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THE STORY OF UTOPIAS




                                  THE
                            STORY OF UTOPIAS

                          IDEAL COMMONWEALTHS
                                  AND
                              SOCIAL MYTHS


                                   BY
                             LEWIS MUMFORD

                          With an Introduction
                                   by
                        HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON


                     “_A Map of the World that
                     does not include Utopia is not
                     worth even glancing at._...”


                      GEORGE G. HARRAP & CO. LTD.
                      LONDON    CALCUTTA    SYDNEY




                            _Published 1923
                    by_ GEORGE G. HARRAP & CO. LTD.
             _39–41 Parker Street, Kingsway, London, W.C.2_




ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


The first outline of this book dates back ten years; and since then I
have woven it and rewoven it in my mind. The actual work of composition
was started by a suggestion from Mr. Van Wyck Brooks; and without Mr.
Brooks’ encouragement I should perhaps never have begun or carried
through the task. The general background of ideas has been heavily
colored by my contacts with Professor Patrick Geddes, through his
books and by correspondence; and I owe a debt to him I have not always
been able to acknowledge in direct reference or in quotation marks. I
take the opportunity here to express the hearty gratitude which might
otherwise have been conveyed in the more archaic form of a dedication.

In the revision of the MS. I have been blessed with the generous advice
and criticism of a number of friends; in particular, Mr. Clarence
Britten, Mr. Herbert Feis, Mr. Geroid Robinson, and Miss Sophia
Wittenberg, each of whom performed a unique service. To Messrs. Victor
Branford and Alexander Farquharson of the Sociological Society of Great
Britain I am indebted for many pertinent suggestions. My thanks are
also due to the editors of The Freeman for permission to use extracts
from two articles: Towards a Humanist Synthesis and Beauty and the
Picturesque. Finally, Mr. Hendrik van Loon’s friendly interest calls
for a departing beam of gratitude.

                                                        LEWIS MUMFORD.

New York City.




CONTENTS


           _Introduction by Hendrik Willem van Loon, Ph.D._


  CHAPTER ONE

  How the will-to-utopia causes men to live in two worlds, and
      how, therefore, we re-read the Story of Utopia--the other
      half of the Story of Mankind.                                    9


  CHAPTER TWO

  How the Greeks lived in a New World, and utopia seemed just
      round the corner. How Plato in the Republic is chiefly
      concerned with what will hold the ideal city together.          27


  CHAPTER THREE

  How something happened to utopia between Plato and Sir Thomas
      More; and how utopia was discovered again, along with the
      New World.                                                      57


  CHAPTER FOUR

  How the new Humanism of the Renascence brings us within sight
      of Christianopolis; and how we have for the first time a
      glimpse of a modern utopia.                                     79


  CHAPTER FIVE

  How Bacon and Campanella, who have a great reputation as
      utopians, are little better than echoes of the men who
      went before them.                                              101


  CHAPTER SIX

  How something happened in the eighteenth century which made
      men “furiously to think,” and how a whole group of
      utopias sprang out of the upturned soil of industrialism.
                                                                     111


  CHAPTER SEVEN

  How some utopians have thought that a good community rested
      at bottom on the right division and use of land; and what
      sort of communities these land-animals projected.              131


  CHAPTER EIGHT

  How Étienne Cabet dreamed of a new Napoleon called Icar, and
      a new France called Icaria; and how his utopia, with that
      which Edward Bellamy shows us in Looking Backward, gives
      us a hint of what machinery might bring us to if the
      industrial organization were nationalized.                     149


  CHAPTER NINE

  How William Morris and W. H. Hudson renew the classic
      tradition of utopias; and how, finally, Mr. H. G. Wells
      sums up and clarifies the utopias of the past, and brings
      them into contact with the world of the present.               171


  CHAPTER TEN

  How the Country House and Coketown became the utopias of the
      modern age; and how they made the world over in their
      image.                                                         191


  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  How we reckon up accounts with the one-sided utopias of the
      partisans.                                                     235


  CHAPTER TWELVE

  How the half-worlds must go, and how eutopia may come; and
      what we need before we can build Jerusalem in any green
      and pleasant land.                                             265


  BIBLIOGRAPHY                                                       309




INTRODUCTION

[Illustration]


It is a sunny day and I am sitting on the top of a mountain.

Until this morning, it had been the mountain of a fairy story that was
twenty centuries old.

Now, it is a mighty hill and I can feel its warm coat of white
reindeer-moss, and if I were willing to stretch out my hand, I could
pluck the red berries that are in full bloom.

A hundred years from now it will be gone.

For it is really a large chunk of pure iron, dumped by a playful
Providence in the very heart of Lapland.

Do you remember an old tale of Norse mythology? How somewhere, far in
the north, there stood a high peak of iron, which was a hundred miles
high and a hundred miles wide? And how a little bird came to it once
every thousand years to sharpen its beak? And how, when the mountain
was gone, a single second of all eternity would have passed by?

I heard it told as a child.

I remembered it always, and I told it to my own boys when they began
to learn history. It seemed the invention of some prehistoric Hans
Christian Andersen. It belonged to the imaginary scenery of our dreams.

The story has come true, and I have found my old mountain where I least
expected it.

To make the cycle of coincidence perfect, this hill was named after
a bird. The Lapp, with a fine sense of sound, called the ptarmigan
“Kiru.” Kirunavaara no longer hears the shrill “kiru-kiru” of rising
birds. Twice a day it listens to the terrific detonation of half a
hundred charges of dynamite.

Then it is shaken by the little trains which carry the rock to the
valley.

In the evening, it sees the lights of the large electric engines
which hoist the valuable metal across the arctic wilderness of Lake
Tornotrask.

Two months later, the ore has been melted and worked into those modern
articles of trade which go by the name of bridges and automobiles and
ships and apartment houses and a thousand other things which once
promised to elevate man from the ranks of the beasts of burden.

What has become of that promise, the survivors of the last eight years
know with great if gruesome accuracy.

Even the humble Lapp has heard of the great upheaval, and has asked why
the white people should kill each other when the whole world was full
of reindeer and when God has given us the hills and the plains so that
forever there should be food enough for the long days of summer and the
longer nights of the endless winter.

[Illustration]

But the ways of the Lapp are not the ways of the white man.

These simple followers of a pure and much undiluted nature follow the
even tenor of their ways as their ancestors did, five and ten thousand
years ago.

We, on the other hand, have our engines and we have our railroad
trains and we have our factories and we cannot get rid of these iron
servants without destroying the very basis of our civilization. We may
hate these ungainly companions, but we need them. In time to come, we
shall know how to be their masters. Then Plato shall give us a revised
Republic where all the houses are heated by steam and where all the
dishes are washed by electricity.

We are not suffering from too much machinery, but from too little. For
let there be enough iron servants and more of us shall be able to sit
on the tops of mountains and stare into the blue sky and waste valuable
hours, imagining the things that ought to be.

The Old Testament used to call such people prophets. They raised
strange cities of their hearts’ delight, which should be based
exclusively upon righteousness and piety. But the greatest of all their
prophets the Jews killed to make a Roman holiday.

The Greeks knew such wise men as philosophers. They allowed them great
freedom and rejoiced in the mathematical precision with which their
intellectual leaders mapped out those theoretical roads which were to
lead mankind from chaos to an ordered state of society.

The Middle Ages insisted with narrow persistence upon the Kingdom of
Heaven as the only possible standard for a decent Christian Utopia.

They crushed all those who dared to question the positive existence of
such a future state of glory and content. They built it of stone and
precious metals, but neglected the spiritual fundament.

[Illustration]

And so it perished.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fought many bitter wars to
decide the exact nature of a whitewashed Paradise, erected upon the
crumbling ruins of the mediæval church.

The eighteenth century saw the Promised Land lying just across the
terrible bulwark of stupidity and superstition, which a thousand years
of clerical selfishness had erected for its own protection and safety.

There followed a mighty battle to crush the infamy of ignorance and
bring about an era of well-balanced reason.

Unfortunately, a few enthusiasts carried the matter a trifle too far.

Napoleon, realist-in-chief of all time, brought the world back to the
common ground of solid facts.

Our own generation drew the logical conclusion of the Napoleonic
premises.

Behold the map of Europe and see how well we have wrought.

For alas! this world needs Utopias as it needs fairy stories. It
does not matter so much where we are going, as long as we are making
consciously for some definite goal. And a Utopia, however strange or
fanciful, is the only possible beacon upon the uncharted seas of the
distant future.

[Illustration]

It encourages us in our efforts. Sometimes the light is hidden by the
clouds and for a moment we may lose our way. Then the faint light once
more breaks through the darkness and we press forward with new courage.

And when life is dull and meaningless (the main curse of all existence)
we find consolation in the fact that a hundred years from now, our
children shall reach the shore for which we were bound when we
ourselves left the bridge and were lowered to the peaceful bottom of
the ocean.

[Illustration]

And now the sun has gone down and a chill wind blows from Kebnekajse,
where the wild geese of little Nils Holgerson live amidst the endless
silence of the eternal snow. Soon the top shall be hidden in the mist
and I shall have to find my way back by the noise of the steam shovels,
plying their elephantine trade at the foot of the first terrace.

The mountain of my fairy story once more will be the profitable
investment of a Company of Iron-mongers.

But that does not matter.

Lewis Mumford, for whom I am writing this, will understand what I mean.

And I shall be content.

[Illustration:

                                                 Hendrik Willem van Loon
]

  Kiruna, Lapland,
  14 Sept., 1922.




CHAPTER ONE

  How the will-to-utopia causes men to live in two worlds, and how,
      therefore, we re-read the Story of Utopias--the other half of
      the Story of Mankind.




THE STORY OF UTOPIAS




CHAPTER ONE


1

Utopia has long been another name for the unreal and the impossible. We
have set utopia over against the world. As a matter of fact, it is our
utopias that make the world tolerable to us: the cities and mansions
that people dream of are those in which they finally live. The more
that men react upon their environment and make it over after a human
pattern, the more continuously do they live in utopia; but when there
is a breach between the world of affairs and the overworld of utopia,
we become conscious of the part that the will-to-utopia has played in
our lives, and we see our utopia as a separate reality.

It is the separate reality of utopia that we are going to explore in
the course of this book--Utopia as a world by itself, divided into
ideal commonwealths, with all its communities clustered into proud
cities, aiming bravely at the good life.

This discussion of ideal commonwealths gets its form and its color from
the time in which it is written. Plato’s Republic dates from the period
of social disintegration which followed the Peloponnesian War; and
some of its mordant courage is probably derived from the hopelessness
of conditions that came under Plato’s eye. It was in the midst of a
similar period of disorder and violence that Sir Thomas More laid the
foundations for his imaginary commonwealth: Utopia was the bridge by
which he sought to span the gap between the old order of the Middle
Age, and the new interests and institutions of the Renascence.

In presenting this history and criticism of utopias we are perhaps
being pulled by the same interests that led Plato and More onwards, for
it is only after the storm that we dare to look for the rainbow. Our
fall into a chasm of disillusion has stimulated us to discuss in a more
thorough way the ultimate goods, the basic aims, the whole conception
of the “good life” by which, in modern times, we have been guided. In
the midst of the tepid and half-hearted discussions that continue to
arise out of prohibition laws and strikes and “peace” conferences let
us break in with the injunction to talk about fundamentals--consider
Utopia!


2

Man walks with his feet on the ground and his head in the air; and the
history of what has happened on earth--the history of cities and armies
and of all the things that have had body and form--is only one-half the
Story of Mankind.

In every age, the external scenery in which the human drama has been
framed has remained pretty much the same. There have been fluctuations
in climate and changes in terrain; and at times a great civilization,
like that of the Mayas in Central America, has arisen where now only
a thick net of jungle remains; but the hills around Jerusalem are the
hills that David saw; and during the historic period the drowning
of a city in the Netherlands or the rise of a shifting bank of real
estate along the coast of New Jersey is little more than the wearing
off of the paint or a crack in the plaster. What we call the material
world constantly changes, it goes without saying: mountains are stript
of trees and become wastes, deserts are plowed with water and become
gardens. The main outlines, however, hold their own remarkably well;
and we could have travelled better in Roman days with a modern map than
with the best chart Ptolemy could have offered us.

If the world in which men live were the world as it is known to the
physical geographer, we should have a pretty simple time of it. We
might follow Whitman’s advice, and live as the animals, and stop
whining for all time about our sins and imperfections.

What makes human history such an uncertain and fascinating story
is that man lives in two worlds--the world within and the world
without--and the world within men’s heads has undergone transformations
which have disintegrated material things with the power and rapidity
of radium. I shall take the liberty of calling this inner world our
idolum (ido′lum) or world of ideas. The word “ideas” is not used here
precisely in the ordinary sense. I use it rather to stand for what the
philosophers would call the subjective world, what the theologians
would perhaps call the spiritual world; and I mean to include in it all
the philosophies, fantasies, rationalizations, projections, images, and
opinions in terms of which people pattern their behavior. This world
of ideas, in the case of scientific truths, for example, sometimes
has a rough correspondence with what people call the world; but it
is important to note that it has contours of its own which are quite
independent of the material environment.

Now the physical world is a definite, inescapable thing. Its limits
are narrow and obvious. On occasion, if your impulse is sufficiently
strong, you can leave the land for the sea, or go from a warm climate
into a cool one; but you cannot cut yourself off from the physical
environment without terminating your life. For good or ill, you must
breathe air, eat food, drink water; and the penalties for refusing to
meet these conditions are inexorable. Only a lunatic would refuse to
recognize this physical environment; it is the substratum of our daily
lives.

But if the physical environment is the earth, the world of ideas
corresponds to the heavens. We sleep under the light of stars that
have long since ceased to exist, and we pattern our behavior by ideas
which have no reality as soon as we cease to credit them. Whilst it
holds together this world of ideas--this idolum--is almost as sound,
almost as real, almost as inescapable as the bricks of our houses or
the asphalt beneath our feet. The “belief” that the world was flat was
once upon a time more important than the “fact” that it was round;
and that belief kept the sailors of the medieval world from wandering
out of sight of land as effectively as would a string of gun-boats or
floating mines. An idea is a solid fact, a theory is a solid fact, a
superstition is a solid fact as long as people continue to regulate
their actions in terms of the idea, theory, or superstition; and it is
none the less solid because it is conveyed as an image or a breath of
sound.


3

This world of ideas serves many purposes. Two of them bear heavily upon
our investigation of utopia. On one hand the pseudo-environment or
idolum is a substitute for the external world; it is a sort of house of
refuge to which we flee when our contacts with “hard facts” become too
complicated to carry through or too rough to face. On the other hand,
it is by means of the idolum that the facts of the everyday world are
brought together and assorted and sifted, and a new sort of reality is
projected back again upon the external world. One of these functions
is escape or compensation; it seeks an immediate release from the
difficulties or frustrations of our lot. The other attempts to provide
a condition for our release in the future. The utopias that correspond
to these two functions I shall call the utopias of escape and the
utopias of reconstruction. The first leaves the external world the way
it is; the second seeks to change it so that one may have intercourse
with it on one’s own terms. In one we build impossible castles in the
air; in the other we consult a surveyor and an architect and a mason
and proceed to build a house which meets our essential needs; as well
as houses made of stone and mortar are capable of meeting them.


4

Why, however, should we find it necessary to talk about utopia and the
world of ideas at all? Why should we not rest secure in the bosom of
the material environment, without flying off into a region apparently
beyond space and time? Well, the alternative before us is not whether
we shall live in the real world or dream away our time in utopia; for
men are so constituted that only by a deliberate discipline--such as
that followed by a Hindu ascetic or an American business man--can
one or the other world be abolished from consciousness. The genuine
alternative for most of us is that between an aimless utopia of escape
and a purposive utopia of reconstruction. One way or the other, it
seems, in a world so full of frustrations as the “real” one, we must
spend a good part of our mental lives in utopia.

Nevertheless this needs a qualification. It is plain that certain
types of people have no need for private utopias and that certain
communities seem to be without them. The savages of the Marquesas whom
Hermann Melville described seem to have had such a jolly and complete
adjustment to their environment that, except for the raids of hostile
tribes--and this turned out to be chiefly sport which only whetted
their appetites for the feast that followed--everything needed for a
good life at the South Sea level could be obtained by direct attack.
The Marquesans had no need to dream of a happier existence; they had
only to grab it.

At times, during childhood perhaps, life has the same sort of
completeness; and without doubt there are many mature people who have
manufactured out of their limitations a pretty adequate response to a
narrow environment; and have let it go at that. Such people feel no
need for utopia. As long as they can keep their contacts restricted,
only a deliberate raid from the outside world would create such a
need. They are like the sick man in the parable of the Persian poet,
whose only desire was that he might desire something; and there is no
particular reason to envy them. People who will not venture out into
the open sea pay the penalty of never having looked into the bright
eyes of danger; and at best they know but half of life. What such
folk might call the good life is simply not good enough. We cannot be
satisfied with a segment of existence, no matter how safely we may be
adjusted to it, when with a little effort we can trace the complete
circle.

But there have been few regions, few social orders, and few people
in which the adjustment has not been incomplete. In the face of
perpetual difficulties and obstructions--the wind and the weather
and the impulses of other men and customs that have long outlived
their use--there are three ways, roughly, in which a man may react.
He may run away. He may try to hold his own. He may attack. Looking
around at our contemporaries who have survived the war, it is fairly
evident that most of them are in the first stage of panic and despair.
In an interesting article on The Dénouement of Nihilism, Mr. Edward
Townsend Booth characterized the generation born in the late eighties
as suffering a complete paralysis of will, or else, “if any initiative
remains to them, they emigrate to Europe or the South Sea Islands, or
crawl off into some quiet corner of the United States--but most of them
continue where they were stricken in a state of living death.”

Speaking more generally, running away does not always mean a physical
escape, nor does an “attack” necessarily mean doing something practical
“on the spot.” Let us use Dr. John Dewey’s illustration and suppose
that a man is denied intercourse with his friends at a distance. One
kind of reaction is for him to “imagine” meeting his friends, and
going through, in fantasy, a whole ritual of meeting, repartee, and
discussion. The other kind of reaction, as Dr. Dewey says, is to see
what conditions must be met in order to cement distant friends, and
then invent the telephone. The so-called extrovert, the type of man
who has no need for utopias, will satisfy his desire by talking to the
nearest human being. (“He may try to hold his own.”) But it is fairly
plain that the extrovert, from the very weakness and inconstancy of his
aims, is incapable of contributing anything but “good nature” to the
good life of the community; and in his hands both art and invention
would probably come to an end.

Now putting aside the extrovert, we find that the two remaining types
of reaction have expressed themselves in all the historic utopias. It
is perhaps well that we should see them first in their normal, everyday
setting, before we set out to explore the ideal commonwealths of the
past.

More or less, we have all had glimpses of the utopia of escape: it is
raised and it collapses and it is built up again almost daily. In the
midst of the clanking machinery of a paper factory I have come across
a moving picture actress’s portrait, stuck upon an inoperative part of
the machine; and it was not hard to reconstruct the private utopia of
the wretch who minded the levers, or to picture the world into which
he had fled from the roar and throb and muck of the machinery about
him. What man has not had this utopia from the dawn of adolescence
onwards--the desire to possess and be possessed by a beautiful woman?

Perhaps for the great majority of men and women that small, private
Utopia is the only one for which they feel a perpetual, warm interest;
and ultimately every other utopia must be translatable to them in some
such intimate terms. Their conduct would tell us as much if their
words did not confess it. They leave their bleak office buildings and
their grimy factories, and night after night they pour into the cinema
theater in order that they may live for a while in a land populated by
beautiful, flirtatious women and tender, lusty men. Small wonder that
the great and powerful religion founded by Mahomet puts that utopia
in the very foreground of the hereafter! In a sense, this is the most
elementary of utopias; for, on the interpretation of the analytical
psychologist, it carries with it the deep longing to return to and
remain at rest in the mother’s womb--the one perfect environment which
all the machinery and legislation of an eager world has never been able
to reproduce.

In its most elemental state, this utopia of escape calls for a complete
breach with the butcher, the baker, the grocer, and the real, limited,
imperfect people that flutter around us. In order to make it more
perfect, we eliminate the butcher and baker and transport ourselves
to a self-sufficient island in the South Seas. For the most part, of
course, this is an idle dream, and if we do not grow out of it, we must
at any rate thrust other conditions into it; but for a good many of us,
idleness without a dream is the only alternative. Out of such fantasies
of bliss and perfection, which do not endure in real life even when
they occasionally bloom into existence, our art and literature have
very largely grown. It is hard to conceive of a social order so
complete and satisfactory that it would rob us of the necessity of
having recourse, from time to time, to an imaginary world in which our
sufferings could be purged or our delights heightened. Even in the
great idyll painted by William Morris, women are fickle and lovers
are disappointed; and when the “real” world becomes a little too hard
and too sullen to face, we must take refuge, if we are to recover our
balance, into another world which responds more perfectly to our deeper
interests and desires--the world of literature.

Once we have weathered the storm, it is dangerous to remain in the
utopia of escape; for it is an enchanted island, and to remain there
is to lose one’s capacity for dealing with things as they are. The
girl who has felt Prince Charming’s caresses too long will be repulsed
by the clumsy embraces of the young man who takes her to the theater
and wonders how the deuce he is going to pay the rent if they spend
more than a week on their honeymoon. Moreover, life is too easy in the
utopia of escape, and too blankly perfect--there is nothing to sharpen
your teeth upon. It is not for this that men have gone into the jungle
to hunt beasts and have cajoled the grasses and roots to be prolific,
and have defied, in little open boats, the terror of the wind and sea.
Our daily diet must have more roughage in it than these daydreams will
give us if we are not to become debilitated.

In the course of our journey into utopia we shall remain a little
while in these utopias of escape; but we shall not bide there long.
There are plenty of them, and they dot the waters of our imaginary
world as the islands that Ulysses visited dotted the Ægean Sea. These
utopias however belong to the department of pure literature, and in
that department they occupy but a minor place. We could dispense with
the whole lot of them, bag and baggage, in exchange for another Anna
Karenin or The Brothers Karamazov.


5

The second kind of utopia which we shall encounter is the utopia of
reconstruction.

The first species represents, the analytical psychologist would tell
us, a very primitive kind of thinking, in which we follow the direction
of our desires without taking into account any of the limiting
conditions which we should have to confront if we came back to earth
and tried to realize our wishes in practical affairs. It is a vague and
messy and logically inconsequent series of images which color up and
fade, which excite us and leave us cold, and which--for the sake of the
respect our neighbors have for our ability to add a ledger or plane a
piece of wood--we had better confine to the strange box of records we
call our brain.

The second type of utopia may likewise be colored by primitive desires
and wishes; but these desires and wishes have come to reckon with the
world in which they seek realization. The utopia of reconstruction is
what its name implies: a vision of a reconstituted environment which
is better adapted to the nature and aims of the human beings who dwell
within it than the actual one; and not merely better adapted to their
actual nature, but better fitted to their possible developments. If the
first utopia leads backward into the utopian’s ego, the second leads
outward--outward into the world.

By a reconstructed environment I do not mean merely a physical thing.
I mean, in addition, a new set of habits, a fresh scale of values, a
different net of relationships and institutions, and possibly--for
almost all utopias emphasize the factor of breeding--an alteration of
the physical and mental characteristics of the people chosen, through
education, biological selection, and so forth. The reconstructed
environment which all the genuine utopians seek to contrive is a
reconstruction of both the physical world and the idolum. It is in this
that the utopian distinguishes himself from the practical inventor and
the industrialist. Every attempt that has been made to domesticate
animals, cultivate plants, dredge rivers, dig ditches, and in modern
times, apply the energy of the sun to mechanical instruments, has
been an effort to reconstruct the environment; and in many cases the
human advantage has been plain. It is not for the utopian to despise
Prometheus who brought the fire or Franklin who captured the lightning.
As Anatole France says: “Without the Utopians of other times, men would
still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced
the lines of the first city.... Out of generous dreams come beneficial
realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into
a better future.”

Our physical reconstructions however have been limited; they have
touched chiefly the surfaces of things. The result is that people
live in a modern physical environment and carry in their minds an odd
assortment of spiritual relics from almost every other age, from that
of the primitive, taboo-ridden savage, to the energetic Victorian
disciples of Gradgrind and Bounderby. As Mr. Hendrik van Loon pithily
says: “A human being with the mind of a sixteenth century tradesman
driving a 1921 Rolls-Royce is still a human being with the mind of
a sixteenth century tradesman.” The problem is fundamentally a human
problem. The more completely man is in control of physical nature, the
more urgently we must ask ourselves what under the heavens is to move
and guide and keep in hand the controller. This problem of an ideal,
a goal, an end--even if the aim persist in shifting as much as the
magnetic north pole--is a fundamental one to the utopian.

Except in the writings of the utopians, and this is an important point
to notice in our travels through utopia, the reconstruction of the
material environment and the reconstitution of the mental framework
of the creatures who inhabit it, have been kept in two different
compartments. One compartment is supposed to belong to the practical
man; the other to the idealist. The first was something whose aims
could be realized in the Here and Now; the other was postponed very
largely to the sweet by-and-bye. Neither the practical man nor the
idealist has been willing to admit that he has been dealing with a
single problem; that each has been treating the faces of a single thing
as if they were separate.

Here is where the utopia of reconstruction wins hands down. It not
merely pictures a whole world, but it faces every part of it at
the same time. We shall not examine the classic utopias without
becoming conscious of their weaknesses, their sometimes disturbing
idiosyncrasies. It is important at present that we should realize
their virtues; and should start on our journey without the feeling of
disparagement which the word utopian usually calls up in minds that
have been seduced by Macaulay’s sneer that he would rather have an acre
in Middlesex than a principality in utopia.


6

Finally, be convinced about the reality of utopia. All that has
happened in what we call human history--unless it has left a building
or a book or some other record of itself--is just as remote and in
a sense just as mythical as the mysterious island which Raphael
Hythloday, scholar and sailor, described to Sir Thomas More. A good
part of human history is even more insubstantial: the Icarians who
lived only in the mind of Étienne Cabet, or the Freelanders who
dwelt within the imagination of a dry little Austrian economist,
have had more influence upon the lives of our contemporaries than
the Etruscan people who once dwelt in Italy, although the Etruscans
belong to what we call the real world, and the Freelanders and Icarians
inhabited--Nowhere.

Nowhere may be an imaginary country, but News from Nowhere is real
news. The world of ideas, beliefs, fantasies, projections, is (I must
emphasize again) just as real whilst it is acted upon as the post
which Dr. Johnson kicked in order to demonstrate that it was solid.
The man who wholly respects the rights of property is kept out of his
neighbor’s field perhaps even more effectively than the man who is
merely forbidden entrance by a no-trespass sign. In sum, we cannot
ignore our utopias. They exist in the same way that north and south
exist; if we are not familiar with their classical statements we at
least know them as they spring to life each day in our own minds. We
can never reach the points of the compass; and so no doubt we shall
never live in utopia; but without the magnetic needle we should not
be able to travel intelligently at all. It is absurd to dispose of
utopia by saying that it exists only on paper. The answer to this is:
precisely the same thing may be said of the architect’s plans for a
house, and houses are none the worse for it.

We must lose our sense of remoteness and severity in setting out on
this exploration of ideal commonwealths, as some of the fine minds of
the past have pictured them. Our ideals are not something that we can
set apart from the main facts of our existence, as our grandmothers
sometimes set the cold, bleak, and usually moldy parlor apart from the
living rooms of the house: on the contrary, the things we dream of tend
consciously or unconsciously to work themselves out in the pattern
of our daily lives. Our utopias are just as human and warm and jolly
as the world out of which they are born. Looking out from the top of
a high tenement, over the housetops of Manhattan, I can see a pale
tower with its golden pinnacle gleaming through the soft morning haze;
and for a moment all the harsh and ugly lines in the landscape have
disappeared. So in looking at our utopias. We need not abandon the real
world in order to enter these realizable worlds; for it is out of the
first that the second are always coming.

Finally, an anticipation and a warning. In our journey through the
utopias of the past we shall not rest content when we have traversed
the whole territory between Plato and the latest modern writer. If
the story of utopia throws any light upon the story of mankind it is
this: our utopias have been pitifully weak and inadequate; and if
they have not exercised enough practical influence upon the course of
affairs, it is because, as Viola Paget says in Gospels of Anarchy,
they were simply not good enough. We travel through utopia only in
order to get beyond utopia: if we leave the domains of history when
we enter the gates of Plato’s Republic, we do so in order to re-enter
more effectively the dusty midday traffic of the contemporary world. So
our study of the classic utopias will be followed by an examination of
certain social myths and partial utopias that have played an important
part in the affairs of the Western World during the last few centuries.
In the end, I promise, I shall make no attempt to present another
utopia; it will be enough to survey the foundations upon which others
may build.

In the meanwhile, our ship is about to set sail; and we shall not heave
anchor again until we reach the coasts of Utopia.




CHAPTER TWO

  How the Greeks lived in a New World, and utopia seemed just round
      the corner. How Plato, in the Republic, is chiefly concerned
      with what will hold the ideal city together.




CHAPTER TWO


1

Before the great empires of Rome and Macedonia began to spread their
camps through the length and breadth of the Mediterranean world,
there was a time when the vision of an ideal city seems to have been
uppermost in the minds of a good many men. Just as the wide expanse of
unsettled territory in America caused the people of eighteenth century
Europe to think of building a civilization in which the errors and
vices and superstitions of the old world might be left behind, so the
sparsely settled coasts of Italy, Sicily, and the Ægean Islands, and
the shores of the Black Sea, must have given men the hope of being able
to turn over a fresh page.

Those years between six hundred and three hundred B.C. were
city-building years for the parent cities of Greece. The city of
Miletus is supposed to have begotten some three hundred cities,
and many of its fellows were possibly not less fruitful. Since new
cities could be founded there was plenty of chance for variation and
experiment; and those who dreamed of a more, generous social order
could set their hands and wits to making a better start “from the
bottom up.”

Of all the plans and reconstruction programs that must have been
put forward during these centuries, only a scant handful remains.
Aristotle tells us about an ideal state designed by one, Phaleas, who
believed like Mr. Bernard Shaw in a complete equality of property; and
from Aristotle, too, we learn of another utopia which was described
by the great architect, city planner, and sociologist--Hippodamus.
Hippodamus was one of the first city planners known to history, and
he achieved fame in the ancient world by designing cities on the
somewhat monotonous checkerboard design we know so well in America. He
realized, apparently, that a city was something more than a collection
of houses, streets, markets, and temples; and so, whilst he was putting
the physical town to rights, he concerned himself with the more basic
problem of the social order. If it adds at all to our sense of reality
in going through utopia, let me confess that it is ultimately through
the inspiration and example of another Hippodamus--Patrick Geddes, the
town planner for Jerusalem and many other cities--that this book about
utopias came to be written. In many ways the distance between Geddes
and Aristotle or Hippodamus seems much less than that which separates
Geddes and Herbert Spencer.

When we look at the utopias that Phaleas and Hippodamus and Aristotle
have left us, and compare them with the Republic of Plato, the
differences between them melt into insignificance and their likenesses
are apparent. It is for this reason that I shall confine our
examination of the Greek utopia to that which Plato set forth in the
Republic, and qualified and broadened in The Laws, The Statesman, and
Critias.


2

Plato’s Republic dates roughly from the time of that long and
disastrous war which Athens fought with Sparta. In the course of
such a war, amid the bombast that patriotic citizens give way to, the
people who keep their senses are bound to get pretty well acquainted
with their enemy. If you will take the trouble to examine Plutarch’s
account of the Laws of Lycurgus and Mr. Alfred Zimmern’s magnificent
description of the Greek Commonwealth you will see how Sparta and
Athens form the web and woof of the Republic--only it is an ideal
Sparta and an ideal Athens that Plato has in mind.

It is well to remember that Plato wrote in the midst of defeat; a
great part of his region, Attica, had been devastated and burned; and
he must have felt that makeshift and reform were quite futile when
a Peloponnesian war could make the bottom drop out of his world. To
Plato an ill-designed ship of state required more than the science of
navigation to pull it through stormy waters: if it was in danger of
perpetually foundering, it seemed high time to go back to the shipyards
and inquire into the principles upon which it had been put together.
In such a mood, I suggest parenthetically, we today will turn again to
fundamentals.


3

In describing his ideal community Plato, like a trained workman, begins
with his physical foundations. So far from putting his utopia in a
mythical island of Avilion, where falls not hail nor rain nor any snow,
it is plain that Plato was referring repeatedly to the soil in which
Athens was planted, and to the economic life which grew out of that
soil. Since he was speaking to his own countrymen, he could let a good
many things pass for common knowledge which we, as strangers, must
look into more carefully in order to have a firmer sense of his utopian
realities. Let it be understood that in discussing the physical side of
the Republic, I am drawing from Aristotle as well as Plato, and from
such modern Greek scholars as Messrs. Zimmern, Myres, and Murray.

Nowadays when we talk about a state we think of an expanse of
territory, to begin with, so broad that we should in most cases be
unable to see all its boundaries if we rose five miles above the
ground on a clear day. Even if the country is a little one, like the
Netherlands or Belgium, it is likely to have possessions that are
thousands of miles away; and we think of these distant possessions and
of the homeland as part and parcel of the state. There is scarcely
any conceivable way in which a Dutchman in Rotterdam, let us say,
possesses the Island of Java: he does not live on the island, he is
not acquainted with the inhabitants, he does not share their ideas
or customs. His interest in Java, if he have an interest at all, is
an interest in sugar, coffee, taxes, or missions. His state is not a
commonwealth in the sense that it is a common possession.

To the Greek of Plato’s time, on the contrary, the commonwealth
was something he actively shared with his fellow citizens. It was
a definite parcel of land whose limits he could probably see from
any convenient hilltop; and those who lived within those limits had
common gods to worship, common theaters and gymnasia, and a multitude
of common interests that could be satisfied only by their working
together, playing together, thinking together. Plato could probably not
have conceived of a community with civilized pretensions in which the
population was distributed at the rate of ten per square mile; and if
he visited such a territory he would surely have said that the people
were barbarians--men whose way of living unfitted them for the graces
and duties of citizenship.

Geographically speaking, then, the ideal commonwealth was a
city-region; that is, a city which was surrounded by enough land to
supply the greater part of the food needed by the inhabitants; and
placed convenient to the sea.

Let us stand on a high hill and take a look at this city-region; the
sort of view that Plato himself might have obtained on some clear
spring morning when he climbed to the top of the Acropolis and looked
down on the sleeping city, with the green fields and sear upland
pastures on one side, and the sun glinting on the distant waters of the
sea a few miles away.

It is a mountainous region, this Greece, and within a short distance
from mountain top to sea there was compressed as many different kinds
of agricultural and industrial life as one could single out in going
down the Hudson valley from the Adirondack Mountains to New York
Harbor. As the basis for his ideal city, whether Plato knew it or not,
he had an “ideal” section of land in his mind--what the geographer
calls the “valley section.” He could not have gotten the various groups
which were to be combined in his city, had they been settled in the
beginning on a section of land like the coastal plain of New Jersey.
It was peculiarly in Greece that such a variety of occupations could
come together within a small area, beginning at the summit of the
valley section with the evergreen trees and the woodcutter, going down
the slope to the herdsman and his flock of goats at pasture, along
the valley bottom to the cultivator and his crops, until at length one
reaches the river’s mouth where the fisher pushes out to sea in his
boat and the trader comes in with goods from other lands.

