A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) đź“–
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after a certain time to rejoin again, one deliberate breach may
exclude a man for ever—of the system of law that has grown up about
such trials, and of the triennial council that revises and alters
the Rule. From that we passed to the discussion of the general
constitution of this World State. Practically all political power
vests in the samurai. Not only are they the only administrators,
lawyers, practising doctors, and public officials of almost all
kinds, but they are the only voters. Yet, by a curious exception,
the supreme legislative assembly must have one-tenth, and may have
one-half of its members outside the order, because, it is alleged,
there is a sort of wisdom that comes of sin and laxness, which is
necessary to the perfect ruling of life. My double quoted me a verse
from the Canon on this matter that my unfortunate verbal memory did
not retain, but it was in the nature of a prayer to save the world
from “unfermented men.” It would seem that Aristotle’s idea of a
rotation of rulers, an idea that crops up again in Harrington’s
Oceana, that first Utopia of “the sovereign people” (a Utopia that,
through Danton’s readings in English, played a disastrous part in
the French Revolution), gets a little respect in Utopia. The
tendency is to give a practically permanent tenure to good men.
Every ruler and official, it is true, is put on his trial every
three years before a jury drawn by lot, according to the range of
his activities, either from the samurai of his municipal area or
from the general catalogue of the samurai, but the business of this
jury is merely to decide whether to continue him in office or order
a new election. In the majority of cases the verdict is
continuation. Even if it is not so the official may still appear as
a candidate before the second and separate jury which fills the
vacant post….
My double mentioned a few scattered details of the electoral
methods, but as at that time I believed we were to have a number of
further conversations, I did not exhaust my curiosities upon this
subject. Indeed, I was more than a little preoccupied and
inattentive. The religion of the samurai was after my heart, and it
had taken hold of me very strongly…. But presently I fell
questioning him upon the complications that arise in the Modern
Utopia through the differences between the races of men, and found
my attention returning. But the matter of that discussion I shall
put apart into a separate chapter. In the end we came back to the
particulars of this great Rule of Life that any man desiring of
joining the samurai must follow.
I remember how, after our third bout of talking, I walked back
through the streets of Utopian London to rejoin the botanist at our
hotel.
My double lived in an apartment in a great building—I should judge
about where, in our London, the Tate Gallery squats, and, as the day
was fine, and I had no reason for hurry, I went not by the covered
mechanical way, but on foot along the broad, tree-set terraces that
follow the river on either side.
It was afternoon, and the mellow Thames Valley sunlight, warm and
gentle, lit a clean and gracious world. There were many people
abroad, going to and fro, unhurrying, but not aimless, and I watched
them so attentively that were you to ask me for the most elementary
details of the buildings and terraces that lay back on either bank,
or of the pinnacles and towers and parapets that laced the sky, I
could not tell you them. But of the people I could tell a great
deal.
No Utopians wear black, and for all the frequency of the samurai
uniform along the London ways the general effect is of a
gaily-coloured population. You never see anyone noticeably ragged or
dirty; the police, who answer questions and keep order (and are
quite distinct from the organisation for the pursuit of criminals)
see to that; and shabby people are very infrequent. People who want
to save money for other purposes, or who do not want much bother
with their clothing, seem to wear costumes of rough woven cloth,
dyed an unobtrusive brown or green, over fine woollen underclothing,
and so achieve a decent comfort in its simplest form. Others outside
the Rule of the samurai range the spectrum for colour, and have
every variety of texture; the colours attained by the Utopian dyers
seem to me to be fuller and purer than the common range of stuffs on
earth; and the subtle folding of the woollen materials witness that
Utopian Bradford is no whit behind her earthly sister. White is
extraordinarily frequent; white woollen tunics and robes into which
are woven bands of brilliant colour, abound. Often these ape the cut
and purple edge that distinguishes the samurai. In Utopian London
the air is as clear and less dusty than it is among high mountains;
the roads are made of unbroken surfaces, and not of friable earth;
all heating is done by electricity, and no coal ever enters the
town; there are no horses or dogs, and so there is not a suspicion
of smoke and scarcely a particle of any sort of dirt to render white
impossible.
The radiated influence of the uniform of the samurai has been to
keep costume simple, and this, perhaps, emphasises the general
effect of vigorous health, of shapely bodies. Everyone is well grown
and well nourished; everyone seems in good condition; everyone walks
well, and has that clearness of eye that comes with cleanness of
blood. In London I am apt to consider myself of a passable size and
carriage; here I feel small and mean-looking. The faint suspicions
of spinal curvatures, skew feet, unequal legs, and ill-grown bones,
that haunt one in a London crowd, the plain intimations—in yellow
faces, puffy faces, spotted and irregular complexions, in nervous
movements and coughs and colds—of bad habits and an incompetent or
disregarded medical profession, do not appear here. I notice few old
people, but there seems to be a greater proportion of men and women
at or near the prime of life.
