A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) đź“–
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transmission to the subordinate local stations, in response to their
inquiries. So the inventory of the State would watch its every man
and the wide world write its history as the fabric of its destiny
flowed on. At last, when the citizen died, would come the last entry
of all, his age and the cause of his death and the date and place of
his cremation, and his card would be taken out and passed on to the
universal pedigree, to a place of greater quiet, to the ever-growing
galleries of the records of the dead.
Such a record is inevitable if a Modern Utopia is to be
achieved.
Yet at this, too, our blond-haired friend would no doubt rebel. One
of the many things to which some will make claim as a right, is that
of going unrecognised and secret whither one will. But that, so far
as one’s fellow wayfarers were concerned, would still be possible.
Only the State would share the secret of one’s little concealment.
To the eighteenth-century Liberal, to the old-fashioned
nineteenth-century Liberal, that is to say to all professed
Liberals, brought up to be against the Government on principle, this
organised clairvoyance will be the most hateful of dreams. Perhaps,
too, the Individualist would see it in that light. But these are
only the mental habits acquired in an evil time. The old Liberalism
assumed bad government, the more powerful the government the worse
it was, just as it assumed the natural righteousness of the free
individual. Darkness and secrecy were, indeed, the natural refuges
of liberty when every government had in it the near possibility of
tyranny, and the Englishman or American looked at the papers of a
Russian or a German as one might look at the chains of a slave. You
imagine that father of the old Liberalism, Rousseau, slinking off
from his offspring at the door of the Foundling Hospital, and you
can understand what a crime against natural virtue this quiet eye of
the State would have seemed to him. But suppose we do not assume
that government is necessarily bad, and the individual necessarily
good—and the hypothesis upon which we are working practically
abolishes either alternative—then we alter the case altogether. The
government of a modern Utopia will be no perfection of intentions
ignorantly ruling the world…. [Footnote: In the typical modern
State of our own world, with its population of many millions, and
its extreme facility of movement, undistinguished men who adopt an
alias can make themselves untraceable with the utmost ease. The
temptation of the opportunities thus offered has developed a new
type of criminality, the Deeming or Crossman type, base men who
subsist and feed their heavy imaginations in the wooing, betrayal,
ill-treatment, and sometimes even the murder of undistinguished
women. This is a large, a growing, and, what is gravest, a prolific
class, fostered by the practical anonymity of the common man. It is
only the murderers who attract much public attention, but the supply
of low-class prostitutes is also largely due to these free
adventures of the base. It is one of the bye products of State
Liberalism, and at present it is very probably drawing ahead in the
race against the development of police organisation.]
Such is the eye of the State that is now slowly beginning to
apprehend our existence as two queer and inexplicable parties
disturbing the fine order of its field of vision, the eye that will
presently be focussing itself upon us with a growing astonishment
and interrogation. “Who in the name of Galton and Bertillon,” one
fancies Utopia exclaiming, “are you?”
I perceive I shall cut a queer figure in that focus. I shall affect
a certain spurious ease of carriage no doubt. “The fact is, I shall
begin….”
Section 7
And now see how an initial hypothesis may pursue and overtake its
maker. Our thumbmarks have been taken, they have travelled by
pneumatic tube to the central office of the municipality hard by
Lucerne, and have gone on thence to the headquarters of the index at
Paris. There, after a rough preliminary classification, I imagine
them photographed on glass, and flung by means of a lantern in
colossal images upon a screen, all finely squared, and the careful
experts marking and measuring their several convolutions. And then
off goes a brisk clerk to the long galleries of the index
building.
I have told them they will find no sign of us, but you see him going
from gallery to gallery, from bay to bay, from drawer to drawer, and
from card to card. “Here he is!” he mutters to himself, and he whips
out a card and reads. “But that is impossible!” he says….
You figure us returning after a day or so of such Utopian
experiences as I must presently describe, to the central office in
Lucerne, even as we have been told to do.
I make my way to the desk of the man who has dealt with us before.
“Well?” I say, cheerfully, “have you heard?”
His expression dashes me a little. “We’ve heard,” he says, and adds,
“it’s very peculiar.”
“I told you you wouldn’t find out about us,” I say,
triumphantly.
“But we have,” he says; “but that makes your freak none the less
remarkable.”
“You’ve heard! You know who we are! Well—tell us! We had an idea,
but we’re beginning to doubt.”
“You,” says the official, addressing the botanist, “are–-!”
And he breathes his name. Then he turns to me and gives me mine.
For a moment I am dumbfounded. Then I think of the entries we made
at the inn in the Urserenthal, and then in a flash I have the truth.
I rap the desk smartly with my finger-tips and shake my index-finger
in my friend’s face.