The great civilizations of the world have been nourished in such valley
sections. We think of the river Nile and Alexandria; the Tiber and
Rome, the Seine and Paris; and so on. It is interesting that our first
great utopia should have had an “ideal” section of territory as its
base.


4

In the economic foundations of the Republic, we look in vain for
a recognition of the labor problem. Now the labor problem is a
fundamental difficulty in our modern life; and it seems on the surface
that Plato is a little highbrow and remote in the ease with which he
gets over it. When we look more closely into the matter, however, and
see the way in which men got their living in the “morning lands”--as
the Germans call them--we shall find that the reason Plato does not
offer a solution is that he was not, indeed, confronted by a problem.

Given a valley section which has not been ruthlessly stript of trees;
given the arts of agriculture and herding; given a climate without
dangerous extremes of heat and cold; given the opportunity to found new
colonies when the old city-region is over-populated--and it is only by
an exercise of ingenuity that a labor problem could be invented. A man
might become a slave by military capture; he did not become a slave
by being compelled, under threat of starvation, to tend a machine.
The problem of getting a living was answered by nature as long as men
were willing to put up with nature’s conditions; and the groundwork
of Plato’s utopia, accordingly, is the simple agricultural life, the
growing of wheat, barley, olives, and grapes, which had been fairly
well mastered before he arrived on the scene. As long as the soil was
not washed away and devitalized, the problem was not a hard one; and
in order to solve it, Plato had only to provide that there should be
enough territory to grow food on, and that the inhabitants must not let
their wants exceed the bounties of nature.

Plato describes the foundations of his community with a few simple
and masterly touches. Those who feel that there is something a little
inhuman in his conception of the good life, when he is discussing the
education and duties of the ruling classes, may well consider the
picture that he paints for us here.

Plato’s society arises out of the needs of mankind; because none of us
is self-sufficing and all have many wants; and since there are many
wants, many kinds of people must supply them. When all these helpers
and partners and co-operators are gathered together in a city the body
of inhabitants is termed a state; and so its members work and exchange
goods with one another for their mutual advantage--the herdsman gets
barley for his cheese and so on down to the complicated interchanges
that occur in the city. What sort of physical life will arise out of
this in the region that Plato describes?

Well, the people will “produce corn and wine and clothes and shoes
and build houses for themselves.... They will work in summer commonly
stript and barefoot, but in winter substantially clothed and shod.
They will feed on barley and wheat, baking the wheat and kneading the
flour, making noble puddings and loaves; these they will serve up on
a mat of reeds or clean leaves; themselves reclining the while upon
beds of yew or myrtle boughs. And they and their children will feast,
drinking of the wine which they have made, wearing garlands on their
heads, and having the praises of the gods on their lips, living in
sweet society, and having a care that their families do not exceed
their means; for they will have an eye to poverty or war.”

So Socrates, in this dialogue on the Republic, describes to his
hearers the essential physical elements of the good life. One of his
hearers, Glaucon, asks him to elaborate it a little, for Socrates has
limited himself to bare essentials. It is the same sort of objection,
by the way, that M. Poincaré, the physicist, made to the philosophy
of Tolstoy. Socrates answers that a good state would have the healthy
constitution which he has just described; but that he has no objection
to looking at an “inflamed constitution.” What Socrates describes as
an inflamed constitution is a mode of life which all the people of
Western Europe and America at the present day--no matter what their
religion, economic status, or political creed may be--believe in with
almost a single mind; and so, although it is the opposite of Plato’s
ideal state, I go on to present it, for the light it throws on our own
institutions and habits.

The unjust state comes into existence, says Plato through the mouth of
Socrates, by the multiplication of wants and superfluities. As a result
of increasing wants, we must enlarge our borders, for the original
healthy state is too small. Now the city will fill up with a multitude
of callings which go beyond those required by any natural want; there
will be a host of parasites and “supers”; and our country, which was
big enough to support the original inhabitants, will want a slice of
our neighbor’s land for pasture and tillage; and they will want a slice
of ours if, like ourselves, they exceed the limits of necessity and
give themselves up to the unlimited accumulation of wealth. “And then
we shall go to war--that will be the next thing.”

The sum of this criticism is that Plato saw clearly that an ideal
community must have a common physical standard of living; and that
boundless wealth or unlimited desires and gratifications had nothing to
do with a good standard. The good was what was necessary; and what was
necessary was not, essentially, many goods.

Like Aristotle, Plato wanted a mode of life which was neither
impoverished nor luxurious: those who have read a little in Greek
history will see that this Athenian ideal of the good life fell rather
symbolically between Sparta and Corinth, between the cities which we
associate respectively with a hard, military life and with a soft,
super-sensuous æstheticism.

Should we moderate our wants or should we increase production?
Plato had no difficulty in answering this question. He held that a
reasonable man would moderate his wants; and that if he wished to
live like a good farmer or a good philosopher he would not attempt to
copy the expenditures of a vulgar gambler who has just made a corner
in wheat, or a vulgar courtesan who has just made a conquest of the
vulgar gambler who has made a corner in wheat. Wealth and poverty,
said Plato, are the two causes of deterioration in the arts: both the
workman and his works are likely to degenerate under the influence
of either poverty or wealth, “for one is the parent of luxury and
indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of
discontent.”

Nor does Plato have one standard of living for his ruling classes and
another for the common people. To each person he would give all the
material things necessary for sustenance; and from each he would be
prepared to strip all that was not essential. He realized that the
possession of goods was not a means of getting happiness, but an effort
to make up for a spiritually depauperate life: for Plato, happiness was
what one could put into life and not what one could loot out of it:
it was the happiness of the dancer rather than the happiness of the
glutton. Plato pictured a community living a sane, continent, athletic,
clear-eyed life; a community that would be always, so to say, within
bounds. There is a horror of laxity and easy living in his Republic.
His society was stripped for action. The fragrance that permeates his
picture of the good life is not the heavy fragrance of rose-petals and
incense falling upon languorous couches: it is the fragrance of the
morning grass, and the scent of crushed mint or marjoram beneath the
feet.


5

How big is Plato’s community, how are the people divided, what are
their relations? Now that we have discussed the lay out of the land,
and have inquired into the physical basis of this utopia, we are ready
to turn our attention to the people; for it is out of the interaction
of folk, work, and place that every community--good or bad, real or
fancied--exists and perpetuates itself.


6

It follows almost inevitably from what we have said of Plato’s
environment, that his ideal community was not to be unlimited in
population. Quite the contrary. Plato said that “the city may increase
to any size which is consistent with its unity; that is the limit.”
The modern political scientist, who lives within a national state of
millions of people, and who thinks of the greatness of states largely
in terms of their population, has scoffed without mercy at the fact
that Plato limited his community to an arbitrary number, 5,040, about
the number that can be conveniently addressed by a single orator. As
a matter of fact there is nothing ridiculous in Plato’s definition:
he was not speaking of a horde of barbarians: he was laying down the
foundations for an active polity of citizens: and it is plain enough
in all conscience that when you increase the number of people in a
community you decrease the number of things that they can share in
common. Plato could not anticipate the wireless telephone and the daily
newspaper; still less would he have been likely to exaggerate the
difference which these instrumentalities have made in the matters that
most intimately concern us; and when he set bounds to the population
his city would contain, he was anticipating by more than two thousand
years the verdict of modern town planners like Mr. Raymond Unwin.

People are not the members of a community because they live under
the same system of political government or dwell in the same country.
They become genuine citizens to the extent that they share certain
institutions and ways of life with similarly educated people. Plato
was primarily concerned with providing conditions which would make
a community hold together without being acted upon by any external
force--as the national state is acted upon today by war or the threat
of war. This concern seems to underlie every line of the Republic. In
attacking his problem, the business of supplying the physical wants of
the city seemed relatively unimportant; and even though Greece in the
time of Plato traded widely with the whole Mediterranean region, Plato
did not mistake commercial unity for civic unity. Hence in his scheme
of things the work of the farmer and the merchant and the trader was
subordinate. The important thing to consider was the general conditions
under which all the individuals and groups in a community might live
together harmoniously. This is a long cry from the utopias of the
nineteenth century, which we will examine later; and that is why it is
important to understand Plato’s point of view and follow his argument.


7

To Plato, a good community was like a healthy body; a harmonious
exercise of every function was the condition of its strength and
vitality. Necessarily then a good community could not be simply a
collection of individuals, each one of whom insists upon some private
and particular happiness without respect to the welfare and interests
of his fellows. Plato believed that goodness and happiness--for he
would scarcely admit that there was any distinct line of cleavage
between these qualities--consisted in living according to nature;
that is to say, in knowing one’s self, in finding one’s bent, and in
fulfilling the particular work which one had the capacity to perform.
The secret of a good community, therefore, if we may translate Plato’s
language into modern political slang, is the principle of function.

Every kind of work, says Plato, requires a particular kind of aptitude
and training. If we wish to have good shoes, our shoes must be made
by a shoemaker and not by a weaver; and in like manner, every man has
some particular calling to which his genius leads him, and he finds a
happiness for himself and usefulness to his fellows when he is employed
in that calling. The good life must result when each man has a function
to perform, and when all the necessary functions are adjusted happily
to each other. The state is like the physical body. “Health is the
creation of a natural order and government in the parts of the body,
and the creation of disease is the creation of a state of things in
which they are at variance with the natural order.” The supreme virtue
in the commonwealth is justice; namely, the due apportionment of work
or function under the rule of “a place for every man and every man in
his place.”

Has any such society ever come into existence? Do not too hastily
answer No. The ideal in Plato’s mind is carried out point for point in
the organization of a modern symphony orchestra.

Now Plato was not unaware that there were other formulas for happiness.
He expressly points out however that in founding the Republic he
does not wish to make any single person or group happier beyond the
rest; he desires rather that the whole city should be in the happiest
condition. It would be easy enough “to array the husbandmen in rich and
costly robes and to enjoin them to cultivate the ground only with a
view to their pleasure,” and so Plato might have conferred a spurious
kind of felicity upon every individual. If this happened, however,
there would be a brief period of ease and revelry before the whole
works went to pot. In this Plato is a thoroughgoing realist: he is not
looking for a short avenue of escape; he is ready to face the road
with all its ups and downs, with its steep climbs as well as its wide
vistas; and he does not think any the worse of life because he finds
that its chief enjoyments rest in activity, and not, as the epicureans
of all sorts have always believed, in a release from activity.


8

Plato arrives at his apportionment of functions by a method which is
old-fashioned, and which anybody versed in modern psychology would
regard as a “rationalization.” Plato is trying to give a firm basis
to the division of classes which he favored; and so he compares the
community to a human being, possessed of the virtues of wisdom, valour,
temperance, and justice. Each of these virtues Plato relates to a
particular class of people.

Wisdom is appropriate to the rulers of the city. Thus arises the class
of guardians.

Valour is the characteristic of the defenders of the city and hence a
military class, called auxiliaries, appears.

Temperance, or agreement, is the virtue which relates to all classes.

Finally, there comes justice. “Justice is the ultimate cause and
condition of all of them.... If a question should arise as to which
of these four qualities contributed most by their presence to the
excellence of the State whether the agreement of rulers and subjects
or the preservation in the soldiers of the opinion which the law
ordains about the true nature of dangers, or wisdom and watchfulness
in the rulers would claim the palm, or whether this which I am about
to mention,” namely, “everyone doing his own work and not being a
busybody--the question would not be easily determined.” Nevertheless,
it is plain that justice is the keystone of the Platonic utopia.

We must not misunderstand Plato’s division of classes. Aristotle
criticizes Plato in terms of a more simple system of democracy; but
Plato did not mean to institute a fixed order; within his Republic
the Napoleonic motto--_la carrière est ouverte aux talents_--was the
guiding principle. What lay beneath Plato’s argument was a belief which
present-day studies in psychology seem likely to confirm; a belief that
children come into the world with a bent already well marked in their
physical and mental constitutions. Plato advocated, it is true, an
aristocracy or government by the best people; but he did not believe in
fake aristocracies that are perpetuated through hereditary wealth and
position. Having determined that his city was to contain three classes,
rulers, warriors, and workers, his capital difficulty still remained to
be faced; how was each individual to find his way to the right class,
and under what conditions would he best fulfill his functions there?

The answers to these questions bring us to the boldest and most
original sections of the Republic: the part that has provoked the
greatest amount of antagonism and aversion, because of its drastic
departure from the rut of many established institutions--in particular,
individual marriages and individual property.

In order to perpetuate his ideal constitution Plato relies upon three
methods: breeding, education, and a discipline for the daily life. Let
us consider the effect of these methods upon each of the classes.

We may dismiss the class of artisans and husbandmen very briefly. It is
not quite clear whether Plato meant his system of marriage to extend to
the members of this class. As for education, it is clear that he saw
nothing to find fault with in the system of apprenticeship whereby the
smith or the potter or the farmer trained others to follow his calling;
and so he had no reason for departing from methods which had proved, on
the whole, very satisfactory. How satisfactory that system was, indeed,
we have only to look at an Athenian ruin or vase or chalice to find
out. Any improvements that might come about in these occupations would
result from the Platonic rule of justice; and Plato followed his own
injunction strictly enough to keep away from other people’s business.

This of course seems an odd and hasty manner of treatment, as I
said before, to those of us who live in a world where the affairs
of industry and the tendencies of the labor movement are forever
on the carpet. But Plato justifies his treatment by saying that
“when shoemakers become bad, and are degenerate, and profess to be
shoemakers when they are not, no great mischief happens to the state;
but when the guardians of the law and the State are not so in reality,
but only in appearance, you see how they entirely destroy the whole
constitution, if they alone shall have the privilege of an affluent
and happy life.” Hence Plato concentrates his attack upon the point
of greatest danger: while the shoemaker, as a rule, knows how to mind
his own business, the statesman is for the most part unaware of the
essential business which he has to mind; and tends to be negligent even
when he has some dim notion as to what it may be--being all too ready
to sacrifice it to golf or the favors of a beautiful woman. As we saw
in Plato’s original description of the State, the common folk would
doubtless have a good many of the joys and delights traditional in the
Greek cities; and doubtless, although Plato says nothing one way or the
other, they would be permitted to own such property as might be needed
for the conduct of their business or the enjoyment of their homes.
The very fact that no definite rule was prescribed for them, makes us
suspect that Plato was willing to let these things go on in the usual
way.

The next class is known as the warriors, or auxiliaries. They are
different in character from the guardians who rule the state; but
frequently Plato refers to the guardians as a single class, including
the auxiliaries; and it seems that they figured in his mind as the
temporal arm of that class. At any rate, the auxiliaries as they are
painted in the Critias, which was the dialogue in which Plato attempted
to show his Republic in action, dwelt by themselves within a single
enclosure; and had common meals and common temples of their own; and
so we may surmise that their way of life was to be similar to that
of the higher guardians, but that it was not capable of being pushed
to the same pitch of development on the intellectual side. These
warriors of Plato are, after all, not so very much unlike the regular
or standing army in a modern State: they have a life of their own
within the barracks, they are trained and drilled to great endurance,
and they are taught to obey without question the Government. When you
examine the naked business of the warriors and artisans, you discover
that Plato is not, for all the difference in scale, so very far away
from modern realities. Apart from the fact that women were permitted
an equal place with men in the life of the camp and the gymnasium and
the academy, the real difference comes in the matter of breeding and
selection. At last we approach the Governors, or the Guardians.

How does the Guardian achieve his position and power? Plato is a little
chary of answering this question; he hints that it can only happen at
the beginning if a person with the brains of a philosopher happen to
be born with the authority of a king. Let us pass this by. How are the
Guardians born and bred? This is the manner.

For the well-being of the state the Guardians have the power to
administer medicinal lies. One of these is to be told to the youth when
their education has reached a point at which it becomes possible for
the Guardians to determine their natural talents and aptitudes.

“Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God
has framed you differently. Some of you have the power to command, and
these he has composed of gold, wherefore also they have the greatest
honor; others of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be
husbandmen and craftsmen he has made of brass and iron; and the species
will generally be preserved in the children. But as you are of the same
original family, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, or
a silver parent a golden son. And God proclaims to the rulers, as a
first principle, that before all things they should watch over their
offspring, and see what elements mingle in their nature, for if the
son of a golden or silver parent has an admixture of brass and iron,
then nature orders a transposition of the ranks; and the eye of the
ruler must not be pitiful towards his child because he has to descend
in the scale and will become a husbandman or artisan, just as there may
be others sprung from the artisan class who are raised to honor, and
become guardians and auxiliaries.”

As the safeguard of this principle of natural selection of functions,
Plato proposed a system of common marriage. “The wives of these
guardians are to be common, and their children are also common, and no
parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent. Starting
from the day of the hymeneal, the bridegroom who was then married
will call all the male children who are born ten and seven months
afterwards his sons, and the female children his daughters, and they
will call him father.... And those who were born at the same time they
will term brothers and sisters, and they are not to intermarry.” One
of the features of this system is that the best stocks--the strongest
and wisest and most beautiful--are to be encouraged to reproduce
themselves. But this is not worked out in detail. There is to be
complete freedom of sexual selection among the guardians; and those who
are most distinguished in their services are to have access to a great
number of women; but beyond encouraging the guardians to be prolific,
Plato did not apparently consider the possibilities of cross-breeding
between the various classes.

On the whole, one may say that Plato puts it up to the Guardians to
perpetuate themselves properly, and indicates that this is to be one
of their main concerns. His good breeding was biological breeding, not
social breeding. He recognized as some of our modern eugenists have
failed to--that good parents might throw poor stock, on occasion, and
that abject parents might have remarkably good progeny. Even if the
Guardians are to be encouraged to have good children, Plato provides
that the children themselves must prove their goodness before they
are in turn recognized as Guardians. As for the children of the baser
sort--well, they were to be rigorously limited to the needs and
resources of the community. Plato lived at a time when a great many
children were born only to be murdered through “exposure” as it was
called; and he had no qualms, apparently, about letting the Guardians
send the children with a bad heredity into the discard. If his
population could not grow properly in the sunlight without getting rid
of the weeds, he was prepared to get rid of the weeds. People who were
physically or spiritually too deformed to take part in the good life
were to be eliminated. Plato, like a robust Athenian, was for killing
or curing a disease; and he gave short shrift to the constitutional
invalids.


9

But to breed Guardians is only one-half the problem. The other half
comes under the heads of education and discipline; and when Plato
discusses these things, he is not speaking, as a modern college
president perhaps would, of book-learning alone; he is referring to
all the activities that mold a person’s life. He follows the older
philosopher, Pythagoras, and anticipates the great organizer, Benedict,
by laying down a rule of life for his guardians. He did not imagine
that disinterested activities, spacious thoughts, and clear vision
would arise in people who normally put their personal comfort and
“happiness” above the necessities of their office.

Let us recognize the depth of Plato’s insight. It is plain that he
did not despise what a modern psychologist would call “the normal
biological career.” For the great majority of people happiness
consisted in learning a definite trade or profession, in doing one’s
daily work, in mating, and when the tension of the day relaxed, in
getting enjoyment and recreation in the simple sensualities of eating,
drinking, singing, love-making, and what not. This normal biological
career is associated with a home, and with the limited horizons of a
home; and a host of small loyalties and jealousies and interests are
woven into the very texture of that life.

Each home, each small circle of relatives and friends, tends to be a
miniature utopia; there is a limited community of goods, a tendency to
adjust one’s actions to the welfare of the little whole, and a habit of
banding together against the world at large. But the good, contrary
to the proverb, is frequently the enemy of the better; and the little
utopia of the family is the enemy--indeed the principal enemy--of the
beloved community. This fact is notorious. The picture of a trade union
leader which Mr. John Galsworthy portrays in Strife, whose power to
act firmly in behalf of his group is sapped by the demands made by
family ties, could be matched in a thousand places. In order to have
the freedom to act for the sake of a great institution, a person must
be stript of a whole host of restraining ties and sentimentalities.
Jesus commanded his followers to leave their families and abandon their
worldly goods; and Plato, in order to preserve his ideal commonwealth,
laid down a similar rule. For those who as guardians were to apply
the science of government to public affairs, a private life, private
duties, private interests, were all to be left behind.

As to the education of the Guardians, I have scarcely the space to
treat the more formal part of it in detail; for among other things, as
Jowett points out, the Republic is a treatise on education; and Plato
presents a fairly elaborate plan. The two branches of Greek education,
music and gymnastic, applied in the student’s early years to the
culture of the body and the culture of the mind; and both branches were
to be followed in common by both sexes. Instruction during the early
part of a child’s life was to be communicated through play activities,
as it is today in the City and Country School in New York; and only
with manhood did the student approach his subjects in a more formal
and systematic manner. In the course of this education the students
were to be tested again and again with respect to their mental keenness
and tenacity and fortitude; and only those who came through the fire
purified and strengthened were to be admitted to the class of guardians.

The daily life of the Guardians is a rigorous, military regime. They
live in common barracks, and in order to avoid paying attention to
private affairs, instead of minding the good of the whole community,
no one is allowed to “possess any substance privately, unless there
be a great necessity for it”; next, Plato continues, none shall have
any dwelling or storehouse into which whoever inclines may not enter;
and as for necessaries, they shall be only such as brave and temperate
warriors may require, and as they are supported by other citizens, they
shall receive such a reward of their guardianship as to have neither an
overplus nor a deficit at the end of the year. They shall have public
meals, as in encampments, and live in common. They are to refrain from
using gold and silver, as all the gold and silver they require is in
their souls.

All these regulations, of course, are for the purpose of keeping the
Guardians disinterested. Plato believed that the majority of people
did not know how to mind public business; for it seemed to him that
the ordering of a community’s life required a measure of science
which the common man could not possibly possess. Indeed, in a city
of a thousand men he did not see the possibility of getting as many
as fifty men who would be sufficiently well versed in what we should
today call sociology to deal intelligently with public affairs--for
there would scarcely be that many first-rate draughts players. At the
same time, if the government is to be entrusted to a few, the few
must be genuinely disinterested. If they possessed lands and houses
and money in a private way they would become landlords and farmers
instead of Guardians; they would be hateful masters instead of allies
of the citizens; and so “hating and being hated, plotting and being
plotted against, more afraid of the enemies within than the enemies
without, they would drag themselves and the rest of the state to speedy
destruction.”

It remains to take a glance at the manhood and later life of the
Guardians.

As young men, the Guardians belong to the auxiliaries; and since
they are not permitted to perform any of the manual arts--for skill
in any of the trades tended to make a man warped and one-sided, like
the symbolic blacksmith god, Hephæstos--their physical edge was
maintained by the unceasing discipline of the gymnasium and “military”
expeditions. I put military in quotation marks, because a greater part
of the warriors’ time is spent not in war but in preparation for war;
and it is plain that Plato looked upon war as an unnecessary evil, for
it arose out of the unjust state; and therefore he must have resorted
to warlike discipline for the educational values he found in it. From
thirty-five to fifty the potential Guardians undertake practical
activities, commanding armies and gaining experience of life. After
fifty, those who are qualified devote themselves to philosophy: out of
their experience and their inner reflection they figure the essential
nature of the good community; and on occasion each guardian abandons
divine philosophy for a while, takes his turn at the helm of the state,
and trains his successors.


10

What is the business of the Guardian? How does Plato’s ideal statesman
differ from Julius Cæsar or Mr. Theodore Roosevelt?

The business of the Guardian is to manufacture liberty. The petty laws,
regulations, and reforms with which the ordinary statesman occupies
himself had nothing to do, in Plato’s mind, with the essential business
of the ruler. So Plato expressly foregoes making laws to regulate
marketing, the affairs of industry, graft, bribery, theft, and so
forth; and he leaves these matters with the curt indication that men
can be left to themselves to devise on a voluntary basis the rules
of the game for the different occupations; and that it is not the
business of the Guardian to meddle in such matters. In a well-founded
state, a great number of minor maladjustments would simply fall
out of existence; whilst in any other state, all the tinkering and
reforming in the world is quite powerless to amend its organic defects.
Those make-believe statesmen who try their hand at legislation and
“are always fancying that by reforming they will make an end of the
dishonesties and rascalities of mankind,” do not know that in reality
they are trying to cut away the heads of a hydra.

The real concern of the Guardians is with the essential constitution of
the state. The means that they employ to perfect this constitution are
breeding, vocational selection, and education. “If once a republic is
set a-going, it proceeds happily, increasing as a circle. And whilst
good education and nurture are preserved, they produce good geniuses;
and good geniuses, partaking of such education, produce still better
than the former, as well in other respects, as with reference to
propagation, as in the case of other animals.” All the activities of
the Republic are to be patterned after the utopia which the Guardians
see with their inward eye. So gradually the community becomes a living
unity; and it exhibits the health of that which is organically sound.


11

What do we miss when we look around this utopia of Plato’s? Contacts
with the outside world? We may take them for granted. Downy beds,
Corinthian girls, luxurious furniture? We can well spare them. The
opportunity for a satisfactory intellectual and physical life? No: both
of these are here.

What Plato has left out are the poets, dramatists, and painters.
Literature and music, in order to contribute to the noble education
of the Guardians, are both severely restricted in theme and in
treatment. Plato has his limitations; and here is the principal one:
Plato distrusted the emotional life, and whilst he was prepared to do
full homage to man’s obvious sensualities, he feared the emotions as
a tight-rope walker fears the wind; for they threatened his balance.
In one significant passage he classifies “love” with disease and
drunkenness, as a vulgar misfortune; and though he was ready to permit
the active expression of the emotions, as in the dance or the sexual
act, he treated the mere play upon the feelings, without active
participation, as a form of intemperance. Hence a great deal of music
and dramatic mimicry was taboo. Foreign as this doctrine sounds to
the modern reader, there is perhaps more than a grain of sense in it:
William James used to teach that no one should passively experience an
emotion at a concert or a play without trying to express that emotion
actively as soon as he could make the opportunity. At any rate, let us
leave this problem which Plato opens up with a free mind; and note here
in passing that in the utopia of William Morris novels drop naturally
out of existence because life is too active an ecstasy to be fed with
the pathetic, the maudlin, and the diseased.


12

As we leave this little city of Plato’s, nestling in the hills, and
as the thin, didactic voice of Plato, who has been perpetually at our
elbows, dies away from our ears--what impression do we finally carry
away?

In the fields, men are perhaps plowing the land for the autumn sowing;
on the terraces, a band of men, women, and children are plucking the
olives carefully from the trees, one by one; in the gymnasium on the
top of the Acropolis, men and youths are exercising, and as they
practice with the javelin now and then it catches the sun and glints
into our eye; apart from these groups, in a shaded walk that overlooks
the city, a Guardian is pacing back and forth, talking in quick,
earnest tones with his pupils.

These are occupations which, crudely or elaborately, men have always
engaged in; and here in the Republic they engage in them still. What
has changed? What has profoundly changed is not the things that men do,
but the relations they bear to one another in doing them. In Plato’s
community, servitude and compulsion and avarice and indolence are
gone. Men mind their business for the sake of living well, in just
relations to the whole community of which they are a part. They live,
in the strictest sense, according to nature; and because no one can
enjoy a private privilege, each man can grow to his full stature and
enter into every heritage of his citizenship. When Plato says no to the
institutions and ways of life that men have blindly fostered, his eyes
are open, and he is facing the light.




CHAPTER THREE

  How something happened to utopia between Plato and Sir Thomas
      More; and how utopia was discovered again, along with the New
      World.




CHAPTER THREE


1

There is a span of nearly two thousand years between Plato and Sir
Thomas More. During that time, in the Western World at any rate, utopia
seems to disappear beyond the horizon. Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus
looks back into a mythical past; Cicero’s essay on the state is a
negligible work; and St. Augustine’s City of God is chiefly remarkable
for a brilliant journalistic attack upon the old order of Rome which
reminds one of the contemporary diatribes of Maximilian Harden. Except
for these works there is, as far as I can discover, scarcely any other
piece of writing which even hints at utopia except as utopia may refer
to a dim golden age in the past when all men were virtuous and happy.

But while utopia dropt out of literature, it did not drop out of men’s
minds; and the utopia of the first fifteen hundred years after Christ
is transplanted to the sky, and called the Kingdom of Heaven. It is
distinctly a utopia of escape. The world as men find it is full of
sin and trouble. Nothing can be done about it except to repent of the
sin and find refuge from the trouble in the life after the grave. So
the utopia of Christianity is fixed and settled: one can enter into
the Kingdom of Heaven if a passport has been granted, but one can do
nothing to create or mold this heaven. Change and struggle and ambition
and amelioration belong to the wicked world, and bring no final
satisfaction. Happiness lies not in the deed, but in having a secure
credit in the final balance of accounts--happiness, in other words,
lies in the ultimate compensation. This world of fading empires and
dilapidated cities is no home except for the violent and the “worldly.”

If the idea of utopia loses its practical hold during this period,
the will-to-utopia remains; and the rise of the monastic system and
the attempts of the great popes from Hildebrand onward to establish a
universal empire under the shield of the church show that, as always,
there was a breach between the ideas which people carried in their
heads and the things which actual circumstances and going institutions
compelled them to do. There is no need to consider these partial,
institutional utopias until we get down to the nineteenth century. What
concerns us now is that the Kingdom of Heaven, as a utopia of escape,
ceased to hold men’s allegiance when they discovered other channels and
other possibilities.

The shift from a heavenly utopia to a worldly one came during that
period of change and uneasiness which characterized the decline of the
Middle Age. Its first expression is the “Utopia” of Sir Thomas More,
the great chancellor who served under Henry VIII.


2

In the introduction to More’s “Utopia” one gets a vivid impression of
the forces that were stirring men’s minds out of the sluggish routine
into which they had settled. The man who is supposed to describe the
commonwealth of Utopia is a Portuguese scholar, learned in Greek.
He has left his family possessions with his kinsmen and has gone
adventuring for other continents with Americus Vesputius. This Raphael
Hythloday is the sort of sunburnt sailor one could probably have
encountered in Bristol or Cadiz or Antwerp almost any day during the
late part of the fifteenth century. He has abandoned Aristotle, whom
the schoolmen had butchered and had made pemmican of, and through his
conquest of Greek he has come into possession of that new learning
which stems back to Plato; and his brain is teeming with the criticisms
and suggestions of a strange, pagan philosophy. Moreover, he has been
abroad to the Americas or the Indies, and he is ready to tell all who
will listen of a strange land on the other side of the world, where, as
Sterne said of France, “they do things better.” No institution is too
fantastic but that it might exist--on the other side of the world. No
way of life is too reasonable but that a philosophical population might
follow it--on the other side of the world. Conceive of the world of
ideas which Greek literature had just opened up coming headlong against
the new lands which the magnetic compass had given men the courage to
explore, and utopia, as a fresh conception of the good life, becomes a
throbbing possibility.


3

In setting out for Utopia Sir Thomas More left behind a scene which in
its political violence and economic maladjustment looks queerly like
our own. Indeed, there are a good many passages which need only have a
few names altered and the language itself cast into modern English in
order to serve as editorial comment for a radical weekly review.

Consider this man Raphael Hythloday, this errant member of the
intelligentzia. Life as he knows it in the Europe of his day no
longer has a hold upon him. The rich are fattening upon the poor;
land is being gathered into big parcels, at least in England; and
turned over into sheep runs. The people who used to cultivate the land
are compelled to leave their few acres and are thrown on their own
resources. Soldiers who have returned from the wars can find nothing
to do; disabled veterans and people accustomed to live as pensioners
on the more prosperous have become destitute. Extravagant luxury grows
on one hand; misery on the other. Those who are poor, beg; those who
are proud, steal; and for their pains the thieves and the vagrants are
tried and sentenced to the gibbet, where by dozens they hang before the
eyes of the market crowds.

Just as today, people complain that the laws are not strict enough or
that they are not enforced; and everyone stubbornly refuses to look at
the matter through Raphael Hythloday’s eyes and to see that the robbery
and violence which are abroad are not a cause of bad times but a result
of them.

What can a man of intelligence do in such a world?

More’s friend, Peter Giles, who is represented as the sponsor for
Raphael, wonders why a man of Raphael’s talent does not enter into the
service of the king--in short, go in for politics. Raphael answers
that he does not wish to be enslaved; and he cannot try to fetch
happiness on terms so abhorrent to his disposition, for “most princes
apply themselves more to the affairs of war than to the useful arts of
peace, and are more set on acquiring new kingdoms right or wrong than
on governing those they possess.” There is no use trying to tell them
about the wiser institutions of the Utopians: if they could not refute
your arguments they would say that the old ways were good enough for
their ancestors and are good enough for them, even though they have
willingly let go of all the genuinely good things that might have been
inherited from the past.

So much for the help an intelligent man might give on domestic
problems. As for international affairs, it is a mess of chicane and
intrigue and brigandage. While so many people of influence are advising
preparedness and “how to carry on the war,” what chance would a poor
intellectual like Hythloday have if he stood up and said that the
government should withdraw their armies from foreign parts and try
to improve conditions at home, instead of oppressing the people with
taxes and spilling their blood without bringing them a single blessed
advantage, whilst their manners are being corrupted by a long war, and
their laws fall into contempt, with robbery and murder on every hand.

More, through the tongue of Raphael Hythloday, is painting a picture of
the life he sees about him; but in it we seem to see every feature of
our own national countenance.

This unhonored and disoriented intellectual is the very emblem of some
of our best spirits today. Rack and ruin have gone too far to admit
of any sort of repair except that which proceeds from the bottom up;
and so Hythloday freely admits that “as long as there is any property,
and while money is the standard of all other things, I cannot think
that a nation can be governed either justly or happily; not justly,
because the best things will fall to the share of the worst men; nor
happily, because all things will be divided among a few (and even these
are not in all respects happy), the rest being left to be absolutely
miserable.” In short, says Hythloday, there is no salvation except
through following the practices of the Utopians.

So the new world of exploration brings us within sight of a new world
of ideas, and the beloved community, whose seed Plato had sought to
implant in men’s minds, springs up again, after a fallow period of
almost two thousand years. What sort of country is it?


4

Geographically viewed, the island of Utopia exists only in More’s
imagination. All that we can say of it is that it is two hundred miles
broad, shaped something like a crescent, with an entrance into its
great bay which lends itself to defence. There are fifty-four cities
in the island; the nearest is twenty-four miles from its neighbor, and
the farthest is not more than a day’s march distant. The chief town,
Amaurot, is situated very nearly in the center; and each city has
jurisdiction over the land for twenty miles around; so that here again
we find the city-region as the unit of political life.


5

The economic base of this commonwealth is agriculture, and no one is
ignorant of the art. Here and there over the countryside are great
farm-houses, equipt for carrying on agricultural operations. While
those who are well-adapted for rural life are free to live in the open
country the whole year round, other workers are sent by turns from the
city to take part in the farm-labor. Every farmstead or “family” holds
no less than forty men and women. Each year twenty of this family come
back to town after two years in the country; and in their place another
twenty is sent out from the town, so that they may learn the country
work from those who have had at least a year’s experience.

Agricultural economics is so well advanced that the countryside knows
exactly how much food is needed by the whole city-region; but the
Utopians sow and breed more abundantly than they need, in order that
their neighbors may have the overplus. Poultry-raising is also highly
advanced. The Utopians “breed an infinite multitude of chickens in a
very curious manner; for the hens do not sit and hatch them, but vast
numbers of eggs are laid in a gentle and equal heat, in order to be
hatched”--in short, they have discovered the incubator!

During the harvest season the country magistrates inform the city
magistrates how many extra hands are needed for reaping; a draft of
city workers is made, and the work is commonly done in short order.