I hang upon that. I have seen one or two fat people here—they are
all the more noticeable because they are rare. But wrinkled age?
Have I yet in Utopia set eyes on a bald head?
The Utopians have brought a sounder physiological science than ours
to bear upon regimen. People know better what to do and what to
avoid, how to foresee and forestall coming trouble, and how to evade
and suppress the subtle poisons that blunt the edge of sensation.
They have put off the years of decay. They keep their teeth, they
keep their digestions, they ward off gout and rheumatism, neuralgia
and influenza and all those cognate decays that bend and wrinkle men
and women in the middle years of existence. They have extended the
level years far into the seventies, and age, when it comes, comes
swiftly and easily. The feverish hurry of our earth, the decay that
begins before growth has ceased, is replaced by a ripe prolonged
maturity. This modern Utopia is an adult world. The flushed romance,
the predominant eroticisms, the adventurous uncertainty of a world
in which youth prevails, gives place here to a grave deliberation,
to a fuller and more powerful emotion, to a broader handling of
life.
Yet youth is here.
Amidst the men whose faces have been made fine by thought and
steadfast living, among the serene-eyed women, comes youth,
gaily-coloured, buoyantly healthy, with challenging eyes, with fresh
and eager face….
For everyone in Utopia who is sane enough to benefit, study and
training last until twenty; then comes the travel year, and many are
still students until twenty-four or twenty-five. Most are still, in
a sense, students throughout life, but it is thought that, unless
responsible action is begun in some form in the early twenties, will
undergoes a partial atrophy. But the full swing of adult life is
hardly attained until thirty is reached. Men marry before the middle
thirties, and the women rather earlier, few are mothers before
five-and-twenty. The majority of those who become samurai do so
between twenty-seven and thirty-five. And, between seventeen and
thirty, the Utopians have their dealings with love, and the play and
excitement of love is a chief interest in life. Much freedom of act
is allowed them so that their wills may grow freely. For the most
part they end mated, and love gives place to some special and more
enduring interest, though, indeed, there is love between older men
and fresh girls, and between youths and maturer women. It is in
these most graceful and beautiful years of life that such freedoms
of dress as the atmosphere of Utopia permits are to be seen, and the
crude bright will and imagination of youth peeps out in ornament and
colour.
Figures come into my sight and possess me for a moment and pass, and
give place to others; there comes a dusky little Jewess, red-lipped
and amber-clad, with a deep crimson flower—I know not whether real
or sham—in the dull black of her hair. She passes me with an
unconscious disdain; and then I am looking at a brightly-smiling,
blue-eyed girl, tall, ruddy, and freckled warmly, clad like a stage
Rosalind, and talking gaily to a fair young man, a novice under the
Rule. A red-haired mother under the Lesser Rule goes by, green-gowned,
with dark green straps crossing between her breasts, and her two
shock-headed children, bare-legged and lightly shod, tug at her
hands on either side. Then a grave man in a long, fur-trimmed robe,
a merchant, maybe, debates some serious matter with a white-tunicked
clerk. And the clerk’s face–-? I turn to mark the straight,
blue-black hair. The man must be Chinese….
Then come two short-bearded men in careless indigo blue raiment,
both of them convulsed with laughter—men outside the Rule, who
practise, perhaps, some art—and then one of the samurai, in
cheerful altercation with a blue-robed girl of eight. “But you
could have come back yesterday, Dadda,” she persists. He is deeply
sunburnt, and suddenly there passes before my mind the picture of a
snowy mountain waste at nightfall and a solitary small figure under
the stars….
When I come back to the present thing again, my eye is caught
at once by a young negro, carrying books in his hand, a
prosperous-looking, self-respecting young negro, in a trimly-cut
coat of purple-blue and silver.
I am reminded of what my double said to me of race.
Race in Utopia
Section 1
Above the sphere of the elemental cravings and necessities, the soul
of man is in a perpetual vacillation between two conflicting
impulses: the desire to assert his individual differences, the
desire for distinction, and his terror of isolation. He wants to
stand out, but not too far out, and, on the contrary, he wants
to merge himself with a group, with some larger body, but not
altogether. Through all the things of life runs this tortuous
compromise, men follow the fashions but resent ready-made uniforms
on every plane of their being. The disposition to form aggregations
and to imagine aggregations is part of the incurable nature of man;
it is one of the great natural forces the statesman must utilise,
and against which he must construct effectual defences. The study of
the aggregations and of the ideals of aggregations about which men’s
sympathies will twine, and upon which they will base a large
proportion of their conduct and personal policy, is the legitimate
definition of sociology.
Now the sort of aggregation to which men and women will refer
themselves is determined
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