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

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.

 

Section 5

 

Within this scheme, which makes the State the source of all energy,

and the final legatee, what will be the nature of the property a 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