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

employment as a right, and there work for a week or

month without degradation upon certain minimum terms, it seems

fairly certain that no one would work, except as the victim of some

quite exceptional and temporary accident, for less.

 

The work publicly provided would have to be toilsome, but not

cruel or incapacitating. A choice of occupations would need to be

afforded, occupations adapted to different types of training and

capacity, with some residual employment of a purely laborious and

mechanical sort for those who were incapable of doing the things

that required intelligence. Necessarily this employment by the

State would be a relief of economic pressure, but it would not be

considered a charity done to the individual, but a public service.

It need not pay, any more than the police need pay, but it could

probably be done at a small margin of loss. There is a number of

durable things bound finally to be useful that could be made and

stored whenever the tide of more highly paid employment ebbed and

labour sank to its minimum, bricks, iron from inferior ores, shaped

and preserved timber, pins, nails, plain fabrics of cotton and

linen, paper, sheet glass, artificial fuel, and so on; new roads

could be made and public buildings reconstructed, inconveniences

of all sorts removed, until under the stimulus of accumulating

material, accumulating investments or other circumstances, the tide

of private enterprise flowed again.

 

The State would provide these things for its citizen as though it

was his right to require them; he would receive as a shareholder in

the common enterprise and not with any insult of charity. But on the

other hand it will require that the citizen who renders the minimum

of service for these concessions shall not become a parent until he

is established in work at a rate above the minimum, and free of any

debt he may have incurred. The State will never press for its debt,

nor put a limit to its accumulation so long as a man or woman

remains childless; it will not even grudge them temporary spells of

good fortune when they may lift their earnings above the minimum

wage. It will pension the age of everyone who cares to take a

pension, and it will maintain special guest homes for the very old

to which they may come as paying guests, spending their pensions

there. By such obvious devices it will achieve the maximum

elimination of its feeble and spiritless folk in every generation

with the minimum of suffering and public disorder.

 

Section 2

 

But the mildly incompetent, the spiritless and dull, the poorer sort

who are ill, do not exhaust our Utopian problem. There remain idiots

and lunatics, there remain perverse and incompetent persons, there

are people of weak character who become drunkards, drug takers, and

the like. Then there are persons tainted with certain foul and

transmissible diseases. All these people spoil the world for others.

They may become parents, and with most of them there is manifestly

nothing to be done but to seclude them from the great body of the

population. You must resort to a kind of social surgery. You cannot

have social freedom in your public ways, your children cannot speak

to whom they will, your girls and gentle women cannot go abroad

while some sorts of people go free. And there are violent people,

and those who will not respect the property of others, thieves and

cheats, they, too, so soon as their nature is confirmed, must pass

out of the free life of our ordered world. So soon as there can be

no doubt of the disease or baseness of the individual, so soon as

the insanity or other disease is assured, or the crime repeated a

third time, or the drunkenness or misdemeanour past its seventh

occasion (let us say), so soon must he or she pass out of the common

ways of men.

 

The dreadfulness of all such proposals as this lies in the

possibility of their execution falling into the hands of hard, dull,

and cruel administrators. But in the case of a Utopia one assumes

the best possible government, a government as merciful and

deliberate as it is powerful and decisive. You must not too hastily

imagine these things being done—as they would be done on earth at

present—by a number of zealous half-educated people in a state of

panic at a quite imaginary “Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit.”

 

No doubt for first offenders, and for all offenders under

five-and-twenty, the Modern Utopia will attempt cautionary and

remedial treatment. There will be disciplinary schools and colleges

for the young, fair and happy places, but with less confidence and

more restraint than the schools and colleges of the ordinary world.

In remote and solitary regions these enclosures will lie, they will

be fenced in and forbidden to the common run of men, and there,

remote from all temptation, the defective citizen will be schooled.

There will be no masking of the lesson; “which do you value most,

the wide world of humanity, or this evil trend in you?” From that

discipline at last the prisoners will return.

 

But the others; what would a saner world do with them?

 

Our world is still vindictive, but the all-reaching State of Utopia

will have the strength that begets mercy. Quietly the outcast will

go from among his fellow men. There will be no drumming of him out

of the ranks, no tearing off of epaulettes, no smiting in the face.

The thing must be just public enough to obviate secret tyrannies,

and that is all.

 

There would be no killing, no lethal chambers. No doubt Utopia will

kill all deformed and monstrous and evilly diseased births, but for

the rest, the State will hold itself accountable for their being.

