A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) đź“–
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point with the labour question forthwith. At last we should draw the
deep breath of resolution and arise and ask for the Public Office.
We should know by this time that the labour bureau sheltered with
the post-office and other public services in one building.
The public office of Utopia would of course contain a few surprises
for two men from terrestrial England. You imagine us entering, the
botanist lagging a little behind me, and my first attempts to be
offhand and commonplace in a demand for work.
The office is in charge of a quick-eyed little woman of six and
thirty perhaps, and she regards us with a certain keenness of
scrutiny.
“Where are your papers?” she asks.
I think for a moment of the documents in my pocket, my passport
chequered with visas and addressed in my commendation and in the
name of her late Majesty by We, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoigne
Cecil, Marquess of Salisbury, Earl of Salisbury, Viscount Cranborne,
Baron Cecil, and so forth, to all whom it may concern, my Carte
d’Identite (useful on minor occasions) of the Touring Club de
France, my green ticket to the Reading Room of the British Museum,
and my Lettre d’Indication from the London and County Bank. A
foolish humour prompts me to unfold all these, hand them to her
and take the consequences, but I resist.
“Lost,” I say, briefly.
“Both lost?” she asks, looking at my friend.
“Both,” I answer.
“How?”
I astonish myself by the readiness of my answer.
“I fell down a snow slope and they came out of my pocket.”
“And exactly the same thing happened to both of you?”
“No. He’d given me his to put with my own.” She raised her eyebrows.
“His pocket is defective,” I add, a little hastily.
Her manners are too Utopian for her to follow that up. She seems to
reflect on procedure.
“What are your numbers?” she asks, abruptly.
A vision of that confounded visitors’ book at the inn above comes
into my mind. “Let me see,” I say, and pat my forehead and
reflect, refraining from the official eye before me. “Let me
see.”
“What is yours?” she asks the botanist.
“A. B.,” he says, slowly, “little a, nine four seven, I
think–-”
“Don’t you know?”
“Not exactly,” says the botanist, very agreeably. “No.”
“Do you mean to say neither of you know your own numbers?” says the
little post-mistress, with a rising note.
“Yes,” I say, with an engaging smile and trying to keep up a good
social tone. “It’s queer, isn’t it? We’ve both forgotten.”
“You’re joking,” she suggests.
“Well,” I temporise.
“I suppose you’ve got your thumbs?”
“The fact is–-” I say and hesitate. “We’ve got our thumbs, of
course.”
“Then I shall have to send a thumb-print down to the office and get
your number from that. But are you sure you haven’t your papers or
numbers? It’s very queer.”
We admit rather sheepishly that it’s queer, and question one another
silently.
She turns thoughtfully for the thumbmarking slab, and as she does
so, a man enters the office. At the sight of him she asks with a
note of relief, “What am I to do, sir, here?”
He looks from her to us gravely, and his eye lights to curiosity at
our dress. “What is the matter, madam?” he asks, in a courteous
voice.
She explains.
So far the impression we have had of our Utopia is one of a quite
unearthly sanity, of good management and comprehensive design in
every material thing, and it has seemed to us a little incongruous
that all the Utopians we have talked to, our host of last night,
the post-mistress and our garrulous tramp, have been of the most
commonplace type. But suddenly there looks out from this man’s pose
and regard a different quality, a quality altogether nearer that of
the beautiful tramway and of the gracious order of the mountain
houses. He is a well-built man of perhaps five and thirty, with the
easy movement that comes with perfect physical condition, his face
is clean shaven and shows the firm mouth of a disciplined man, and
his grey eyes are clear and steady. His legs are clad in some woven
stuff deep-red in colour, and over this he wears a white shirt
fitting pretty closely, and with a woven purple hem. His general
effect reminds me somehow of the Knights Templars. On his head is a
cap of thin leather and still thinner steel, and with the vestiges
of ear-guards—rather like an attenuated version of the caps that
were worn by Cromwell’s Ironsides.
He looks at us and we interpolate a word or so as she explains and
feel a good deal of embarrassment at the foolish position we have
made for ourselves. I determine to cut my way out of this
entanglement before it complicates itself further.
“The fact is–-” I say.
“Yes?” he says, with a faint smile.
“We’ve perhaps been disingenuous. Our position is so entirely
exceptional, so difficult to explain–-”
“What have you been doing?”
“No,” I say, with decision; “it can’t be explained like that.”
He looks down at his feet. “Go on,” he says.
I try to give the thing a quiet, matter-of-fact air. “You see,” I
say, in the tone one adopts for really lucid explanations, “we come
from another world. Consequently, whatever thumbmark registration
or numbering you have in this planet doesn’t apply to us, and we
don’t know our numbers because we haven’t got any. We are really,
you know, explorers, strangers–-”
“But what world do you mean?”
