A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) 📖
- Author: H. G. Wells
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nor happiness. The permanent idleness of a human being is not
only burthensome to the world, but his own secure misery. But
unprofitable occupation is also intended by idleness, and it may be
considered whether that freedom also will be open to the Utopian.
Conceivably it will, like privacy, locomotion, and almost all the
freedoms of life, and on the same terms—if he possess the money to
pay for it.
That last condition may produce a shock in minds accustomed to the
proposition that money is the root of all evil, and to the idea that
Utopia necessarily implies something rather oaken and hand-made and
primitive in all these relations. Of course, money is not the root
of any evil in the world; the root of all evil in the world, and the
root of all good too, is the Will to Live, and money becomes harmful
only when by bad laws and bad economic organisation it is more
easily attained by bad men than good. It is as reasonable to say
food is the root of all disease, because so many people suffer from
excessive and unwise eating. The sane economic ideal is to make the
possession of money the clear indication of public serviceableness,
and the more nearly that ideal is attained, the smaller is the
justification of poverty and the less the hardship of being poor. In
barbaric and disorderly countries it is almost honourable to be
indigent and unquestionably virtuous to give to a beggar, and even
in the more or less civilised societies of earth, so many children
come into life hopelessly handicapped, that austerity to the poor
is regarded as the meanest of mean virtues. But in Utopia everyone
will have had an education and a certain minimum of nutrition and
training; everyone will be insured against ill-health and accidents;
there will be the most efficient organisation for balancing the
pressure of employment and the presence of disengaged labour, and so
to be moneyless will be clear evidence of unworthiness. In Utopia,
no one will dream of giving to a casual beggar, and no one will
dream of begging.
There will need to be, in the place of the British casual wards,
simple but comfortable inns with a low tariff—controlled to a
certain extent no doubt, and even in some cases maintained, by the
State. This tariff will have such a definite relation to the minimum
permissible wage, that a man who has incurred no liabilities through
marriage or the like relationship, will be able to live in comfort
and decency upon that minimum wage, pay his small insurance premium
against disease, death, disablement, or ripening years, and have a
margin for clothing and other personal expenses. But he will get
neither shelter nor food, except at the price of his freedom, unless
he can produce money.
But suppose a man without money in a district where employment is
not to be found for him; suppose the amount of employment to have
diminished in the district with such suddenness as to have stranded
him there. Or suppose he has quarrelled with the only possible
employer, or that he does not like his particular work. Then no
doubt the Utopian State, which wants everyone to be just as happy as
the future welfare of the race permits, will come to his assistance.
One imagines him resorting to a neat and business-like post-office,
and stating his case to a civil and intelligent official. In any
sane State the economic conditions of every quarter of the earth
will be watched as constantly as its meteorological phases, and a
daily map of the country within a radius of three or four hundred
miles showing all the places where labour is needed will hang upon
the post-office wall. To this his attention will be directed. The
man out of work will decide to try his luck in this place or that,
and the public servant, the official, will make a note of his name,
verify his identity—the freedom of Utopia will not be incompatible
with the universal registration of thumbmarks—and issue passes for
travel and coupons for any necessary inn accommodation on his way to
the chosen destination. There he will seek a new employer.
Such a free change of locality once or twice a year from a region of
restricted employment to a region of labour shortage will be among
the general privileges of the Utopian citizen.
But suppose that in no district in the world is there work within
the capacity of this particular man?
Before we suppose that, we must take into consideration the general
assumption one is permitted to make in all Utopian speculations. All
Utopians will be reasonably well educated upon Utopian lines; there
will be no illiterates unless they are unteachable imbeciles, no
rule-of-thumb toilers as inadaptable as trained beasts. The Utopian
worker will be as versatile as any well-educated man is on earth
to-day, and no Trade Union will impose a limit to his activities.
The world will be his Union. If the work he does best and likes best
is not to be found, there is still the work he likes second best.
Lacking his proper employment, he will turn to some kindred
trade.
But even with that adaptability, it may be that sometimes he will
not find work. Such a disproportion between the work to be done and
the people to do it may arise as to present a surplus of labour
everywhere. This disproportion may be due to two causes: to an
increase of population without a corresponding increase of
enterprises, or to a diminution of employment throughout the world
due to the completion of great enterprises, to economies achieved,
or to the operation of new and more efficient labour-saving
appliances. Through either cause, a World State may find itself
doing well except for an excess of citizens of mediocre and lower
quality.
