A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) đź“–
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State control to personal morals may be best discussed in the case
of intoxication, the most isolated and least complicated of all this
group of problems. But Plato’s treatment of this issue as a question
of who may or may not have the use of wine, though suitable enough
in considering a small State in which everybody was the effectual
inspector of everybody, is entirely beside the mark under modern
conditions, in which we are to have an extraordinarily higher
standard of individual privacy and an amplitude and quantity of
migration inconceivable to the Academic imagination. We may accept
his principle and put this particular freedom (of the use of wine)
among the distinctive privileges of maturity, and still find all
that a modern would think of as the Drink Question untouched.
That question in Utopia will differ perhaps in the proportion of its
factors, but in no other respect, from what it is upon earth. The
same desirable ends will be sought, the maintenance of public order
and decency, the reduction of inducements to form this bad and
wasteful habit to their lowest possible minimum, and the complete
protection of the immature. But the modern Utopians, having
systematised their sociology, will have given some attention to the
psychology of minor officials, a matter altogether too much
neglected by the social reformer on earth. They will not put into
the hands of a common policeman powers direct and indirect that
would be dangerous to the public in the hands of a judge. And they
will have avoided the immeasurable error of making their control of
the drink traffic a source of public revenue. Privacies they will
not invade, but they will certainly restrict the public consumption
of intoxicants to specified licensed places and the sale of them to
unmistakable adults, and they will make the temptation of the young
a grave offence. In so migratory a population as the Modern Utopian,
the licensing of inns and bars would be under the same control as
the railways and high roads. Inns exist for the stranger and not for
the locality, and we shall meet with nothing there to correspond
with our terrestrial absurdity of Local Option.
The Utopians will certainly control this trade, and as certainly
punish personal excesses. Public drunkenness (as distinguished from
the mere elation that follows a generous but controlled use of wine)
will be an offence against public decency, and will be dealt with in
some very drastic manner. It will, of course, be an aggravation of,
and not an excuse for, crime.
But I doubt whether the State will go beyond that. Whether an adult
shall use wine or beer or spirits, or not, seems to me entirely a
matter for his doctor and his own private conscience. I doubt if we
explorers shall meet any drunken men, and I doubt not we shall meet
many who have never availed themselves of their adult freedom in
this respect. The conditions of physical happiness will be better
understood in Utopia, it will be worth while to be well there, and
the intelligent citizen will watch himself closely. Half and more of
the drunkenness of earth is an attempt to lighten dull days and
hopelessly sordid and disagreeable lives, and in Utopia they do not
suffer these things. Assuredly Utopia will be temperate, not only
drinking, but eating with the soundest discretion. Yet I do not
think wine and good ale will be altogether wanting there, nor good,
mellow whisky, nor, upon occasion, the engaging various liqueur.
I do not think so. My botanist, who abstains altogether, is of
another opinion. We differ here and leave the question to the
earnest reader. I have the utmost respect for all Teetotalers,
Prohibitionists, and Haters and Persecutors of Innkeepers, their
energy of reform awakens responsive notes in me, and to their
species I look for a large part of the urgent repair of our earth;
yet for all that–-
There is Burgundy, for example, a bottle of soft and kindly
Burgundy, taken to make a sunshine on one’s lunch when four
strenuous hours of toil have left one on the further side of
appetite. Or ale, a foaming tankard of ale, ten miles of sturdy
tramping in the sleet and slush as a prelude, and then good bread
and good butter and a ripe hollow Stilton and celery and ale—ale
with a certain quantitative freedom. Or, again, where is the sin in
a glass of tawny port three or four times, or it may be five, a
year, when the walnuts come round in their season? If you drink no
port, then what are walnuts for? Such things I hold for the reward
of vast intervals of abstinence; they justify your wide, immaculate
margin, which is else a mere unmeaning blankness on the page of
palate God has given you! I write of these things as a fleshly man,
confessedly and knowingly fleshly, and more than usually aware of my
liability to err; I know myself for a gross creature more given to
sedentary world-mending than to brisk activities, and not one-tenth
as active as the dullest newspaper boy in London. Yet still I have
my uses, uses that vanish in monotony, and still I must ask why
should we bury the talent of these bright sensations altogether?
Under no circumstances can I think of my Utopians maintaining their
fine order of life on ginger ale and lemonade and the ale that is
Kops’. Those terrible Temperance Drinks, solutions of qualified
sugar mixed with vast volumes of gas, as, for example, soda,
seltzer, lemonade, and fire-extincteurs hand grenades—minerals,
they call such stuff in England—fill a man with wind and
self-righteousness. Indeed they do! Coffee destroys brain and
kidney, a fact now universally recognised and advertised throughout
America; and tea, except for a kind of green tea best used with
discretion in punch, tans the entrails and turns honest stomachs
into leather bags. Rather would I be Metchnikoffed [Footnote: See
The Nature of Man, by Professor Elie Metchnikoff.] at once and have
a clean, good stomach of German silver. No! If we are to have no ale
in Utopia, give me the one clean temperance drink that is worthy to
set beside wine, and that is simple water. Best it is when not quite
pure and with a trace of organic matter, for then it tastes and
sparkles….