While every man, woman, and child knows how to cultivate the soil,
since each has learned partly in school and partly by practice, every
person also has some “peculiar trade to which he applies himself,
such as the manufacture of wool or flax, masonry, smith’s work or
carpenter’s work”; and no trade is held in special esteem above the
others. (That is a great jump from the Republic where the mechanic arts
are considered base and servile in nature!) The same trade usually
passes down from father to son, since each family follows its own
special occupation; but a man whose genius lies another way may be
adopted into a family which plies another trade; and if after he has
learnt that trade, he wishes still to master another, this change is
brought about in the same manner. “When he has learned both, he follows
that which he likes best, unless the public has more occasion for the
other.”

The chief and almost the only business of the magistrates is to see
that no one lives in idleness. This does not mean that the Utopians
wear themselves out with “perpetual toil from morning to night, as if
they were beasts of burden,” for they appoint eight hours for sleep and
six for work, and the rest of the day is left to each man’s discretion.
They are able to cut down the length of time needed for work, without
our so-called labor saving machinery, by using the services of classes
which in More’s time were given for the most part to idleness--princes,
rich men, healthy beggars, and the like. The only exception to this
rule of labor is with the magistrates--who are not in the habit of
taking advantage of it--and the students, who upon proving their
ability are released from mechanical operations. If there is too great
a surplus of labor, men are sent out to repair the highways; but
when no public undertaking is to be performed, the hours of work are
lessened.


6

So much for the daily industrial life of the Utopians. How are the
goods distributed?

Between the city and the country there is a monthly exchange of goods.
This occasion is made a festival, and the country people come into
town and take back for themselves the goods which the townspeople have
made; and the magistrates “take care to see it given to them.” In back
of this direct interchange of goods between town and country, between
household and household, there are doubtless regulations; and it is
simply our misfortune that Raphael Hythloday did not think it necessary
to go into them. Within the cities, we must add, there are storehouses
where a daily market takes place.

As with the business of production, the family is the unit of
distribution; and the city is composed of these units, rather than of
a multitude of isolated individuals. “Every city is divided into four
equal parts, and in the middle of each there is a marketplace; what is
brought hither, and manufactured by the several families, is carried
from thence to houses appointed for that purpose, in which all things
of a sort are laid by themselves; and thither every father goes and
takes whatever he or his family stand in need of, without either paying
for it or leaving anything in exchange. There is no reason for giving
denial to any person, since there is such plenty of everything among
them; and there is no danger of a man’s asking for more than he needs;
they have no inducements to do this, since they are sure they shall
always be supplied.”

More goes on to explain this direct system of exchange, and to justify
it. “It is the fear of want that makes any of the whole race of animals
either greedy or ravenous, but besides fear, there is in man a pride
that makes him fancy it a particular glory to excel others in pomp and
excess. But by the laws of the Utopians there is no room for this. Near
these markets are others for all sorts of provisions, where there are
not only herbs, fruits, and bread, but also fish, fowl, and cattle.
There are also, without their towns, places appointed near some running
water for killing their beasts, and for washing away their filth.”

In addition to the monthly apportionment of goods by the local
magistrates, the great council which meets at Amaurot once a year
undertakes to examine the production of each region, and those regions
that suffer from a scarcity of goods are supplied out of the surplus
of other regions, “so that indeed the whole island is, as it were, one
family.”

Taking it all together, there is pretty much the same standard of
well-being that we found in the Republic. More recognizes the instinct
for self-assertion and the exhibitionist element in man’s makeup; but
he does not pander to it. The precious metals are held in contempt:
gold is used to make chamberpots and chains for slaves; pearls are
given to children who glory in them and enjoy them while they are young
and are as much ashamed to use them afterwards as they are of their
puppets and other toys. Gaudy clothes and jewelry are likewise out of
fashion in Utopia. The shopkeepers of Bond Street and Fifth Avenue
would break their hearts here; for it is impossible to spend money or
to spend other people’s labor on articles which lend themselves solely
to conspicuous display, and are otherwise neither useful nor beautiful.
Contrast More’s Utopia with St. John’s vision of heaven, and the
worldly Utopia seems quite naked and austere. Two hundred years later,
in Penn’s city of Philadelphia, we might have fancied that we were
walking about the streets of Amaurot.


7

The town life of the Utopians, as I have explained, rests upon rural
foundations; there is such a mixture of town and country as Peter
Kropotkin sought to realize in his sketch of “Fields, Factories, and
Workshops.” Let us conjure up the town of Amaurot and see in what sort
of environment the townspeople spend their days. Our Utopian city,
alas! reminds us somewhat of its rivals in latter-day America; for
Raphael tells us that he who knows one of their towns knows all of them.

Amaurot lies on the side of a hill; it is almost a square, two miles on
each side; and it faces the river Anider which takes its rise eighty
miles above the town, and gets lost in the ocean sixty miles below. The
town is compassed by a high, thick wall; the streets are convenient
for carriages and sheltered from the winds; and the houses are built
in rows so that a whole side of the street looks like a single unit.
(It was so that the great people built their houses in eighteenth
century London and Edinburgh, as Belgrave Square, Charlotte Square, and
the great Adelphi Mansion designed by the Brothers Adam show us.) The
streets are twenty feet broad; and in back of the houses are gardens,
which everyone has a hand in keeping up; and the people of the various
blocks vie with each other in ordering their gardens, so that there
is “nothing belonging to the whole town that is more useful and more
pleasant.”

In every street there are great halls, distinguished by particular
names, and lying at an equal distance from each other. In each hall
dwells the magistrate of a district, who rules over thirty families,
fifteen living on one side and fifteen on another; and since a family
consists of not more than sixteen and not less than ten people, this
magistrate--or Philarch as he is called--is the “community leader” of
some four hundred people.

In these halls everyone meets and takes his principal meal. The
stewards go to the market place at a particular hour, and, according
to the number of people in their halls, carry home provisions. The
people who are in hospitals--which are built outside the walls and are
so large they might pass for little towns--get the pick of the day’s
food. At the hours of dinner and supper the whole block is called
together by a trumpet, and everybody joins company, except such as are
sick or in hospital, just as the students and fellows to this day eat
their principal meal in an Oxford college. The dressing of meat and the
ordering of the tables belongs to the women; all those of every family
taking their place by turns. In the same building there is a common
nursery and chapel; and so the women who have children to care for
labor under no inconvenience.

The midday meal is dispatched unceremoniously; but at the end of the
day music always accompanies the meals, perfumes are burnt or sprinkled
around, and they “want nothing that may cheer up their spirits.” Bond
Street and Fifth Avenue may weep about the absence of conspicuous
waste in Utopia; but at supper time, at any rate, William Penn would
be uncomfortable. There is the odor of an uncommonly good club in the
description of the final meal of the day: the smell of the barracks
or the poorhouse, which we should find later in Robert Owen’s common
halls, does not intrude for an instant. More, when you examine him
closely, does not altogether forget the mean sensual man who dwells
occasionally in all of us!


8

Now that we have laid the foundations of the material life, we must
observe the limitations that are laid upon the daily activities of the
Utopians. This brings us to the government.

The basis of the Utopian political state, as in the economic province,
is the family. Every year thirty families choose a magistrate, known
as a Philarch; and over every ten Philarchs, with the families subject
to them, there is an Archphilarch. All the Philarchs, who are in
number 200, choose the Prince out of a list of four, who are named by
the people of the four divisions of the city. The Prince is elected
for life, unless he be removed on suspicion of attempting to enslave
the people. The Philarchs are chosen for a single year; but they are
frequently re-elected. In order to keep their rulers from conspiring to
upset the government, no matter of great importance can be set on foot
without being sent to the Philarchs, “who, after they have communicated
it to the families that belong to their divisions, and have considered
it among themselves, make report to the senate; and upon great
occasions the matter is referred to the council of the whole island.”

Recollect that each household is an industrial as well as a domestic
unit, as was usual in the Middle Age, and you will perceive that this
is an astute combination of industrial and political democracy on a
genuine basis of common interest.

The greater part of the business of the government relates to the
economic life of the people. There are certain other matters, however,
which remain over for them; and these affairs constitute a blot on
More’s conception of the ideal commonwealth. One of them is the
regulation of travel; another is the treatment of crime; and a third is
war.

It is interesting to note that on two subjects which More is mightily
concerned to rectify in his own country--crime and war--he establishes
conditions which are pretty far from being ideal or humane in his
Utopia. A. E. has well said that a man becomes the image of the thing
he hates. Everything that Raphael brings up against the government of
England in the Introduction to Utopia could be brought with almost
equal force, I believe, against the very country which is to serve as a
standard.

While any man may travel if there is no particular occasion for him
at home--whether he wishes to visit friends or see the rest of the
country--it is necessary for him to carry a passport from the Prince.
If he stay in any place longer than a night he must follow his proper
occupation; and if anyone goes out of the city without leave or
is found wandering around without a passport, he is punished as a
fugitive, and upon committing the offense a second time is condemned to
slavery. This is a plain example of unimaginative harshness; and it is
hard to explain away; indeed, I have no intention to.

Apparently More could not conceive of a perfectly happy commonwealth
for the majority of men if they still had to perform certain filthy
daily tasks, like the slaughtering of beef; and so he attempts to kill
two birds with one stone: he creates a class of slaves, and he fills
this class by condemning to it people who have committed venial crimes.
In doing this, he overlooks the final objection to slavery in all its
forms; namely, that it tends to corrupt the master.

Since we are discussing the conditions that undermine More’s
commonwealth, we may remark that war, too, remains; the difference
being that the Utopians attempt to do by strategy, corruption, and
what we should now call propaganda what less intelligent people do by
sheer force of arms. If the Utopian incubator anticipates the modern
invention, their method of conducting war likewise anticipates our
modern technique of undermining the enemy’s morale: these Utopians, in
the good and the bad, are our contemporaries! Among the just causes
of war the Utopians count the seizure of territory, the oppression of
foreign merchants, and the denial of access to land to nations capable
of cultivating it. They take considerable pains to keep their “best
sort of men for their own use at home, so they make use of the worst
sort of men for the consumption of war.” In other words, they regard
war as a means, among other things, of weeding out undesirable elements
in the community.

It is a relief to turn away from these residual iniquities to marriage
and religion!

In marriage there is a curious mixture of the personal conception of
sexual relations, which is the modern note, with a belief in certain
formal specifications which was the distinctly mediæval quality.
Thus on one hand the Utopians take care that the bride and the
bridegroom are introduced to each other, in their nakedness, before the
ceremony; and the grounds for divorce are adultery and insufferable
perverseness. When two people cannot agree they are permitted to escape
the bond by mutual agreement under approval granted by the Senate after
strict inquiry. On the other hand, unchastity is sternly punished, and
those who commit adultery are condemned to slavery and not given the
privilege of a second marriage.

In religion there is complete toleration for all creeds, with this
exception: that those who dispute violently about religion or attempt
to use any other force than that of mild persuasion are punished for
breaking the public peace.


9

There is not the space to follow the life of the Utopians in all its
details. It is time to discuss the world of ideas by which these
Utopians chart their daily activities. This exposition of the basic
Utopian values has been so admirably put by Sir Thomas More himself
that the greater part of our conclusion will inevitably fall within
quotation marks.

The Utopians “define virtue thus: that it is a living according to
Nature, and think that we are made by God for that end; they believe
that a man then follows Nature when he pursues or avoids things
according to the direction of reason.... Reason directs us to keep
our minds as free from passion and as cheerful as we can, and that we
should consider ourselves bound by the ties of good-nature and humanity
to use our utmost endeavors to help forward the happiness of all other
persons; for there never was any man such a morose and severe pursuer
of virtue, such an enemy to pleasure, that though he set hard rules for
men to undergo much pain, many watchings and other rigors, yet did not
at the same time advise them to do all they could to relieve and ease
the miserable, and who did not represent gentleness and good nature as
amiable dispositions.... A life of pleasure is either a real evil, and
in that case we ought not to assist others in their pursuit of it, but,
on the contrary, to keep them from it all we can, as from that which is
most hurtful and deadly; or if it is a good thing, so that we not only
may but ought to help others to it, why then ought not a man to begin
with himself? Since no man can be more bound to look after the good of
another than after his own....

“Thus as they define Virtue to be living according to Nature, so they
imagine that Nature prompts all people to seek after pleasure, as the
end of all they do. They also observe that in order to further our
supporting the pleasures of life, Nature inclines us to enter into
society; for there is no man so much raised above the rest of mankind
as to be the only favorite of Nature, who, on the contrary, seems to
have placed on a level all those that belong to the same species.
Upon this they infer that no man ought to seek his own conveniences
so eagerly as to prejudice others; and therefore they think that all
agreements between private persons ought to be observed, but likewise
that all those laws ought to be kept, which either a good prince has
published in due form, to which a people that is neither oppressed with
tyranny nor circumvented by fraud, has consented, for distributing
these conveniences of life which afford us all our pleasures.

“They think it is an evidence of true wisdom for a man to pursue his
own advantages, as far as the laws allow it. They account it piety to
prefer public good to one’s private concerns; but they think it unjust
for a man to seek for pleasure by snatching another man’s pleasures
from him.

“Thus upon an inquiry into the whole matter, they reckon that all
our actions, and even all our virtues, terminate in pleasure, as in
our chief end and greatest happiness; and they call every motion or
state, either of body or mind, in which Nature teaches us to delight,
a pleasure. They cautiously limit pleasure only to those appetites to
which Nature leads us; for they say that Nature leads us only to those
delights to which reason as well as sense carries us, and by which we
neither injure any other person nor lose the possession of greater
pleasures, and of such as draw no troubles after them.”

Thus the Utopians discriminate between natural pleasures and those
which have some sting or bitterness concealed in them. The love of fine
clothes is considered by Utopians as a pleasure of the latter sort;
likewise is the desire of those who possess fine clothes to be kowtowed
to by other people. Men who heap up wealth without using it are in the
same class; and those who throw dice or hunt--for in Utopia hunting is
turned over to the butchers, and the butchers are slaves.

Now Utopians “reckon up several sorts of pleasures which they call true
ones; some belong to the body and others to the mind. The pleasures of
the mind lie in knowledge, and in that delight which the contemplation
of truth carries with it; to which they add the joyful reflections on
a well-spent life; and the assured hopes of a future happiness. They
divide the pleasures of the body into two sorts; the one is that
which gives our senses some real delight, and is performed, either by
recruiting nature, and supplying those parts which feed the internal
heat of life by eating and drinking; or when nature is eased of any
surcharge that oppresses it; when we are relieved from sudden pain,
or that which arises from satisfying the appetite which Nature has
wisely given for the propagation of the species. There is another
kind of pleasure that arises neither from our receiving what the body
requires, nor its being relieved when overcharged, and yet by a secret,
unseen virtue affects the senses, raises the passions, and strikes the
mind with generous impressions; this is the pleasure that arises from
music. Another kind of bodily pleasure is that which arises from an
undisturbed and vigorous constitution of body, when life and active
spirits seem to actuate every part. This lively health, when entirely
free from all mixture of pain, of itself gives an inward pleasure ...
and Utopians reckon it the foundation and basis of all the other joys
of life, since this alone makes the state of life easy and desirable;
and when this is wanting a man is really capable of no other pleasure.”
The crowning pleasure of the Utopian is the cultivation of the mind;
and the leisure hours of the people, as well as the professional
scholars, are spent in the lecture hall and the study.


10

Such are the goals for which the Utopians direct their social order.
These values are, I need scarcely point out, rooted in the nature of
man, and not in any set of external institutions. The aim of every
Utopian institution is to help every man to help himself. When we put
the matter in these bald phrases, what More brings forward seems weak
and platitudinous. Behind it all, however, is a vital idea: namely,
that our attempts to live the good life are constantly perverted by our
efforts to gain a living; and that by juggling gains and advantages,
by striving after power and riches and distinction, we miss the
opportunity to live as whole men. People become the nursemaids of their
furniture, their property, their titles, their position; and so they
lose the direct satisfaction that furniture or property would give.

To cultivate the soil rather than simply to get away with a job; to
take food and drink rather than to earn money; to think and dream and
invent, rather than to increase one’s reputation; in short, to grasp
the living reality and spurn the shadow--this is the substance of
the Utopian way of life. Power and wealth and dignity and fame are
abstractions; and men cannot live by abstractions alone. In this Utopia
of the New World every man has the opportunity to be a man because no
one else has the opportunity to be a monster. Here, too, the chief end
of man is that he should grow to the fullest stature of his species.




CHAPTER FOUR

  How the new Humanism of the Renascence brings us within sight of
      Christianopolis; and how we have for the first time a glimpse
      of a modern utopia.




CHAPTER FOUR


1

A hundred years pass, and the man who next conducts us into Utopia is
a Humanist scholar. After the manner of his time, he answers to the
latinized name, Johann Valentin Andreæ. He is a traveller, a social
reformer, and above all things a preacher; and so the vision he imparts
to us of Christianopolis seems occasionally to flicker into blackness
whilst he moralizes for us and tells us to the point of tedium what
his views are concerning the life of man, and in particular the
conceptions of Christianity which his countrymen, the Germans, are
debating about. Sometimes, when we are on the point of coming to grips
with his utopia, he will annoy us by going off on a long tirade about
the wickedness of the world and the necessity for fastening one’s gaze
upon the life hereafter--for Protestantism seems just as other-worldly
as Catholicism. It is the Humanist Andreæ rather than the Lutheran
Andreæ who paints the picture of a Christian city. While Andreæ sticks
to Christianopolis his insight is deep, his views are sound, and his
proposals are rational; and more than once he will amaze us by putting
forward ideas which seem to leap three hundred years ahead of his time
and environment.

It is impossible to get rid of the personal flavor of Andreæ: his fine
intelligence and his candor make our contacts with Christianopolis
quite different from the dreary guidebook sketches which some of the
later utopians will inflict upon us. The two other utopians who
wrote in the same half century as Andreæ--Francis Bacon and Tommaso
Campanella--are quite second-rate in comparison; Bacon with his
positively nauseating foppishness about details in dress and his
superstitious regard for forms and ceremonials, and Campanella, the
lonely monk whose City of the Sun seems a marriage of Plato’s Republic
and the Court of Montezuma. When Bacon talks about science, he talks
like a court costumer who is in the habit of describing the stage
properties for a masque; and it is hard to tell whether he is more
interested in the experiments performed by the scientists of the New
Atlantis or the sort of clothes they wear while engaged in them. There
is nothing of the snob or the dilettante about Andreæ: His eye fastens
itself upon essentials, and he never leaves them except when--for he is
necessarily a man of his age--he turns his gaze piously to heaven.

This teeming, struggling European world that Andreæ turns his back upon
he knows quite well; for he has lived in Herrenburg, Koenigsbrunn,
Tuebingen, Strassburg, Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Geneva, Vaihingen,
and Calw; and he is in correspondence with learned men abroad, in
particular with Samuel Hartlib, who lives in England, and with John
Amos Comenius. Like the Chancellor in Christianopolis, he longs for an
“abode situated below the sky, but at the same time above the dregs
of this known world.” Quite simply, he finds himself wrecked on the
shore of an island dominated by the city of Christianopolis. After
being examined as to his ideas of life and morals, his person, and his
culture, he is admitted to the community.


2

This island is a whole world in miniature. As in the Republic, the unit
once more is the valley section, for the “island is rich in grain and
pasture fields, watered with rivers and brooks, adorned with woods and
vineyards, full of animals.”

In outward appearance, Christianopolis does not differ very much from
the pictures of the cities one finds in seventeenth century travel
books, except for a unity and orderliness that these cities sometimes
lack. “Its shape is a square whose side is 700 feet, well fortified
with four towers and a wall.... It looks therefore towards the four
quarters of the earth. Of buildings there are two rows, or if you count
the seat of the government and the storehouses, four; there is only one
public street, and only one marketplace, but this one is of a very high
order.” In the middle of the city there is a circular temple, a hundred
feet in diameter; all the buildings are three stories; and public
balconies lead to them. Provision against fire is made by building
the houses of burnt stone and separating them by fire-proof walls. In
general, “things look much the same all around, not extravagant nor yet
unclean; fresh air and ventilation are provided throughout. About four
hundred citizens live here in religious faith and peace of the highest
order.” The whole city is divided into three parts, one to supply food,
one for drill and exercise, and one for looks. The remainder of the
island serves the purposes of agriculture, and for workshops.


3

When we look back upon the Republic, with its external organization
so plainly modeled upon military Sparta, we see the camp and the
soldier giving the pattern to the life of the whole community. In
Utopia, the fundamental unit was the farmstead and the family; and
family discipline, which arises naturally enough in rural conditions,
was transferred to the city. In Christianopolis, the workshop and
the worker set the lines upon which the community is developed; and
whatever else this society may be, it is a “republic of workers, living
in equality, desiring peace, and renouncing riches.” If Utopia exhibits
the communism of the family, Christianopolis presents the communism of
the guild.

Industrially speaking, there are three sections in Christianopolis.
One of them is devoted to agriculture and animal husbandry. Each of
these departments has appropriate buildings, and directly opposite them
is a rather large tower which connects them with the city buildings;
under the tower a broad vaulted entrance leads into the city, and a
smaller one to the individual houses. The dome of this tower roofs
what we should call a guildhall, and here the citizens of the quarter
come together as often as required to “act on sacred as well as
civil matters.” It is plain that these workers are not sheep led by
wise shepherds, as in the Republic, but the members of autonomous,
self-regulating groups.

The next quarter contains the mills, bake-shops, meat-shops, and
factories for making whatever is done with machinery apart from
fire. As Christianopolis welcomes originality in invention, there
are a variety of enterprises within this domain; among them, paper
manufacturing plants, saw mills, and establishments for grinding
and polishing arms and tools. There are common kitchens and wash
houses, too; for, as we shall see presently, life in this ideal city
corresponds to what we experience today in New York, London, and many
another modern industrial city.

The third quarter is given over to the metallurgical industries, as
well as to those like the glass, brick, and earthenware industries
which require constant fire. It is necessary to point out that in
planning the industrial quarters of Christianopolis, these seventeenth
century Utopians have anticipated the best practice that has been
worked out today, after a century of disorderly building. The
separation of the city into zones, the distinction between “heavy”
industries and “light” industries, the grouping of similar industrial
establishments, the provision of an agricultural zone adjacent to the
city--in all this our garden cities are but belated reproductions of
Christianopolis.

Moreover, in Christianopolis, there is a conscious application of
science to industrial processes; one might almost say that these
artisans believed in efficiency engineering; for “here in truth
you see a testing of nature herself. The men are not driven to a
work with which they are unfamiliar, like pack-animals to their
task, but they have been trained before in an accurate knowledge of
scientific matters,” on the theory that “unless you analyze matter by
experiment, unless you improve the deficiencies of knowledge by more
capable instruments, you are worthless.” The dependence of industrial
improvement upon deliberate scientific research may be a new discovery
for the practical man, but it is an old story in Utopia.


4

What is the character of this artisan democracy? The answer to this
is summed up in one of those sayings that Andreæ, in the midst of his
energetic exposition, drops by the way.

“To be wise and to work are not incompatible, if there is moderation.”

So it follows that “their artisans are almost entirely educated men.
For that which other people think is the proper characteristic of a few
(and yet if you consider the stuffing of inexperience by learning, the
characteristic of too many already) this, the inhabitants argue, should
be attained by all individuals. They say that neither the substance of
letters is such, nor yet the difficulty of work, that one man, if given
enough time, cannot master both.”

“Their work, or as they prefer to hear it called, ‘the employment of
their hands,’ is conducted in a certain prescribed way, and all things
are brought into a public booth. From here every workman receives out
of the stock on hand whatever is necessary for the work of the coming
week. For the whole city is, as it were, one single workshop, but of
all different sorts and crafts. The ones in charge of these duties
are stationed in the small towers at the corners of the wall; they
know ahead of time what is to be made, in what quantity, and of what
form, and they inform the mechanics of these items. If the supply of
material in the work booth is sufficient, the workmen are permitted to
indulge and give free play to their inventive genius. No one has any
money, nor is there any use for any private money; yet the republic has
its own treasury. And in this respect the inhabitants are especially
blessed, because no one can be superior to the other in the amount of
riches owned, since the advantage is rather one of power and genius,
and the highest respect that of morals and piety. They have very few
working hours, yet no less is accomplished than in other places, as it
is considered disgraceful by all that one should take more rest and
leisure time than is allowed.”

In addition to the special trades, there are “public duties to which
all citizens have obligation, such as watching, guarding, harvesting
of grain and wine, working roads, erecting buildings, draining ground;
also certain duties of assisting in the factories which are imposed
upon all in turn according to age and sex, but not very often nor for
a long time. For even though certain experienced men are put in charge
of all the duties, yet when men are asked for, no one refuses the state
his services and strength. For what we are in our homes, they are in
their city, which they not undeservedly think a home. And for this
reason it is no disgrace to perform any public function.... Hence all
work, even that which is considered rather irksome, is accomplished in
good time, and without much difficulty, since the promptness of the
great number of workmen permits them easily to collect or distribute
the great mass of things.”

In this Christianopolis, as Mr. Bertrand Russell would put it, the
creative rather than the possessive impulses are uppermost. Work is the
main condition of existence, and this good community faces it. It is a
pretty contrast to the attitude of the leisured classes who, as Andreæ
says, with an entirely mistaken sense of delicacy shrink from touching
earth, water, stones, coal, and things of that sort, but think it grand
to have in their possession to delight them “horses, dogs, harlots and
other similar creatures.”


5

The place of commerce in this scheme of life is simple. It does not
exist for the sake of individual gain. Hence no one engages in commerce
on his own hook, for such matters are put in the hands of “those
selected to attend to them,” and the aim of commerce is not to gain
money but to increase the variety of things at the disposal of the
local community; so that--and again Andreæ steps in for emphasis--“we
may see the peculiar production of each land, and so communicate with
each other that we may seem to have the advantages of the universe in
one place, as it were.”


6

The constitution of the family in Christianopolis follows pretty
definitely upon the lines dictated by urban occupations; for Andreæ
is a city man, and since he does not despise the advantages city life
can give, he does not shrink from their consequences. One of these
consequences is, surely, the restriction of domesticity, or rather, the
projection in the city at large of the functions that in a farmstead
would be carried on within the bosom of the family.

When a lad is twenty-four and a lass is eighteen, they are permitted to
marry, with the benefit of Christian rites and services, and a decorous
avoidance of drunkenness and gluttony after the ceremony. Marriage is
a simple matter. There are no dowries to consider, no professional
anxieties to face, no housing shortage to keep one from finding a home,
and above all, perhaps, no landlord to propitiate with money, since
all houses are owned by the city and are granted and assigned to
individuals for their use. Virtue and beauty are the only qualities
that govern a marriage in Christianopolis. Furniture is provided with
the house out of the public store. If in Utopia the families are
grouped together in a patriarchal household, such as More himself
maintained at Chelsea, in Christianopolis they consist of isolated
couples, four, at most six people in all, a woman, a man, and such
children as are not yet of school age.

Let us visit a young couple in Christianopolis. We reach the house
by way of a street, twenty feet broad, faced by houses with a wide
frontage on the street, some forty feet in length, and of from fifteen
to twenty-five feet in depth. In our crowded towns, today, where people
pay for land by the front foot, the frontage is narrow and the houses
are deep; and as a result there is a dreadful insufficiency of light
and air; but in Christianopolis, as in some of the older European
towns, the houses are built to get a maximum of air and sunlight. If
it is raining when we make our visit, a covered walk, five feet wide,
supported by columns twelve feet high, will shelter us from the rain.

Our friends live, we shall say, in one of the average apartments;
so they have three rooms, a bathroom, a sleeping apartment, and a
kitchen. “The middle part within the tower has a little open space with
a wide window, where wood and the heavier things are raised aloft by
pulleys”--in short, a dumbwaiter. Looking out from the window in the
rear, we face a well-kept garden; and if our host is inclined to give
us wine, he may let us take our pick from among the cobwebs of a small
private cellar in the basement, where such things are kept. If it is a
cold day, the furnace is going; or if we happen to make our visit in
the summer time, the awnings are drawn.

Our host makes apologies, perhaps, for a litter of wood and shavings
that occupies a corner of the kitchen, for he has just been putting up
a few shelves in his spare time, and has borrowed a kit of tools from
the public supply house. (Since he is not a carpenter, he has no need
for these tools the rest of the year; and other people can have their
turn at them.) Coming from Utopia, one of the things that strikes us is
the absence of domestic attendance; and when we ask our hostess about
it, she tells us that she will not have anyone to wait upon her until
she is confined.

“But isn’t there a lot of work for you to do all by yourself?” we shall
ask.

“Not for anybody with a college training,” she will answer. “You see
that our furnishings are quite simple; and since there are no gimcracks
to be dusted, no polished tables to be oiled, no carpets to be swept,
and nothing in our apartment that is just for show to prove that we can
afford to live better than our neighbors, the work is scarcely more
than enough to keep one in good health and temper. Of course, cooking
meals is always something of a nuisance; and washing up is worse. But
my husband and I share the work together, in everything but sewing and
washing clothes, and you would be surprised how quickly everything
gets done. Work is usually galling when somebody else is taking his
ease while one is doing it; but where husband and wife share alike, as
in Christianopolis, there is really nothing to it. If you’ll stay to
dinner, you’ll find out how easily it goes. Since you haven’t brought
your rations, my husband will get some cooked meats in the public
kitchen, and that will do for all of us.”

“No one need be surprised at the rather cramped quarters,” Andreæ
hastens to interject. “People who house vanity ... can never live
spaciously enough. They burden others and are burdened themselves, and
no one measures their necessities, nay even their comforts, easily
otherwise than by an unbearable and unmovable mass. Oh, only those
persons are rich who have all of which they have real need, who admit
nothing else, merely because it is possible to have it in abundance.”

Carried to its extreme, you will find this philosophy put once for all
in Thoreau’s Walden. We have got our bearings in Utopia, I believe,
when we have determined what a life abundant consists of, and what will
suffice for it.


7

Suppose that our friends have children. During the early years of
their life they are in the care of their mother. When they have
completed their sixth year, the children are given over to the care of
the community, and both sexes continue in school through the stages
of childhood, youth, and early maturity. “No parent gives closer or
more careful attention to his children than is given here, for the
most upright preceptors, men as well as women, are placed over them.
Moreover,” the parents “can visit their children, even unseen by them,
as often as they have leisure. As this is an institution for the public
good, it is managed agreeably as a common charge for all the citizens.
They see to it that the food is appetizing and wholesome, that the
couches and beds are clean and comfortable, and that the clothes and
attire of the whole body are clean.... If diseases of the skin or body
are contracted, the individuals are cared for in good time; and to
avoid the spreading of infection, they are quarantined.”

There is scarcely need to examine the program of study except in its
broad outlines. It is enough to observe that “the young men have their
study period in the morning, the girls in the afternoon, and matrons as
well as learned men are their instructors.... The rest of their time
is devoted to manual training and domestic art and science, as each
one’s occupation is assigned to his natural inclination. When they
have vacant time they are permitted to engage in honorable physical
exercises either in the open spaces of the town or in the field.”

Two points, however, deserve our attention. The first is that the
school is run as a miniature republic. The second is the calibre of the
instructors. “The instructors,” says our zealous humanist, “are not
men from the dregs of human society nor such as are useless for other
occupations, but the choice of all the citizens, persons whose standing
in the Republic is known and who very often have access to the highest
positions of the state.”

The last phrase again transports me back to the modern world. I see
this fine humanist ideal budding in another place. This time it is
a summer school in the hills of New Hampshire, where the children
govern themselves in the classroom, where there is no punishment
except temporary exclusion from the group, and where, above all, each
instructor is chosen because of his creative practice in the subject
which he teaches: a highly gifted composer teaches music, an athlete
teaches gymnastics, a poet teaches literature. Then I think of all the
casual and wasted talents of people who for little more than the asking
would share their love of the arts and sciences with little children,
if only those who are in charge of little children were not too blind
or too fearful to make use of them. Faraday’s classic lectures on
the physics of the candle, and Ruskin’s addresses to a young ladies’
boarding school on the function of literature--such things might be
multiplied. It is not the creation of this utopian method that is
difficult; for the thing has already been done: what we need is its
extension. Then children might come to school as gaily as they do in
Peterborough, N. H., on the lush summer mornings; and people would
not turn their backs on learning any more than they would turn their
backs on life. If anyone thinks that Johann Andreæ’s prescription for
a teaching staff is an impossible one, let him visit the Peterborough
School, and examine its records and achievements.

It remains to record the further stages of learning. The halls of the
central citadel are divided into twelve departments, and except for the
armory, the archives, the printing establishment, and the treasury,
these halls are devoted entirely to the arts and sciences.

There is, to begin with, a laboratory of physical science. “Here the
properties of metals, minerals, and vegetables, and even the life of
animals, are examined, purified, increased, and united for the use of
the human race and in the interests of health.... Here men learn to
regulate fire, make use of air, value the water, and test the earth.”

Next to this laboratory is a Drug Supply House, where a pharmacy is
scientifically developed, for the curing of physical disease, and
adjoining this is a school of medicine, or as Andreæ reports, “a place
given over to anatomy.... The value of ascertaining the location of
the organs and of assisting the struggles of nature no one would deny,
unless he be as ignorant of himself as are the barbarians.... The
inhabitants of Christianopolis teach their youth the operations of life
and the various organs, from the parts of the physical body.”

We come now then to a Natural Science laboratory which is in effect a
Museum of Natural History, an institution founded in Utopia a century
and a half before a partial and inadequate substitute--a mere extension
of the curio chamber of a Country House--was presented to an admiring
world as the British Museum. “This,” as Andreæ says, “cannot be too
elegantly described,” and I heartily agree with him; for he paints the
picture of a museum which the American Museum at New York or South
Kensington in London has only begun to realize within the last decade
or two of their existence.

“Natural history is here seen painted on the walls in detail, and
with greatest skill. The phenomena of the sky, views of the earth in
different regions, the different races of men, representations of
animals, the forms of growing things, classes of stones and gems, are
not only on hand and named, but they even teach and make known their
nature and qualities.... Truly is not recognition of things of the
earth much easier of competent demonstration if illustrative materials
are at hand and if there is some guide to the memory? For instruction
enters altogether more easily through the eyes than through the ears,
and much more pleasantly in the presence of refinement than among the
base. They are deceived who think it is impossible to teach except in
dark caves and with a gloomy brow. A liberal minded man is never so
keen as when he has his instructors on confidential terms.”

Going farther, we find a mathematics laboratory and a department of
mathematical instruments. The first is “remarkable for its diagrams of
the heavens, as the hall of physics for its diagrams of the earth....
A chart of the star-studded heavens and a reproduction of the whole
shining host above were shown,” ... and also “different illustrations
representing tools and machines, small models, figures of geometry;
instruments of the mechanical arts, drawn, named, and explained.” I
cannot help expressing my admiration here for the concrete imagination
of this remarkable scholar: he deliberately anticipated, not in
the vague, allegorical form that Bacon does, but as lucidly as an
architect or a museum curator, the sort of institute which South
Kensington, with its Departments of Physical and Natural Science,
or perhaps the Smithsonian in America, has just begun to resemble.
If our museums had begun with the ideal Andreæ had in mind, instead
of with the miscellaneous rubbish which was the nucleus of their
collections--and still remains the nucleus in many of the less advanced
institutions--the presentation of the sciences would be a more adequate
thing than it is.

