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

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.

 

Section 6

 

From the conception of mechanical force as coming in from Nature to

the service of man, a conception the Utopian proposal of a coinage

based on energy units would emphasise, arise profound contrasts

between the modern and the classical Utopias. Except for a meagre

use of water power for milling, and the wind for sailing—so meagre

in the latter case that the classical world never contrived to do

without the galley slave—and a certain restricted help from oxen in

ploughing, and from horses in locomotion, all the energy that

sustained the old-fashioned State was derived from the muscular

exertion of toiling men. They ran their world by hand. Continual

bodily labour was a condition of social existence. It is only with

the coming of coal burning, of abundant iron and steel, and of

scientific knowledge that this condition has been changed. To-day,

I suppose, if it were possible to indicate, in units of energy,

the grand total of work upon which the social fabric of the

United States or England rests, it would be found that a vastly

preponderating moiety is derived from non-human sources, from coal

and liquid fuel, and explosives and wind and water. There is every

indication of a steady increase in this proportion of mechanical

energy, in this emancipation of men from the necessity of physical

labour. There appears no limit to the invasion of life by the

machine.

 

Now it is only in the last three hundred years that any human being

seems to have anticipated this. It stimulates the imagination to

remark how entirely it was overlooked as a modifying cause in human

development. [Footnote: It is interesting to note how little even

Bacon seems to see of this, in his New Atlantis.] Plato clearly had

no ideas about machines at all as a force affecting social

organisation. There was nothing in his world to suggest them to him.

I suppose there arose no invention, no new mechanical appliance or

method of the slightest social importance through all his length of

years. He never thought of a State that did not rely for its force

upon human muscle, just as he never thought of a State that was not

primarily organised for warfare hand to hand. Political and moral

inventions he saw enough of and to spare, and in that direction he

still stimulates the imagination. But in regard to all material

possibilities he deadens rather than stimulates. [Footnote: The lost

Utopia of Hippodamus provided rewards for inventors, but unless

Aristotle misunderstood him, and it is certainly the fate of all

Utopias to be more or less misread, the inventions contemplated were

political devices.] An infinitude of nonsense about the Greek mind

would never have been written if the distinctive intellectual and

artistic quality of Plato’s time, its extraordinarily clear

definition of certain material conditions as absolutely permanent,

coupled with its politico-social instability, had been borne in

mind. The food of the Greek imagination was the very antithesis of

our own nourishment. We are educated by our circumstances to think

no revolution in appliances and economic organisation incredible,

our minds play freely about possibilities that would have struck the

men of the Academy as outrageous extravagance, and it is in regard

to politico-social expedients that our imaginations fail. Sparta,

for all the evidence of history, is scarcely more credible to us

than a motor-car throbbing in the agora would have been to

Socrates.

 

By sheer inadvertence, therefore, Plato commenced the tradition of

Utopias without machinery, a tradition we find Morris still loyally

following, except for certain mechanical barges and such-like toys,

in his News from Nowhere. There are some foreshadowings of

mechanical possibilities in the New Atlantis, but it is only in the

nineteenth century that Utopias appeared in which the fact is

clearly recognised that the social fabric rests no longer upon human

labour. It was, I believe, Cabet [Footnote: Cabet, Voyage en Icarie,

1848.] who first in a Utopian work insisted upon the escape of man

from irksome labours through the use of machinery. He is the great

primitive of modern Utopias, and Bellamy is his American equivalent.

Hitherto, either slave labour (Phaleas), [Footnote: Aristotle’s

Politics, Bk. II., Ch. VIII.] or at least class distinctions

involving unavoidable labour in the lower class, have been

assumed—as Plato does, and as Bacon in the New Atlantis probably

intended to do (More gave his Utopians bondsmen sans phrase for

their most disagreeable toil); or there is—as in Morris and the

outright Return-to-Nature Utopians—a bold make-believe that all

toil may be made a joy, and with that a levelling down of all

society to an equal participation in labour. But indeed this is

against all the observed behaviour of mankind. It needed the

Olympian unworldliness of an irresponsible rich man of the

shareholding type, a Ruskin or a Morris playing at life, to imagine

as much. Road-making under Mr. Ruskin’s auspices was a joy at Oxford

no doubt, and a distinction, and it still remains a distinction; it

proved the least contagious of practices. And Hawthorne did not find

bodily toil anything more than the curse the Bible says it is, at

Brook Farm. [Footnote: The Blythedale Experiment, and see also his

Notebook.]

