A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) 📖

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.

 

Section 2

 

Now if this Utopian world is to be in some degree parallel to

contemporary thought, it must have been concerned, it may be still

concerned, with many unsettled problems of currency, and with the

problems that centre about a standard of value. Gold is perhaps of

all material substances the best adapted to the monetary purpose,

but even at that best it falls far short of an imaginable ideal. It

undergoes spasmodic and irregular cheapening through new discoveries

of gold, and at any time it may undergo very extensive and sudden

and disastrous depreciation through the discovery of some way of

transmuting less valuable elements. The liability to such

depreciations introduces an undesirable speculative element into the

relations of debtor and creditor. When, on the one hand, there is

for a time a check in the increase of the available stores of gold,

or an increase in the energy applied to social purposes, or a

checking of the public security that would impede the free exchange

of credit and necessitate a more frequent production of gold in

evidence, then there comes an undue appreciation of money as against

the general commodities of life, and an automatic impoverishment of

the citizens in general as against the creditor class. The common

people are mortgaged into the bondage of debt. And on the other

hand an unexpected spate of gold production, the discovery of a

single nugget as big as St. Paul’s, let us say—a quite possible

thing—would result in a sort of jail delivery of debtors and a

financial earthquake.

 

It has been suggested by an ingenious thinker that it is possible

to use as a standard of monetary value no substance whatever, but

instead, force, and that value might be measured in units of energy.

An excellent development this, in theory, at any rate, of the

general idea of the modern State as kinetic and not static; it

throws the old idea of the social order and the new into the

sharpest antithesis. The old order is presented as a system of

institutions and classes ruled by men of substance; the new, of

enterprises and interests led by men of power.

 

Now I glance at this matter in the most incidental manner, as a man

may skim through a specialist’s exposition in a popular magazine.

You must figure me, therefore, finding from a casual periodical

paper in our inn, with a certain surprise at not having anticipated

as much, the Utopian self of that same ingenious person quite

conspicuously a leader of thought, and engaged in organising the

discussion of the currency changes Utopia has under consideration.

The article, as it presents itself to me, contains a complete

and lucid, though occasionally rather technical, explanation of

his newest proposals. They have been published, it seems, for

general criticism, and one gathers that in the modern Utopia the

administration presents the most elaborately detailed schemes of any

proposed alteration in law or custom, some time before any measure

is taken to carry it into effect, and the possibilities of every

detail are acutely criticised, flaws anticipated, side issues

raised, and the whole minutely tested and fined down by a planetful

of critics, before the actual process of legislation begins.

 

The explanation of these proposals involves an anticipatory glance

at the local administration of a Modern Utopia. To 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