Does Andreæ leave the fine arts out of his picture? By no means.
“Opposite the pharmacy is a very roomy shop for pictorial art, an art
in which the city takes the greatest delight. For the city, besides
being decorated all over with pictures representing the various phases
of the earth, makes use of them especially in the instruction of youth
and for rendering learning more easy.... Besides, pictures and statues
of famous men are to be seen everywhere, an incentive of no mean value
to the young for striving to imitate their virtue.... At the same time
also, the beauty of forms is so pleasing to them that they embrace with
a whole heart the inner beauty of virtue itself.”

At the summit of art and science we naturally find in Christianopolis
the temple of religion. Alas! the hand of Calvin has been busy in
Christianopolis--recollect that Andreæ once lived in Geneva and admired
its ordinances--and attendance at prayers is compulsory. In order to
get an idea of this great circular temple, three hundred sixteen feet
in circumference and seventy feet high, we must think of a colossal
moving picture theater in a modern metropolis. The comparison is not
essentially sacrilegious; and I believe that those who will take
the trouble to look below the surface will find without difficulty
the common denominator between the profane and the ecclesiastical
institution. (Attendance at motion pictures, I must quickly add for the
benefit of the future historian, has not yet been made compulsory in
the modern metropolis.)

One-half of the temple is where the public gatherings take place; and
the other is reserved for the distribution of the sacraments and for
music. “At the same time, the sacred comedies, by which they set so
much store, and are entertained every three months, are shown in the
temple.”


8

We have discussed folk, work, and place in Christianopolis; and we have
dealt in an admittedly sketchy fashion with culture and art. We must
now turn attention to the polity; and here we must note that Andreæ’s
description shifts for once to an allegorical plane, and departs not a
little from the realism of his treatment of science and the arts.

At the bottom of the polity there are glimpses of a local industrial
association, meeting in the common halls that are provided in the
towers of each of the industrial quarters; and we gather that to
represent the city at large twenty-four councilmen are chosen, while
as the executive department there is a triumvirate consisting of a
Minister, a Judge, and a Director of Learning, each of whom is married,
for metaphorical point, to Conscience, Understanding, and Truth,
respectively. “Each one of the leaders does his own duty, yet not
without the knowledge of others; all consult together in matters that
concern the safety of the state.”

In the censorship of books, Christianopolis reminds us of the Republic;
in the exclusion of lawyers it calls up nearly every other utopia; and
in its attitude towards crime it has a temperance and leniency that
is all its own, for “the judges of this Christian city observe this
custom especially, that they punish most severely those misdeeds which
are directed straight against God, less severely those which injure
men, and lightest of all those who harm only property. As the Christian
citizens are always chary of spilling blood, they do not willingly
agree upon the death sentence as a form of punishment.... For anyone
can destroy a man but only the best can reform.”

How shall we sum up this government? Let Andreæ speak his own words;
for he has reached the innermost shrine of Christianopolis and
perceives the center of activity in the state.

“Here religion, justice, and learning have their abode, and theirs
is the control of the city.... I often wonder what people mean who
separate and disjoint their best powers, the joining of which might
render them blessed as far as may be on earth. There are those who
would be considered religious, who throw off all things human; there
are some who are pleased to rule, though without any religion at all;
learning makes a great noise, flattering now this one, now that, yet
applauding itself most. What finally may the tongue do except provoke
God, confuse men, and destroy itself? So there would seem to be a need
of co-operation which only Christianity can give--Christianity which
conciliates God with men and unites men together, so that they have
pious thoughts, do good deeds, know the truth, and finally die happily
to live eternally.”

There are some who might object to this statement on the ground that it
smacked too heartily of supernatural religion; but it remains just as
valid if we translate it into terms whose theological reactions have
been neutralized. To have a sense of values, to know the world in which
they are set, and to be able to distribute them--this is our modern
version of Andreæ’s conception of religion, learning, and justice. A
little search might uncover another expression of the Humanist ideal
as complete and magnificent as this; but I doubt if it would find a
better one. In essence, this blunt and forthright German scholar is
standing shoulder to shoulder with Plato: his Christianopolis is as
enduring as the best nature of men.




CHAPTER FIVE

  How Bacon and Campanella, who have a great reputation as
      utopians, are little better than echoes of the men who went
      before them.




CHAPTER FIVE


1

A Genoese sea-captain is the guest of a Grand Master of the Knights
Hospitaller. This sea-captain tells him of a great country under the
equator, dominated by the City of the Sun. The outward appearance of
this country is a little strange--the city with its seven rings named
after the seven planets, and its four gates that lead to the four
quarters of the earth, and the hill that is topt by a grand temple,
and the walls covered with laws and alphabets and paintings of natural
phenomena, and the Rulers--Power, Wisdom, and Love--with the learned
doctors, Astrologus, Cosmographus, Arithmeticus, and their like: it
is an apparition such as never yet was seen on land or sea. Small
wonder, for this City of the Sun existed only in the exotic brain of a
Calabrian monk, Tommaso Campanella, whose Utopia existed in manuscript
before Andreæ wrote his Christianopolis.

We shall not stay long in the City of the Sun. After we have become
familiar with the outward color and form of the landscape, we discover,
alas! that it is not a foreign country we are exploring, but a sort of
picture puzzle put together out of fragments from Plato and More. As in
the Republic, there is a complete community of property, a community of
wives, and an equality of the sexes; as in Utopia, the younger people
wait upon the elders; as in Christianopolis, science is imparted, or
at least hinted at, by demonstration. When one subtracts what these
other Utopian countries have contributed, very little indeed remains.

But we must not neglect to observe two significant passages. One of
them is the recognition of the part that invention might play in the
ideal commonwealth. The people of the City of the Sun have wagons that
are driven by the wind, and boats “which go over the waters without
rowers or the force of the wind, but by a marvelous contrivance.” There
is a very clear anticipation of the mechanical improvements which began
to multiply so rapidly in the eighteenth century. At the tale end of
the sea-captain’s recital, the Grand Master exclaims: “Oh, if you knew
what our astrologers say of the coming age, that has in it more history
within a hundred years than all the world had in four thousand years
before! Of the wonderful invention of printing and guns, and the use of
the magnet....” With the mechanical arts in full development, labor in
the City of the Sun has become dignified: it is not the custom to keep
slaves. Since everyone takes his part in the common work, there is not
more than four hours’ work to be done per day. “They are rich because
they want nothing; poor because they possess nothing; and consequently
they are not slaves to circumstances, but circumstances serve them.”

The other point upon which Campanella’s observation is remarkably keen
is his explanation of the relation of private property and the private
household to the commonwealth. Thus:

“They say that all private property is acquired and improved for the
reason that each one of us by himself has his own home and wife and
children. From this self-love springs. For when we raise a son to
riches and dignities, and leave an heir to much wealth, we become
either ready to grasp at the property of the state, if in any case
fear should be removed from the power which belongs to riches and
rank; or avaricious, crafty, and hypocritical, if any is of slender
purse, little strength, and mean ancestry. But when we have taken away
self-love, there remains only love for the state.”

How shall the common Utopia keep from being neglected through each
one’s concern for his little private utopia?

This is the critical problem that our utopians have all to face;
and Campanella loyally follows Plato in his solution. It is perhaps
inevitable that each utopian’s personal experience of life should
enter into his solution, and overwhelmingly give it color; and here
the limitations of our utopians are plain. More and Andreæ are married
men, and they stand for the individual family. Plato and Campanella
were bachelors, and they proposed that men should live like monks or
soldiers. Perhaps these two camps are not so far away as they would
seem. If we follow the exposition of that excellent anthropologist,
Professor Edward Westermarck, we shall be fairly well convinced, I
believe, that marriage is a biological institution, and thorough
promiscuity is, to say the least, an unusual form of mating. Plato
perhaps recognized this when he left us in doubt as to whether a
community of wives would be practiced by his artisans and husbandmen.
So he perhaps paves the way for a solution by which the normal life
for the great majority of men would be marriage, with its individual
concerns and loyalties, whilst for the active, creative elements in
the community a less secluded form of mating would be practiced. The
painter, Van Gogh, has given us a kernel to chew on when he says that
the sexual life of the artist must be either that of the monk or the
soldier, for otherwise he is distracted from his creative work.

We may leave this question in the air, as long as we realize that all
our utopias rest upon our ability to discover some sort of a solution.


2

Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis is not a utopia in the sense that I
have explained our principle of selection in the preface to the
bibliography. It is only a fragment, and not very good as fragments go;
and it would drop out altogether from our survey were it not for the
hugely over-rated reputation that Bacon has as a philosopher of natural
science--indeed, as _the_ philosopher after Aristotle.

The greater part of Bacon’s ideas are anticipated and more amply
expressed by Andreæ. When we have deleted Bacon’s multitudinous prayers
and exhortations, when we have disposed of his copious descriptions
of jewels and velvets and satins and ceremonial regalia, we find that
the core of his commonwealth is Salomon’s House, sometimes known as
the College of the Six Days’ Works; which he describes as the noblest
foundation that ever was upon earth, and the lantern of the kingdom.

The purpose of this foundation is the “knowledge of the causes and
secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human
empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” The material
resources of this foundation are manifold. It has laboratories dug into
the sides of hills, and observatories with towers half a mile high;
it has great lakes of salt and fresh water which seem to anticipate
the marine laboratories we know today; and it has engines for setting
things in motion. Besides this, there are spacious houses where
physical demonstrations are made, and sanatoria where various novel
cures are attempted; there are experimental agricultural stations,
too, where grafts and crosses are tried. Add to this pharmaceutical
laboratories, industrial laboratories, and numerous houses devoted
to such things as experiments with sounds, lights, perfumes, and
tastes--which Bacon presents in a wild farrago without any regard to
the essential sciences to which the work he describes is related--and
one has a tally of the “riches of Salomon’s House.”

Twelve fellows of the college travel into foreign lands to bring
back books and abstracts, and reports on experiments and inventions.
Three make a digest of experiments. Three collect the experiments of
all the mechanical arts, and also of practices which are not brought
into the arts. Three try new experiments. Three devote themselves to
classifications; and another three, known as dowry men or benefactors,
look into the experiments of their fellows and cast about for means
of applying them to human life and knowledge. Three fellows consult
with the whole body of scientific workers and plan new channels of
investigation; and three, who are called interpreters of nature,
attempt to raise the results of particular investigations into general
observations and axioms.

In telling all this, as in the rest of his New Atlantis, Bacon is
incredibly childish and incoherent: he gives such a description of
Salomon’s House as a six-year-old schoolboy might give of a visit to
the Rockefeller Foundation. Beneath these maladroit interpretations,
however, we see that Bacon had a grasp on some of the fundamentals of
scientific research, and of the part that science might play in the
“relief of man’s estate.” It is nothing more than a hint, this New
Atlantis; but a word to the wise is enough; and as we look about the
modern world we see that, in its material affairs at any rate, the
great scientific institutes and foundations--the United States Bureau
of Standards, for one--play a part not a little like that of the
College of the Six Days’ Works.

Campanella with his dream of powerful mechanical inventions, in which
he had been anticipated by Leonardo, and Bacon with his sketch of
scientific institutes--with these two utopians we stand at the entrance
to the utopia of means; that is to say, the place in which all that
materially contributes to the good life has been perfected. The earlier
utopias were concerned to establish the things which men should aim
for in life. The utopias of the later Renascence took these aims for
granted and discussed how man’s scope of action might be broadened. In
this the utopians only reflected the temper of their time; and did not
attempt to remold it. As a result of our preoccupation with the means,
we in the Western World live in an inventor’s paradise. Scientific
knowledge and mechanical power we have to burn; more knowledge and more
power than Bacon or Campanella could possibly have dreamed of. But
today we face again the riddle that Plato, More, and Andreæ sought to
answer: what are men to do with their knowledge and power?

As we skip here and there through the Utopias of the next three
centuries, this question gets more deeply impregnated in our minds.




CHAPTER SIX

  How something happened in the eighteenth century which made men
      “furiously to think,” and how a whole group of utopias sprang
      out of the upturned soil of industrialism.




CHAPTER SIX


1

There is a gap in the Utopian tradition between the seventeenth century
and the nineteenth. Utopia, the place that must be built, faded into
no-man’s land, the spot to which one might escape; and the utopias of
Denis Vairasse and Simon Berington and the other romancers of this
in-between period are in the line of Robinson Crusoe rather than the
Republic.

One finds the clue to this lapse in Tiphaigne de la Roche’s Giphantia,
a sketch of what was and what is and what will be, and in particular,
an inquiry into the “Babylonian” mode of life. The author of Giphantia
tells a parable about Sophia, the incarnation of Wisdom, who rejects
the offers of the spendthrift, the merchant, the soldier, and the
student, and accepts the suit of a diffident fellow who had retired in
solitude to the country, to spend his days like a cultivated gentleman.
One remembers the way in which Montaigne spent his declining years;
one remembers Voltaire; and one sees how deeply the ideal of Robinson
Crusoe--a cultivated Robinson Crusoe, surrounded with books and beyond
the reach of any king and court--colored the deepest aspirations of
this period. Rousseau, writing about the corrupting influence of the
arts and sciences, and Chateaubriand, seeking the noble savage in the
American wilderness and finding him in his own bosom--these men struck
the dominating note of the eighteenth century. In a society that was
already painfully artificial and “arranged” the institutes of Lycurgus
and Utopus must have seemed as repressive as those of Louis XIV. So
almost two centuries pass before we find any fresh regions to explore
in Utopia.


2

The Utopia of Sir Thomas More, and those of the later men of the
Renascence, arose, as I have pointed out, from the contrast between the
possibilities that lay open beyond the sea and the dismal conditions
that attended the breakdown of the town economy of the Middle Age.
Like Plato’s Republic, it attempted to face the difficult problem of
transition.

In the course of the next three centuries the adventure of exploring
and ransacking strange countries loses its hold upon men’s imagination;
and a new type of activity becomes the center of interest. The conquest
of alien countries and the lure of gold do not indeed die out with
this new interest; but they are subordinated to another type of
conquest--that which man seeks to effect over nature. Here and there,
particularly in Great Britain, untrained men “with a practical turn”
begin to busy themselves with improving the mechanical apparatus by
which the day’s labor is done. A retired barber, named Arkwright,
invents a spinning frame, a Scotchman named MacAdam discovers a new
method of laying roads; and out of a hundred such inventions during
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a new world comes
into existence--a world in which energy derived from coal and running
water takes the place of human energy; in which goods manipulated by
machinery take the place of goods woven or sawed or hammered by hand.
Within a hundred years the actual world and the idola were transformed.

In this new world of falling water, burning coal, and whirring
machinery, utopia was born again. It is easy to see why this should
have happened, and why about two-thirds of our utopias should have been
written in the nineteenth century. The world was being visibly made
over; and it was possible to conceive of a different order of things
without escaping to the other side of the earth. There were political
changes, and the monarchic state was tempered by republicanism; there
were industrial changes, and two hungry mouths were born where one
could feed before; and there were social changes--the strata of society
shifted and “faulted,” and men who in an earlier period would have been
doomed to a dull and ignominious round, perhaps, took a place alongside
those whom inheritance had given all the privileges of riches and
breeding.

In contrast to all these fresh possibilities were the dismal realities
which were easily enough perceived by people who stood outside this
new order, or who by temperament revolted against the indignities
and repressions and vilenesses that accompanied it. It is not my
particular business here to deal with the facts of history; but unless
one understands the facts of history, the utopias which I am about
to present lose a good part of their meaning. Those machines whose
output was so great that all men might be clothed; those new methods of
agriculture and new agricultural implements, which promised crops so
big that all men might be fed--the very instruments that were to give
the whole community the physical basis of a good life turned out, for
the vast majority of people who possessed neither capital nor land, to
be nothing short of instruments of torture.

I do not speak too harshly of the early industrial age; it is
impossible to speak too harshly. Take the trouble to read Robert Owen’s
“Essay on the Formation of Character” (Manchester: 1837) and learn what
conditions were like in a model factory run by an enlightened employer:
it is a picture of unmitigated brutality. One must go back to the
blackest periods of ancient slavery for a parallel, if indeed one would
find it, for the Pyramids that were built under the lash have a certain
grandeur and permanence which justify their existence, whilst the goods
which were produced in Yorkshire through the maimed bodies of pauper
children proved to be as impermanent as the lives that were sacrificed
in making them.

Those who were inside this new order--the Gradgrinds and Bounderbys
whom Dickens pictures in “Hard Times”--sought to realize their utopia
of the Iron Age on earth. When we are through with the genuine utopians
we shall examine the idola by which all the “practical” men of the
nineteenth century, Marx as well as Macaulay, patterned their behavior.
Those who stood out against this new order were not so much opposed to
the new methods as to the purposes for which they were being used: they
felt that an orderly conquest of Nature had turned into a wild scramble
for loot, and that all the goods industrialism promised were being
lost, for the benefit of a few aggressive and unsocialized individuals.
With the host of critics and interpreters and reformers that arose
in the nineteenth century we shall have a little reckoning to make
presently: those who concern us here however belong to the stock of
Plato, More, and Andreæ, in that they attempted to see society as a
whole, and to protect a new order which would be basically sound as
well as superficially improved. Yet with the exception of the utopias
which revolted against industrialism these nineteenth century essays
are partial and one-sided; for they tend to magnify the importance of
the industrial order as much as Gradgrind and Bounderby did, and in
doing this they lose sight of the whole life of man. These industrial
utopias are no longer concerned with values but with means; they are
all instrumentalist. I doubt whether an intelligent peasant in India or
China would get out of the whole batch of these utopias a single idea
which would have any bearing on the life that he has experienced--so
little of human significance remains when the problems of mechanical
and political organization have been disposed of!

One symptom of this lack of individuality, this lack of what, in the
old-fashioned sense used to be called a philosophy, is the fact that
we can treat all these industrial utopias in groups. The first of
these group-utopias I shall call, perhaps somewhat arbitrarily, the
Associationists.


3

Among the Associationists, the most influential utopian is Charles
François Marie Fourier. He was a prolific and incoherent writer, and
his Utopia, if the truth be told, exists as disjecta membra rather than
as a single work; but in his case I make an exception to the criterion
of selection; because in every other respect he has a claim upon our
attention. This Fourier was a dry little French commercial traveller,
whose personal fortune was lost in the French revolution and whose
hopes for founding a real eutopia were blasted by the July revolution
of 1830. Again and again he transferred himself from one line of goods
to another in order to increase the area of the territory he covered
and learn more of the workings of society; and so in his writings a
wealth of concrete detail goes hand in hand with personal crotchets
and the opinionativeness which arises almost inevitably out of an
undisciplined solitude. What follows is a distillation of Fourier’s
thought, with the lees and orts left in the bottom of the flask.

Fourier differs largely from the early utopians in that he is concerned
first of all not with modifying human nature but with finding out what
it actually is. His utopia is to be based upon an understanding of
man’s actual physical and mental makeup, and its institutions are to
be such as will permit man’s original nature to function freely. The
motive which draws his community together is attraction; the power
which sets his institutions going is “the passions.” Under the head of
passions--the original biological equipment--Fourier gives a list of
tendencies which corresponds roughly with the modern psychologist’s
list of instincts.

Fourier takes these passions as “given”; his utopia is not designed to
“effect any change in our passions ... their direction will be changed
without changing their nature.” As Brisbane says in his Introduction to
Fourier’s philosophy, social institutions are to these passional forces
what machinery is to material forces. A good community, according to
Fourier, is one which will bring all these passions into play, in their
complex actions and interactions.

As in the Republic, the ideal behind Fourier’s utopia is harmony;
for man has a threefold destiny; namely, “an industrial destiny, to
harmonize the material world; a social destiny, to harmonize the
passional or moral world; and an intellectual destiny, to discover
the laws of universal order and harmony.” What was at fault with
modern civilized societies was that they were incomplete, and in
their functioning they created a social dissonance. To overcome this,
says Fourier, men must unite into harmonious associations which will
give play to all their activities, and which, by erecting common
institutions, will do away with the waste arising in the individual’s
attempts to do for himself all the things which would be done by a
complete community.

For this perfect association Fourier provides minute plans and tables;
but the general plan can be outlined with brevity.

First of all, Fourier, too, goes back to the valley section. The
initial nucleus of his utopia is to consist of a company of 1,500
or 1,600 persons, owning a good stretch of land comprising at least
a square league. Since this experimental phalanx, as Fourier called
it, would have to stand alone, and without the support of neighboring
phalanxes, there will in consequence of this isolation be many gaps
in “attraction,” and “many passional calms to dread in its workings.”
To overcome this, Fourier insists that it is necessary to locate the
phalanx on soil fit for a variety of functions. “A flat country, such
as Antwerp, Leipsic, Orleans, would be totally unsuitable ... owing
to the uniformity of land surface. It will therefore be necessary to
select a diversified region, like the surroundings of Lausanne, or at
the very least, a fine valley, provided with a stream of water and a
forest, like the valley of Brussel or of Halle.”

This domain would be laid out in fields, orchards, vineyards, and so
forth, according to the nature of the soil and industrial requirements.
By devotion to horticulture and arboriculture, Fourier figures, an
intensive development would supply abundantly the needs of the colony.
The main economic occupation of the phalanx would be agricultural--this
is perhaps the great distinction between Fourier and later
Utopians--but all the arts would be practiced within the phalanstery,
since otherwise the association would be incomplete.

The principle of the association is concretely embodied in a vast
edifice in the center of the domain: “a palace complete in all its
appointments serving as the residence of the associates. In this palace
there are three wings, corresponding to the Material, the Social, and
the Intellectual domains. In one wing are the workshops and halls of
industry. In another are the library, the scientific collections,
museums, artists’ studios, and the like. In the center, devoted to
the social element, are banquet halls, a hall of reception, and grand
salons. At one end of the palace is a Temple of the Material Harmonies,
devoted to singing, music, poetry, dancing, gymnastics, painting, and
so forth. At the other end is the Temple of Unityism, to celebrate with
appropriate rites man’s unity with the universe. On the summit there is
an observatory with telegraph and signal tower, for communication with
other phalanxes.

The phalanx men are associationists; but it follows from Fourier’s
theory of the passions that they have private interests as well as
public ones; and these private interests are permitted to flourish
as long as they do not interfere with social solidarity. Thus they
avoid the waste inherent in private housekeeping by having public
kitchens, where, incidentally, the children are trained from an early
age at cooking, as they are today in one or two experimental schools:
nevertheless it is possible to dine in solitude as well as in company.
By the same token, every member of the phalanx is guaranteed a minimum
of food, clothing, lodging, and even amusements without respect to
work; at the same time, private property is sanctioned, and each
member extracts from the common store a dividend in proportion to the
amount of stock he holds in the association. This dividend, it must be
qualified, is considerably reduced by the fact that a system of profit
sharing replaces the pure wage system. There is thus a sort of balance
between private self-seeking and the maintenance of the public good.

In order to manufacture goods economically, large scale production
is introduced wherever possible, and the division of labor is forced
to its ultimate limits. Fourier takes account of the resulting
monotony, however, and suggests that the monotony be corrected by
having recourse to changing tasks and occupations from time to time.
In commercial exchange, the phalanx acts as a unit; it constitutes a
great self-governing body which traffics in surplus goods with similar
associations, without any middleman, in something of the manner,
perhaps, that the Co-operative Wholesale Societies do today.

By abolishing the individual household, the phalanx gives a new
freedom to women; and Fourier does not see how it is possible to
maintain the system of monogamic proprietorship once women have a free
choice of mates. So the women of the phalanx are not intellectual
nonentities; and since they no longer preside over the individual home,
they help run the whole community. Is it necessary to add the common
nurseries, the common schools, the informal education of the children,
and the number of other things which follow from this emancipation?

Perhaps one of the most remarkable characteristics of this utopia is
its utilization of a moral equivalent for war, long before Professor
William James invented the phrase. One of the great functions of the
phalanx is the assemblage of productive armies even as “civilization”
assembles destructive ones. There is a fine passage in which Fourier
pictures an industrial army of golden youths and maidens, “instead of
devastating thirty provinces in a campaign, these armies will have
spanned thirty rivers with bridges, re-wooded thirty barren mountains,
dug thirty trenches for irrigation, and drained thirty marshes.” It is
for lack of such industrial armies, says Fourier, that civilization is
unable to produce anything great.


4

What strikes us when we put together the fragments of Fourier’s
utopia--as one might put together a jigsaw puzzle--is the fact that he
faces the variety and inequality of human nature. Instead of erecting
a standard for men to live up to, and rejecting mankind as unfit for
utopia because the standard is far beyond its height, the standard
itself is founded upon the utmost capacity which a community might be
able to exhibit. Fourier meets human nature half-way: he endeavors to
project a society which will give regular channels to all its divergent
impulses, and prevent them from spilling unsocially all over the
landscape. In his statement of this aim there are plenty of weaknesses
and absurdities; and I confess that it is hard to take this pathetic
little man seriously; but when one has grappled with Fourier’s thought
one discovers that there is something to take.

Fourier died without persuading anyone to give a trial to his scheme of
association; and yet his work was not without its practical influence.
The Brook Farm experiment in America was a fumbling attempt to plant
a phalanstery without paying any attention to the conditions which
Fourier would have rigorously imposed; and the “familistere” of the
great steel works of Godin at Guise, in France, is another direct
result of Fourier’s inspiration. He remains, I believe, the first man
who had a plan for colonizing the wilderness of industrial barbarism
that existed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and redeeming
that wilderness to civilization.


5

The name of Robert Owen is usually associated with utopianism; but his
work belongs more to the “real” world than to the idola of utopia;
and I pass over him with the briefest mention, for his projects for a
model industrial town have more of the flavor of a poor colony than
that of a productive human society. Let us grant him good intentions,
organizing ability, and moral fervor: without doubt he is a noble
figure, even when his attitude is strained and his tone strident. The
series of essays he wrote on love and marriage are marked by fine
sympathy and common sense; and it is to be regretted that they are not
as widely known as his plans for a new moral world. If this little note
can repair the neglect, I have done Owen ample justice: as an active
figure in English and American public life he is properly a subject for
the social historian. With Owen I must also dismiss John Ruskin, who
began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to develop plans
for a “Guild of St. George.” This guild was to form a little island
of honest labor and sound education in the midst of the turbid sea of
industrialism; but it did not embrace the whole of society, and it was
utopian only in the sense that the Oneida Community, let us say, was
utopian. While they are full of pregnant suggestions, the plans for the
Guild are as fragmentary as the New Atlantis.


6

One of the neglected utopias of the mid-nineteenth century is that of
James Buckingham.

James Buckingham was one of those erratic men of affairs which the
fertile soil of British individualism produces, and which hard British
common sense persistently ignores. Like Owen, Buckingham was acquainted
with industrial and commercial affairs from the inside: he travelled
widely and wrote upon various matters with that copious, amateurish
dogmatism and spirit which marks him, perhaps, as the philistine
counterpart of John Ruskin. If the utopias of the past express the
ideals of the soldier, the farmer, and the artisan, the community
which Buckingham projected represents the ideal of the bourgeoisie.
Buckingham’s Victoria is the ideal aspect of that Coketown which in a
later chapter we shall attempt to describe.

We talk loosely of the individualism of the nineteenth century; but
in reality it was a period that was thriving with associations.
The scope of joint stock companies and philanthropic societies had
immeasurably widened. Along with the Mudfog Association, “for the
advancement of everything,” which Dickens satirized, there sprang up
a hundred different societies for performing some special function in
the industrial system or realizing some particular purpose in society.
Buckingham gives us a picture of his contemporaries which is also a
criticism:

“We have the government of the country itself, passing acts of
parliament for the better drainage of towns, and a more ample supply
of water and air for ventilation.... Hence, too, arise associations of
noblemen and others for building model lodging houses for the labouring
classes; associations for improving the dwellings of the poor;
societies for providing baths and bath houses for families unable to
procure such conveniences for themselves; associations for establishing
suburban villages for the working classes, and to get them at night at
least out of the crowded haunts and vicious atmosphere of the towns.
And hence we have Temperance Societies, Tract Societies, Home Missions,
Asylums for Repentant Magdalens, Homes for Seaman out of Employ, and
Houses of Refuge for the Destitute, with soup kitchens and other modes
of temporary relief....”

What does this all come to? Let Buckingham answer:

“They are, after all, mere palliatives, and do not reach the seat of
the disease.... This can only be done by uniting the disjointed efforts
of all these well-meaning but partially curative bodies into one, in
order to achieve, by their union of means, influence, and example, the
erection of a “Model Society,” with its model farms, model pastures,
model mines, model manufactures, model town, model schools, model
workshops, model kitchens, model libraries, and places of recreation,
enjoyment, and instruction; all of which could be united in one new
Association.”

Without inquiring too closely into what a model pasture may be, we may
admit that the notion behind Buckingham’s proposal was not unsound. The
industrial society of his day was in an inchoate, indeed in a chaotic
state. In order to sift out the necessary institutions and put them on
a firm basis, it was the better part of wisdom to start anew on a fresh
area of land and attempt to plan the development of the community as a
whole. It is true that in this proposal of Buckingham’s there is none
of Fourier’s brilliant intuitions of a true social order, and none of
Ruskin’s critical inquiry into what composed a good life: Buckingham
took contemporary values for granted. What he sought to do was to
realize these values completely, and in orderly fashion. Here are the
elements of his proposal.

There is to be formed a model town association, with a limited
liability, for the purpose of building a new town called Victoria. The
town is to contain every improvement in “position, plan, drainage,
ventilation, architecture, supply of water, light, and every other
elegance and convenience.” Its size is to be about a mile square and
the number of inhabitants is not to exceed 10,000. A suitable variety
of manufactures and handicraft trades is to be established near the
edge of the town; and the town itself is to be surrounded by farm land
10,000 acres broad. All of the lands, houses, factories, and materials
are to be the property of the company, and not of any individual; and
this property is to be held for the benefit of all in proportion as
their shares entitle them. No person is to be a member of the company
or an inhabitant of the town except one who is a bona fide shareholder
to the extent of at least twenty pounds, and who is ready to subscribe
to a drastic series of blue laws which, while permitting freedom in
religious worship and preventing child labor, do away with liquor,
drugs, and even tobacco.

In addition to these provisions there are to be common laundries,
kitchens, refectories, and nurseries; and medical advice is to be given
free, at home or in the hospital, as in the army and navy. Education is
to be undertaken by the community. Justice, it should be noted by those
who are acquainted with an experiment which has recently been started
in New York, is to be administered by competent arbitrators under a
written code of laws, without the expense, delay, and uncertainty
of ordinary legal proceedings. All members are to sign declarations
accepting arbitration and waiving other legal proceedings against
members of the company.

All these affairs, especially the manner in which the town is to
be built, are worked out in considerable detail; thus the size and
character of the houses are set forth on the plan, and it is provided
that each workingman is to occupy at least one entire and separate
room for himself; whilst each married couple without children gets
two rooms, and each family in which there are children is to occupy
at least three rooms for domestic purposes. I have set down all these
details baldly because the plan itself is a bald one; and no amount
of fine writing will embellish it. Buckingham’s society is not based
upon a thoroughgoing criticism of human institutions: the ends for
which this society exists are doubtless those which were held good
and proper by the Macaulays and the Martineaus. What is interesting
in Buckingham’s utopia is the definite plans and specifications,
accompanied by drawings; for this is surely one of the first attempts
to put a problem in social engineering on a basis from which an
engineer or an architect could work.

Buckingham thought that, given a successful model town, the rest of
England might in time be colonized by the surplus population, and
thus the old centers of black industry would be wiped out. Nor was
Buckingham altogether deceived. His utopia was a limited one, but out
of his limitations has come success. In 1848 this utopia was a chimera;
in 1898, Mr. Ebenezer Howard reconstructed it and set it forth in a
persuasive little book called Tomorrow, and as a direct result of
the plans advocated by Mr. Howard, a flourishing garden city called
Letchworth has come into existence; which in turn has propagated
another garden city, called Wellwyn; and at the same time has, by
example, paved the way for numerous garden villages and garden suburbs
in various parts of Europe and in America.

With this mid-Victorian theorist, we pass over from a pre-scientific
method of thinking to one which sacrifices the artistic imagination to
a realistic grasp of the facts; and in this passage something is gained
and something is lost. Buckingham gains by confining his proposals to
what is immediately practicable. He loses by not having the imaginative
energy to criticize the ways, means, and ends that are sanctioned by
current practise. If utopia begins with Plato’s glorious dream of an
organic community, the image of the just man made perfect, it cannot
end with Buckingham’s invention of a shell. Nevertheless, through the
nineteenth century the superficial utopians, the shell-builders, are
dominant; and we must continue to examine them.




CHAPTER SEVEN

  How some Utopians have thought that a good community rested at
      bottom on the right division and use of land; and what sort
      of communities these land-animals projected.




CHAPTER SEVEN


1

Before the Industrial Revolution upset the balance of social power,
there were little villages in England where, on a limited scale and to
no very grand purpose, a quiet and placid and fairly jolly existence
must have been the rule of things. These villages were those in which
the land was either held in freehold by small proprietors, or where
there still remained for the use of each inhabitant certain common
pastures and wastes. Under this regime there was a fair degree of
prosperity with which only the wind and the weather and war could
interfere. Something of the savor of this life Mr. W. H. Hudson finely
conveys in his A Traveller in Little Things; and a century ago Cobbett
made a series of excellent snapshots in his Rural Rides.

When the mediæval order broke down the great proprietors began to
seize this common land; and during the eighteenth century, under the
incentive of big-scale scientific agriculture, the seizure went on at a
merry pace. The peasant without land was forced to migrate to the new
towns, as the Hammonds have pictured in their graphic work on the Town
Laborer; and the labor of the peasant and his family fed the machines
which the Watts and Arkwrights were developing in the eighteenth
century. Industrial progress and social poverty went hand in hand. The
period before the Industrial Revolution seemed in comparison a real
utopia; and the key to this utopia was the land.

The importance of land in the constitution of civil society was
emphasized by the Diggers of Cromwell’s time; one of them, Gerard
Winstanley, wrote a minor utopia to prove that the land should be held
in common; and this view was reinforced--without the communism--in a
purely political utopia called Oceana by James Harrington, who lived
during the same period. Harrington advocated such a distribution of
land that the landed gentry should be the leaders, and the commonalty
should have the preponderance of power.

Out of all the modern utopias with which we have to reckon there are
two, in particular, in which the common possession of land is the
foundation of every other institution. These are Spensonia and A Visit
to Freeland.


2

The early part of the nineteenth century is remarkable for the fact
that men of common stock, usually self-educated, began to apply their
wits to improving the conditions of the class to which they belonged;
and in particular there was in London a peasant named William Cobbett,
a tailor named Francis Place, and a stationer named Thomas Spence who
devoted a good part of what remained over from their working days to
plans for bettering man’s estate.

Thomas Spence had a shop in High Holborn from which he published
little pamphlets of rough philosophy, called Pig’s Meat; in 1795 he
issued A Description of Spensonia, which was followed in 1801 by The
Constitution of Spensonia: A Country in Fairyland situated between
Utopia and Oceana; brought from thence by Captain Swallow. Spence’s
title to have written a complete utopia rests upon the fact that
he proposes a return to an environment which had once been, in its
fashion, complete.