“It’s a different planet—a long way away. Practically at an
infinite distance.”
He looks up in my face with the patient expression of a man who
listens to nonsense.
“I know it sounds impossible,” I say, “but here is the simple
fact—we appear in your world. We appeared suddenly upon the neck
of Lucendro—the Passo Lucendro—yesterday afternoon, and I defy you
to discover the faintest trace of us before that time. Down we
marched into the San Gotthard road and here we are! That’s our fact.
And as for papers–-! Where in your world have you seen papers like
this?”
I produce my pocket-book, extract my passport, and present it to
him.
His expression has changed. He takes the document and examines it,
turns it over, looks at me, and smiles that faint smile of his
again.
“Have some more,” I say, and proffer the card of the T.C.F.
I follow up that blow with my green British Museum ticket, as
tattered as a flag in a knight’s chapel.
“You’ll get found out,” he says, with my documents in his hand.
“You’ve got your thumbs. You’ll be measured. They’ll refer to the
central registers, and there you’ll be!”
“That’s just it,” I say, “we sha’n’t be.”
He reflects. “It’s a queer sort of joke for you two men to play,” he
decides, handing me back my documents.
“It’s no joke at all,” I say, replacing them in my pocket-book.
The post-mistress intervenes. “What would you advise me to do?”
“No money?” he asks.
“No.”
He makes some suggestions. “Frankly,” he says, “I think you have
escaped from some island. How you got so far as here I can’t
imagine, or what you think you’ll do…. But anyhow, there’s the
stuff for your thumbs.”
He points to the thumbmarking apparatus and turns to attend to his
own business.
Presently we emerge from the office in a state between discomfiture
and amusement, each with a tramway ticket for Lucerne in his hand
and with sufficient money to pay our expenses until the morrow. We
are to go to Lucerne because there there is a demand for
comparatively unskilled labour in carving wood, which seems to us a
sort of work within our range and a sort that will not compel our
separation.
Section 6
The old Utopias are sessile organisations; the new must square
itself to the needs of a migratory population, to an endless coming
and going, to a people as fluid and tidal as the sea. It does not
enter into the scheme of earthly statesmanship, but indeed all local
establishments, all definitions of place, are even now melting under
our eyes. Presently all the world will be awash with anonymous
stranger men.
Now the simple laws of custom, the homely methods of identification
that served in the little communities of the past when everyone knew
everyone, fail in the face of this liquefaction. If the modern
Utopia is indeed to be a world of responsible citizens, it must have
devised some scheme by which every person in the world can be
promptly and certainly recognised, and by which anyone missing can
be traced and found.
This is by no means an impossible demand. The total population of
the world is, on the most generous estimate, not more than
1,500,000,000, and the effectual indexing of this number of people,
the record of their movement hither and thither, the entry of
various material facts, such as marriage, parentage, criminal
convictions and the like, the entry of the new-born and the
elimination of the dead, colossal task though it would be, is still
not so great as to be immeasurably beyond comparison with the work
of the post-offices in the world of to-day, or the cataloguing of
such libraries as that of the British Museum, or such collections as
that of the insects in Cromwell Road. Such an index could be housed
quite comfortably on one side of Northumberland Avenue, for example.
It is only a reasonable tribute to the distinctive lucidity of the
French mind to suppose the central index housed in a vast series of
buildings at or near Paris. The index would be classified primarily
by some unchanging physical characteristic, such as we are told
the thumbmark and finger-mark afford, and to these would be
added any other physical traits that were of material value.
The classification of thumbmarks and of inalterable physical
characteristics goes on steadily, and there is every reason for
assuming it possible that each human being could be given a distinct
formula, a number or “scientific name,” under which he or she could
be docketed. [Footnote: It is quite possible that the actual
thumbmark may play only a small part in the work of identification,
but it is an obvious convenience to our thread of story to assume
that it is the one sufficient feature.] About the buildings in which
this great main index would be gathered, would be a system of other
indices with cross references to the main one, arranged under names,
under professional qualifications, under diseases, crimes and the
like.
These index cards might conceivably be transparent and so contrived
as to give a photographic copy promptly whenever it was needed, and
they could have an attachment into which would slip a ticket bearing
the name of the locality in which the individual was last reported.
A little army of attendants would be at work upon this index day and
night. From substations constantly engaged in checking back
thumbmarks and numbers, an incessant stream of information would
come, of births, of deaths, of arrivals at inns, of applications to
post-offices for letters, of tickets taken for long journeys, of
criminal convictions, marriages, applications for public doles and
the like. A filter of offices would sort the stream, and all day and
all night for ever a swarm of clerks would go to and fro correcting
this central register, and photographing copies of its entries
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