“By Jove!” I say in English. “They’ve got our doubles!”
The botanist snaps his fingers. “Of course! I didn’t think of
that.”
“Do you mind,” I say to this official, “telling us some more about
ourselves?”
“I can’t think why you keep it up,” he remarks, and then almost
wearily tells me the facts about my Utopian self. They are a little
difficult to understand. He says I am one of the samurai, which
sounds Japanese, “but you will be degraded,” he says, with a gesture
almost of despair. He describes my position in this world in phrases
that convey very little.
“The queer thing,” he remarks, “is that you were in Norway only
three days ago.”
“I am there still. At least–-. I’m sorry to be so much trouble to
you, but do you mind following up that last clue and inquiring if
the person to whom the thumbmark really belongs isn’t in Norway
still?”
The idea needs explanation. He says something incomprehensible about
a pilgrimage. “Sooner or later,” I say, “you will have to believe
there are two of us with the same thumbmark. I won’t trouble you
with any apparent nonsense about other planets and so forth again.
Here I am. If I was in Norway a few days ago, you ought to be able
to trace my journey hither. And my friend?”
“He was in India.” The official is beginning to look perplexed.
“It seems to me,” I say, “that the difficulties in this case are
only just beginning. How did I get from Norway hither? Does my
friend look like hopping from India to the Saint Gotthard at one
hop? The situation is a little more difficult than that–-”
“But here!” says the official, and waves what are no doubt
photographic copies of the index cards.
“But we are not those individuals!”
“You are those individuals.”
“You will see,” I say.
He dabs his finger argumentatively upon the thumbmarks. “I see
now,” he says.
“There is a mistake,” I maintain, “an unprecedented mistake. There’s
the difficulty. If you inquire you will find it begin to unravel.
What reason is there for us to remain casual workmen here, when you
allege we are men of position in the world, if there isn’t something
wrong? We shall stick to this wood-carving work you have found us
here, and meanwhile I think you ought to inquire again. That’s how
the thing shapes to me.”
“Your case will certainly have to be considered further,” he says,
with the faintest of threatening notes in his tone. “But at the same
time”—hand out to those copies from the index again—“there you
are, you know!”
Section 8
When my botanist and I have talked over and exhausted every
possibility of our immediate position, we should turn, I think, to
more general questions.
I should tell him the thing that was becoming more and more apparent
in my own mind. Here, I should say, is a world, obviously on the
face of it well organised. Compared with our world, it is like a
well-oiled engine beside a scrap-heap. It has even got this
confounded visual organ swivelling about in the most alert and
lively fashion. But that’s by the way…. You have only to look at
all these houses below. (We should be sitting on a seat on the
Gutsch and looking down on the Lucerne of Utopia, a Lucerne that
would, I insist, quite arbitrarily, still keep the Wasserthurm and
the Kapellbrucke.) You have only to mark the beauty, the simple
cleanliness and balance of this world, you have only to see the free
carriage, the unaffected graciousness of even the common people, to
understand how fine and complete the arrangements of this world must
be. How are they made so? We of the twentieth century are not going
to accept the sweetish, faintly nasty slops of Rousseauism that so
gratified our great-great-grandparents in the eighteenth. We know
that order and justice do not come by Nature—“if only the policeman
would go away.” These things mean intention, will, carried to a
scale that our poor vacillating, hot and cold earth has never known.
What I am really seeing more and more clearly is the will beneath
this visible Utopia. Convenient houses, admirable engineering that
is no offence amidst natural beauties, beautiful bodies, and a
universally gracious carriage, these are only the outward and
visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. Such an order means
discipline. It means triumph over the petty egotisms and vanities
that keep men on our earth apart; it means devotion and a nobler
hope; it cannot exist without a gigantic process of inquiry, trial,
forethought and patience in an atmosphere of mutual trust and
concession. Such a world as this Utopia is not made by the chance
occasional co-operations of self-indulgent men, by autocratic rulers
or by the bawling wisdom of the democratic leader. And an
unrestricted competition for gain, an enlightened selfishness, that
too fails us….
I have compared the system of indexing humanity we have come upon to
an eye, an eye so sensitive and alert that two strangers cannot
appear anywhere upon the planet without discovery. Now an eye does
not see without a brain, an eye does not turn round and look without
a will and purpose. A Utopia that deals only with appliances and
arrangements is a dream of superficialities; the essential problem
here, the body within these garments, is a moral and an intellectual
problem. Behind all this material order, these perfected
communications, perfected public services and economic organisations,
there must be men and women willing these things. There must be a
considerable number and a succession of these men and women of will.
No single person, no transitory group of people, could order and
sustain this vast complexity. They must have a collective if not
a common width of aim, and that involves a spoken or written
literature, a living literature to
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