A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) đź“–
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desirable end upon which all civilising efforts converge, what do
you regard as the desirable end? Synthesis, one may remark in
passing, does not necessarily mean fusion, nor does it mean
uniformity.
The alternatives fall roughly under three headings. The first is to
assume there is a best race, to define as well as one can that best
race, and to regard all other races as material for extermination.
This has a fine, modern, biological air (“Survival of the Fittest”).
If you are one of those queer German professors who write insanity
about Welt-Politik, you assume the best race is the “Teutonic”;
Cecil Rhodes affected that triumph of creative imagination, the
“Anglo-Saxon race”; my friend, Moses Cohen, thinks there is much to
be said for the Jew. On its premises, this is a perfectly sound and
reasonable policy, and it opens out a brilliant prospect for the
scientific inventor for what one might call Welt-Apparat in the
future, for national harrowing and reaping machines, and
race-destroying fumigations. The great plain of China (“Yellow
Peril”) lends itself particularly to some striking wholesale
undertaking; it might, for example, be flooded for a few days, and
then disinfected with volcanic chlorine. Whether, when all the
inferior races have been stamped out, the superior race would not
proceed at once, or after a brief millennial period of social
harmony, to divide itself into sub-classes, and begin the business
over again at a higher level, is an interesting residual question
into which we need not now penetrate.
That complete development of a scientific Welt-Politik is not,
however, very widely advocated at present, no doubt from a want of
confidence in the public imagination. We have, however, a very
audible and influential school, the Modern Imperialist school, which
distinguishes its own race—there is a German, a British, and an
Anglo-Saxon section in the school, and a wider teaching which
embraces the whole “white race” in one remarkable tolerance—as the
superior race, as one, indeed, superior enough to own slaves,
collectively, if not individually; and the exponents of this
doctrine look with a resolute, truculent, but slightly indistinct
eye to a future in which all the rest of the world will be in
subjection to these elect. The ideals of this type are set forth
pretty clearly in Mr. Kidd’s Control of the Tropics. The whole world
is to be administered by the “white” Powers—Mr. Kidd did not
anticipate Japan—who will see to it that their subjects do not
“prevent the utilisation of the immense natural resources which they
have in charge.” Those other races are to be regarded as children,
recalcitrant children at times, and without any of the tender
emotions of paternity. It is a little doubtful whether the races
lacking “in the elementary qualities of social efficiency” are
expected to acquire them under the chastening hands of those races
which, through “strength and energy of character, humanity, probity,
and integrity, and a single-minded devotion to conceptions of duty,”
are developing “the resources of the richest regions of the earth”
over their heads, or whether this is the ultimate ideal.
Next comes the rather incoherent alternative that one associates in
England with official Liberalism.
Liberalism in England is not quite the same thing as Liberalism in
the rest of the world; it is woven of two strands. There is
Whiggism, the powerful tradition of seventeenth-century Protestant
and republican England, with its great debt to republican Rome, its
strong constructive and disciplinary bias, its broad and originally
very living and intelligent outlook; and interwoven with this there
is the sentimental and logical Liberalism that sprang from the
stresses of the eighteenth century, that finds its early scarce
differentiated expression in Harrington’s Oceana, and after fresh
draughts of the tradition of Brutus and Cato and some elegant
trifling with noble savages, budded in La Cite Morellyste, flowered
in the emotional democratic naturalism of Rousseau, and bore
abundant fruit in the French Revolution. These are two very distinct
strands. Directly they were freed in America from the grip of
conflict with British Toryism, they came apart as the Republican and
Democratic parties respectively. Their continued union in Great
Britain is a political accident. Because of this mixture, the whole
career of English-speaking Liberalism, though it has gone to one
unbroken strain of eloquence, has never produced a clear statement
of policy in relation to other peoples politically less fortunate.
It has developed no definite ideas at all about the future of
mankind. The Whig disposition, which once had some play in India,
was certainly to attempt to anglicise the “native,” to assimilate
his culture, and then to assimilate his political status with that
of his temporary ruler. But interwoven with this anglicising
tendency, which was also, by the bye, a Christianising tendency, was
a strong disposition, derived from the Rousseau strand, to leave
other peoples alone, to facilitate even the separation and autonomy
of detached portions of our own peoples, to disintegrate finally
into perfect, because lawless, individuals. The official exposition
of British “Liberalism” to-day still wriggles unstably because of
these conflicting constituents, but on the whole the Whig strand now
seems the weaker. The contemporary Liberal politician offers cogent
criticism upon the brutality and conceit of modern imperialisms, but
that seems to be the limit of his service. Taking what they do not
say and do not propose as an indication of Liberal intentions, it
would seem that the ideal of the British Liberals and of the
American Democrats is to favour the existence of just as many petty,
loosely allied, or quite independent nationalities as possible, just
as many languages as possible, to deprecate armies and all controls,
and to trust to the innate goodness of disorder and the powers of an
ardent sentimentality to keep the world clean and sweet. The
Liberals will not face the plain consequence that such a state of
affairs is hopelessly unstable, that it involves the maximum risk of
war with the minimum of permanent benefit and public order. They
will not reflect that the stars in their courses rule inexorably
against it. It is a vague, impossible ideal, with a rude sort of
unworldly moral beauty, like the gospel of the Doukhobors. Besides
that charm it has this most seductive quality to an official British
Liberal, that it does not exact intellectual activity nor indeed
activity of any sort whatever. It is, by virtue of that alone, a far
less mischievous doctrine than the crude and violent Imperialism of
the popular Press.