There is no justice in Nature perhaps, but the idea of justice

must be sacred in any good society. Lives that statesmanship has

permitted, errors it has not foreseen and educated against, must

not be punished by death. If the State does not keep faith, no one

will keep faith. Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State’s

failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community. Even

for murder Utopia will not, I think, kill.

 

I doubt even if there will be jails. No men are quite wise enough,

good enough and cheap enough to staff jails as a jail ought to be

staffed. Perhaps islands will be chosen, islands lying apart from

the highways of the sea, and to these the State will send its

exiles, most of them thanking Heaven, no doubt, to be quit of a

world of prigs. The State will, of course, secure itself against

any children from these people, that is the primary object in their

seclusion, and perhaps it may even be necessary to make these

island prisons a system of island monasteries and island nunneries.

Upon that I am not competent to speak, but if I may believe the

literature of the subject—unhappily a not very well criticised

literature—it is not necessary to enforce this separation.

[Footnote: See for example Dr. W. A. Chapple’s The Fertility of

the Unfit.]

 

About such islands patrol boats will go, there will be no freedoms

of boat building, and it may be necessary to have armed guards at

the creeks and quays. Beyond that the State will give these

segregated failures just as full a liberty as they can have. If

it interferes any further it will be simply to police the islands

against the organisation of serious cruelty, to maintain the freedom

of any of the detained who wish it to transfer themselves to other

islands, and so to keep a check upon tyranny. The insane, of course,

will demand care and control, but there is no reason why the islands

of the hopeless drunkard, for example, should not each have a

virtual autonomy, have at the most a Resident and a guard. I believe

that a community of drunkards might be capable of organising even

its own bad habit to the pitch of tolerable existence. I do not

see why such an island should not build and order for itself and

manufacture and trade. “Your ways are not our ways,” the World State

will say; “but here is freedom and a company of kindred souls. Elect

your jolly rulers, brew if you will, and distil; here are vine

cuttings and barley fields; do as it pleases you to do. We will take

care of the knives, but for the rest—deal yourselves with God!”

 

And you see the big convict steamship standing in to the Island of

Incurable Cheats. The crew are respectfully at their quarters,

ready to lend a hand overboard, but wide awake, and the captain is

hospitably on the bridge to bid his guests good-bye and keep an eye

on the movables. The new citizens for this particular Alsatia, each

no doubt with his personal belongings securely packed and at hand,

crowd the deck and study the nearing coast. Bright, keen faces would

be there, and we, were we by any chance to find ourselves beside the

captain, might recognise the double of this great earthly magnate or

that, Petticoat Lane and Park Lane cheek by jowl. The landing part

of the jetty is clear of people, only a government man or so stands

there to receive the boat and prevent a rush, but beyond the gates a

number of engagingly smart-looking individuals loiter speculatively.

One figures a remarkable building labelled Custom House, an

interesting fiscal revival this population has made, and beyond,

crowding up the hill, the painted walls of a number of comfortable

inns clamour loudly. One or two inhabitants in reduced circumstances

would act as hotel touts, there are several hotel omnibuses and a

Bureau de Change, certainly a Bureau de Change. And a small house

with a large board, aimed point-blank seaward, declares itself a

Gratis Information Office, and next to it rises the graceful dome of

a small Casino. Beyond, great hoardings proclaim the advantages of

many island specialities, a hustling commerce, and the opening of a

Public Lottery. There is a large cheap-looking barrack, the school

of Commercial Science for gentlemen of inadequate training….

 

Altogether a very go-ahead looking little port it would be, and

though this disembarkation would have none of the flow of hilarious

good fellowship that would throw a halo of genial noise about the

Islands of Drink, it is doubtful if the new arrivals would feel

anything very tragic in the moment. Here at last was scope for

adventure after their hearts.

 

This sounds more fantastic than it is. But what else is there to do,

unless you kill? You must seclude, but why should you torment? All

modern prisons are places of torture by restraint, and the habitual

criminal plays the part of a damaged mouse at the mercy of the cat

of our law. He has his little painful run, and back he comes again

to a state more horrible even than destitution. There are no

Alsatias left in the world. For my own part I can think of no crime,

unless it is reckless begetting or the wilful transmission of

contagious disease, for which the bleak terrors, the solitudes and

ignominies of the modern prison do not seem outrageously cruel. If

you want to go so far as that, then kill. Why, once you are rid of

them, should you pester criminals to respect an uncongenial standard

of conduct? Into such islands of exile as this a modern Utopia will

have to purge itself. There is no alternative that I can

contrive.

 

Section 3

 

Will a Utopian be free to be idle?

 

Work has to be done, every day humanity is sustained by its

collective effort, and without a constant recurrence of effort in