 

If toil is a blessing, never was blessing so effectually disguised,

and the very people who tell us that, hesitate to suggest more than

a beautiful ease in the endless day of Heaven. A certain amount of

bodily or mental exercise, a considerable amount of doing things

under the direction of one’s free imagination is quite another

matter. Artistic production, for example, when it is at its best,

when a man is freely obeying himself, and not troubling to please

others, is really not toil at all. It is quite a different thing

digging potatoes, as boys say, “for a lark,” and digging them

because otherwise you will starve, digging them day after day as a

dull, unavoidable imperative. The essence of toil is that

imperative, and the fact that the attention must cramp itself to

the work in hand—that it excludes freedom, and not that it involves

fatigue. So long as anything but a quasi-savage life depended upon

toil, so long was it hopeless to expect mankind to do anything but

struggle to confer just as much of this blessing as possible upon

one another. But now that the new conditions physical science is

bringing about, not only dispense with man as a source of energy but

supply the hope that all routine work may be made automatic, it is

becoming conceivable that presently there may be no need for anyone

to toil habitually at all; that a labouring class—that is to say,

a class of workers without personal initiative—will become

unnecessary to the world of men.

 

The plain message physical science has for the world at large is

this, that were our political and social and moral devices only as

well contrived to their ends as a linotype machine, an antiseptic

operating plant, or an electric tram-car, there need now at the

present moment be no appreciable toil in the world, and only the

smallest fraction of the pain, the fear, and the anxiety that now

makes human life so doubtful in its value. There is more than enough

for everyone alive. Science stands, a too competent servant, behind

her wrangling underbred masters, holding out resources, devices, and

remedies they are too stupid to use. [Footnote: See that most

suggestive little book, Twentieth Century Inventions, by Mr. George

Sutherland.] And on its material side a modern Utopia must needs

present these gifts as taken, and show a world that is really

abolishing the need of labour, abolishing the last base reason for

anyone’s servitude or inferiority.

 

Section 7

 

The effectual abolition of a labouring and servile class will make

itself felt in every detail of the inn that will shelter us, of the

bedrooms we shall occupy. You conceive my awakening to all these

things on the morning after our arrival. I shall lie for a minute or

so with my nose peeping over the coverlet, agreeably and gently

coming awake, and with some vague nightmare of sitting at a common

table with an unavoidable dustman in green and gold called Boffin,

[Footnote: Vide William Morris’s News from Nowhere.] fading out of

my mind. Then I should start up. You figure my apprehensive,

startled inspection of my chamber. “Where am I?” that classic

phrase, recurs. Then I perceive quite clearly that I am in bed in

Utopia.

 

Utopia! The word is enough to bring anyone out of bed, to the

nearest window, but thence I see no more than the great mountain

mass behind the inn, a very terrestrial looking mountain mass. I

return to the contrivances about me, and make my examination as I

dress, pausing garment in hand to hover over first this thing of

interest and then that.

 

The room is, of course, very clear and clean and simple; not by any

means cheaply equipped, but designed to economise the labour of

redding and repair just as much as is possible. It is beautifully

proportioned, and rather lower than most rooms I know on earth.

There is no fireplace, and I am perplexed by that until I find a

thermometer beside six switches on the wall. Above this switch-board

is a brief instruction: one switch warms the floor, which is not

carpeted, but covered by a substance like soft oilcloth; one warms

the mattress (which is of metal with resistance coils threaded to

and fro in it); and the others warm the wall in various degrees,

each directing current through a separate system of resistances. The

casement does not open, but above, flush with the ceiling, a

noiseless rapid fan pumps air out of the room. The air enters by a

Tobin shaft. There is a recess dressing-room, equipped with a bath

and all that is necessary to one’s toilette, and the water, one

remarks, is warmed, if one desires it warm, by passing it through an

electrically heated spiral of tubing. A cake of soap drops out of a

store machine on the turn of a handle, and when you have done with

it, you drop that and your soiled towels and so forth, which also

are given you by machines, into a little box, through the bottom of

which they drop at once, and sail down a smooth shaft. A little

notice tells you the price of your room, and you gather the price is

doubled if you do not leave the toilette as you found it. Beside the

bed, and to be lit at night by a handy switch over the pillow, is a

little clock, its face flush with the wall. The room has no corners

to gather dirt, wall meets floor with a gentle curve, and the

apartment could be swept out effectually by a few strokes of a

mechanical sweeper. The door frames and window frames are of metal,

rounded and impervious to draught. You are politely requested to

turn a handle at the foot of your bed before leaving the room, and

forthwith the frame turns up into