Neither of these two schools of policy, neither the international
laisser faire of the Liberals, nor “hustle to the top” Imperialism,
promise any reality of permanent progress for the world of men. They
are the resort, the moral reference, of those who will not think
frankly and exhaustively over the whole field of this question. Do
that, insist upon solutions of more than accidental applicability,
and you emerge with one or other of two contrasted solutions, as the
consciousness of kind or the consciousness of individuality prevails
in your mind. In the former case you will adopt aggressive
Imperialism, but you will carry it out to its “thorough” degree of
extermination. You will seek to develop the culture and power of
your kind of men and women to the utmost in order to shoulder all
other kinds from the earth. If on the other hand you appreciate the
unique, you will aim at such a synthesis as this Utopia displays, a
synthesis far more credible and possible than any other
Welt-Politik. In spite of all the pageant of modern war, synthesis
is in the trend of the world. To aid and develop it, could be made
the open and secure policy of any great modern empire now. Modern
war, modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only
through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the conceit and
intellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind.
Were the will of the mass of men lit and conscious, I am firmly
convinced it would now burn steadily for synthesis and peace.
It would be so easy to bring about a world peace within a few
decades, was there but the will for it among men! The great empires
that exist need but a little speech and frankness one with another.
Within, the riddles of social order are already half solved in books
and thought, there are the common people and the subject peoples to
be educated and drilled, to be led to a common speech and a common
literature, to be assimilated and made citizens; without, there is
the possibility of treaties. Why, for example, should Britain and
France, or either and the United States, or Sweden and Norway, or
Holland, or Denmark, or Italy, fight any more for ever? And if there
is no reason, how foolish and dangerous it is still to sustain
linguistic differences and custom houses, and all sorts of foolish
and irritating distinctions between their various citizens! Why
should not all these peoples agree to teach some common language,
French, for example, in their common schools, or to teach each
other’s languages reciprocally? Why should they not aim at a common
literature, and bring their various common laws, their marriage
laws, and so on, into uniformity? Why should they not work for a
uniform minimum of labour conditions through all their communities?
Why, then, should they not—except in the interests of a few rascal
plutocrats—trade freely and exchange their citizenship freely
throughout their common boundaries? No doubt there are difficulties
to be found, but they are quite finite difficulties. What is there
to prevent a parallel movement of all the civilised Powers in the
world towards a common ideal and assimilation?
Stupidity—nothing but stupidity, a stupid brute jealousy, aimless
and unjustifiable.
The coarser conceptions of aggregation are at hand, the hostile,
jealous patriotisms, the blare of trumpets and the pride of fools;
they serve the daily need though they lead towards disaster. The
real and the immediate has us in its grip, the accidental personal
thing. The little effort of thought, the brief sustained effort of
will, is too much for the contemporary mind. Such treaties, such
sympathetic international movements, are but dream stuff yet on
earth, though Utopia has realised them long since and already passed
them by.
The Bubble Bursts
Section 1
As I walk back along the river terrace to the hotel where the
botanist awaits me, and observe the Utopians I encounter, I have no
thought that my tenure of Utopia becomes every moment more
precarious. There float in my mind vague anticipations of more talks
with my double and still more, of a steady elaboration of detail, of
interesting journeys of exploration. I forget that a Utopia is a
thing of the imagination that becomes more fragile with every added
circumstance, that, like a soap-bubble, it is most brilliantly and
variously coloured at the very instant of its dissolution. This
Utopia is nearly done. All the broad lines of its social
organisation are completed now, the discussion of all its general
difficulties and problems. Utopian individuals pass me by, fine
buildings tower on either hand; it does not occur to me that I may
look too closely. To find the people assuming the concrete and
individual, is not, as I fondly imagine, the last triumph of
realisation, but the swimming moment of opacity before the film
gives way. To come to individual emotional cases, is to return to
the earth.
I find the botanist sitting at a table in the hotel courtyard.
“Well?” I say, standing before him.
“I’ve been in the gardens on the river terrace,” he answers, “hoping
I might see her again.”
“Nothing better to do?”
“Nothing in the world.”
“You’ll have your double back from India to-morrow. Then you’ll have
conversation.”
“I don’t want
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