Spensonia begins with a parable about a father who had a number of
sons, who built them a ship for traffic, and who provided that the
profits of the enterprise were to be shared in common. This ship is
wrecked upon an island; and the sons quickly awake to the conclusion
that if “they did not apply the Marine Constitution given them by
their father to their landed property, they would soon experience
inexpressible inconveniences. They therefore declared the property of
the island to be the property of them all collectively, in the same
manner as the ship had been, and that they ought to share the profits
thereof in the same way. The island they named Spensonia, after the
ship which their father had given them. They next chose officers to
mark out such portions of the land, as every person or family desired
to occupy, for which they were to receive for the use of the public a
certain rent according to its value. This rent was applied to public
uses or divided among themselves as they thought proper. But in order
to keep up the remembrance of their rights, they decreed that they
should never fail to share at rent-time, an equal dividend, though ever
so small, and though the public demands should be ever so urgent....
As they had determined, when seeing that every ship they should build
and man, should ... be the property of the crew, so, in conformity
therewith, they decreed that every district or parish which they
should people, should be the property of the inhabitants, and the
rent and police of the same at their disposal.... A National Assembly
or Congress consisting of delegates from all the parishes takes care
of the national concerns, and defrays the expenses of the state and
matters of common utility, by a pound rate from each parish without any
other tax.”

What is a parish and what is its work? Look around the English
countryside and see.

A parish, to begin with, is a “compact portion of the country,
designedly not too large that it may the more easily be managed by the
inhabitants with respect to its revenues and the police.”

“The parishes build and repair houses, make roads, plant hedges and
trees, and in a word do all the business of a landlord.... A parish
has many heads to contrive what ought to be done. Instead of debating
about mending the state, ... (for ours needs no mending) we employ
our ingenuity nearer home, and the result of the debates are in every
parish, how we shall work such a mine, make such a river navigable,
drain such a fen, or improve such a waste. These things we are all
immediately interested in, and have each a vote in executing.”

There is a rough, homespun quality about this utopia, and it needs
a visit to the English villages of the New Forest or the Chiltern
Hills, where some of the common lands have been kept, to see what a
rural utopia would be like if it could keep itself free from invaders
who sought to live off the fat of the land without contributing their
labor. Spence was not altogether blind to the necessity of keeping
watch over this constitution of equality; and he places his utopia in
the care of two guardian angels--Voting by Ballot and the Universal
Use of Arms--two angels which look less formidable and potent in the
twentieth century than they did in the first decade of the nineteenth,
when the first had still to be tried, and when the second was not
complicated by the invention of machine guns and poison gases.

At the bottom of Spence’s Utopia, however, lies the conviction which he
shares with Plato and all the other genuine utopians; namely, that in
Thoreau’s words less is accomplished by the thousands who are hacking
at the branches of evil than by one who is striking at the root.
Spence, it must be remembered, wrote in the thick of the agitation
for parliamentary reform which was the keynote of so much nineteenth
century activity--the chartist movement, parliamentary socialism, and
the like, being so many rainbows in the bubble of political effort
which burst with such a bang when the Great War broke out. Spence saw
the futility of these superficial demands. He said:

“Thousands of abortive schemes are daily proposed for redressing
grievances and mending the constitution, whereas, the shoes were so
ill-made at first, and so worn, rotten, and patched already, that
they are not worth the trouble or expense, but ought to be thrown
to the dunghill; and a new pair should be made, neat, tight, and
easy as for the foot of one that loves freedom and ease. Then would
your controversies about this and the other way of cobbling, that
continually agitate you, be done away; and you would walk along the
rugged and dirty path of life easy and dry-shod.”


3

The next utopia, Freeland, marks a transition between the utopia in
which the land alone is held by the community and that in which land
and capital and all the machinery of production belong to a national
state.

The writer of this utopia was an Austrian economist, Theodor Hertzka;
and he first published his view in considerable detail, with reference
to current economic doctrines, in a book called Freeland: A Social
Anticipation. He condensed these doctrines in another book called A
Visit to Freeland, or the new Paradise Regained, an attempt to picture
his freeman’s commonwealth in action.

These books formed the center of a whirlwind of agitation; a magazine
sprang up; societies were organized in various cities in Europe and
America; and a definite attempt was made to colonize a certain section
of Africa, selected by Hertzka; an attempt which, alas! met with speedy
failure as a result of the obtuseness and international jealousy of
various colonial officials. The first book was published in 1889; and
all this happened in the early nineties. Perhaps the only practical
effect of it was--and this is mere conjecture--to turn the thoughts
of certain Zionists, like Israel Zangwill, from establishing Zion in
Jerusalem to building it up again in some more suitable region in the
heart of Africa.

Freeland may be described as an individualist Utopia on a social
foundation. Hertzka was filled with sympathy and admiration for the
doctrines that Adam Smith set forth in The Wealth of Nations; and he
desired to realize a society in which the maximum amount of individual
freedom and initiative would prevail, especially in industrial
enterprises. This leads to a paradox; namely, that in order to ensure
freedom it is impossible to practise laissez faire; for the effect of
laissez faire is to permit accidental aggregations of wealth and power
to threaten the freedom that less fortunate individuals seek to enjoy.
So far from being an anarchist utopia, Freeland is a co-operative
commonwealth in which the State acts as an interested party in the
production and distribution of goods. This differs from socialism in
name; and it differed from the practical socialist agitation of the
time in that it relied, not upon turning over established institutions
in Europe, but in turning over a new leaf in the Kenia Highlands of
Africa; but Hertzka’s “individualism” comes to almost the same thing.


4

A visit to Freeland teaches us little about the arts of social life or
the constitution of a good society. What we can learn is one of the
methods by which--on hypothesis anyway--the industrial mechanism might
be controlled.

In Freeland there are five fundamental laws; and of these the first is
the most important; namely, that:

Every inhabitant has an equal right to the common land and to the means
of production which are furnished by the state.

The other fundamental laws have to do with the support of women and
children, old men, and those otherwise unfit to work, all of whom
have the right of maintenance, corresponding to the amount of credit
belonging to the state; with the provision of universal suffrage for
all above twenty-five years of age; and with the establishment of
independent legislative and executive branches of the government.

Let us follow the visitor to Freeland as he makes his first
explorations in Edendale, its principal city, and learns how affairs
are conducted. If this is an individualist utopia it is not by any
means free from the services of a bureaucracy; for first of all the
visitor turns to the Central Statistical Office, where records are kept
of the occupations that are open and the amount of pay offered by each.
“Every inhabitant of Freeland,” our visitor finds, “has the right to
become a member of any business he pleases. One has only to present
oneself for this purpose; for the managers only decide upon the manner
in which the members are to be employed, and not on the membership
itself.” In practice, the number of individuals with private businesses
and partnerships seems to be limited, for big companies not merely
operate factories but provide restaurant service, build houses, and
even supply domestic service to private individuals and households.

(The visitor has his boots blacked by one of these associated menials,
and his hostess explains how the services of a caterer and a valet may
be obtained by calling up a central distributing agency.)

The sole condition upon which a person or company is allowed to engage
in business is that the public be kept informed of all business
transactions. “The companies are therefore obliged to conduct their
book-keeping openly. The prices at which goods are bought and sold,
the net profits and the number of workmen, must be communicated at
intervals which are fixed according to the judgment of the central
office.”

Observe that Hertzka reckons with the fact that in an industrial
society, access to machinery is just as important as access to the
land, since, in a manner of speaking, all our modern activities,
even agriculture, are parasitic upon machinery. Hence the collection
and distribution of capital is managed in the interests of the whole
community; the first being taken care of by a yearly tax, which
obviates the need--and perhaps the possibility--of individual savings,
whilst the capital is distributed without interest to the companies
that make application for it. The community pays for the plant through
the added charge which is laid on consumers; the credit advanced is
cancelled out through production. This arrangement does away with the
standing charge for capital which is maintained under present day
production for profit even after the original capital has been paid
off in dividends; and above all, it does away with the practice of
capitalizing increased returns in such a way as to enlarge the amount
of the standing charge for capital. The social use of capital to
advance production, rather than to provide fixed incomes for a rentier
class, is recognized in Freeland.

Since our visitor is an engineer, he turns to a plant devoted to the
manufacture of railway equipment; and notes that it is run under the
following statutes.

1. Everyone is free to join the first Edendale Engine and Railway
Manufacturing Co., even if he also belongs to other companies. Everyone
is also permitted to leave the company whenever he chooses. The board
of management decides in what branch of the works the members shall be
employed.

2. Every member is entitled to an amount of the net proceeds of the
company corresponding to the quantity of work which is done.

3. The amount of work is calculated according to the number of hours,
to which two per cent. is added to that of the older members, and ten
per cent. to foremen, and ten per cent. for night work.

4. The engineers are paid as if working from ten to fifteen hours,
according to ability. The value of the manager is estimated in the
general assembly.

5. Out of the company’s profits a deduction is first made towards
repayment of capital, and after this the tax to the state is deducted.
The remainder is divided among members.

6. If the company is dissolved or liquidated, the members are
responsible in proportion to the amount of profit which they get
from revenues of the company, and this responsibility for the amount
which is still pledged is proportionately laid upon new members. When
a member leaves the company, his responsibility for debt which has
already been contracted is not extinguished. In case of dissolution,
liquidation, or sale, this responsibility corresponds to the claim of
the responsible member to the means of the company which are in hand,
or to his share in what is sold.

7. The principal judicial body of the company is the general assembly
in which every member has the same right to speak and exercise the
same active and passive right of choice. The general assembly makes
its determination by simply counting the majority of votes. A majority
of three quarters is necessary for changing the statutes and for a
dissolution or liquidation of the company.

8. The general assembly practises its right either directly or by means
of chosen officials, who are answerable to it for their actions.

9. The business of the society is managed by a directorate of three
members who hold office at the will of the general assembly. The
subordinate functionaries are chosen by the managers.

10. The general assembly selects every year a committee of inspection
which consists of five members. This body has to control and make a
report upon the books and the manner in which the company is conducted.

Now, as a member of the company, our visitor would have the amount he
has earned credited to him at a Central Bank, which keeps his accounts
and sends him an abstract every week; and through this bank he would
make the larger part of his disbursements. The products of the company,
moreover, are valued, stored, and sold by a Central Warehouse, in much
the same fashion that under the present regime a manufacturer’s whole
output may be disposed of through a big department store or a mail
order house.

Let us now sum this up. The collection and disposition of capital
belongs to the community; and the total capital available for
further production each year is based directly upon the productive
capacities of the community, without the waste and leakage that arises
in present-day society though what Mr. Thorstein Veblen calls the
conspicuous waste--the futile expenditures--of the leisured classes.
That this collection of a capital tax upon income would be any more
difficult than the present corporation tax or private income tax,
which is now dissipated to the extent of some 90 per cent. or so upon
armies and navies, is seriously to be doubted. In addition to this, the
process of open book-keeping enables the Central Bank and the Central
Warehouse to have an accurate knowledge of potential production, and
thus there exists an accurate basis for apportioning credit. At the
same time the value of commodities comes by this means to have a direct
relation to the costs of production rather than to what the traffic
will bear.

On all these heads the trained economist will doubtless have many
points to contest; but in their broad outlines there is no abrupt
departure from current practise in any of these items, and not much
reason, perhaps, why they should not be more thoroughly instituted.

With the various ramifications of Edendale industry and corporate
finance it is not my business to deal; we have gone far enough to see
that very little indeed remains when the question of means has been
gone into.

The chief good that Freeland seems to offer is freedom in industrial
enterprise. An association of men can get land and capital on demand,
and devote themselves to either agriculture or manufacturing industry;
and the risk of failure is minimized by a complete knowledge of the
probable demand and probable supply calculated by the statistical
bureau. Failing an outlet for industry through association, there
remains the land itself, for individual cultivation. “Every family in
Freeland dwells in its own house, and every house is surrounded by its
great garden, a thousand square meters in extent. These houses are the
private property of the inhabitants, and serve, like the gardens, for
private use. The inhabitants of Freeland do not, as a rule, recognize
any kind of ownership of land; they rather go upon the principle that
the land must be put in everyone’s hands to do with what he chooses.
This, in the most literal and wide sense of the word, means that every
inhabitant of Freeland can cultivate every piece of land whenever he
pleases. But this only relates to the land which is set apart for
cultivation, and not that set apart for living upon.... The inhabitants
of Freeland have agreed, with regard to the size and disposition
of the land, serving for the creation of a dwelling house, to form
regulations, and a kind of building court ... which has to determine
what ground is and what is not to be built upon, parcels out the land
for building, sees to the laying out of streets, canals, and the like,
and especially takes care that not more than one building is erected
upon one building allotment.”


5


What sort of life arises out of this kind of industrial association,
these provisions for the common use of machinery and land? It is all
rather dry and colorless, a sort of picture postcard view of the
Promised Land.

We are told that there are a great number of public buildings in
Edendale--an administrative palace, the Central bank, the University,
the Academy of Arts, three Public Libraries, four Theaters, the grand
central goods warehouse, a great number of schools and other buildings.
In addition, extraordinary means are taken to provide for public
cleanliness, and the aqueducts in Edendale--we seem to be reading a
Chamber of Commerce report!--are “almost without any equal in the
world,” moreover, “they are being extended daily.” The refuse is
cleaned away by a system of pneumatic sucking apparatus. The streets
are entirely macadamized. Electric tramways cross them in every
direction and bind the suburbs to the town. Such glimpses as we get of
Edendale remind us, in fact, of a go-ahead city in California or South
Africa. The utopia of Freeland is progressive enough in all conscience;
for many of these mechanical devices were only vague anticipations in
1889; but it is progressive in a mechanical sense; and when we examine
it carefully, people seem to live the same sort of life here as they do
in a “modern” European or American city.

There are differences, of course; and I do not seek to minimize their
importance: the slum proletariat has been abolished; everyone belongs
to the middle class and enjoys the felicities of a high-grade clerk
or an engineer or minor official. This is the peculiarity of our
nineteenth century utopians: they do not so much criticize the goods
of their times as demand more of them! Buckingham and Hertzka, though
they differ in details, wish to extend middle class values throughout
society--comfort and security and a plenitude of soap and sanitation.
Even when the means they propose are revolutionary, the institutions
they would erect are conceived very much in the image of current use
and wont, and are unspeakably tame.

As we pass from Hertzka to Bellamy these facts glare insistently at
us. The slight air of tedium that I have not been able to disguise
in dealing with these utopias arises, I believe, from our excessive
familiarity with their contents. Our nineteenth century utopias, if
we except those of Fourier and Spence and a few more distinguished
ones which we shall presently come to, do not dream of a renovated
world: they keep on adding inventions to the present one. These utopias
become vast reticulations of steel and red-tape, until we feel that we
are caught in the Nightmare of the Age of Machinery; and shall never
escape. If this characterization seem unjust, I beg the reader to
compare the utopias before Bacon with the utopias after Fourier, and
find out how little human significance remains in the post-eighteenth
century utopia when the machinery for supporting the good life is
blotted out. These utopias are all machinery: the means has become the
end, and the genuine problem of ends has been forgotten.




CHAPTER EIGHT

  How Étienne Cabet dreamed of a new Napoleon called Icar, and
      a new France called Icaria; and how his utopia, with that
      which Edward Bellamy shows us in Looking Backward, gives us
      a hint of what machinery might bring us to if the industrial
      organization were nationalized.




CHAPTER EIGHT


1

Étienne Cabet opened his eyes upon the year that preceded the meeting
of the National Assembly in 1788, and closed them upon the Empire of
Napoleon III.

It would be foolish to give an account of Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie
without noting these facts; for the reason that Cabet’s most
impressionable years were drenched with the flamboyant light of the
Napoleonic conquests and the Napoleonic tradition which remained as an
afterglow when the conquests themselves had fallen below the horizon.
The spectacle of a nationalized church and a nationalized system of
education, extending their ministrations to the smallest commune
through a vast system of bureaucracy, must have given a solidity to his
dreams which the interruption of the first Napoleon’s personal downfall
could only have reinforced.

To understand why the Journey to Icaria, as we may call it, should
have been one of the best sellers among workingmen in 1845, and to see
why Louis Blanc should have attempted to set up an organization of
National Workshops in 1848, one must realize the historic momentum of
Napoleon’s dictatorship. Cabet consciously or unconsciously idealized
the Napoleonic tradition; and in Icaria he consummated it. That Cabet’s
futile will-to-power should have led him, under the inspiration of
Owen, to the swamps of Missouri as the leader of a little band of
communist pioneers is an ironic twist of circumstance: his Icaria was
a national state, with all its pomp and dignity and splendor, and not
a squalid collection of huts in the midst of a dreary prairie. Cabet
died in America, as much perhaps from an outraged sense of dignity as
from any physical disease, and nothing came of his utopia until Edward
Bellamy gave it a fresh outline in Looking Backward.


2

With the romantic element in the Journey to Icaria--the English lord
and the Icarian family he visits, and the various friendships and love
affairs that are outlined in its pages--I purpose to have nothing to
do. These things add an element of complication to Cabet’s picture
without doing very much to illuminate it.

Icaria is a country divided into a hundred provinces almost equal
in extent and almost the same in population. These provinces are in
turn divided into ten communes, which are likewise almost equal,
and the provincial capital is in the center of the province, whilst
each communal city is the center of the commune. The elegance and
precision of the decimal system has overlaid the facts of geography
and as one looks over the map of the imaginary country one recalls
the way in which the French revolution divided France into arbitrary
administrative areas called departments, upsetting those ancient
regional groupings which corresponded, roughly, with the natural units
of soil, climate, population, and historic continuity.

In the midst of Icaria is the city of Icara. Icara is a reconstructed
Paris, built on a reconstructed Seine. It is almost circular, cut
into two equal parts by a river whose banks have been straightened
and enclosed in two straight walls; and the bed has been deepened to
receive ocean vessels. In the middle of the city the river divides
into two arms, which form a rather big circular island--though the
islands formed naturally by the division of a river are inevitably
not circular!--and here is the civic center, planted with trees, in
the midst of which stands a palace. There is a superb garden elevated
on a terrace; in the center, a vast column surmounted by a colossal
statue that dominates all the buildings. On each side of the river
is a big quay, bordered by public offices. The effect is indubitably
metropolitan.

The city is divided into quarters: Icara has sixty communes of almost
equal size. In each quarter is a school, a hospital, a temple, shops,
public places, and monuments. The streets are straight and wide, the
city being traversed by fifty avenues parallel to the river and fifty
perpendicular to it. How it is possible to reconcile this street plan
with a circular city I have no notion; and Cabet apparently did not
take the trouble to cast his verbal specifications into a definite
picture or plan. Each block has fifteen houses on each side, with a
public building in the middle, and one at each end; and between the
rows of houses are gardens which the inhabitants of Icaria, like
those of Utopia, have a great pride in keeping up. The blocks are
arranged around squares, very much like those of Belgravia and Mayfair
in London; but the gardens are public ones and are cared for by the
inhabitants.

The Icarian villages are almost as metropolitan as the principal city
itself. One notes a great preoccupation with hygienic conveniences and
sanitary regulations. There are dust collectors of special model; the
sidewalks are covered with glass against rain; and the stations for
omnibuses are also covered. The streets are well-lighted and paved.
Stables, slaughter houses, and hospitals are on the outskirts of the
village. The factories and warehouses are on the railway lines and
canals, and half the streets are closed to all traffic except dog-carts.

In sum, Icaria enjoys a highly sophisticated and metropolitan form of
life. Everything has been “arranged,” everything has been “attended
to.” There are no upsetting complications and diversities. Even the
weather has been disposed of. Nothing short of a very powerful and
persistent organization could have accomplished these things. What is
this organization?


3

In the beginning was Icar, the dictator who established the government
of Icaria, and out of Icar there sprang a number of bureaux,
departments, and committees. Let us follow a typical Icarian through
his day, and examine the institutions he comes in contact with.

Our Icarian is an early riser by necessity, for at 6 A. M. breakfast is
served in a restaurant or factory. It is not a capricious breakfast;
it is such a breakfast, perhaps, as the guardians of Battle Creek,
Michigan, dream of. The food that is served in Icaria is regulated by
a committee of scientists; and while everybody has all that is good
for him, precisely what is good and in what amounts, someone else has
decided in advance. So it is at present in our armies and navies,
and to some extent in our cheap lunchrooms, the difference being that
there remains, outside Icaria, the possibility of breaking away from
the routine and following caprice and appetite without respect for the
committee of dietitians.

When our Icarian has breakfasted, he goes to his work, seven hours
in summer, six in winter. He works the same number of hours as every
other Icarian, and whether he works in the field or the workshop, the
products of his industry are deposited in public stores. Who is his
employer? The State. Who owns all the instruments of production and
service, down to the horses and carriages? The State. Who organizes the
workers? The State. Who constructs the stores and factories, attends
to the cultivation of the ground, has houses built, and makes all the
things necessary for clothing, lodging, and transport? The same. In
theory, the public is the sole proprietor and director of industry; in
practice--Cabet doesn’t tell us otherwise and it necessarily follows in
a system of national industry--a body of engineers and officials have
taken over the dictatorship of Icar and are running the affairs of the
community.

How familiar this Icaria seems to us. Utopia--_c’est la guerre_!

When he is through with his work, our Icarian possibly changes his
clothes. Exactly what clothes are necessary, and what are permissible
has already been prescribed by a committee on clothes; which comes to
saying that every Icarian’s dress is a uniform, even as every Icarian
is an official of the State. Eating, working, dressing, sleeping--there
is no getting away from State regulations. The uniformity that irks
us in modern life and that makes people who have some remnant of free
initiative in their makeup chafe in the civil service, to say nothing
of the army, is extended to the last degree in Icaria. Napoleon’s
conception of a nation in arms is dominant; only now it is a nation in
overalls.

Our Icarian’s father and mother were married after a six-month interval
of courtship. Since they took advantage of the institution at the
earliest moment permitted by law, he was twenty and she was eighteen.
By education, they had been taught to look upon conjugal fidelity as a
desideratum; and they realized that concubinage and adultery would be
looked upon as crimes by public opinion, even if these crimes were not
punished by law. Before our Icarian was born his mother received public
instruction on maternity.

Up to the age of five our Icarian’s education was domestic; but from
the fifth to the seventeenth or eighteenth year, domestic instruction
was combined with intellectual and moral education, under a program
laid down by a committee which had consulted all systems of education,
ancient and modern. His general or elementary education was the same as
that of every other Icarian; but at seventeen for girls and eighteen
for men, his professional education began.

The only industries or professions open to our Icarians were those
recognized and sanctioned by the State; and every year a list is
published telling the number of workers needed in each profession. The
number of workers, in turn, is determined by a committee on industry,
which plans the amount of goods that must be produced during the coming
year. Our Icarian begins work at eighteen, his sister at seventeen;
and he is exempt from work at sixty-five, while she would be exempt at
fifty. The republic, I may note parenthetically, asks from each commune
the sort of industrial and agricultural production which goes best
with its natural resources; delivering its surplus production to other
communes and giving it, in turn, what it may lack.

Cabet describes all these institutions in the minutest fashion, down
to the noiseless window with which each Icarian’s house is equipt; but
the broad outlines of the industrial and social system are contained
in this picture. What we see is a National State, abundantly organized
for war, and remaining on that footing in the midst of its peace-time
activities. What is not of national importance, in this scheme of
things, is of no importance; and the people who decide what is or is
not of national importance are the officeholders--I find it difficult
to discover a utopian equivalent for this word or to fancy any great
improvement in utopia--in the capital.

The political activities that regulate these Icarian institutions
do not greatly reassure us. From each of the thousand communes two
deputies are chosen to hold office for two years: this constitutes
the national representation. The basis of this system is the
communal assembly; and from this communal assembly the provincial
representatives are drawn. The national executive consists of sixteen
members, each with a special department; and it is plain that here is
the seat of power; for exactly what business remains in the hands of
the two thousand legislators when the food committee has determined
the amount and variety of food, the industrial committee the quantity
and kind of manufactured products, and the educational committee the
methods, subjects, and aims of education, it is a little hard to
determine.

There are no newspapers and no means of organized criticism, except
the right of submitting propositions to the popular assemblies. The
only thing resembling public opinion is the collective opinion of
these assemblies. The newspapers are published by the government, one
for the nation, one for the province, and one for the commune; and
they are devoted solely to the presentation of news, divorced from
opinion. For this kind of political system, and for all the power that
it might presume to wield, there is a word in philosophy which has
no substitute--epiphenomenon. The popular system of representation
in Icaria is but a shadow of that dictatorial power which was first
wielded by Icar and was in turn transmitted to the committees and
bureaux.

If I have been criticizing Icaria in terms of the last century of
political experience, I can only plead that it is because Icaria is so
little like Utopia and so much like the actual order of things. It must
be prepared to stand fire as a _fait accompli_: indeed, in the early
days of the second Russian revolution it came near to being a _fait
accompli_--there was more of Cabet than of Marx perhaps in embryonic
Soviet Russia! Icaria is essentially not an ideal but an idealization;
and it is in order to keep the two from being confused that I have
emphasized its little weaknesses. What is good in Icaria is what is
good in the institution of an army; what is bad is what is bad in the
execution of a war. If the good life could be perpetrated by a junta
of busybodies, as Plato would call them, Icaria would be a model
community.


4

Looking backward into the future: that was the paradox by which a
young New England romancer, Edward Bellamy, concerned like Thoreau and
Emerson and the rest of the great Concord school with the well-being
of his community, descended from literature to sociology; and stirred
the minds of thousands of people in America in much the same fashion
that Theodor Hertzka, writing at the same time, stirred his European
contemporaries. Having begun to romanticize about reality, Bellamy
during the decade that followed the publication of Looking Backward,
devoted himself to realizing his romance. In a later work, Equality,
he set forth his picture of the New Society of the year 2000 in much
greater detail; just as if the popularity of his first work committed
him to take up seriously the tasks of the economist and the statesman.

The chief pleasure, nowadays, in both of these books is the familiar
one of recognition; for if Bellamy did not portray a better future he
at any rate, like Mr. H. G. Wells, in his early romances, outlined
many parts of a future that has for us, in the twentieth century,
become an actuality; a fact which makes us realize very poignantly
the limitations of his utopia. In spite of a thin-lipped style,
Bellamy handles his story in a neat, workmanlike way, with a certain
plausibility and familiarity which doubtless explains the fact that it
can still be found, without any difficulty, on the fiction shelves of
our circulating public libraries.

The preface to Looking Backward is dated: “Historical Section Shawmut
College, Boston, December 26, 2000.” In that preface the work is
presented as an avowed romance which will enable the readers of 2000
to realize the gaps that separate them from their ancestors, and to
value the prodigious “moral and material” transformation that has taken
place in a few generations. Julius West is a person whom our Shawmut
historian invents, to bridge the gap between the two eras. Julius West,
a young man of wealth, sensitive to the ignominy of his position, and
feeling that, as a “rich man living among the poor, an educated man
among the uneducated,” he “was like one living in isolation among a
jealous and alien race.” In order to overcome his insomnia West sleeps
in a vaulted room in the foundations of his house, and gets put to
sleep by a hypnotist; and so by a dramatic oversight he hibernates for
113 years, and awakens among strange faces. Needless to say, West has
a love affair in the old world which is carried on in the new, through
a descendant of the girl he meant to marry; and it is equally needless
to observe that he reawakens to the world of 1887 as soon as the
institutions of 2000 have been described and the love affair has been
resolved.

Let us take West’s muzziness, his amazement, and his sense of isolation
for granted, and follow him as he explores his new environment.


5

If Plato cavalierly disposes of the labor problem of the Republic by
permitting things to remain pretty much as they were, Bellamy makes
the solution of labor organization and the distribution of wealth the
key to every other institution in his utopia.

In the United States of 1887 the growing organization of labor and the
aggregation of capital into trusts were the two chief economic factors:
Dr. Leete, Julius West’s host, pictures how this aggregation and
combination were continued until, by a mere shift of gears, “the epoch
of trusts had ended in The Great Trust.” In a word, “the people of the
United States concluded to assume the conduct of their own business,
just as one hundred years before they had assumed the conduct of their
own government, organizing now for industrial purposes on precisely the
same grounds that they had organized for political purposes.” Was there
any violence in this transition? Ah no! everything had been prepared
beforehand by public opinion, the great corporations had gradually
trained everybody into an acceptance of large-scale organization, and
the final step of merging all the big corporations into a national
corporation occurred without a jar. With the assumption by the nation
of the mills, machinery, railroads, farms, mines, and capital in
general, all the difficulties of labor vanished, for every citizen
became by virtue of his citizenship an employee of the government, and
was distributed according to the needs of industry.

In 2000 “the labor army” is not a figure of speech: it is an army
indeed, for the nation is a single industrial unit, and the principle
upon which the working force is recruited is universal compulsory
industrial service. After a man’s education has been completed in the
common school system, which extends straight through college, he must
first serve a term of three years in an unclassified labor army, which
performs all the rough and menial tasks of the community. When this
period is over, he is permitted to offer himself as a recruit in any of
the trades or professions which may be declared open by the government,
and can train for his calling up to the age of thirty, in the national
schools and institutes. In order to attract people into occupations
where they are needed, the hours are reduced and, for the dangerous
trades, volunteers are called for. There are however no discriminations
in pay. Every person is credited with a sum of four thousand dollars
per annum at the National Bank, a sum which he receives because of his
needs as a man and not because of his capacity as a worker. Instead
of being rewarded for giving the full measure of his energies and
abilities, a man is penalized if he fails to do so. It is possible
to shift from one branch of the service to another, under certain
restrictions, even as in the navy one can change one’s rating and
apply for service on a different ship or station, but except for the
possibility of retiring on a half-income at the age of thirty-three,
everyone must remain at work until he is forty-five.

To this rule there is one exception; and we may note ironically that
it is made in favor of the writer’s guild. If a man produces a book he
may name his own royalties, and live as long from this income as the
sale will allow; and if he wishes to start a newspaper or a magazine,
and can get credit from a sufficient number of other people to support
his enterprise, there is nothing to prevent him from remitting service
to the amount his guarantors are ready to deduct from their personal
income. In other words, a man must “either by literary, artistic,
or inventive productiveness indemnify the nation for the loss of his
services, or must get a sufficient number of people to contribute to
such an indemnity.” This is the one open hole in our militarized,
industrial utopia; and I think it is the most acceptable feature in the
whole system. A community organized as a single unit, directed by a
general staff at Washington, and perpetually exhibiting a herd complex
which every institution would naturally reinforce, might not be a very
genial shelter for the soul of an artist; but if it were, this means of
support would doubtless be fair and excellent for the encouragement of
the arts.

To go back to our army. The entire field of production and distribution
is divided into ten great departments, each representing a group of
allied industries; and each particular industry is in turn represented
by a subordinate bureau, which has a complete record of the plant and
the force under its control, of the present product, and of the means
of increasing it. The estimates of the distributive department, after
adoption by the administration, are sent as mandates to the ten great
departments, which allot them to the subordinate bureaux, representing
the particular industries, and these set the men at work.... “After the
necessary contingents have been detailed for the various industries,
the amount of labor left for other employment is expended in creating
fixed capital, such as buildings, machinery, engineering works, and so
forth.”

In order to safeguard the consumer from the caprices of the
administration, a new article must be produced as soon as a certain
guaranteed demand for it has been established by popular petition,
whilst an old article must be continued to be produced as long as
there are customers for it, provision being made that the price rise in
accordance with the greater cost of production per unit.

Now the general of this industrial army is the president of the United
States. He is chosen from among the corps commanders; and it is
provided that every officer in the army, from the president down to
the sergeant, must work his way up from the grade of common laborer.
The chief peculiarity of this system consists in the way in which the
voting is done. The voters are all honorary members of the guild to
which they belong; that is, men who are over forty-five years old;
this applies not merely to the ten lieutenant generals, but to the
commander-in-chief, who is not eligible for the presidency until he
has been a certain number of years out of office. The president is
elected by vote of all the men of the nation who are not connected
with the industrial army; for any other method, Bellamy thinks,
would be prejudicial to discipline. There are various names for this
practice: one of them is gerontocracy, or government by the aged; and
another, more familiar, is “alumni control.” When we recollect that
the hardships of military service look rather mild and pleasant to
the man who has been mustered out, I doubt if the youngsters in the
industrial army would stand much chance of having their lot improved
if the initiative for a change had to come from the alumni. Yet we
know what even the formation of a worker’s shop committee would be
in an industrial army: it would be mutiny. As for criticism of the
administration, that would be treason; admiration for the practices of
another country would be disloyalty; and advocacy of a change in the
method of industry would be sedition.

True: corruption and bribe-taking and all the dirty scandals that
we associate today with a financial oligarchy would be wiped out
in utopia; but this merely means that the defects of the old order
would disappear along with its virtues. What would remain would be
the defects that arise when a nation is in arms, and when there is
no escape, by travel or mental withdrawal, from its institutions; in
short, the defects of a state of war. To call this a peaceful community
is absurd: one might as well call a battleship a pleasure-craft because
a modern one possesses a band and shows motion pictures to the crew.
The organization of this utopia is an organization for war; and the
one rule that such a community would not tolerate is “live and let
live.” If this is the peace that “industrial preparedness” ensures it
is scarcely worth having. Any community that liked this state of life
would scarcely need the constant exhortation of the recruiting sergeant
or the final compulsion of a conscription act.


6

The great part of Looking Backward is a discussion of this perfected
form of industrial organization; the manner in which it is worked;
and the effects of complete economic equality in doing away with the
necessity for the greater part of the legal machinery of the present
day, since crimes with an economic motive would almost, according to
Bellamy, be unthinkable. Here and there however we have glimpses of the
social life of this new age.

First of all, there floats before our eyes the picture of a vast body
of superannuated persons, who for the most part spend their time in
a sort of country-club existence. They can travel, because the other
countries in the world are likewise nationalized, and by a simple
system of book-keeping foreign credit for goods and personal services
can be transferred from one country to another; and they can take up
special vocations and hobbies during their superannuated years; but
it is equally plain that their work has not done very much to foster
intellectual or emotional maturity, since in relation to the citizens
the state exists as a “Great White Father”; and there is good reason
perhaps for the great interest in sport which characterizes Bellamy’s
utopia. Games are organized, apparently, upon lines of industrial guild
rivalry; just as one has sports nowadays between rival battleship
squadrons perhaps; for “if bread is the first necessity of life,
recreation is a second, and the nation caters for both.” The demand
for bread and circuses, our guide explains, is recognized in the year
2000 as a wholly reasonable one. Both work and play are external to the
citizen’s inner trends and interests; and we should not be surprised
if an infantile element predominated in the character of this happy
republic.

This externalism, this impersonality, seems to characterize the whole
scene. We follow Julius West and his new love, Edith, into a modern
shop, where everything is displayed by sample, and an order for goods
is sent to a central warehouse, and along with undoubted economies
of space and time, we note that there is an almost complete absence
of personal contacts or relationships: more than ever the worker has
become a cog in the machine, more than ever he deals with a thin,
barren, abstract world of paper notations, more than ever his desire
for social contacts is dammed up; and so, more than ever, there must be
occasion in this new age for stimulants and socialities beside which
the roller coasters of Coney Island and the promiscuities of a modern
dance hall would be insipid things. Bellamy does not show us what these
compensatory institutions would be: but he has invented a high-powered
engine of repression, and he does not fool us when he conceals the
safety-valve. Unless there is a safety-valve his universal army, under
a rigorous discipline for twenty-four years, is bound to blow up the
works. We can guess when we read the cheap illustrated papers, when we
go to the movies, when we watch the behavior of the crowds on Broadway,
what this twenty-first century Utopia would be like--it would be all
that a modern city is, exaggerated. In The New Society, Dr. Walter
Rathenau drew a picture of a socialized modern society, moving along
its present path without any change in its aims and ideals; and that
nightmare of his must be added to Bellamy’s dream in order to define it.

