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

with the dull

surface and something of the tint of yellow ivory; the colour is a

little irregular, and a partial confession of girders and pillars

breaks this front of tender colour with lines and mouldings of

greenish gray, that blend with the tones of the leaden gutters and

rain pipes from the light red roof. At one point only does any

explicit effort towards artistic effect appear, and that is in the

great arched gateway opposite my window. Two or three abundant

yellow roses climb over the face of the building, and when I look

out of my window in the early morning—for the usual Utopian working

day commences within an hour of sunrise—I see Pilatus above this

outlook, rosy in the morning sky.

 

This quadrangle type of building is the prevalent element in Utopian

Lucerne, and one may go from end to end of the town along corridors

and covered colonnades without emerging by a gateway into the open

roads at all. Small shops are found in these colonnades, but the

larger stores are usually housed in buildings specially adapted to

their needs. The majority of the residential edifices are far finer

and more substantial than our own modest shelter, though we gather

from such chance glimpses as we get of their arrangements that the

labour-saving ideal runs through every grade of this servantless

world; and what we should consider a complete house in earthly

England is hardly known here.

 

The autonomy of the household has been reduced far below terrestrial

conditions by hotels and clubs, and all sorts of co-operative

expedients. People who do not live in hotels seem usually to live in

clubs. The fairly prosperous Utopian belongs, in most cases, to one

or two residential clubs of congenial men and women. These clubs

usually possess in addition to furnished bedrooms more or less

elaborate suites of apartments, and if a man prefers it one of these

latter can be taken and furnished according to his personal taste. A

pleasant boudoir, a private library and study, a private garden

plot, are among the commonest of such luxuries. Devices to secure

roof gardens, loggias, verandahs, and such-like open-air privacies

to the more sumptuous of these apartments, give interest and variety

to Utopian architecture. There are sometimes little cooking corners

in these flats—as one would call them on earth—but the ordinary

Utopian would no more think of a special private kitchen for his

dinners than he would think of a private flour mill or dairy farm.

Business, private work, and professional practice go on sometimes in

the house apartments, but often in special offices in the great

warren of the business quarter. A common garden, an infant school,

play rooms, and a playing garden for children, are universal

features of the club quadrangles.

 

Two or three main roads with their tramways, their cyclists’ paths,

and swift traffic paths, will converge on the urban centre, where

the public offices will stand in a group close to the two or three

theatres and the larger shops, and hither, too, in the case of

Lucerne, the head of the swift railway to Paris and England and

Scotland, and to the Rhineland and Germany will run. And as one

walks out from the town centre one will come to that mingling of

homesteads and open country which will be the common condition of

all the more habitable parts of the globe.

 

Here and there, no doubt, will stand quite solitary homesteads,

homesteads that will nevertheless be lit and warmed by cables from

the central force station, that will share the common water supply,

will have their perfected telephonic connection with the rest of

the world, with doctor, shop, and so forth, and may even have

a pneumatic tube for books and small parcels to the nearest

post-office. But the solitary homestead, as a permanent residence,

will be something of a luxury—the resort of rather wealthy garden

lovers; and most people with a bias for retirement will probably get

as much residential solitude as they care for in the hire of a

holiday chalet in a forest, by remote lagoons or high up the

mountain side.

 

The solitary house may indeed prove to be very rare indeed in

Utopia. The same forces, the same facilitation of communications

that will diffuse the towns will tend to little concentrations of

the agricultural population over the country side. The field workers

will probably take their food with them to their work during the

day, and for the convenience of an interesting dinner and of

civilised intercourse after the working day is over, they will most

probably live in a college quadrangle with a common room and club. I

doubt if there will be any agricultural labourers drawing wages in

Utopia. I am inclined to imagine farming done by tenant

associations, by little democratic unlimited liability companies

working under elected managers, and paying not a fixed rent but a

share of the produce to the State. Such companies could reconstruct

annually to weed out indolent members. [Footnote: Schemes for the

co-operative association of producers will be found in Dr. Hertzka’s

Freeland.] A minimum standard of efficiency in farming would be

insured by fixing a minimum beneath which the rent must not fall,

and perhaps by inspection. The general laws respecting the standard

of life would, of course, apply to such associations. This type of

co-operation presents itself to me as socially the best arrangement

for productive agriculture and horticulture, but such enterprises

as stock breeding, seed farming and the stocking and loan of

agricultural implements are probably, and agricultural research and

experiment certainly, best handled directly by large companies or

the municipality or the State.