My botanist would still argue.
Thank Heaven this is my book, and that the ultimate decision rests
with me. It is open to him to write his own Utopia and arrange that
everybody shall do nothing except by the consent of the savants of
the Republic, either in his eating, drinking, dressing or lodging,
even as Cabet proposed. It is open to him to try a News from Nowhere
Utopia with the wine left out. I have my short way with him here
quite effectually. I turn in the entrance of our inn to the civil
but by no means obsequious landlord, and with a careful ambiguity of
manner for the thing may be considered an outrage, and I try to make
it possible the idea is a jest—put my test demand….
“You see, my dear Teetotaler?—he sets before me tray and glass
and…” Here follows the necessary experiment and a deep sigh….
“Yes, a bottle of quite excellent light beer! So there are also
cakes and ale in Utopia! Let us in this saner and more beautiful
world drink perdition to all earthly excesses. Let us drink more
particularly to the coming of the day when men beyond there will
learn to distinguish between qualitative and quantitative questions,
to temper good intentions with good intelligence, and righteousness
with wisdom. One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the
unteachable wildness of the Good.”
Section 7
So presently to bed and to sleep, but not at once to sleep. At first
my brain, like a dog in unfamiliar quarters, must turn itself round
for a time or so before it lies down. This strange mystery of a
world of which I have seen so little as yet—a mountain slope, a
twilit road, a traffic of ambiguous vehicles and dim shapes, the
window lights of many homes—fills me with curiosities. Figures and
incidents come and go, the people we have passed, our landlord,
quietly attentive and yet, I feel, with the keenest curiosity
peeping from his eyes, the unfamiliar forms of the house parts and
furnishings, the unfamiliar courses of the meal. Outside this little
bedroom is a world, a whole unimagined world. A thousand million
things lie outside in the darkness beyond this lit inn of ours,
unthought-of possibilities, overlooked considerations, surprises,
riddles, incommensurables, a whole monstrous intricate universe of
consequences that I have to do my best to unravel. I attempt
impossible recapitulations and mingle the weird quality of dream
stuff with my thoughts.
Athwart all this tumult of my memory goes this queer figure of my
unanticipated companion, so obsessed by himself and his own
egotistical love that this sudden change to another world seems only
a change of scene for his gnawing, uninvigorating passion. It occurs
to me that she also must have an equivalent in Utopia, and then that
idea and all ideas grow thin and vague, and are dissolved at last in
the rising tide of sleep….
Utopian Economics
Section 1
These modern Utopians with the universally diffused good manners,
the universal education, the fine freedoms we shall ascribe to them,
their world unity, world language, world-wide travellings,
world-wide freedom of sale and purchase, will remain mere
dreamstuff, incredible even by twilight, until we have shown that at
that level the community will still sustain itself. At any rate, the
common liberty of the Utopians will not embrace the common liberty
to be unserviceable, the most perfect economy of organisation still
leaves the fact untouched that all order and security in a State
rests on the certainty of getting work done. How will the work of
this planet be done? What will be the economics of a modern
Utopia?
Now in the first place, a state so vast and complex as this world
Utopia, and with so migratory a people, will need some handy symbol
to check the distribution of services and commodities. Almost
certainly they will need to have money. They will have money, and
it is not inconceivable that, for all his sorrowful thoughts, our
botanist, with his trained observation, his habit of looking at
little things upon the ground, would be the one to see and pick up
the coin that has fallen from some wayfarer’s pocket. (This, in our
first hour or so before we reach the inn in the Urseren Thal.) You
figure us upon the high Gotthard road, heads together over the
little disk that contrives to tell us so much of this strange
world.
It is, I imagine, of gold, and it will be a convenient accident if
it is sufficient to make us solvent for a day or so, until we are a
little more informed of the economic system into which we have come.
It is, moreover, of a fair round size, and the inscription declares
it one Lion, equal to “twaindy” bronze Crosses. Unless the ratio of
metals is very different here, this latter must be a token coin, and
therefore legal tender for but a small amount. (That would be pain
and pleasure to Mr. Wordsworth Donisthorpe if he were to chance to
join us, for once he planned a Utopian coinage, [Footnote: A System
of Measures, by Wordsworth Donisthorpe.] and the words Lion and
Cross are his. But a token coinage and “legal tender” he cannot
abide. They make him argue.) And being in Utopia, that unfamiliar
“twaindy” suggests at once we have come
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