It is the same with every other institution. There is a big communal
restaurant in which each family of the neighborhood has a private room;
this is the place where the principal meal is ordered by the family,
and served by young conscript waiters. Am I at fault if I point out
that this universal hostelry is a little too elaborate and mechanical;
that there is more promise of a genuine utopia in Plato’s olives and
cheese and beans, simply served, than in the “perfection of catering
and cooking” which the new age boasts. So one could go down the line
and enumerate the mechanical marvels which take the place of a fully
humanized life; marvels like the telephone concerts and sermons which
astoundingly anticipate by thirty-odd years the radio broadcasting
service which is now a prevalent mania in America. Are these things, as
Aristotle would have said, the material bases of the good life, or are
they substitutes for the good life? There may have been some doubt as
to the answer in Bellamy’s time; but I think there need not be any at
present. In so far as these instruments are consonant with humanized
purposes they are good; in so far as they are irrelevant they are so
much rubbish--idiotic rubbish. A free public library is a good thing;
but a free public library devoted exclusively to distributing the
novels of Gene Stratton Porter and the uplift books of Mr. Orison Swett
Marden would not contribute so much as a useful platitude towards a
vivid and stimulating society.

There is no escaping the problem of ends and the problem of ends, if
I may be permitted a pun, belongs at the beginning. Subordinate to
humanized ends, machinery and organization--yes, complicated machinery
and organization--have undoubtedly a useful contribution to make
towards a good community; unsubordinated, or subordinated only to
the engineer’s conceptions of an efficient industrial equipment and
personnel, the most innocent machine may be as humanly devastating
as a Lewis gun. All this Bellamy overlooked in Looking Backward, and
yet--something remains.

What remains in Looking Backward is the honest passion that inspired
the man; the play of generous impulses; the insistence that there
is no fun for an ordinarily imaginative person in dining with Dives
whilst Lazarus hangs around the table. Bellamy wanted everyone to
be equally educated, so that everyone might be his companion; he
wanted everyone to be decently fed and sheltered; he wanted to take
his share in the dirty work and to see that accidents of wealth did
not keep other people from taking theirs. He wanted private life to
be simple and public life to be splendid. He wanted men and women
to mate with each other without permitting this relationship to be
compromised by obligations to a father, a mother, or the butcher,
the baker, and the grocer. He wanted the generous, the just, and the
tender-hearted to be as well endowed as the cold-hearted, the greedy,
and the self-seeking. He pleaded for an absence of artificiality and
restraint in the relations of the sexes; for such a candor as has
perhaps come into fashion again--thank heaven!--today, a candor which
permits women physical freedom in dress, and a spiritual freedom in
exhibiting their love, and giving it freely. All this is to the good.
I do not question Bellamy’s fine motives; I question only the outlets
he imagined for them. There is a breach between Bellamy’s conception of
the good life and the structure he erected to shelter it. This breach
is due, I believe, to an over-emphasis of the part that wholesale
mechanical organization, directed by a handful of people, would play
in such a reconstruction. If Bellamy sometimes exaggerated the bad in
modern society, with its muddle of competitive privileges, he likewise
overestimated the good that it contained; and he was more than fair to
the present order of things when he made the future so closely in its
image.




CHAPTER NINE

  How William Morris and W. H. Hudson renew the classic tradition
      of utopias; and how, finally, Mr. H. G. Wells sums up and
      clarifies the utopias of the past, and brings them into
      contact with the world of the present.




CHAPTER NINE


1

It would be a pretty sad thing if the Utopias of the nineteenth century
were all of a piece with those of Buckingham and Bellamy. In general we
may say that all the utopias of reconstruction had a deadly sameness
of purpose and a depressing singleness of interest; and although they
saw society whole, they saw the problem of reconstructing society
as a simple problem of industrial reorganization. Fortunately, the
utopias of escape have something to contribute which the utopias of
reconstruction lack; and if William Morris, for example, seems too
remote from Manchester and Minneapolis to be of any use, he is by that
token a little nearer the essential human realities: he knows that
the chief dignity of man lies not in what he consumes but in what he
creates, and that the Manchester ideal is--devastatingly consumptive.

Before I go into these utopias of escape, I wish to point out the
strange way in which the three utopias we shall examine return as
it were upon their classic models, each of the returns being, it is
fairly plain, without the consciousness of the writer. Mr. W. H. Hudson
returns upon More; and in A Crystal Age the farmstead and the family
is the ultimate unit of social life. In News from Nowhere the city of
workers, such as Andreæ dreamed of, comes again into being; and in
A Modern Utopia, with its order of Samurai, we are ruled once more
by a highly disciplined class of Platonic guardians. Mr. Hudson is a
naturalist with a deep sympathy for the rural life of England; William
Morris was a craftsman who knew what the English town was like before
it had been blighted by industrialism; and with both of these men we
feel close to the essential life of man and the essential occupations.


2

As the clouded vision of the traveller to the Crystal Age clears, he
finds himself received in a great Country House, which is inhabited
by a large group of men and women who till the land and perform the
simple operations of weaving and stonecutting and the like. All over
the world, one gathers, these great country houses dot the landscape.
Each of them is no weekend center of social life but a permanent home;
indeed their permanence is almost past believing; for in each house
traditions are carried back thousands of years. The great cities and
the complicated metropolitan customs that they produced have long been
wiped away, as one might wipe away mold. The world has been stabilized;
the itch for getting and spending has disappeared. Our traveller must
bind himself to work for a whole year in order to pay for the garments
his house-mates weave for him, garments whose texture and cut have a
classic turn.

This household, I say, is the social unit of the Crystal Age: the
house-father administers the laws and customs, and he dispenses the
punishment of seclusion when the visitor trespasses upon the code of
the house. The house-mates work together, eat together, play together,
and listen together to the music of a mechanical instrument called
the musical sphere. At night they sleep in separate little cubicles
which can be opened to the night air. The horses and dogs of the
Crystal Age have a degree of intelligence which our common breeds do
not possess, so that the horses all but harness themselves to the
plow, and the dog teaches the traveller when to leave off working the
animals. Each household has not merely its laws and traditions: it has
its literature; its written history; and the very girl with whom the
traveller falls in love bears a resemblance to the sculptured face of
an unhappy house-mother who lived and suffered in the immemorial past.
These houses, these families, these social relations are built for
endurance. What is the secret of their strength?

The secret of our Crystal Age Utopia is the secret of the beehive: a
queen bee. The Crystallites have done away with the difficulties of
mating by appointing one woman, in every house, to be the house-mother,
the woman whose capital duty is to carry on the family: the entire
burden of each generation falls upon her shoulders, and in return for
the sacrifice she is treated with the respect due to divinity, like
the young man who was chosen in the Kingdom of Montezuma, as the tales
have it, to represent the chief deity until at the end of a year he
was disembowelled. The wish of a house-mother is a command; the word
of the house-mother is law. For a year before her retirement as mother
she is put into communion with the sacred books of the house, and has
at her command a store of knowledge which the rest of the hive are not
permitted to share. It is she who keeps burning the fires of life.

For all except the house-mother sex is a matter of purely physical
appearance. The Crystallites, if we may speak irreverently, are
“content with a vegetable love--which would certainly not suit me”
nor, it appears, did it suit our traveller to the Crystal Age, when he
discovers that his passion could never be reciprocated by his beloved,
even if she so far transgressed the laws of the household as to give
way to him. Against the appearance of passion and all the mortal
griefs that it carries with it, the house-mother possesses a remedy.
When in the murk of despair our traveller turns to her for advice and
consolation, she gives him a phial of liquid. He drinks it in the
belief that it will make him as free from passion as his house-mates;
and he is not deceived; for--he dies.

The social life of the household is not to be wrecked by the storms
and stresses of the individual’s passions. The engines of life are no
longer dangerous: the fuel has been taken away! A “chill moonlight
felicity” is all that remains.


3

There are times when one may look upon the whole adventure of civilized
life as a sort of Odyssey of domestication; and in this mood the
Crystal Age marks a terminus upon that particular aspect of the
adventure. To the objection that this sort of utopia requires that we
change human nature, the answer, in terms of modern biology, is that
there is no apparent scientific reason why certain elements in human
nature should not be selected and brought to the front, or why certain
others should not be reduced in importance and eliminated. So, for
all practical purposes, there is no apparent reason why human nature
should not be changed, or why we should not be prepared to believe
that in times past it has been changed--communities which selectively
bred for pugnacity and aggression committing suicide and opening the
way for communities which socially selected other traits that made
for survival. It is possible that in times past man has done a great
deal to domesticate himself and fit himself for harmonious social
life; and a utopia which rests upon the notion that there should be a
certain direction in our breeding is not altogether luny; indeed, is
nowadays less so than ever before, for the reason that it is possible
to separate romantic love from physical procreation without, as the
Athenians did, resorting to homosexuality.

If A Crystal Age opens our minds to these possibilities it is not to
be counted purely as a romance; in spite of the fact that as a romance
it has passages that rival Green Mansions. Between the individual
households and common marriages, the utopia of the beehive is a third
alternative which possibly remains to be explored.


4

There are regions in the world--I am thinking perhaps of the table
land of South Africa and the Mississippi Valley--where if one dreamed
about utopia the apparatus to support it would be a gigantic network
of steel, and huge communities of people would naturally flow together
and coalesce in complicated patterns, somewhat after the fashion of
those which Mr. H. G. Wells describes in When the Sleeper Awakens. It
would be almost impossible, I fancy, to dream of a simple life and of
handfuls of people in those parts of the earth: the simplicity would
be barrenness, and a handful of people would be lost.

It is different with the valley of the Thames, that little stream which
begins a short way above Oxford and meanders between banks of lush
grass and bending willows, down through Marlow, where musty ales have
long been made, past Windsor between the Great Park and the Chiltern
Hills, through Richmond and so down to Hammersmith where one might
perhaps ford the river at low tide if an iron bridge did not carry one
across, till below the city of London the estuary becomes a wide tide
of water and expands proudly to meet the sea. Nature has carved this
valley to the human scale: the houses are not dwarfed by the landscape;
and except for the huge warren of London--for which nature is not
responsible--there is a fitness between the actor and the scene which,
without offering any great Olympian moments, gives the naïve and jolly
and whole-hearted effect that one finds in a good English hunting print
or, let us say, in Pickwick Papers. In such an atmosphere, particularly
as one thinks of it on a day late in June, human nature bubbles
naturally into good nature, and whatever harshness remains, a tankard
of ale will drain away.

It is in this valley of the Thames that William Morris awoke to find
his utopia, after returning to his home in Hammersmith, the last really
urban borough of London as one goes upstream. From that landscape,
sweetened and freshened and ridden of cockney landmarks, Morris evokes
the spirit of the River God, as Socrates and Phædrus, by the banks of
the Ilyssus, call forth the spirit of Pan.

With all the grime and tedium of the dull ’eighties lying upon his
soul, Morris finds himself transported to a world which has been
cleansed by a revolution of a greater part of the nineteenth century
landmarks. In the meanwhile, grass has laid a decent blanket over many
irretrievable ruins. The house in which he has gone to bed is now a
Guest House; and he is first received into this refurbished world by
a boatman who takes him for a morning swim on the Thames, and knows
about the value of money only as a collector of copper curios might. At
breakfast, he finds himself among a group of friendly people, who call
him “Guest”; and he is taken firmly and sweetly and quite serenely in
hand by the comely young women who preside over the house. These women,
like everyone else in the new Thames valley, are healthy, full-blooded,
athletic, sane, and free from the puling maladies which idleness or
overwork gave to the women of the nineteenth century. The other guests
are a weaver who has come down from the north to take a turn at the
boatman’s job while the latter goes up towards Oxford to help gather in
the hay, and a loquacious dustman in marvellous greens and golds.

In this new England, work has become what one would call in the
kindergarten “busy work”: in the simplification of the standard of
living and the release from the pressure of artificially stimulated
wants, the main business of getting a living is easily performed,
and the chief concern of everyone is to do his work under the
pleasantest conditions possible--a demand which brings back many of
the handicrafts, and places a great premium on manual skill. Although
the mechanical arts have been improved in certain directions, for in
his trip up the Thames our guest meets with a barge driven by some
internal engine, let us say by electricity, a good many devices have
been allowed to fall into disuse, because, although the output in goods
might be greater, the work itself and the way of life it promotes
are not so beneficial as the simple methods of hand labor. In every
direction, simplicity and direct action and the immediate supply and
interchange of goods out of local produce, has taken the place of
the monstrously complicated system of traffic that prevailed in the
earlier imperialistic world. Work is given freely, and the proceeds of
work exchanged freely, as a man might give of his goods and services
nowadays when he welcomes a friend within his own house. A great
part of the energy of this new community has gone into building; and
architecture, sculpture, and painting flourish in the townhalls and
common dining halls of which each village boasts.

It follows from this that the big cities have disappeared. London
is again a congeries of villages, mingled in great woodlands and
meadows where in the summer children roam about and camp and pick up
the simple occupations of rural life. Of all the proud monuments of
London that the nineteenth century left, only the Houses of Parliament
remain, as a storage-place for dung. There are shops, where one takes
for the asking, and there are common halls where people eat and have
conversation, as they do now in restaurants--only these new hostels are
beautiful, spacious, and well-served.

Since economic pressure is absent, the people of the Thames valley seem
to live a life of leisure; but this life of leisure is not the aimless
leisure of the country house, with its artificial stimulants, its
artificial exercises, and the like: the life of dignified leisure is
a life of work; in short, the life of the artist. If other people have
talked of the necessity for labor, the dignity of labor, the heroism of
labor, these simple Englishmen have discovered the beauty of leisurely
work--the simple grace that follows when even the practical arts are
pursued as if they were liberal arts. In this utopia the instinct
of workmanship, the creative impulse, has free play; and since the
majority of people are neither scholars nor scientists, as Sir Thomas
More would have had them, they find their fulfillment in adding beauty
to all the necessities of their daily toil. Where the work itself leads
purely to some useful end, as in the growing of wheat or grass, the
joy of work arises out of the comradeship and good-feeling that bind
together those who perform it, and the comparative lightness of the
tasks that find many hands eager almost to the point of competition to
perform them.

One looks at the faces of these people, and the effects of their life
are visible. Their women are ten or fifteen years older than we should
judge by their appearance; and on every face is written the healthy
serenity that follows when people do good work, with a good spirit,
in a good place. There is a candor, a plainness, a wholesomeness, an
absence of furtive repressions in their every gesture; and as far as
men can be satisfied and happy in a good environment, this community
is satisfied and happy. There are grumblers, it goes without saying.
One of them is a crusty old fellow who has read ancient history and who
sighs for the cutthroat practices of the competitive era; and there
is another who complains of the tameness of Utopian literature, as
compared with that which dealt with the miseries and warped passion of
an earlier age.

The only wretchedness in this utopia comes out of the essential human
tragedy--the disparity between one’s aims and one’s attainments,
between one’s desires and the circumstances that clog their
fulfillment. How can unhappiness be altogether wiped out as long as
maids are fickle and sexual passion strong? The boatman, for example,
has been mated with a beautiful girl who leaves him for another
man; but she tires of her new love, and under the eyes of the Guest
her uncle brings the pair together, and the drama of courtship and
mating goes on all over again; for there are no laws to bind people
together when every fibre of their being drives them apart; and in
a civilization that deals kindly even with its adults there is no
difficulty about giving the children all the care they need. For the
most part, those who suffer in love bear their burdens manfully,
without wailing over imaginary wrongs which are associated with the
worship of impossible chastities and reticences; and they turn their
balked impulses into the channels of work and poetry as completely as
they know how.

Is this the arcadian age of innocence all over again? Are brutality
and lust forever wiped out? Not at all. In sudden passion even murders
occur, no matter how good and helpful the social order; but instead of
compounding murder with an additional murder, the guilty person is left
to his own remorse. Use and wont are more powerful than law, and the
whole guild that earns its living from the frictions and dissidences
of our social life has dropt into limbo. By the same token, the game
of the ins and the outs, which we call political government, has
disappeared; for the only matters in which our community is interested
are as to whether a new field is to be laid under the plow or a bridge
thrown over a stream or a townhall built; and about such things the
local community is competent to decide, without lining up in a purely
fictitious antagonism.


5

Sanity and health and good-will and tolerance--as one sculls along the
Thames, above Richmond, on a Sunday morning, between boatloads of gay
picnickers and sauntering people, it is not impossible to imagine a
new social order developing on simple lines and bringing these things
into existence. With five million people in England, and perhaps half a
million in the Thames valley, the thing would not be impossible. Then
the whole countryside would be dressed again in green; then buildings
would arise in the landscape like flowers out of the ground; then the
kindliness and spontaneous co-operation of a happy holiday would be
prolonged into the workaday week. We should know how to spend our time
and with what to occupy our heads and hands, if the great wen of London
were removed from the Thames valley, and all the cheap cockney things
that London has conjured into existence were to be blasted away. We
should know all these things, because William Morris has told us about
them; and we should do all these things, because in our heart of hearts
we realize that they would satisfy.


6

The utopia that remains for consideration is the last important one
in point of time; and it is, curiously enough, the quintessential
utopia, for it is written with a free and critical gesture, and with a
succinct familiarity towards the more important books that came before
it. Mr. H. G. Wells, it is true, has made more than one excursion
into an imaginary commonwealth: The Time Machine is his earliest and
The World Set Free may possibly be considered as his latest. A Modern
Utopia combines the vivid fantasy of the first picture with the more
strict regard for present realities that marks the second; and it is,
altogether, a fine and lucid product of the imagination.

The assumption upon which Mr. Wells gains entrance into his utopia
differs from those shipwrecks and somnambulisms in which our modern
utopias have been stereotyped. He conceives of a modern man, a little
thickset and protuberant, seated at a desk and brooding over the
possibilities of man’s future; and gradually this image comes to
life and defines his views, and his voice rises into narrative in
something like the fashion of a lecturer, throwing from time to time
his illustrations of a New World upon the screen. He enters utopia by
hypothesis; that is, without any other subterfuge than an act of the
imagination; and in the thickening realities of a utopian community,
first discovered in an Alpine pass, he finds himself in the company of
a sentimental botanist, who is sick with a love affair and is maudlin
about dogs, and who again and again wrecks this exploration of utopia
by dragging into the midst of the scene some petty complication--about
his sweetheart or his doggie--that he has acquired on earth!

Where and what is this modern utopia? By hypothesis, it is a globe
identical with the one on which we live; it has the same oceans and
continents, the same rivers and minor land-masses, the same animals
and plants; yes, even the same people, so that each one of us has his
utopian counterpart. Conveniently, this new earth is located beyond
Sirius; and for the most part its history is parallel to ours; except
that it had a critical turn for the better at a not too remote period;
so that, while mechanical invention and science and all that sort of
thing is exactly on the same level as ours, the scale and order is
entirely different.

The scale and order of things is indeed different. Utopia is a world
community; it is a single civilization whose net of monorails and
posts, whose identification bureaux, whose rules of law and order are
the same in England as in Switzerland; and presumably the same in
Asia and Africa as in Europe. In every sense it is a modern utopia.
Machinery plays an important part, and the absence of menial service is
conspicuous from the very first contacts in which our travellers get
the hospitality of an inn, and find that interior decoration has verged
towards the style of the modern lunchroom and subway station, so that
the whole room can be redded, after use, by the guest himself. There
is no harking back to the past in industry, in architecture, or in the
mode of living. All that machinery has to offer has been accepted and
humanized: there is a cleanliness, an absence of squalor and confusion,
in this world-community, which indicates that utopia has not been
purchased by evasion.

The price of this order and spaciousness is not as heavy as that
which Bellamy was willing to pay in Looking Backward. The land and
its natural resources are owned by the community and are in the
custody of regional authorities; and the means of communication and
travel are in the hands of one common administrative body. There are
great socialized enterprises such as the railways, with planetary
ramifications; there are regional industries, and there are a good many
minor affairs which are still undertaken by private individuals and
companies. Farms are worked by a co-operative association of tenant
farmers, upon lines suggested by Dr. Hertzka in Freeland. Perhaps the
most remarkable feature of utopian organization is the registration
of every individual, with his name, numeral, finger-print, changes of
residence and changes in life; all of which is filed in a huge central
filing office, to become part of a permanent file upon the individual’s
death. Utopian registration gets our travellers into hot water, for
they are naturally mistaken for their utopian doubles; but outside of
its use in the story this little device seems strangely beside the
point, and it arose, I believe, out of Mr. Wells’ temperamental regard
for tidiness--tidiness on a planetary scale--the tagging and labelling
of a well-conducted shop....

The people of our Modern Utopia are roughly divided into four classes:
the kinetic, the poietic, the base, and the dull. The kinetic are the
active and organizing elements in the community: as active kinetics
they are the managers, the enterprisers, the great administrators,
as passive kinetics they are the minor officials, the innkeepers,
the shoptenders, farmers, and the like. The poietic are the creative
elements in the community; the “intellectuals” we should perhaps call
them. This follows in general the lines laid down by Comte--chiefs,
people, intellectuals, and emotionals, and perhaps something of the
same classification was outlined by More in his Philarchs, people,
priests, and scholars. This division of classes is a very ancient
one. In that old Indian script, the Bhagavad Gita, we find that the
population is divided into Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaisryas, and Sudras,
and that their duties are “determined by the modes that prevail in
their separate natures.” The residual classes of the base and the
dull correspond to the Sudras; they are, of course, the slag of the
community; and the active elements in this class, the criminals, the
habitual drunkards, and the like are exported to various islands in the
Atlantic where they have organized a community of their own in which
they may practice fraud, chicane, and violence to their hearts’ content.

Like Plato, Mr. Wells is concerned to provide for the education,
discipline, and maintenance of people who will be sufficiently
disinterested and intelligent to keep this vast organization a going
concern--no ordinary politician or captain of industry will do. Hence
there arises a class of Samurai. These Samurai are selected by rigorous
mental and physical tests out of youth who are past twenty-five, up to
which time they may be foolish and unsettled and may sow their wild
oats. These Samurai have a high intellectual standard of achievement.
They live a simple life. They are under strict moral discipline, and
follow a minute regimentation of dress and minor details of conduct.
They cannot marry out of their class. Once a year they are sent out
into the forests, the mountains, or the waste places to shift for
themselves; they go “bookless and weaponless, without pen or paper,
or money”; and they come back again with a new hardness and fineness
and fortification of spirit. It is such an organization as might have
been evolved at the time of the Reformation had the Order of Jesuits
been able to effect a dictatorship of Christendom. I say this without
disparagement of either the Jesuits or the Samurai, in order to point
out that these guardians of A Modern Utopia are plausible historic
characters. All the important economic and political enterprises of
the state, and important vocations like that of the physician, are in
the hands of Samurai. They are as necessary to the social organization
of A Modern Utopia as the research laboratories, which are provided by
charter with each factory, are necessary to its industrial organization.


7

The glimpses that one gets of this utopia are full of color and light
and movement; there are finely contained cities, surrounded by wide
suburban territories, cities that are not built of paper and alabaster.
Lovers pass arm in arm through the streets in the twilight; and there
is a soft dignity in the women, with their gay, sexually unemphatic
dresses, that charms. There are electric trains weaving silently on
rails over the landscape of Europe, crossing under the English Channel
by tube, and emerging in London with none of the bustle, the grinding,
or the dirt of a modern railway ride. There are well-cultivated
fields and adequate inns. There are no obstreperous patriotisms, as
one suspects in Looking Backward; there is none of the shirking one
might fear in News from Nowhere. (While our travellers are waiting to
be identified they stay for a while in a residential quadrangle at
Lucerne, and are given employment in a toy workshop.) There is less
dogmatism about creeds than in Christianopolis, and an entire absence
of menialism which contrasts with More’s Utopia.

This modern utopia brings together, compares, and criticizes important
points that all the other utopias have raised; and it does all this
with a deftness and a turn of humor that speaks for Mr. Wells at his
best. Above all, A Modern Utopia strikes a new note, the note of
reality, the note of the daily world from which we endeavor in vain to
escape. More or less, all the other utopias assume that a change has
come over the population; that it has been diminished; that the blind,
the lame, and the deaf have been cured; that the mean sensual man has
been converted and is ready to flap his wings and sing Hallelujah!
There is a minimum of these assumptions in A Modern Utopia. It is above
all other things an accounting and a criticism; and so it forms a
fitting prelude to the remainder of this book.




CHAPTER TEN

  How the Country House and Coketown became the utopias of the
      Modern Age; and how they made the world over in their image.




CHAPTER TEN


1

Now that we have ransacked the literature of ideal commonwealths for
examples of the utopian vision and the utopian method, there remains
another class of utopias which has still to be reckoned with, in order
to make our tally complete.

All the utopias that we have dealt with so far have been filtered
through an individual mind, and whereas, like any other piece of
literature, they grew out of a certain age and tradition of thought,
it is dangerous to overrate their importance either as mirrors of the
existing order or as projectors of a new order. While again and again
the dream of a utopian in one age has become the reality of the next,
as O’Shaughnessy sings in his famous verses, the exact connection
between the two can only be guessed at, and rarely, I suppose, can it
be traced. It would be a little foolish to attempt to prove that the
inventor of the modern incubator was a student of Sir Thomas More.

Up to the present the idola which have exercised the most considerable
influence upon the actual life of the community are such as have been
partly expressed in a hundred works and never perhaps fully expressed
in one. In order to distinguish these idola from those that have
occupied us till now, we should perhaps call them collective utopias or
social myths. There is a considerable literature that relates to these
myths in French, one of the best known works being M. George Sorel’s
Reflections on Violence; and in practice it is sometimes rather hard to
tell where the Utopia leaves off and the social myth begins.

The history of mankind’s social myths has still in the main to be
written. There is a partial attempt at this over a limited period
in Mr. Henry Osborn Taylor’s The Mediæval Mind; but this is only a
beginning, and other ages are almost untouched. The type of myth
that concerns us here is not the pure action myth which M. Sorel has
analyzed; we are rather interested in those myths which are, as it
were, the ideal content of the existing order of things, myths which,
by being consciously formulated and worked out in thought, tend to
perpetuate and perfect that order. This type of social myth approaches
very closely to the classic utopia, and we could divide it, similarly,
into myths of escape and myths of reconstruction. Thus the myth of
political freedom, for example, as formulated by the writers of the
American revolution, frequently serves as an excellent refuge for
disturbed consciences when the Department of Justice or the Immigration
Bureau has been a little too assiduous in its harassment of political
agitators.

Unfortunately, it has become a habit to look upon our idola as
particularly fine and exalted, and as representing the better side of
human nature. As a matter of fact, the myths which are created in a
community under religious, political, or economic influences cannot be
characterized as either good or bad: their nature is defined by their
capacity to help men to react creatively upon their environment and
to develop a humane life. We have still to recognize that a belief
in these idola is not by itself a creditable attitude. Even quite
base and stupid people are frequently governed by ideals; indeed, it
is the ideals that are in many cases responsible for their baseness
and stupidity. Neither is the habit of responding to idola any
evidence of rational thought. People respond to “ideas”--that is,
to word-patterns--as they respond to the stimulus of light or heat,
because they are human beings and not because they are philosophers,
and they respond to projections, to idola, for the same reason, and
not because they are saints. Our myths may be the outcome of rational
thought and practice or not; but the response to these myths is not
perhaps more than ten times in a hundred the result of following the
processes of reason from beginning to end.

We must think of our idola as a sort of diffused environment or
atmosphere, which differs in “chemical content” and in extension with
each individual. Some of these idola have so uniformly taken possession
of men’s minds in a particular age that they are as much a part of the
environment a baby is born into as the furniture of his house. The
sociologists who follow Émile Durkheim have called a certain part of
these idola collective representations but they are wrong, I believe,
when they limit these “representations” to savage or ignorant groups
for they are an important part of every civilized person’s luggage.
Parallel with The Story of Mankind and with The Story of Utopias, which
I have just told, it would be amusing to write The Story of Mankind’s
Myths. This work, however, would require the scholarship and industry
of another Leibniz, and all that I wish to do here is to put together
the chief social myths that have played a part in Western Europe and
America during the modern period, to contrast these idola with the
utopias of the past and the partial remedies for the present, and to
suggest the bearing of all this upon any new departures we may be ready
to make.

In selecting these idola--The Country House, Coketown, the
Megalopolis--I have been forced to gauge their strength and test their
quality very largely by their actual results in the workaday world, and
it is a little hard to purify them from the various institutions, old
and new, in which they are mixt. Yet with all this taint of actuality,
these idola are scarcely as credible as the Republic and it will help
matters a little to realize that we are still within the province of
utopia, and may exercise all the utopian privileges.


2

To understand the utopia of the Country House we must jump back a few
centuries in history.

Anyone who has ranged through the European castles that were built
before the fourteenth century will realize that they were no more
built for comfort than is a modern battleship. They were essentially
garrisons of armed men whose main occupation was theft, violence,
and murder; and every feature of their environment reflected the
necessities of their life. These castles would be found beetling a
cliff or a steep hill; their walls and their buttresses would be made
of huge, rough hewn stones; their living arrangements would resemble
those of a barracks with an almost complete lack of what we now regard
as the normal decencies and privacies, except possibly for the lord and
his lady; and the life of these feudal bands was necessarily a crude
and limited one.

Up to the fourteenth century in Western Europe the little fortified
town, or the unfortified town that lay beneath the protection of a
garrison on a hill, was the only other social unit that competed with
the even more limited horizons of the peasant’s village, or with the
spacious claims for the Here and the Hereafter which were put forward
by the Roman Church. To dream of huge metropolises and farflung armies
and food brought from the ends of the earth would have been wilder in
those days than anything More pictured in his Utopia.

During the fifteenth century in England, and in other parts of Europe
the same thing seems to have happened sooner or later, this life of
agriculture and warfare and petty trade was upset: the feudal power
of the reigning nobles was concentrated in the hands of a supreme
lord, the King; and the King and his archives and his court settled in
the National Capital, instead of moving about from place to place in
the troubled realm. The territories of the feudal lords ceased to be
dispersed; their possessions were confined more and more within what
were called national boundaries; and instead of remaining in their
castles the great lords gave up their crude, barbaric ways, and went up
to the capital to be civilized. In the course of time money took the
place of direct tribute; instead of receiving wheat and eggs and labor,
the lord came into possession of a rent which could be figured in pence
and pounds; a rent which could be transferred to the new trading cities
for the goods which the rest of the world had for sale. There is a
fascinating picture of this change in W. J. Ashley’s Economic History;
and the old life itself is outlined, with a wealth of significant
detail, in J. S. Fletcher’s Memorials of a Yorkshire Parish.

At the same time that this change was taking place in the physical
life of Western Europe, a corresponding change was taking place in the
domain of culture. Digging about the ruins of Rome and other cities,
the men of the late Middle Age discovered the remains of a great and
opulent civilization; and exploring the manuscripts and printed books
which were getting into general circulation, they found themselves face
to face with strange conceptions of life, with habits of refinement,
ease, and sensuous luxury which the hard life of the camp and the
castle had never really permitted. There followed a reaction against
their old life which was little less than a revulsion; and in that
reaction two great institutions fell out of fashion. Men ceased to
build castles to protect themselves against physical dangers; and they
left off entering monasteries in order to fortify their souls for the
Hereafter. Both the spiritual and the temporal life began to shift to
a new institution, the Country House. The idolum of the Country House
drew together and coalesced; and as a familiar symbol of this change
the colleges at Oxford which date from the Renascence can scarcely
be distinguished in architectural detail from the palaces which the
aristocracy were building in the same period; while our banks and our
political edifices to this day bear almost universally the stamp of
that Roman and Grecian litter which men discovered on the outskirts of
the mediæval city.


3

We do not know the Country House until we realize, to begin with,
what its physical characteristics are like. There are a great many
descriptions which the reader may consult if he does not happen to live
in the neighborhood of a great Country House: but perhaps instead of
examining the contemporary Country House it will be well to go back
to its beginnings, and see how it was pictured in all its encrusted
splendor at the first movement of the Renascence--in the setting which
François Rabelais, in one of the few downright serious passages in his
great work, Gargantua, sought to provide for the good life.

Gargantua purposes to build a new Abbey which he calls the Abbey of
Theleme. This Abbey is to be in every respect what the mediæval Abbey
was not. Hence to begin with, the Abbey, unlike the castle, is to
lie in the midst of the open country; and unlike the monastery, it
is to have no walls. Every member is to be furnished with a generous
apartment, consisting of a principal room, a withdrawing room, a
handsome closet, a wardrobe, and an oratory; and the house itself
is to contain not merely libraries in every language, but fair and
spacious galleries of paintings. Besides these lodgings there is to
be a tilt-yard, a riding court, a theatre, or public playhouse, and
a natatory or place to swim. By the river, for the Abbey is to be
situated on the Loire, there is to be a Garden of Pleasure, and between
two of the six towers of the hexagon, in which form the building is
arranged, there are courts for tennis and other games. Add to this
orchards full of fruit trees, parks abounding with venison, and an
archery range, fill all the halls and chambers with rich tapestries,
cover all the pavements and floors with green cloth--and the furnishing
of the Abbey of Theleme is complete.

The costumes of the inmates are equally splendid and elaborate. In
order to have the accoutrements of the ladies’ and gentlemen’s toilets
more convenient, there was to be “about the wood of Theleme a row of
houses to the extent of half a league, very neat and cleanly, wherein
dwelt the goldsmiths, lapidaries, jewellers, embroiderers, tailors,
gold drawers, velvet weavers, tapestry makers, and upholsterers....”
They were to be “furnished with matter and stuff from the hands of Lord
Nausiclete, who every year brought them seven ships from the Perlas and
Cannibal Islands, laden with ingots of gold, with raw silk, with pearls
and precious stones.”

The women who are admitted to Theleme must be fair, well-featured, and
of sweet disposition; the men must be comely and well-conditioned.
Everyone is to be admitted freely and allowed to depart freely; and
instead of attempting to practice poverty, chastity, and obedience, the
inmates may be honorably married, may be rich, and may live at liberty.

The liberty of Theleme is indeed complete; it is such a liberty as one
enjoys at a Country House to this day, under the care of a tactful
hostess; for everyone does nothing except follow his own free will and
pleasure, rising out of his bed whenever he thinks good, and eating,
drinking, and laboring when he has a mind to it. In all their rule and
strictest tie of their order, as Rabelais puts it, there is but one
clause to be observed--

“Do what you please.”


4

When we turn our attention from Rabelais’ conceit of an anti-monastic
order, we discover that he has given us an excellent picture of the
Country House, and of what I shall take the liberty of calling Country
House culture. We see pretty much the same outlines in the introduction
to Boccaccio’s Decameron; it is elaborately described in terms of that
most complete of Country Houses, Hampton Court, in Pope’s Rape of the
Lock; it is vividly pictured by Meredith in his portrait of The Egoist;
and it is analyzed in Mr. H. G. Wells’ cruel description of Bladesover
in Tono-Bungay, as well as by Mr. Bernard Shaw in Heartbreak House.
Whether Mr. W. H. Mallock holds the pattern of Country House culture up
to us in The New Republic or Anton Chekhov penetrates its aimlessness
and futility in The Cherry Orchard, The Country House is one of the
recurrent themes of literature.

This renascence idolum of the Country House, then, is powerful and
complete: I know no other pattern which has imposed its standards and
its practices with such complete success upon the greater part of
European civilization. While the Country House was in the beginning an
aristocratic institution, it has penetrated now to every stratum of
society; and although we may not immediately see the connection, it
is responsible, I believe, for the particular go and direction which
the industrial revolution has taken. The Country House standards of
consumption are responsible for our Acquisitive Society.