 

But I should do little to investigate this question; these are

presented as quite incidental impressions. You must suppose that for

the most part our walks and observations keep us within the more

urban quarters of Lucerne. From a number of beautifully printed

placards at the street corners, adorned with caricatures of

considerable pungency, we discover an odd little election is in

progress. This is the selection, upon strictly democratic lines,

with a suffrage that includes every permanent resident in the

Lucerne ward over the age of fifteen, of the ugliest local building.

The old little urban and local governing bodies, we find, have long

since been superseded by great provincial municipalities for all the

more serious administrative purposes, but they still survive to

discharge a number of curious minor functions, and not the least

among these is this sort of aesthetic ostracism. Every year every

minor local governing body pulls down a building selected by local

plebiscite, and the greater Government pays a slight compensation to

the owner, and resumes possession of the land it occupies. The idea

would strike us at first as simply whimsical, but in practice it

appears to work as a cheap and practical device for the aesthetic

education of builders, engineers, business men, opulent persons, and

the general body of the public. But when we come to consider its

application to our own world we should perceive it was the most

Utopian thing we had so far encountered.

 

Section 2

 

The factory that employs us is something very different from the

ordinary earthly model. Our business is to finish making little

wooden toys—bears, cattle men, and the like—for children. The

things are made in the rough by machinery, and then finished by

hand, because the work of unskilful but interested men—and it

really is an extremely amusing employment—is found to give a

personality and interest to these objects no machine can ever

attain.

 

We carvers—who are the riffraff of Utopia—work in a long shed

together, nominally by time; we must keep at the job for the length

of the spell, but we are expected to finish a certain number of toys

for each spell of work. The rules of the game as between employer

and employed in this particular industry hang on the wall behind us;

they are drawn up by a conference of the Common Council of Wages

Workers with the employers, a common council which has resulted in

Utopia from a synthesis of the old Trades Unions, and which has

become a constitutional power; but any man who has skill or humour

is presently making his own bargain with our employer more or less

above that datum line.

 

Our employer is a quiet blue-eyed man with a humorous smile. He

dresses wholly in an indigo blue, that later we come to consider a

sort of voluntary uniform for Utopian artists. As he walks about

the workshop, stopping to laugh at this production or praise that,

one is reminded inevitably of an art school. Every now and then

he carves a little himself or makes a sketch or departs to the

machinery to order some change in the rough shapes it is turning

out. Our work is by no means confined to animals. After a time I am

told to specialise in a comical little Roman-nosed pony; but several

of the better paid carvers work up caricature images of eminent

Utopians. Over these our employer is most disposed to meditate, and

from them he darts off most frequently to improve the type.

 

It is high summer, and our shed lies open at either end. On one hand

is a steep mountain side down which there comes, now bridging a

chasm, now a mere straight groove across a meadow, now hidden among

green branches, the water-slide that brings our trees from the

purple forest overhead. Above us, but nearly hidden, hums the

machine shed, but we see a corner of the tank into which, with a

mighty splash, the pine trees are delivered. Every now and then,

bringing with him a gust of resinous smell, a white-clad machinist

will come in with a basketful of crude, unwrought little images, and

will turn them out upon the table from which we carvers select

them.

 

(Whenever I think of Utopia that faint and fluctuating smell of

resin returns to me, and whenever I smell resin, comes the memory of

the open end of the shed looking out upon the lake, the blue-green

lake, the boats mirrored in the water, and far and high beyond

floats the atmospheric fairyland of the mountains of Glarus, twenty

miles away.)

 

The cessation of the second and last spell of work comes about

midday, and then we walk home, through this beautiful intricacy of a

town to our cheap hotel beside the lake.

 

We should go our way with a curious contentment, for all that we

were earning scarcely more than the minimum wage. We should have, of

course, our uneasiness about the final decisions of that universal

eye which has turned upon us, we should have those ridiculous sham

numbers on our consciences; but that general restlessness, that

brooding stress that pursues the weekly worker on earth, that aching

anxiety that drives him so often to stupid betting, stupid drinking,

and violent and mean offences will have vanished out of mortal

experience.

 

Section 3

 

I should find myself contrasting my position with my preconceptions

about a Utopian visit. I had always imagined myself as standing

outside the general machinery of the State—in the distinguished

visitors’ gallery, as it were—and getting the new world in a series

of comprehensive perspective views. But this Utopia, for all the

sweeping floats of generalisation I do my best to maintain, is

swallowing me up. I find myself going between my work and the room

in which I sleep and the place in which I dine, very much as I went

to and fro in that real world into which I fell five-and-forty years

ago. I find about me mountains and horizons that limit my view,

institutions that vanish also without an explanation, beyond the

limit of sight, and a great complexity of things I do not understand

and about which,