A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) đź“–
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latter condition must be respected. Instead of competing to escape
death and wretchedness, we may compete to give birth and we may heap
every sort of consolation prize upon the losers in that competition.
The modern State tends to qualify inheritance, to insist upon
education and nurture for children, to come in more and more in the
interests of the future between father and child. It is taking over
the responsibility of the general welfare of the children more and
more, and as it does so, its right to decide which children it will
shelter becomes more and more reasonable.
How far will such conditions be prescribed? how far can they be
prescribed in a Modern Utopia?
Let us set aside at once all nonsense of the sort one hears in
certain quarters about the human stud farm. [Footnote: See Mankind
in the Making, Ch. II.] State breeding of the population was a
reasonable proposal for Plato to make, in view of the biological
knowledge of his time and the purely tentative nature of his
metaphysics; but from anyone in the days after Darwin, it is
preposterous. Yet we have it given to us as the most brilliant of
modern discoveries by a certain school of sociological writers, who
seem totally unable to grasp the modification of meaning “species”
and “individual” have undergone in the last fifty years. They do not
seem capable of the suspicion that the boundaries of species have
vanished, and that individuality now carries with it the quality of
the unique! To them individuals are still defective copies of a
Platonic ideal of the species, and the purpose of breeding no more
than an approximation to that perfection. Individuality is indeed a
negligible difference to them, an impertinence, and the whole flow
of modern biological ideas has washed over them in vain.
But to the modern thinker individuality is the significant fact of
life, and the idea of the State, which is necessarily concerned with
the average and general, selecting individualities in order to pair
them and improve the race, an absurdity. It is like fixing a crane
on the plain in order to raise the hill tops. In the initiative of
the individual above the average, lies the reality of the future,
which the State, presenting the average, may subserve but cannot
control. And the natural centre of the emotional life, the cardinal
will, the supreme and significant expression of individuality,
should lie in the selection of a partner for procreation.
But compulsory pairing is one thing, and the maintenance of general
limiting conditions is another, and one well within the scope of
State activity. The State is justified in saying, before you may add
children to the community for the community to educate and in part
to support, you must be above a certain minimum of personal
efficiency, and this you must show by holding a position of solvency
and independence in the world; you must be above a certain age, and
a certain minimum of physical development, and free of any
transmissible disease. You must not be a criminal unless you have
expiated your offence. Failing these simple qualifications, if you
and some person conspire and add to the population of the State, we
will, for the sake of humanity, take over the innocent victim of
your passions, but we shall insist that you are under a debt to the
State of a peculiarly urgent sort, and one you will certainly pay,
even if it is necessary to use restraint to get the payment out of
you: it is a debt that has in the last resort your liberty as a
security, and, moreover, if this thing happens a second time, or if
it is disease or imbecility you have multiplied, we will take an
absolutely effectual guarantee that neither you nor your partner
offend again in this matter.
“Harsh!” you say, and “Poor Humanity!”
You have the gentler alternative to study in your terrestrial slums
and asylums.
It may be urged that to permit conspicuously inferior people to have
one or two children in this way would be to fail to attain the
desired end, but, indeed, this is not so. A suitably qualified
permission, as every statesman knows, may produce the social effects
without producing the irksome pressure of an absolute prohibition.
Amidst bright and comfortable circumstances, and with an easy and
practicable alternative, people will exercise foresight and
self-restraint to escape even the possibilities of hardship and
discomfort; and free life in Utopia is to be well worth this trouble
even for inferior people. The growing comfort, self-respect, and
intelligence of the English is shown, for example, in the fall in
the proportion of illegitimate births from 2.2 per 1,000 in 1846-50
to 1.2 per 1,000 in 1890-1900, and this without any positive
preventive laws whatever. This most desirable result is pretty
certainly not the consequence of any great exaltation of our moral
tone, but simply of a rising standard of comfort and a livelier
sense of consequences and responsibilities. If so marked a change is
possible in response to such progress as England has achieved in the
past fifty years, if discreet restraint can be so effectual as this,
it seems reasonable to suppose that in the ampler knowledge and the
cleaner, franker atmosphere of our Utopian planet the birth of a
child to diseased or inferior parents, and contrary to the sanctions
of the State, will be the rarest of disasters.
And the death of a child, too, that most tragic event, Utopia will
rarely know. Children are not born to die in childhood. But in our
world, at present, through the defects of our medical science and
nursing methods, through defects in our organisation, through
poverty and carelessness, and through the birth of children that
never ought to have been born, one out of every five children born
dies within five years. It may be the reader has witnessed this most
distressful of all human tragedies. It is sheer waste of suffering.