But the first cause may be anticipated by wise marriage laws…. The
full discussion of these laws will come later, but here one may
insist that Utopia will control the increase of its population.
Without the determination and ability to limit that increase as well
as to stimulate it whenever it is necessary, no Utopia is possible.
That was clearly demonstrated by Malthus for all time.
The second cause is not so easily anticipated, but then, though its
immediate result in glutting the labour market is similar, its final
consequences are entirely different from those of the first. The
whole trend of a scientific mechanical civilisation is continually
to replace labour by machinery and to increase it in its
effectiveness by organisation, and so quite independently of any
increase in population labour must either fall in value until it
can compete against and check the cheapening process, or if that
is prevented, as it will be in Utopia, by a minimum wage, come out
of employment. There is no apparent limit to this process. But a
surplus of efficient labour at the minimum wage is exactly the
condition that should stimulate new enterprises, and that in a State
saturated with science and prolific in invention will stimulate new
enterprises. An increasing surplus of available labour without an
absolute increase of population, an increasing surplus of labour
due to increasing economy and not to proliferation, and which,
therefore, does not press on and disarrange the food supply, is
surely the ideal condition for a progressive civilisation. I am
inclined to think that, since labour will be regarded as a
delocalised and fluid force, it will be the World State and not the
big municipalities ruling the force areas that will be the reserve
employer of labour. Very probably it will be convenient for the
State to hand over the surplus labour for municipal purposes, but
that is another question. All over the world the labour exchanges
will be reporting the fluctuating pressure of economic demand and
transferring workers from this region of excess to that of scarcity;
and whenever the excess is universal, the World State—failing an
adequate development of private enterprise—will either reduce the
working day and so absorb the excess, or set on foot some permanent
special works of its own, paying the minimum wage and allowing them
to progress just as slowly or just as rapidly as the ebb and flow of
labour dictated. But with sane marriage and birth laws there is no
reason to suppose such calls upon the resources and initiative of
the world more than temporary and exceptional occasions.
Section 4
The existence of our blond bare-footed friend was evidence enough
that in a modern Utopia a man will be free to be just as idle or
uselessly busy as it pleases him, after he has earned the minimum
wage. He must do that, of course, to pay for his keep, to pay his
assurance tax against ill-health or old age, and any charge or debt
paternity may have brought upon him. The World State of the modern
Utopist is no state of moral compulsions. If, for example, under the
restricted Utopian scheme of inheritance, a man inherited sufficient
money to release him from the need to toil, he would be free to go
where he pleased and do what he liked. A certain proportion of men
at ease is good for the world; work as a moral obligation is the
morality of slaves, and so long as no one is overworked there is no
need to worry because some few are underworked. Utopia does not
exist as a solace for envy. From leisure, in a good moral and
intellectual atmosphere, come experiments, come philosophy and the
new departures.
In any modern Utopia there must be many leisurely people. We are all
too obsessed in the real world by the strenuous ideal, by the idea
that the vehement incessant fool is the only righteous man. Nothing
done in a hurry, nothing done under strain, is really well done. A
State where all are working hard, where none go to and fro, easily
and freely, loses touch with the purpose of freedom.
But inherited independence will be the rarest and least permanent of
Utopian facts, for the most part that wider freedom will have to be
earned, and the inducements to men and women to raise their personal
value far above the minimum wage will be very great indeed. Thereby
will come privacies, more space in which to live, liberty to go
everywhere and do no end of things, the power and freedom to
initiate interesting enterprises and assist and co-operate with
interesting people, and indeed all the best things of life. The
modern Utopia will give a universal security indeed, and exercise
the minimum of compulsions to toil, but it will offer some acutely
desirable prizes. The aim of all these devices, the minimum wage,
the standard of life, provision for all the feeble and unemployed
and so forth, is not to rob life of incentives but to change their
nature, to make life not less energetic, but less panic-stricken and
violent and base, to shift the incidence of the struggle for
existence from our lower to our higher emotions, so to anticipate
and neutralise the motives of the cowardly and bestial, that the
ambitious and energetic imagination which is man’s finest quality
may become the incentive and determining factor in survival.
Section 5
After we have paid for our lunch in the little inn that corresponds
to Wassen, the botanist and I would no doubt spend the rest of the
forenoon in the discussion of various aspects and possibilities of
Utopian labour laws. We should examine our remaining change, copper
coins of an appearance ornamental rather than reassuring, and we
should decide that after what we had gathered from the man with the
blond hair, it would, on the whole,
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