5

Perhaps the shortest way to suggest the character of Country House
institutions is to say that they are the precise opposite of everything
that Plato looked upon as desirable in a good community.

The Country House is concerned not with the happiness of the whole
community but with the felicity of the governors. The conditions which
underly this limited and partial good life are political power and
economic wealth; and in order for the life to flourish, both of these
must be obtained in almost limitless quantities. The chief principles
that characterize this society are possession and passive enjoyment.

Now, in the Country House possession is based upon privilege and not
upon work. The title to land which was historically obtained for the
most part through force and fraud is the economic foundation of the
Country House existence. In order to keep the artisans and laborers
who surround the Country House at their work, it is necessary to keep
them from having access to the land on their own account, provision
always being made that the usufruct of the land shall go to the owner
and not to the worker. This emphasis upon passive ownership points
to the fact that in the Country House there is no active communion
between the people and their environment. Such activities as remain
in the Country House--the pursuit of game, for instance--rest upon
imitating in play activities which once had a vital use or prepared
for some vital function, as a child’s playing with a doll is a
preparation for motherhood. The Country House ideal is that of a
completely functionless existence; or at best, an existence in which
all the functions that properly belong to a civilized man shall be
carried on by functionaries. Since this ideal cannot be realized in the
actual world, for the reason that it is completely at odds with man’s
biological inheritance, it is necessary in the Country House utopia to
fill in by play and sport an otherwise desirable vacuity.

In the Country House literature and the fine arts undoubtedly
flourish: but they flourish as the objects of appreciation rather
than as the active, creative elements in the community’s life; they
flourish particularly in the fashion that Plato looked upon as a
corrupting influence in the community. In the arts, a gourmandizing
habit of mind--the habit of receiving things and being played upon
by them--prevails; so that instead of the ability to share creative
ecstasy, the chief canon of judgment is “taste,” a certain capacity to
discriminate among sensory stimuli, a capacity which is essentially
just as hospitable to a decomposing cheese as to the very staff of
life. The effect of this gourmandism in the arts can be detected
in every element of the Country House from cellar to roof; for the
result has been to emphasize the collection of good things rather than
their creation, and there is an aspect in which the Country House is
little better than a robber’s hoard or a hunter’s cache--a miniature
anticipation of the modern museums of natural history and art.

Observe the architecture of our Country House. If it has been built in
England during the last three hundred years, the style is probably that
bastard Greek or Roman which we call Renascence architecture; if the
Country House was built in America during the last thirty years, it is
as likely as not a Tudor residence with traces of castle fortification
left here and there on the façade. On the walls there will be plenty
of paintings; indeed a whole gallery may be devoted to them. In all
probability, however, the paintings have been created in other times by
men long since dead, and in other countries: there may be a portrait
by Rembrandt, a Persian miniature, a print by Hokusai. Some very fine
element in the structure, a fireplace or a bit of panelling, may have
been removed piece by piece from the original Country House in England,
Italy, or France; even as many features of the original Country House
were quarried, perhaps, from some mediæval abbey. The very china
that we use upon our tables nowadays is a Country House importation
which took the place of pewter and earthenware; and wall paper is
another importation. From feature to feature everything is derivative;
everything, in the last analysis, has either been stolen or purchased
from the original makers; and what has not been stolen or purchased has
been basely copied.

The insatiability of the Country House to possess art is only equalled
by its inability to create it. In the Country House, the arts are not
married to the community, but are kept for its pleasure.

Let there be no confusion as to either the facts or the ideal we are
examining. There is a vast difference between that fine mingling of
traditions which is the very breath of the arts, as the lover of
classic Greek statuary knows, and the rapacious imperialistic habit of
looting the physical objects of art which has been the essence of the
Country House method in modern times, even as it seems to have been
a couple of thousand years ago in the Roman villa. A genuine culture
will borrow steadily from other cultures; but it will go to them as
the bee goes to the flower for pollen, and not as the beekeeper goes
to the hive for honey. There is a creative borrowing and a possessive
borrowing; and the Country House has in the main limited itself to
possessive borrowing. The Country House ideal, in fact, is limitless
possession: so the great Country House masters have five or six houses,
perhaps, in their name, although they need but a single one to cover
their heads.

Now the Country House idolum involves a dissociation between the
Country House and the community in which it is placed. If you will
take the trouble to examine mediæval conditions, you will find that
differences of rank and wealth did not make a very great difference
between the life of the lord in his castle, and his retainers: if the
common man could not claim to be as good as his lord, it is plain that
the lord shared most of the common man’s disabilities, and was, for all
the exaggerations of chivalry, just as ignorant, just as illiterate,
just as coarse. In the cities, too, the lowest workman in the guild
shared the institutions of his masters: the churches, the guild
pageants, and the morality plays were all part and parcel of the same
culture.

The Country House changed this condition. Culture came to mean not a
participation in the creative activities of one’s own community, but
the acquisition of the products of other communities; and it scarcely
matters much whether these acquisitions were within the spiritual or
the material domain. There had of course been the beginnings of such
a split in mediæval literature, with its vulgar Rabelaisian tales and
its refined romances of the court; but with the integration of the
Country House idolum, this divorcement was accentuated in every other
activity of the community. One of the results of this split was that
popular institutions were deprived of their contacts with the general
world of culture, and languished away; or they were transformed, as
the public schools of England were transformed into restricted upper
class institutions. Far more important than this, perhaps, was the fact
that each separate Country House was forced to obtain for its limited
circle all the elements that were necessary to the good life in a whole
community such as Plato described. We shall deal with the effects of
this presently.


6

Let us admit what is valid in the utopia of the Country House.
Enjoyment is a necessary element in achievement, and by its regard for
the decent graces of life, for such things as an ease in manners and
a fine flow of conversation and the clash of wits and a sensitiveness
to beautiful things, the Country House was by all odds a humanizing
influence. In so far as the Country House fostered a belief in
contemplation and a desire for the arts apart from any uses that might
be made of them by way of civic advertisement; in so far as it urged
that all our pragmatic activities must be realized in things that are
worth having or doing for themselves, the Country House was right,
eminently right. It was no snobbery on the part of Russian soviet
officialism when it opened up some of its Country Houses as rest
houses for the peasants and workers, and then insisted that some of
the airs of the Country House should be acquired there, to replace the
rough usages of the stable, the dungpile, and the field. Ruskin and
Samuel Butler were possibly right when they insisted that the perfect
gentleman was a finer product than the perfect peasant or artisan:
he is a finer product because he is essentially more alive. Even by
its emphasis upon appreciation the Country House did no mean service;
for it called attention to the fact that there were more permanent
standards--standards which were common to the arts of Greece and
China--than those which were looked upon as sufficient in the local
region. In sum, the Country House emphasized a human best, which was
the sum of a dozen partial perfections; and so all that was crude
and inadequate in the old regional cultures was brought to light and
criticized. All these virtues I admit; and they hold just as good today
as they ever did.

The fatal weakness of Country House culture comes out all the plainer
for this admission. The Country House did not see that enjoyment
rested upon achievement, and was indeed inseparable from achievement.
The Country House strove to put achievement in one compartment and
enjoyment in another; with the result that the craftsman who no longer
had the capacity to enjoy the fine arts no longer had the ability to
create them. The effect of an isolated routine of enjoyment is equally
debilitating; for enjoyment, to the masters of the Country House came
too easily, with a mere snap of the fingers, as it were, and the
tendency of connoisseurship was to set novelty above intrinsic worth.
Hence the succession of styles by which Country House decoration has
become a thing for mockery: Chinese in one age, Indian in another,
Persian in the next, with Egyptian, Middle African, and heaven knows
what else destined to follow in due order. There is nothing to settle
to, because there is no task to be done, and no problem to work out;
and as soon as the first taste for a style gets exhausted it is
speedily supplanted by another.

It would be impossible to calculate the extent to which the Country
House has degraded our taste but I have little doubts as to the source
of the degradation. The stylicism which has perverted the arts and
has kept a congruent modern style from developing has been the work
of Country House culture. I remember well the contempt with which a
furniture manufacturer in the Chiltern Hills told me about the way
in which he produced an original Sheraton: his knowledge of sound
furniture design was subordinated to some other person’s knowledge of
“style” and the miscarriage of the man’s innate craftsmanship made him
so mordant on the subject that it seemed as though he had been reading
Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. It is the same through
all the arts. A visit to the industrial sections of the Metropolitan
Museum in New York will show how dismally the taste for novelty, which
led the Sheratons and Chippendales to find “classic motifs” in one age,
causes the designers of the present day to seek the motifs of Sheraton
and Chippendale. So much for what happened to the arts when enjoyment
and achievement are separated.


7

The industrial bearing of the Renascence ideal is of capital importance.

During the Middle Age the emphasis in industry was upon the production
of tangible goods; the craft guilds set high standards in design and
workmanship; and the aim of the worker, in most of the trades, was to
get a living from his work, and not simply to get enough money to free
himself from the necessity of working. This is a broad generalization,
I need scarcely emphasize, and there is plenty of evidence of pecuniary
interests under the best of conditions; but it seems fair to say that
the dominant ideals of the older industrial order were industrial
rather than commercial. In the trading ventures that the Country House
promoted under its Drakes and Raleighs, ventures which were needed to
bring them “Ships from the Perlas and Cannibal Islands,” the emphasis
shifted from workmanship to sale; and the notion of working and
gambling to acquire multifarious goods took the place of that earlier
ideal which Henry Adams so sympathetically described in Mt. St. Michel
and Chartres. Thus the good life, as I have said elsewhere, was the
Goods Life: it could be purchased. If the whole community no longer
offered the conditions for this life, one might filch what one wanted
from the general store, and try to monopolize for self or family all
that was needed for a good life in the community.

What is the chief economic outcome of this ideal? The chief outcome,
I think, is to exaggerate the demand for goods, and to cause an
enormously wasteful duplication of the apparatus of consumption. If the
limit to one’s possessions should be simply the extent of one’s purse;
if happiness is to be acquired through obtaining the comforts and
luxuries of life; if a man who possesses a single house is considered
fortunate, and a man who possesses five houses five times as fortunate;
if there are no standards of living other than the insatiable one that
has been set up in the Country House--well, then there is really no
limit to the business of getting and spending, and our lives become the
mean handiwork of coachman, cook, and groom. Our Country House will not
merely be a house: there will be a chapel, an art gallery, a theater,
a gymnasium, as François Rabelais imagined. As the common possessions
of the community dwindle, the private possessions of individuals
are multiplied; and at last, there remains no other community than
a multitude of anarchic individuals, each of whom is doing his best
to create for himself a Country House, notwithstanding the fact that
the net result of his endeavors--this is the drab tragedy and the
final thing to be said against it--is perhaps nothing better than six
inadequate rooms at the end of nowhere in a Philadelphia suburb.

The Country House, then, is the chief pattern by means of which the
mediæval order was transformed into the modern order. It does not
matter very much whether the Country House is an estate on Long Island
or a cottage in Montclair; whether it is a house in Golder’s Green
or a family manor in Devonshire: these are essentially affairs of
scale, and the underlying identity is plain enough. The idolum of the
Country House prevails even when quarters are taken up in the midst
of the metropolis. More than ever the Country House today tries to
make up by an abundance of physical goods for all that has been lost
through its divorce from the underlying community; more than ever it
attempts to be self-sufficient within the limits of suburbia. The
automobile, the phonograph, and the radio-telephone have only served to
increase this self-sufficiency; and I need not show at length how these
instrumentalities have deepened the elements of acquisitiveness and
passive, uncreative, mechanical enjoyment.

The Country House’s passionate demand for physical goods has given rise
to another institution, Coketown; and it is the idolum of Coketown, the
industrial age’s contribution to the Country House, that we have now to
consider.


8

The chief difference between the individual utopias of the nineteenth
century and the “collective representation” of Coketown is that these
individual utopias were concerned to repair certain points where
Manchester, Newark, Pittsburgh, and Elberfeld-Barmen fell short of the
ideal. In repairing these points, Bellamy and Hertzka were ready to
alter the conventional arrangements by which property and land were
held, and capital was accumulated. The final end however was the same;
and the differences are therefore more apparent than real.

If the illustrative example of the Country House is in the Abbey of
Theleme, that of Coketown is in the sharp picture of industrialism
which Charles Dickens presents in Hard Times.

Coketown, as Dickens sees it, is the quintessence of the industrial
age. It is perhaps one of the few idola of the modern world which has
no parallel in any earlier civilization that we have been able to
explore. In order to understand what Coketown brought into the world,
we must realize that before Coketown came into existence the center
of every important European city consisted of a marketplace, shadowed
over by a Cathedral, a Market Court, and a Guildhall; and frequently
there would be an adjacent university. This was the typical formation.
The various quarters of the city were subordinated to these central
institutions, and the work which was carried on within the city’s walls
was more or less concretely realized in the local community.

Coketown, on the other hand, was the outcome of other conditions and
necessities. The center of Coketown’s activity was the mill, set at
first in the open country near falling water, and then as coal was
applied to steam engines, removed to areas more accessible to the coal
fields. The factory became the new social unity; in fact it became the
only social unit; and, as Dickens sharply put it, “the jail looked like
the town hall, and the town hall like the infirmary”--and all of them
looked like the factory, a gaunt building of murky brick that once was
red or yellow. The sole object of the factory is to produce goods for
sale; and every other institution is encouraged in Coketown only to the
extent that it does not seriously interfere with this aim.

What are the outward physical aspects of Coketown? To begin with, the
city is laid out by an engineer; it is laid out with a mathematical
correctness and with a complete disregard for the amenities. If there
are hills where Coketown ought to stand, the hills are leveled; if
there are swamps, the swamps are filled; if there are lakes, the lakes
are drained away. The pattern to which Coketown’s activities are fitted
is that of the gridiron; there are no deviations and no allowances in
the working out of this plan; never will a street swerve as much as
a hair’s breadth to save a stand of trees or open up a vista. In the
matter of transportation and intercourse, the aim of Coketown is to
“get somewhere”; and it fancies that by laying down straight lines
and joining them in rectangles this aim is expedited; despite the
demonstration in every city of older growth that a radial system of
intercommunication is much more economical than the gridiron. As a
result, there is no terminus to any of the avenues of Coketown; for
they begin on a draughting board and end in infinity. It is impossible
to approach from the front the jails, hospitals, and sanatoria of which
Coketown boasts; the tendency is to run past them. So much for the
physical layout of the industrial city; what remains is obscured by
smoke.

The factory is the center of Coketown’s social life; and it is here
that the greater part of the population spend their days. At its
purest, that is to say, during the first half of the nineteenth
century, and in a great many centers to this day, the factory is
the only institution that provides anything like a social life, in
spite of the fact that the unremitting toil which accompanies its
routine reduces the graces of social intercourse to such a minimum
that drunkenness and copulation are the only amusements which the
inhabitants can engage in as a relief from their noble duty of
providing the rest of the world with necessities, comforts, luxuries,
and nullities.

The Coketown idolum has been disintegrating a little during the last
two decades, under the influence of the garden cities movement,
and I am aware that in certain departments I am celebrating a lost
cause and an abandoned idealism; but there still remain in acres and
acres of workingmen’s dwellings, such as one finds in Battersea and
Philadelphia, and in old-fashioned railway stations, and in buildings
like the Mechanics Halls of Pittsburgh and Boston, a notion of what
Coketown stood for when Coketown, the Frankenstein which had been
created by the Country House, had not been repudiated by its master.

Coketown is devoted to the production of material goods; and there
is no good in Coketown that does not derive from this aim. The only
enjoyment which those who are inured to the Coketown routine can
participate in is mechanical achievement; that is to say, activity
along industrial and commercial lines; and the only result of this
achievement is--more achievement. It follows that all the standards
of Coketown are of a quantitative kind; so many score of machines, so
many tons of gew-gaws, so many miles of piping, so many dollars of
profit. The opportunities for self-assertion and constructiveness in
such a community are practically boundless; and I can never confront
the mechanical felicities of a printing plant without realizing how
fascinating these opportunities are, and how deeply they satisfy
certain elements in our nature. The unfortunate thing about Coketown,
however, is that these are the only sort of opportunities that are
available; and work whose standards are of a qualitative sort, the work
of scholars and artists and scientists, is either frozen out of the
community by deliberate ostracism, or is hitched to the machine; the
artist, for example, being compelled to sing the praises of Coketown’s
goods or to paint the portrait of Coketown’s supreme esthetic
achievement--the Self-Made Man.

In its pristine state, Coketown is not a complete community. So it is
natural that the idolum should have provided certain additions. In the
first place, the activities of Coketown, whether they are beneficial
or wasteful, satisfy only certain elements in the human makeup; and
although much may be done by compulsory education to discipline the
younger generation to the machine, and to show them the necessity of
doing nothing which would interfere with the continued activity of the
machine--for work in Coketown, as Samuel Butler fearfully predicted
in Erewhon, is in the main simply attendance upon machinery--here
and there the igneous instincts of the workers will break through
the solidified layer of habit which the school and the factory have
produced, and the arcane energies of the population will flow either
into the Country House or into that other simulacrum of the civic life,
Broadway.

Coketown for the workaday week, the Country House for the weekend,
is the compromise that has been practically countenanced; although
the country houses of the working classes may be nothing more than
a diminutive extension of the urban slum near sea or mountain. But
it must be admitted that there is a permanent Country House and a
permanent Coketown population in the more ideal aspects of the order.
Mr. Wells in the Time Machine has given a picture of Coketown which
is perhaps a little exuberant in some of its details--the picture of
a happy and careless Country House population, living on the surface
of the earth, mid all the graces of a jolly weekend, and that of the
factory population, the Morlocks, living in the bowels of the earth and
performing the necessary industrial functions. Mr. Wells’ presentation
is a little exaggerated, however, and we must be content here with such
a plain and outright description as Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind
would approve of.

In the Coketown scheme of things, all that does not contribute to the
physical necessities of life is called a comfort; and all that does not
contribute either to comforts or necessities is called a luxury. These
three grades of good correspond to the three classes of the population:
the necessities are for the lower order of manual workers, together
with such accessory members as clerks, teachers, and minor officials;
the comforts are for the comfortable classes, that is, the small order
of merchants, bankers, and industrialists; while the luxuries are for
the aristocracy, if there is such an hereditary group, and for such as
are able to lift themselves out of the two previous orders. Chief among
the luxuries, it goes without saying, are art and literature and any of
the other permanent interests of a humane life.

Let us note what an improvement the three classes of Coketown are
upon the three classes in Plato’s Republic. The custom of limiting
the earnings of the working classes to the margin of subsistence is
singularly effective in keeping them occupied with the business of
production--as long as there is no overplus in the market to throw
them out of work--and it is thus a safeguard of efficiency and
industry which Plato, who was deplorably obtuse in these matters,
did not provide. It is likewise obvious that the life of a middle
class citizen, with plenty to eat and drink, with his life protected
by the policeman, his pocketbook protected by the insurance company,
his spiritual happiness protected by the church, his human sympathies
protected by the charity organization society, his intelligence
protected by the newspaper, and his economic privileges protected
by the State--this middle class citizen is, after all, a much more
fortunate and happy individual than those Platonic warriors whose
life was a perpetual effort to keep the edge on their bodies and
minds. As for the Guardians of the State, it is plain that Plato did
not offer them any inducement to do their work which would attract a
normal commercial man: anyone who was worth a hundred thousand dollars
a year would have thought twice before assuming leadership in Plato’s
impoverished commonwealth, whereas in Coketown he would find that
his simple ability to make money would be taken as sufficient proof
of his education, his insight, and his wisdom in every department of
life. More than that, Coketown, when all is said and done, welcomes
the artist with a cordiality that puts Plato to shame: Coketown can
afford its luxuries since, when you look at the matter squarely, a rare
painting might be worth as much as a rare postage stamp; and it is
accordingly an acceptable addition to the Coketown milieu.

Coketown has, in fact, only one question for the arts to answer: What
are they good for? If the answer can be expressed in money, the art
in question is taken to be almost as satisfactory as a device to save
labor, to increase speed, or to multiply the output.


9

There is one phenomenon still to be accounted for in the economy
of Coketown; one monumental instrument without which the wheels of
Coketown would become clogged and the very breath of Coketown be
extinguished.

I refer to the rubbish heaps.

The aim of production in Coketown is naturally more production, and it
is only by making things sufficiently shoddy to go to pieces quickly,
or by changing the fashion sufficiently often, that the machinery of
Coketown can for the most part be kept running. The rage and fury of
Coketown’s production has to be balanced off by an equal rage and
fury of consumption--continence would be fatal. As a result, nothing
in Coketown is finished or permanent or settled: these qualities are
another name for death. Coketown makes china to be broken, clothes
to be worn out, and houses to be torn down; and if something remains
over from an earlier age which made things more soundly, it is
either incarcerated in a museum, and derided as the monument of a
non-progressive age, or it is demolished as a nuisance. So powerful
is the idolum of Coketown that in the workaday world building after
building continues to meet with irreparable ruin at the hands of
barbarians from Coketown: why, I have even seen innocent little
half-timbered fifteenth century cottages whose fronts were obliterated
by a nineteenth century plasterer, in the name of progress.

The status of every family in Coketown can be told by the size of its
rubbish heap. In fact, to “make a pile” in the markets of Coketown is
ultimately to make another pile--of dust and junk and litter--on the
edge of the town where the factory district dribbles off into the open
country. So in Coketown consumption is not merely a necessity: it is a
social duty, a means of keeping “the wheels of civilization turning.”
At times there appears to be a possibility that this utopia may defeat
its purposes by producing goods at such a pace that the rubbish heaps
will fall behind the demands of the market; and while this mars the
theoretic perfection of the Coketown social organization, it is offset
by periods of war, when the market is practically inexhaustible, and
Coketown’s prosperity increases to a point at which the working classes
are on the point of becoming the comfortable classes without having had
sufficient previous training to make their contribution to the rubbish
heap--a serious pass, amidst which confusion the working classes of
Coketown might take to reducing their working days and enjoying their
leisure without sufficient consumptive effort.

This, then, is the idolum of Coketown. There are certain features in
it which need to be noticed. The first is that there is a certain
solid reality in Coketown that remains when all its pretensions
and idiocies have been incinerated. An environment that is devoted
solely to the production of material goods is obviously no sort of
environment for a good community, for life is more than a matter of
finding what we shall eat and wherewithal we shall be clothed: it is
an interaction with a whole world of landscapes, living creatures and
ideas, in comparison with which Coketown is a mere blister on the
earth’s surface. Nevertheless, with respect to the business of melting
steel and building roads and performing certain essential industrial
operations, the aims of Coketown are, up to a certain point, relevant:
we have already encountered them in Andreæ’s Christianopolis. There is
no need to dismiss the good that lies inside of industrialism because
it does not embrace the good that lies beyond it.

Up to a certain point, then, using mechanical power rather than human
power is good; so is large-scale production, so is the division of
labor and division of operation; so is rapid transportation; so is
the accurate methodology of the engineer; and so are various other
features in the modern industrial world. One might even say a word for
efficiency, as against “doing things rather more or less.” Coketown
made the horrid mistake of believing that all these things were good in
themselves. New factories, for example, drew a bigger population into
the city: Coketown did not perceive that, as Plato pointed out, beyond
a certain point the city as a social unit would cease to exist. Bigger
and better was Coketown’s motto; and it resolutely refused to see that
there was no necessary connection between these adjectives. The whole
case for and against Coketown rests upon our admission of the phrase
“up to a certain point.” Up to a certain point, industrialism is good,
especially in its modern, neotechnic, electrical phase: Coketown, on
the other hand, believes that there is no limit to the usefulness of
industrialism.

Up to a certain point--but what point? The answer is, up to the point
at which the cultivation of a humane life in a community of humane
people becomes difficult or impossible.

Men come together, says Aristotle, to live; they remain together in
order to live the good life. This determination of the good life is
the only check and balance that we can have upon Coketown; and it is
perhaps because we have been so little concerned with it that the
practical effect of the Coketown idolum has been so devastating.
“Invention and organization,” as Mr. George Santayana admirably
points out, “which ought to have increased leisure by producing
the necessaries of life with little labor, have only increased the
population, degraded labor, and diffused luxury.” William Morris
conceived that men in the future might discard many complicated
machines because they could live more happily, aye, work more happily
without them. Whether indeed a good part of modern organization and
machinery could be scrapt is perhaps a debatable question: but the
possibility of scrapping it is at least conceivable once we become more
interested in the actual result of industrialism upon the life and
happiness of the people who are part of the organization than we are in
the profits which pile up upon paper, and are finally realized in an
ever-growing rubbish heap.


10

By what means can the Country House keep Coketown working for it? The
idolum of the Country House, which was built up during the Renascence,
and the idolum of Coketown, which was formed in the early part of the
nineteenth century, are obviously two separate worlds; and in order
that each might be realized in our daily life, it was necessary that
some connecting tissue be manufactured to keep them together. This
tissue was the social myth, the collective utopia, of the National
State.

There is a sense in which we may look upon the National State as a
fact; but that great philosopher of the National State, Mazzini,
realized that the National State had continually to be willed; and
its existence lies plainly, therefore, on a different plane from the
existence of a bit of territory, a building, or a city. In fact, it is
only by the persistent projection of this utopia for the last three
or four hundred years that its existence has become credible; for all
the minute descriptions which the political historian gives to the
National State, its origins and its institutions and its people, read
a good deal like that fine story which Hans Andersen told about the
king who walked the streets naked because two rascally tailors had
persuaded him that they had woven and cut up for him a beautiful outfit
of clothes.

It will help us to appreciate this beautiful fabrication of the
National State if we turn aside for a moment and glance at the actual
world as it is known to the geographer and the anthropologist. Here are
the physical facts in defiance of which the utopia of nationalism has
been clapped together.


11

The earth that the geographer surveys is divided into five great land
masses. These land masses in turn can be broken up into a number of
natural regions, each of which has within its rough and approximate
frontiers a certain complex of soil, climate, vegetation, and, arising
out of these, certain primitive occupations which the inhabitants
of the region originally practiced and later, through the advance
of trade and invention, elaborated. Between these natural regions
there are occasionally frontiers, such as the barrier of the Pyrenees
which separates “France” from “Spain”; but these barriers have never
altogether prevented movements of population from one area to another.
In order to have a more faithful knowledge of regional groupings in
certain important areas, the reader might with profit consult Professor
Fleure’s Human Geography in Western Europe. (London: Williams and
Norgate.)

These natural regions are the groundwork of human regions; that is, the
non-political grouping of population with respect to soil, climate,
vegetation, animal life, industry and historic tradition. In each of
these human regions we find that the population does not consist of a
multitude of atomic individuals: on the contrary, when the geographer
plots houses and buildings on a topographic map, he finds that people
and houses cohere together in groups of more or less limited size,
called cities, towns, villages, hamlets. Normally, a vast amount of
intercourse takes place between these groupings; and in the Middle
Age, before the utopia of the National State had been created, the
pilgrim and the wandering scholar and the journeyman and the strolling
player could have been met with on all the highways of Europe. Under
the dispensation of the National State, however, the population, as
the German economist Buecher points out, tends to be more settled,
and we transport goods rather than people. It is important to realize
that, so far as the geographer can discover, this trade and intercourse
between local groups has been a part of Western European civilization
since Neolithic times, at least: it takes place continually between
individuals and corporate groups in one place and another, and as far
as geographical facts are concerned might more easily exist between
Dover and Calais, let us say, than between Calais and Paris.

Now the interesting thing about the utopia of the National State is
that it has only the most casual relation to the facts of geography.
Wherever it suits the purposes of the Guardians of the State, the facts
are ignored, and an artificial relation is _willed_ into existence.
The human communities which the regional sociologist recognizes do not
always coincide with those which the statesman wishes to incorporate as
“national territory,” and when this conflict occurs, the idea rather
than the reality triumphs, if necessary by brute force.

In the utopia of the National State there are no natural regions; and
the equally natural grouping of people in towns, villages and cities,
which, as Aristotle points out, is perhaps the chief distinction
between man and the other animals, is tolerated only upon the fiction
that the State hands over to these groups a portion of its omnipotent
authority, or “sovereignty” as it is called, and permits them to
exercise a corporate life. Unfortunately for this beautiful myth, which
generations of lawyers and statesmen have labored to build up, cities
existed long before states--there was a Rome on the Tiber long before
there was a Roman Imperium--and the gracious permission of the state is
simply a perfunctory seal upon the accomplished fact.

Instead of recognizing natural regions and natural groups of people,
the utopia of nationalism establishes, by the surveyor’s line, a
certain realm called national territory, and makes all the inhabitants
of this territory the members of a single, indivisible group, the
nation, which is supposed to be prior in claim and superior in power
to all other groups. This is the only social formation that is
officially recognized within the national utopia. What is common to
all the inhabitants of this territory is thought to be of far greater
importance than any of the things that bind men together in particular
civic or industrial groups.

Let us look at this world of national utopias. The contrast between
the politician’s map and the geographer’s would be little less than
amazing were our eyes not used to it, and were we not taught in modern
times to look upon it as inevitable. Instead of the natural grouping
of land masses and regions, one finds a multitude of quite arbitrary
lines: boundaries like those that separate Canada and the United States
or Belgium and the Netherlands are just as frequent as the natural
frontier of sea that surrounds England. Sometimes these national
territories are big, and sometimes they are little; but the bigness of
empires like those of France, England, or the United States is not due
to any essential identity of interests between the sundry communities
of these empires, but to the fact that they are forcibly held together
by a political government. National lines, in other words, continue to
exist only as long as the inhabitants continue to act in terms of them;
are ready to pay their taxes to support customs bureaux, immigration
offices, frontier patrols, and educational systems; and are prepared,
in the last extremity, to lay down their lives to prevent other groups
from crossing these imaginary lines without permission.

The chief concern of the national utopia is the support of the central
government, for the government is the guardian of territory and
privilege. The principal business of that government is to keep the
territory properly defined, and to increase its limits, when possible,
so as to make the taxable area larger. By stressing the importance of
these concerns, and constantly playing up the dangers of rivalry from
other national utopias, the State builds a bridge between the Country
House and Coketown, and persuades the workers in Coketown that they
have more in common with the classes that exploit them than they have
in common with other groups within a more limited community. It would
seem that this reconciliation of Coketown and the Country House is
little less than miraculous, even as an ideal; and perhaps it would be
interesting to examine a little more carefully the apparatus by which
this is effected.


12

The chief instrument of the National State is Megalopolis, its biggest
city, the place where the idolum of the National Utopia was first
created, and where it is perpetually willed into existence.

In order to grasp the quintessential character of Megalopolis we must
shut our eyes to the palpable earth, with its mantle of vegetation
and its tent of clouds, and conceive what might be made of the human
landscape if it could be entirely fabricated out of paper; for the
ultimate aim of the Megalopolis is to conduct the whole of human life
and intercourse through the medium of paper.

The early life of a young citizen in Megalopolis is spent in acquiring
the tools by which paper may be used. The names of these tools
are writing, reading, and arithmetic; and once upon a time these
constituted the main elements in every Megalopolitan’s education.
There was, however, a good deal of dissatisfaction, on paper,
against this somewhat barren curriculum, and so at a fairly early
date in the history of Megalopolis, various other subjects, such as
literature, science, gymnastics, and manual training were added to
the curriculum--on paper. It is indeed possible for a Megalopolitan
student to know the atomic formula of clay without ever having seen it
in the raw earth, to handle pine wood in the workshop without having
walked through a pine forest, and to go through the masterpieces of
poetic literature without having experienced a single emotion which
would prepare him to appreciate anything different from one of the
influential Megalopolitan magazines, “Smutty Stories”, but as long as
his hours of attendance can be recorded on paper, and as long as he can
give a satisfactory account of his studies on an examination paper, his
preparation for life is practically complete; and so he is graduated
with a paper certificate of education into the industries of Coketown,
or into the multitudinous bureaus of Megalopolis itself.

The end of this period of paper tutelage is but a prelude to its
continuation in another form; for the religious care of paper is
the Megalopolitan’s life work. The daily newspaper, the ledger, the
card index are the means by which he now makes contact with life,
whilst the fiction magazine and the illustrated paper are the means
by which he escapes from it. Through the translucent form of paper
known as celluloid, it has been possible to do away on the stage
with flesh-and-blood people; and therefore the drama of life, as the
Megalopolitan story writers tell it, can be enacted at one remove
from actuality. Instead of his travelling, the world moves before the
Megalopolitan, on paper; instead of his venturing forth on the highways
of the world, adventure comes to him, on paper; instead of his getting
him a mate, his bliss may be all but consummated--on paper. In fact,
so accustomed does the Megalopolitan become to experiencing all his
emotions on paper that he can be entertained by the representation of
a static bowl of flowers on a moving picture screen; while his cockney
ignorance of nature is so vast that a certain vaudeville performer,
seeking to amuse him by imitating the calls of birds and beasts, finds
it wise to have moving pictures taken of the rooster, the dog, and the
cat, in order to give his mimicries reality in minds destitute of any
personal image.

The notion of direct action, direct intercourse, direct association,
is a foreign one to Megalopolis. If any action is to be taken by the
whole community, or by any group in it, it is necessary to carry it
through the Megalopolitan parliament, and have it established on paper,
after innumerable people, who have no genuine concern in the matter,
have committed their views about it to paper. If any intercourse is
to be carried on, it must be largely conducted on paper; and if that
medium is not directly available, subsidiary instruments, like the
telephone, are used. The chief form of association in Megalopolis is
that by political party, and it is through the political party that the
Megalopolitan expresses his views, on paper, as to what is necessary
to amend the paper constitution or promote the welfare of the paper
community; albeit he realizes that the promises made by political
parties are written on what Megalopolitans in their more cynical
moments call “non-negotiable” paper, and will probably never pass into
currency.

By its traffic in Coketown’s multifarious goods and by its command over
certain kinds of paper known as mortgages or securities, Megalopolis
ensures a supply of real foods and real staples from the countryside.
Through incessant production of books, magazines, newspapers,
boilerplate features, and syndicated matter, Megalopolis ensures that
the idolum of the National Utopia shall be kept alive in the minds of
the underlying inhabitants of the country. Finally, by the devices of
“national education” and “national advertising” all the inhabitants
of the National Utopia are persuaded that the good life is that which
is lived, on paper, in the capital city; and that an approximation to
this life can be achieved only by eating the food, dressing in the
clothes, holding the opinions, and purchasing the goods which are
offered for sale by Megalopolis. So the chief aim of every other city
in the National Utopia is to become like Megalopolis; its chief hope
is to grow as big as Megalopolis; its boast is that it is another
Megalopolis. When the denizens of Megalopolis dream of a better world,
it is only a paper perfection of that National Utopia which Edward
Bellamy looked forward to in Looking Backward.

Working in connection with the Machine Process of Coketown, the
Megalopolis erects a standard of life which can be expressed in
commercial terms, on paper, even if it does not offer any tangible
satisfaction in goods and services and perfections. The chief boast
of this standard is its uniformity; that is, its equal applicability
to every person in the community without respect to his history, his
circumstances, his needs, his actual rewards. Hence such goods as
Megalopolis creates in profusion are for the most part in the line of
plumbing and sanitary devices which, if they do not exactly heighten
the joy of living, at any rate make the routine of Megalopolitan life a
little less formidable.

