and I do not see how it is altogether
to be escaped. It is a disadvantage that has to be accepted.
Whatever institution has existed or exists, however irrational,
however preposterous, has, by virtue of its contact with
individualities, an effect of realness and rightness no untried
thing may share. It has ripened, it has been christened with
blood, it has been stained and mellowed by handling, it has
been rounded and dented to the softened contours that we associate
with life; it has been salted, maybe, in a brine of tears.
But the thing that is merely proposed, the thing that is merely
suggested, however rational, however necessary, seems
strange and inhuman in its clear, hard, uncompromising lines,
its unqualified angles and surfaces.
There is no help for it, there it is! The Master suffers with the
last and least of his successors. For all the humanity he wins
to, through his dramatic device of dialogue, I doubt if anyone
has ever been warmed to desire himself a citizen in the Republic
of Plato; I doubt if anyone could stand a month of the relentless
publicity of virtue planned by More… . No one wants to
live in any community of intercourse really, save for the sake of
the individualities he would meet there. The fertilising conflict
of individualities is the ultimate meaning of the personal life,
and all our Utopias no more than schemes for bettering that

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 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.

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Chapter 3.

No less than a planet will serve the purpose of a modern
Utopia. Time was when a mountain valley or an island
seemed to promise sufficient isolation for a polity to maintain
itself intact from outward force; the Republic of Plato stood
armed ready for defensive war, and the New Atlantis and the
Utopia of More in theory, like China and Japan through many
centuries of effectual practice, held themselves isolated from
intruders. Such late instances as Butler's satirical “Erewhon,”
and Mr. Stead's queendom of inverted sexual conditions in
Central Africa, found the Tibetan method of slaughtering the
inquiring visitor a simple, sufficient rule. But the whole trend
of modern thought is against the permanence of any such enclosures.
We are acutely aware nowadays that, however subtly
contrived a State may be, outside your boundary lines the epidemic,
the breeding barbarian or the economic power, will
gather its strength to overcome you. The swift march of invention
is all for the invader. Now, perhaps you might still guard a
rocky coast or a narrow pass; but what of that near to-morrow
when the flying machine soars overhead, free to descend at
this point or that? A state powerful enough to keep isolated under
modern conditions would be powerful enough to rule the
world, would be, indeed, if not actively ruling, yet passively acquiescent
in all other human organisations, and so responsible
for them altogether. World-state, therefore, it must be.
That leaves no room for a modern Utopia in Central Africa,
or in South America, or round about the pole, those last
refuges of ideality. The floating isle of La Cité Morellyste no
longer avails. We need a planet. Lord Erskine, the author of a
Utopia (“Armata”) that might have been inspired by Mr. Hewins,
was the first of all Utopists to perceive this—he joined his
twin planets pole to pole by a sort of umbilical cord. But the
modern imagination, obsessed by physics, must travel further
than that.
Out beyond Sirius, far in the deeps of space, beyond the
flight of a cannon-ball flying for a billion years, beyond the
range of unaided vision, blazes the star that is our Utopia's
sun. To those who know where to look, with a good opera-glass
aiding good eyes, it and three fellows that seem in a cluster

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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

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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… .