A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) đź“–
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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.”
Failure in a Modern Utopia
Section 1
The 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
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