There is no reason why ninety-nine out of every hundred children
born should not live to a ripe age. Accordingly, in any Modern
Utopia, it must be insisted they will.
Section 3
All former Utopias have, by modern standards, erred on the side of
over regulation in these matters. The amount of State interference
with the marriage and birth of the citizens of a modern Utopia
will be much less than in any terrestrial State. Here, just as in
relation to property and enterprise, the law will regulate only in
order to secure the utmost freedom and initiative.
Up to the beginning of this chapter, our Utopian speculations, like
many Acts of Parliament, have ignored the difference of sex. “He”
indeed is to be read as “He and She” in all that goes before. But
we may now come to the sexual aspects of the modern ideal of
a constitution of society in which, for all purposes of the
individual, women are to be as free as men. This will certainly be
realised in the Modern Utopia, if it can be realised at all—not
only for woman’s sake, but for man’s.
But women may be free in theory and not in practice, and as long as
they suffer from their economic inferiority, from the inability to
produce as much value as a man for the same amount of work—and
there can be no doubt of this inferiority—so long will their legal
and technical equality be a mockery. It is a fact that almost
every point in which a woman differs from a man is an economic
disadvantage to her, her incapacity for great stresses of exertion,
her frequent liability to slight illnesses, her weaker initiative,
her inferior invention and resourcefulness, her relative incapacity
for organisation and combination, and the possibilities of emotional
complications whenever she is in economic dependence on men. So long
as women are compared economically with men and boys they will be
inferior in precisely the measure in which they differ from men. All
that constitutes this difference they are supposed not to trade upon
except in one way, and that is by winning or luring a man to marry,
selling themselves in an almost irrevocable bargain, and then
following and sharing his fortunes for “better or worse.”
But—do not let the proposition in its first crudity alarm
you—suppose the Modern Utopia equalises things between the sexes in
the only possible way, by insisting that motherhood is a service to
the State and a legitimate claim to a living; and that, since the
State is to exercise the right of forbidding or sanctioning
motherhood, a woman who is, or is becoming, a mother, is as much
entitled to wages above the minimum wage, to support, to freedom,
and to respect and dignity as a policeman, a solicitor-general, a
king, a bishop in the State Church, a Government professor, or
anyone else the State sustains. Suppose the State secures to every
woman who is, under legitimate sanctions, becoming or likely to
become a mother, that is to say who is duly married, a certain wage
from her husband to secure her against the need of toil and anxiety,
suppose it pays her a certain gratuity upon the birth of a child,
and continues to pay at regular intervals sums sufficient to keep
her and her child in independent freedom, so long as the child
keeps up to the minimum standard of health and physical and mental
development. Suppose it pays more upon the child when it rises
markedly above certain minimum qualifications, physical or mental,
and, in fact, does its best to make thoroughly efficient motherhood
a profession worth following. And suppose in correlation with this
it forbids the industrial employment of married women and of mothers
who have children needing care, unless they are in a position to
employ qualified efficient substitutes to take care of their
offspring. What differences from terrestrial conditions will
ensue?
This extent of intervention will at least abolish two or three
salient hardships and evils of the civilised life. It will abolish
the hardship of the majority of widows, who on earth are poor and
encumbered exactly in proportion as they have discharged the chief
distinctive duty of a woman, and miserable, just in proportion as
their standard of life and of education is high. It will abolish the
hardship of those who do not now marry on account of poverty, or who
do not dare to have children. The fear that often turns a woman from
a beautiful to a mercenary marriage will vanish from life. In Utopia
a career of wholesome motherhood would be, under such conditions as
I have suggested, the normal and remunerative calling for a woman,
and a capable woman who has borne, bred, and begun the education
of eight or nine well-built, intelligent, and successful sons and
daughters would be an extremely prosperous woman, quite irrespective
of the economic fortunes of the man she has married. She would need
to be an exceptional woman, and she would need to have chosen a man
at least a little above the average as her partner in life. But his
death, or misbehaviour, or misfortunes would not ruin her.
Now such an arrangement is merely the completed induction from the
starting propositions that make some measure of education free and
compulsory for every child in the State. If you prevent people
making profit out of their children—and every civilised State—even
that compendium of old-fashioned Individualism, the United States
of America—is now disposed to admit the necessity of that
prohibition—and if you provide for the aged instead of leaving them
to their children’s sense of duty, the practical inducements to
parentage, except among very wealthy people, are greatly reduced.
The sentimental factor in the case rarely leads to more than a
solitary child or
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