The total result of these standards and uniformities is that what was
originally a fiction in time becomes a fact. Whereas the inhabitants of
the national utopia may originally have been as diverse as the trees
in a forest, they tend to become, under the influence of education
and propaganda, as similar as telegraph poles along a road. It is
not a little to the credit of Megalopolis that the National Utopia
has pragmatically justified itself. It has created the sort of mental
environment on paper which is necessary to a smooth adjustment of
Coketown and the Country House. What is Megalopolis, in fact, but a
paper purgatory which serves as a medium through which the fallen sons
of Coketown, the producer’s hell, may finally attain the high bliss of
the Country House, the consumer’s Heaven?


13

It should be plain that in describing the National Utopia and
Megalopolis I have been trying to outline what Plato would call the
pure form. It is equally clear, I trust, that the pure form is an
idolum to which any existing national state or metropolis approximates
only so far as the idolum does not conflict too grossly with the
real men and women, the real communities, the real regions, the real
workaday occupations which continue, despite the reign of these idola,
to exist, and to occupy our main attention. Formal education has not
altogether taken the place of vital education; loyalty to the state
has not altogether succeeded as a substitute for deeper allegiances
and affiliations: occasionally, here and there, people meet each other
face to face, they eat real food, dig in real earth, smell real flowers
instead of coal tar perfumes that arise from paper bouquets, and embark
quite madly on real love affairs. It is true that these realities are
a disturbing influence: they are always threatening to undermine the
idola which the politicians and journalists and academic handymen
unite so valiantly to build up; but there they are--and even the most
stubborn idealist cannot help himself from occasionally confronting the
world that he denies!

If you and I were perfect citizens of Megalopolis, we should never
let anything come between us and our loyalty to the State: when the
State called for our taxes, we should never think regretfully of the
amusements we must forego in order to pay them; when the State demanded
that we go to war, nothing like the claims of a family or an occupation
or a moral conviction would ever step between us and our national duty.
By the same token, we should never eat any other food than that which
had been nationally advertized, and never buy anything direct from
the producer when we might buy it from a third person in Megalopolis;
we should never read any literature that is not produced in our own
country, never desire any other climate than our own country can
boast, and never seek to find in any other culture, remote in space or
time, the things which we seem to miss in our own environment. If only
this utopia of nationalism could be realized completely it would be
self-sufficient; and there would be nothing on earth, in heaven, or in
the waters over the earth which did not bear the authentic trademark of
Megalopolis.


14

The picture of the National Utopia that I have drawn is perhaps a
little too black to stand out clearly; and I must now add a few high
lights for definition.

As in Coketown, there was a point up to which efficiency in mechanical
production was a good thing, so in the national utopia there is a
point up to which uniformity is a good thing. The National State
seems historically to have arisen in some part through the relief
which the people of the Middle Age experienced in being able to travel
under the protection of the King’s law along the King’s highway, and
their discovery that common laws and customs, common weights and
measures, were on the whole an advantage over a multitude of senseless
irregularities which continued to exist in particular neighborhoods.
It was a distinct triumph for the good life when the men of London and
the men of Edinburgh, let us say, realized that they had something in
common as citizens of a single country, and emphasized the likenesses
which bound them as men rather than the antagonisms that separated them
as cities. If the National State erected barriers of trade against
other countries, it at any rate broke down barriers that had long
existed in even more limited regions, and that have long continued to
exist in certain cities in Italy and France. So much is to the good.

But uniformity is not a good in itself. It is a good only in so far
as it promotes association and social intercourse. In breaking down
minor barriers, the State created major ones, and it created national
uniformities in regions where they were meaningless. Moreover,
nationalism is inimical to cultural unity, and it perpetuates
irrelevant conflicts in the Kingdom of the Spirit where there should
be neither slave nor free, neither white nor black, neither citizen
nor outlander. As a matter of fact, the two great international
cultural vehicles of the Middle Age--the Latin Language and the Roman
Church--were broken down by the propagation of a National Language,
that spoken at the National Capital, and a National Church, that which
was subservient to the State; and nothing that nationalism has done
since has repaired this loss. On one hand, the idolum of the National
State is too narrow, because the world of culture is man’s common
inheritance, and not the mere segment of it which is called “national
literature” or “national science.” And on the other hand, the idolum
is too big, for the reason that there is no bond except a paper one
between men who are as far apart as Bermondsey and Bombay, or New York
and San Francisco. The temporal community, as Auguste Comte finely
pointed out, is local, restricted, and multiform; this is its essential
nature and limitation. The spiritual community is universal. It was a
great cultural misdemeanor when the National Utopia, in its extension
as imperialism, sought to make the spiritual community restricted and
the temporal community universal; and it is this heresy to the good
life which makes all the pretensions of the national utopia so shabby
and insincere.


15

If Coketown and the Country House and the National Utopia had
remained on paper, they would doubtless be entertaining and edifying
contributions to our literature. Unfortunately, these social myths
have been potent; they have given a pattern to our lives; and they are
the source of a great many evils that threaten, like stinking weeds,
to choke the good life in our communities. It is not because these
myths are utopias that I have been criticizing them so assiduously; it
is rather because they continue to work such wholesale damage. Hence
it has seemed worth while to point out that they are on pretty much
the same level of reality as the Republic or Christianopolis. We may
perhaps approach our social institutions a little more courageously
when we realize how completely we ourselves have created them; and how,
without our perpetual “will to believe” they would vanish like smoke in
the wind.




CHAPTER ELEVEN

  How we reckon up accounts with the one-sided utopias of the
      partisans.




CHAPTER ELEVEN


1

There have been many periods when men did not think it possible to make
life in the community reach much higher levels than it had attained,
without working a change upon human nature. The working of this
change has been one of the chief preoccupations of religion; but no
one can pretend that it has met, during the historic period, with any
overwhelming success. In the eighteenth century men became impatient
with the ministrations of institutional religion, and sought to effect
an improvement in the common life by a different method--by improving
the political, economic, and social mechanisms of society.

Up to this time the only method that had seemed feasible for improving
the technique of social organization was the mandate of law. Although
Aristotle, for instance, predicted that slavery would come to an end
on the condition that the shuttle should weave by itself and the lyre
play without human hand, no one in the Greek community of his time saw
very much likelihood of improvement through mechanical inventions or
wholesale innovations in agriculture; and no one, apparently, concerned
himself seriously with the mechanical side of affairs.

It was the same during the Middle Age. If the men of that time were
not exuberantly happy over their civilization, they had the dogmatic
conviction that nothing very satisfactory could come of a race that had
inherited the curse of Adam--a race whose only salvation could come
when its individuals were purged one by one of sin, and delivered,
by the intercession of the saints and the grace of God, into a more
benignly constituted afterworld. One might relieve the pressure a
little if the shoe pinched, perhaps, but scarcely anyone dreamed of
travelling in seven-league boots, or of establishing an Arcadia in
which boots could be dispensed with. It was foolish to look for a more
perfect society in a world that was rife with imperfect men.

The Renascence, as we have seen, changed all this. Presently a school
of philosophers followed on the heels of the utopians who devoted
themselves to preparing fairly minute plans and specifications for the
social order. In the beginning, these plans were devoted to politics
and criminal reform, like those of Rousseau, Beccaria, Bentham,
Jefferson, Godwin, and the eighteenth century reformers generally;
in the nineteenth century the main accent was economic, and a number
of movements arose which could be traced back to the semi-scientific
investigations of Adam Smith, Ricardo, Proudhon, Malthus, Marx, and
perhaps half a dozen other thinkers of outstanding importance, among
whom we should perhaps include such latter day figures as Mill,
Spencer, and Henry George.

All of these thinkers have in one way or another influenced our
thoughts and deflected our actions; and if one adds to this galaxy the
reforming elements which remained in the churches and the missionary
brotherhoods and the philanthropic organizations, we can observe,
growing up in the nineteenth century, a multitude of partisan
organizations and movements, each of which is strenuously bent on
realizing its private and partisan utopia. It is these private and
partisan utopias that I purpose to make a slight reckoning with in the
present chapter; but the field is such a huge and formidable one that I
shall limit my criticism in the main to those that attempted to effect
a change in the economic order.


2

For all the activities that men engage in we have separate words. This
is a great misfortune; for in using these words we tend to believe
that each action takes place in a separate compartment. Instead of
beginning with a whole man interacting in a whole community, we are
likely to consider only a partial man in a partial community, and by a
mental sleight of hand, before we know it, we have let the part stand
for the whole. It is this sort of abstraction, I believe, that has been
responsible for a good deal of fallacious thinking with regard to the
place of industry in the community. The economists seem to have made
the error first by talking of a creature whom they called the Economic
Man, a creature who had no instincts but those of construction and
acquisition, no habits but of working and saving, and no other ultimate
purpose than to become such a captain of industry as would make him a
candidate for the biographic sketches of Mr. Samuel Smiles, and his
present successors in the newspapers and popular magazines.

Now this Economic Man was the embodiment of honest labor and rapacious
greed. Out of the better quality, Karl Marx painted the picture of
the faithful laborer in Coketown whose masters swindled him out of
the “surplus value” he produced; out of the worse quality classical
economists like Ricardo painted an equally entrancing picture of the
beneficent capitalist, through whose foresight, organizing ability,
and boldness business could be conducted on a scale a simpler age had
scarcely dreamed of. It was out of these conceptions, as they were
elaborated and rationalized in books like Porter’s Progress of the
Nineteenth Century and Marx’s Capital, that there grew up the notion
that the only fundamental problem in the modern world was the labor
problem--the problem as to who should control industry, who should
profit by its advances, and who should own the complicated instruments
by which it was conducted.

Our business here is not to examine the various programs that were
offered during the last century in answer to these problems; merely
to catalog them with the barest explanation of their purpose would be
an imposing task, were it not for the fact that it has been neatly
done for us by Mr. Savel Zimand. It is enough to see here the common
element in capitalism, copartnery, State Socialism, Guild Socialism,
Co-operation, Communism, Syndicalism, the One Big Union, Trades
Unionism, and the like; whether these movements represent actual facts,
like capitalism, copartnery, or trades unionism, or whether they are
simply projections, like Syndicalism and the One Big Union.

If our excursion through the classic utopias has been of any use, it
must have shown us how pathetic is this notion that the key to a good
society rests simply on the ownership and control of the industrial
plant of the community. Is it any less absurd when we confess that
most of the movements which were founded upon this assumption were
actuated by generous and humane motives, and that Francis Place, the
tailor of Charing Cross, who believed in a radical application of
laissez faire principles, was just as sincere a believer in the common
weal as Karl Marx, who predicted a dictatorship of the proletariat?
If a great many of these programs have had the notion that industrial
machinery, under socialism or guildism or co-operation was to be used
for the common benefit, what was lacking was any common notion as to
what the common benefit was.

All that was common to these partisan utopias was a desire to get rid
of positive evils such as overwork or starvation or irregularity of
employment. In their rejection of the existing order of Coketown, with
its rubbish heaps for the disposal of material waste, and its jails,
hospitals, sanatoria, doss houses, Salvation Army Headquarters, and
charitable organizations for the disposal of the human excrement of
industrialism--in turning their backs upon these things and asserting
the simple elements of human dignity, all our radical programs were
right and inevitable. To reject what industrial society had to offer
its members in the filthy factory districts and wretched slums of
Coketown was obviously to reject barbarism and degradation of the worst
sort: the incredible thing about the industrial revolution, indeed,
is not that there were a few riots here and there against the use of
machinery, but that the industrial population has not been in a state
of continual insurrection, and that the industrial towns have not been
looted and razed again and again. It is nothing less than a tribute
to the fundamental good nature and sweetness of human beings that the
strikes by which the workers have expressed their sense of grievance
have not demolished the material hovels that today stand upright in the
valleys of York-Riding, in the valleys of the Ohio and its tributaries,
or in that terrible slum which stretches in back of the Jersey meadows
from Elizabeth into Patterson. There are many districts in these areas
which are scarcely worth the respect of orderly demolition. To give a
grim rejection to the society that produced them only mildly meets the
situation. They should be destroyed by trumpets and God’s wrath--like
Jericho!

So much for what is sound and valid in the various one-sided programs
for reform. But if their attitude towards the past performances of
industrialism was sound, their gesture towards the future, and their
attitude towards the whole milieu, was little less than indifferent.
There were to be certain gains in money wages, in political control,
in the distribution of products, and so forth; but the realization
of these gains was never projected in any very vivid way--a vague
fellowship in peace and plenty under gay red banners was all that was
left over when the current efforts to “educate the masses,” “revise the
constitution,” or “organize the revolution” were taken for granted.

In his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Friedrich Engels made a plea
for a realistic method of thought, which limited itself to a here and
now, as against what he derided as the utopian method, the attempt
on the part of a single thinker to give a detailed picture of the
society of the future. Yet at the present time it is easy to see that
if the utopian socialism of Owen has been ineffective, the realistic
socialism of Marx has been equally ineffective; for while Owen’s kind
of socialism has been partly fulfilled in the co-operative movement,
the dictatorship of the proletariat rests upon very shaky foundations,
and such success as it has had is due perhaps as much to Marx’s
literary picture of what it would be like as to anything else. I do not
doubt that the partisan movements have achieved many specific gains;
consumer’s co-operation alone has in England measurably lightened the
physical burden of existence for a great many people. Their weakness
consists in the fact that they have not altered the contents of
the modern social order, even when they have altered the method of
distribution; and in addition, a good many of these partisan utopias,
for lack of any definite and coherent scheme of values, crumble away
as soon as they meet the opposition of such powerful collective
utopias as Coketown or the Country House. In America, particularly,
the labor movement is paralyzed by this perpetual movement into the
bourgeoisie--concretely speaking, into Suburbia and the Country
House--and in Great Britain much the same sort of dereliction can be
observed within the narrower group from which the leaders of the trades
unions and the Labor Party are drawn.

Hence also the less interesting problem of the Tired Radical, which
Mr. Walter Weyl suggestively outlined. There is indeed a pertinent
criticism of the paper environment of Megalopolis, in the tenacious way
in which people continue to cling to abstract programs and to movements
which never approach perceptibly nearer their fulfillment. The marvel
is that the concrete utopia of the Country House has not exercised a
more potent influence than it actually does. When one compares the vast
amount of agitation during the last century--the Chartist Movement,
the Socialist Movement, the International Peace Movement--with the
actual results in the reconstruction of work, place, and people, or
with the actual effects any reconstruction has had upon our polity,
our culture, our art--it is surprising that these movements have had
any effective claim upon our allegiance. Men will indeed work for an
idea--the notion that they will not is a superstition--but sooner or
later the spirit must be made manifest in the flesh, and if it never
comes to birth, or at best is an abortion, the idea is bound to wither
away.

How long would the parliamentary clatter of socialism have mechanically
kept on--had it not been for the dislocation of war? How long could
its abstract programs have remained in the air, before coming down to
specifications? I obviously cannot answer these questions; but it seems
plain enough that our radical programs have had simply a sentimental
interest: they moved people without giving them a specific task, they
stirred them emotionally without giving them an outlet, and so, at
best, they are but partial utopias of escape, using the powers of
organization, collective meetings, and pronunciamentos to take the
place of the emotional stimuli which the avowed utopia of escape, like
News from Nowhere, supplies by introducing a beautiful girl. In this
aspect, the Socialist Party, with its revolutionary demands, did not
differ in its psychological performance from the Republican Party,
which specialized in the rhetorical device of the full dinner pail;
nor did it differ in any fundamental way from the defunct Progressive
Party, which for a time believed in a new heaven and earth to follow
the initiative, referendum, and recall with an intensity of moral
conviction beside which the social revolutionist was positively tame.

Who doubts the honesty and sincerity of most of the members of these
parties? Who doubts their devotion to revolution or “uplift”? It is
all beside the point. A machine which doesn’t work because it is badly
constructed is just as useless as one that doesn’t work because its
maker is a deliberate fraud; and all the sincerity and good will and
honesty doesn’t make any one a smile the happier. It is about time that
we faced the facts and realized that in all our sundry mechanisms of
reform “there is a screw loose somewhere.” This pregnant metaphor of
the industrial age is usually applied to neurotic disorder; and I am
using it in the present context with fell intentions. I mean that the
utopia of the partisan is, psychologically speaking, a fetish; that
is to say, it is an attempt to substitute the part for the whole, and
to pour into the part all the emotional content that belongs to the
whole. When a man gets hold of a lady’s handkerchief or garter, and
behaves towards that object with as much intensity and interest as he
would towards its flesh and blood owner, the handkerchief or garter is
said to be a fetish. I hazard the judgment that Socialism, Prohibition,
Proportional Representation, and the various other abstract “isms” are
the fetishes of the partisan: they are attempts to make some particular
instrument or function of the community stand for the whole. It is
doubtless much easier to filch a handkerchief than to win a girl.
By the same token, it is easier to concentrate on the use of liquor
or the ownership of machinery and land than upon the totality of a
community’s activities. It is easier indeed; but it is fatal; for the
result of this fetishism is perhaps that the girl remains unmated, and
the society fails to undergo any fundamental change. Moreover, the
reforming elements in society become incapacitated by their practice
of fetishism to take a normal part in the community’s activities; and
remain so much waste material--at best, they wander between two worlds,
“one dead, the other powerless to be born.”

We know these disoriented reformers, these disillusioned
revolutionaries, these tired radicals; we could mention names if it
were not so needless and so cruel. Apart from anything else, their
original mistake was to keep their problem within the compartment of
politics and economics, instead of venting it to the wide world. They
forgot that the adjustment of some single activity or institution,
without respect to the rest, begged the very difficulty they were
trying to overcome. If they were anti-militarists, they saw the world
simply as an armed camp; if they were socialists, they saw it as a
gigantic mechanism of exploitation; and alas! they saw only so much of
the world as would conveniently fit within these diagrams. The world
is perhaps an armed camp and a mechanism of exploitation; it is all
that and much more; but any attempt to deal with it on a wholesale plan
by eliminating all the qualifying elements in the problem is bound to
encounter the brute nature of things; and if the nature of things is
essentially antagonistic, the reform itself will fail.

To say all this is to emphasize the obvious. If any further emphasis
were needed it would be necessary only to compare the doctrines of
Marx, as expounded by Lenin at the beginning of the Russian Revolution,
and the doctrines of Lenin, as tempered by experience and circumstance
a few years later.


3

There was still another weakness that characterized all the partisan
utopias of the nineteenth century. That weakness was their externalism.

If the mediæval thinkers were convinced that, on the whole, nothing
could be done to rectify men’s institutions, while men themselves were
so easily bitten by corruption, their successors in the nineteenth
century committed the opposite kind of error and absurdity: they
believed that human nature was unsocial and obstreperous only because
the church, the state, or the institution of property perverted every
human impulse. Men like Rousseau, Bentham, Godwin, Fourier, and Owen
might be miles apart from one another in their criticism of society,
but there was an underlying consensus in their belief in human nature.
They looked upon human institutions as altogether external to men;
these were so many straitjackets that cunning rulers had thrown over
the community to make sane and kindly people behave like madmen; and
they could conceive of changing the institutions without changing the
habits and redirecting the impulses of the people by whom and for whom
they had been created. If one devised neat political constitutions,
with plenty of checks and balances, or laid out pauper colonies and
invited the countryside to make use of them--well, all would be to the
good.

There was, it is true, one great exception to this notion that
institutions might be reformed without, in that process, making over
men. I refer to the belief in education which accompanied these
classic criticisms of human institutions; for this seems to point to
a perception that men needed a special training and discipline before
they could enter freely into the life of a reconstituted community. But
upon examination, this exception melts away. The emphasis in the new
programs of education was upon the formal, institutional acquirement
of the apparatus of knowledge; and they, too, began with the clean
slate of a new generation, whereas the critical difficulty was that
of getting the adult community sufficiently educated, in a realistic
sense, to be able to make over its educational institutions; and in
this respect the reformers were just as much in Cuckooland as--well,
Campanella. So it follows that the Country House and Coketown shared
honors in building up the new educational organizations; and the
outcome of the sort of education that the public school and college
provided was to make these redoubtable utopias practically unassailable.

Besides, there were the adults: consider Robert Owen!

Robert Owen, one of the most sanguine advocates of popular education,
was himself a living example of the need for a different kind of
discipline than his narrow and homiletic mind, with its childish
interpretation of religious belief and its equally childish
rationalism, was capable of framing. No one ever frustrated so many
good ideas, from the plan of garden cities down to the project for
co-operative production than this same Owen, whose bumptiousness,
arrogance, and conceit were bound to provoke reactions in other people
which would have defeated the plans of Omnipotence itself. The capital
difficulty was to get any sort of social improvement in a world that
was full of refractory Owens. A locomotive may, in a sense, be a more
perfect thing than the man who made it; but no social order can be
better than the human beings who take part in it; for whereas the
locomotive can stand apart from its operatives and perform all its
functions effectively even if the workers themselves are deficient in
every other respect than mechanics, with a social order the product and
the producer continue to be one.

Not merely does a community need a Buddha, let us say, before it
can produce Buddhism; it needs a whole succession of Buddhas if the
religion itself is not to fritter away into the hideous ecclesiastical
grind it became in Thibet. This principle has a general application.
The social critics of the last century confused the mechanical problem
of transforming an institution or of creating a new organization
with the personal and social problem of spurring people to effect
the transformation and see it through. Their tactics were those of
a general who would go into battle without training his army; their
strategy was that of the demagogue who talks of a million armed men
springing up overnight. The personal problem, the problem of education,
was as easy as that!

If we are to account for the poverty of our achievements in renovating
the community, in contrast with the enormous amount of quite
justifiable economic and political agitation, research, and criticism,
it is perhaps not altogether fair to put the entire burden of failure
upon the partisan’s lop-sided utopia. The plans of our reformers have
indeed been weak and jerrybuilt in themselves; but that is not all.
What has perhaps been even more conspicuously lacking has been people
who are accessible to the existing knowledge, people whose minds have
been trained to play freely with the facts, people who have learned the
fine and exacting art of co-operating with their fellows; people who
are as critical of their own mental processes and habits of behavior as
they are of the institutions they wish to alter. As Viola Paget says:
“The bulk of thinking and feeling intended to help on human improvement
has not really been good enough for the purpose. Not good enough in the
sense of not sufficiently impersonal and disciplined.”

Between our programs, our utopias, and their fulfillment there has
usually dropt a thick veil of personalities; and were the plan itself
the collaborate product of the best minds of the race; as Mr. H. G.
Wells satirically pictured in Boon, it would still have to take its
chances with the wild asses of the devil that human weakness, apathy,
greed, lust for power, might release. Walt Whitman said of Carlyle
that behind the tally of his work and genius stood the stomach, and
gave a sort of casting vote. So one may say of every social movement,
that behind the tally of its theoretic background and its concrete
programs stand human beings--hale and sick, neurotic and stable,
well-intentioned and malicious--and give the casting vote.

Anyone who has read an important book, and then met the author, who has
respected an apparently significant social movement, and then met the
leaders behind the scenes, will realize how frequent is the difficulty
of reconciling theoretic agreement with the inaccessibilities and
prejudices and repugnances of particular personalities. No one can join
the work of even the most trivial sort of committee--be it a delegation
to shake hands with the Congressman or a body designated to revise the
rules of a tennis club--without discovering how the work in hand is
perpetually being balked and diverted by the play of personalities.

It is not a little significant that popular speech gives the word
“personalities” a derogatory meaning. Again and again the success or
failure in large collaborations hinges upon human factors that have no
bearing on the question at issue. Pope’s satiric words about wretches
hanging that jurymen may dine touches the point neatly. Our programs
for reconstruction that have not reckoned with the perpetual cussedness
of human nature and have no method for exorcising it are as shallow as
those older theologies which sought to make men live in grace without
altering the social order in which they functioned. Perhaps they could
learn something from the story of that ancient agitator who cured the
blind, the maimed, the sick, and the halt before he bade them enter
into the Kingdom of Heaven. Emerson well said in his essay on Man the
Reformer that it was stupid to expect any real or permanent change from
any social program which was unable to regenerate or convert--these are
religious phases for a common psychological phenomenon--the people who
are to engineer it and carry it through.

It would be so easy, this business of making over the world, if it
were only a matter of creating machinery. There has probably never
been lacking the sort of energy and talent that is needed for this
sort of work; and at any rate, during the last three centuries, with
the growth of technology, the mechanical services at the command of
our engineers and organizers are huge and adequate. Unfortunately, we
are still in the same ditch that Carlyle mordantly pointed out in his
essay on Characteristics: Given a world of knaves, we are trying by
various cunning devices to produce an honesty from their united action.
I do not share Carlyle’s contempt for human nature in the raw, but he
is quite right, I believe, in making fun of the superficiality of our
partisan utopias. These utopias were so concerned to alter the shell
of the community’s institutions that they neglected to pay attention
to the habits of the creature itself--or its habitat. That is why
mechanical devices play such an important part, perhaps, in all these
utopias, from Jeremy Bentham, with his Panopticon method of reforming
criminals, down to the hideous cog-and-wheel utopia of Edward Bellamy.

The conceptions of human life that our reforming groups have had have
been pretty thin and unsatisfying. Any adequate conception of a new
social order would, it seems to me, include the scenery, the actors,
and the play. It is a mark of our immaturity that we never seem able to
get beyond the scene shifting. Our social theorists, in so far as they
consider the actors at all, are inclined to treat them as mechanical
puppets. As for the play itself--the universal drama of courtship
and trial and adventure and contest and achievement, in which every
human being is potentially the hero or heroine--the play itself has
hardly entered into their consciousness. Their values have not been
human values: they have been such values as have been authenticated by
commerce and industry, values such as efficiency, fair wages, and what
not. These, at any rate, have been the immediate objects of effort,
and if human values hung vaguely in the background, they were to be
realized in a distant and unascertainable future. So one often feels
that no matter how base and deteriorated the modern community is, it
nevertheless retains in its totality a greater measure of human values
than many of the groups that have attacked its inadequacy have to offer.

All this comes out pretty plainly in the attitude of the labor groups
towards the current situation. Whether they are organized for political
action or for industrial warfare, their aims are curiously similar.
In the very act of contending against the present order, they have
accepted the ends for which that order stands and have been content to
demand simply that they be universalized. This perhaps accounts for the
essential uncreativeness of the labor movement. By a revolution they do
not mean a transvaluation of values: they mean a dilution and spreading
out of established practices and institutions. There may indeed be
plenty of excuse for this attitude in any particular situation--a
group of unorganized and semi-destitute workers such as those in many
American steel plants--but the worst of it is that this attitude
characterizes the more advanced and economically secure groups, and
creeps into such ultimate programs as one can deduce from attempts to
create workers’ educational institutions--as if a change in ownership
or the balance of power would alter the face of Coketown so that its
fires would no longer burn and its cinders no longer smut.

I have emphasized what is the weakness, as it seems to me, of the
labor movement; not because I am necessarily out of sympathy with any
particular measure that might be proposed, but because it illustrates
upon an enormous scale the point which I desire to make. The
prohibition movement, or the charity organization movement--towards
both of which I feel, on the contrary, a cordial antipathy--would
serve just as well for illustration; for they all have this common
distinction: they lack any explicit, consciously projected humane ends
which would make any particular measure that they might offer justified.


4

Let me now anticipate the answer which this criticism will probably
meet. To some people it will seem that the current movements for
reform are inevitably secular; that they have no business to concern
themselves with the ultimate faith of men; that they inevitably deal
with a limited here and now, a dollar more of wages, a drop less of
liquor, a touch more of uniformity, and so forth. In short, our partial
utopias need not concern themselves with any of the questions that have
to do with the life of the spirit.

The simple answer to this crude philosophy is--so much the worse for
them. The breach between the institutions that deal with the material
life and those that deal with the ideal life results either in a
complete dissociation, by which each set of institutions becomes
paralytic and imbecile; or, as so often happens, in a capitulation
of the spiritual power to the temporal, and its complete engrossment
in temporal ends. I am aware that these phrases, “spiritual” and
“temporal,” have a certain old-fashioned smell; but they precisely
express my meaning: it is plain that every community contains the
corresponding institutions--one group being devoted to values and
the other to means. When our reforms are not touched by a sense of
values, the result is that purely temporal ends are taken as ultimate,
and we have such notions as efficiency or organization regarded
as the very touchstone of social improvement. This is scarcely an
improvement over the old order of things, with which we are now so
dismally familiar--the state in which our values were not fertilized
by any intercourse with the concrete and actual world about us, and so
remained remote and sterile. In short, unless our reformers concern
themselves with the ultimate values of men, with what constitutes
a good life, they are bound to pander to such immediate faiths and
superstitions as the National State, Efficiency, or the White Man’s
Burden.


5

There is a final criticism of the partial utopias: our one-sided
reforms have had this fatal defect--they are one-sided. This
partisanship was expressed by their relation to the facts upon which
their programs were based, and in their attitude towards the people who
were to be affected by them.

The mood of partisanship has been that of a lawyer who is getting up
an argument and is looking for such facts as will bolster up his case.
That mood is inimical to free and intelligent thought: its object
is rhetorical triumph. Now it happens that in all the matters which
intimately concern a community, a person’s attitude towards the facts
not merely seems more important than the facts themselves, but seems so
deucedly important that the facts are ignored. The attitude of a group
of Southern whites who will lynch a negro on the report that he has
raped a white woman before they investigate the truth of the assertion
is a bestial exaggeration of a very natural human tendency. Men are
built for action rather than thought; or rather, since thought, on the
psychologist’s interpretation, is inhibited action, the business of
inhibition naturally comes a little hard to us; and when we are in a
place where we have the rough choice of pushing through the obstacle,
under a strong impulse of resentment (instinct of pugnacity) or may
quietly withdraw from the obstacle, survey it, and frame a plan of
action to circumvent it, our fundamental impulse is to follow the first
mode.

It is easy to see, for example, how the hideous human suffering
which accompanied the growth of the capitalist organization--and
still exists!--caused the socialists to concentrate attention upon
the subjects of ownership and profits, and long blinded them to the
specific problems of organization, distribution, and control within
the industries that might be affected by the program of socialization.
This concentration upon the particular aspect of a problem, like
the concentration upon a particular aspect of the solution, has
the weakness of ignoring the total situation, and it too crudely
simplifies the difficulties. In their haste to arrive at solutions and
remedies--for the life of man is short and the needs of the moment are
pressing--the partisans neglect to make a complete tally of the facts;
and they are too ready to let “common knowledge” take the place of a
thorough investigation of the data.

This weakness arises out of an almost instinctive tendency towards
partisanship; and it is one of the reasons that partisanship continues.
If nothing else prevents groups from getting together, their failure
to agree about the facts, and their lack of a method for getting at
the facts and focussing them, is responsible. If an examination of
the facts did nothing else, it might show at least the impossibility
of drawing any conclusion from them, and it might warn the partisan
to step warily. Thus the testimony that was offered for and against
Prohibition came from fairly high authorities on both sides; and if
there had been anything like right reason in the strategically stronger
camp, it would have convinced those who were interested in the welfare
of the community that nothing could be wisely done while the very basis
for judgment--scientific knowledge as to the place of alcoholic stimuli
in the life of the human organism--had not been established.

It is of course conceivable that men will quarrel and split when they
are fully apprised of the facts: we may well remember the story of
the British ambassador who confessed to his French colleague that
the reason he did not get on very well with the Americans was that
both countries unfortunately spoke the same language; but it is
inconceivable that they should ever reach an intelligent agreement
before they are in common possession of the facts. By ignoring the
necessity for substantiating his claims and assertions the partisan
frequently not merely fails to see his whole problem in all its
implications, but also prevents any one else from seeing it. Even when
the partisan is not intentionally blind, he lacks the discipline which
is essential to an open-eyed judgment of the case. What that discipline
may be I shall attempt to discuss in the next chapter.

The second weakness of partisanship is that it breaks the community
into vertical divisions, and promotes fictitious antagonisms and
kinships which run against the horizontal affiliations and loyalties of
a man’s life. This tendency was nicely illustrated in a play by Mr. St.
John Ervine, called Mixed Marriage, which dealt with the love affair
of a young girl and a young man who were separated by the religions
that had been handed down by their parents. In Mr. Ervine’s wretched
little Ulster community, these religions served as an excuse to keep
people from being friendly and decent to their neighbors. Now it is
obvious that mating, and making friends with those who have common
interests and sentiments, and mixing freely within the whole community,
are highly important horizontal interests; they tend to unite people
in a common bond which is fundamental for the reason that these
interests and activities are essentially human. The antagonism between
two Christian sects, on the other hand, undermines the good life as a
whole, because it insists that there is no other good than a religious
good--a good embodied in a pope, or in the practice of scoffing at a
pope--while it is obvious to anyone who has possession of his senses
that kissing a pretty girl is good, and having a friendly pipe with
one’s neighbor is good, and that institutions which prevent one from
doing these things at appropriate times are perverted and antisocial.
It is true that people who emphasize religious interests take “high
ground,” as the saying is, and that those who value the friendly pipe
seem by implication to take low ground: but what the partisans fail to
see is that there is a good human case for low ground, and that, for
the great majority of people it may prove to be not merely the only
practicable ground, but in its own right a good and sufficient one.

Now for Catholic and Protestant in Mr. St. John Ervine’s play one
may substitute Democrat and Republican, White Guard and Red Guard,
Socialist and Financier, Prohibitionist and anti-Prohibitionist and
the results will be just as deplorably the same. There are any number
of interests in a well-wrought life which lie altogether beyond these
categories, and it is the chief misdemeanor of partisanism, as opposed
to utopianism, that it tends to slight these general interests, and
either bring them into the service of the “ism” or urge that they be
neglected in devotion to the “cause.” The first method has been used
by the apostles of nationalism. The National State, recognizing that
art and culture and science could not be altogether engrossed in the
strategy of political warfare, promptly put these goods in the pigeon
hole labelled national resources. The partisans of the State talked
about American science as opposed to German science, of Italian art
as opposed to French art; and thus emphasized the things which men in
America had with other Americans in order to mark off more clearly the
things they had apart from men of similar interests in other countries.
The same thing happened in the Russian communist state, with its
attempt to set aside the common cultural heritage of mankind at large
and define a purely proletarian culture. The results in every case are,
I believe, incurably mischievous; and those who would promote the good
life must cease this infantile practice of asserting vainly that “my
father knows more than your father,” “my mother is more beautiful than
your mother”--and so on.

For the most part the second method has been indefatigably used. In
the political state the partisans make a great show of the gulf which
separates the political party in power from that which is outside,
and every other interest in life is supposed to be secondary to this
abysmal cleavage. In relatively crude communities, like the United
States and Ireland, these differences seem to be taken by the great
mass of people at their face value; whereas in England, which at least
has the virtues of disillusion, it is the great tradition of Parliament
that all the animosities of the floor are ignored in the bar of the
House of Commons, while all the congenialities and convivialities that
bind men together are emphasized. Lest I be accused of prejudice where
none exists, let me add that in the most substantial reconstruction
movement that Ireland possesses--I refer to agricultural co-operation
as promoted by Sir Horace Plunkett and A. E.--the horizontal interests
which bind men together as farmers and members of a local community
are successfully emphasized to the exclusion of irrelevant vertical
differences, at least in matters touching the organization and conduct
of the Irish Agricultural Organization Society; and that, as far as
I can see, this single organization has done more to promote the
good life in Ireland than any other institution, with the possible
exception of the equally non-partisan literary association which grew
up in Dublin under the leadership of A. E., William Butler Yeats, Lady
Gregory, and the rest of that fine and glorious crew.

Obviously, it is not altogether for nothing that men have joined
together in vertical organizations which are as broad as a continent,
let us say, or the European world. There is a sense in which the
Christians of Jerusalem have more in common with the Christians of Rome
than they have with the Jews and Mohammedans of their local region. In
the same way, I find myself more deeply drawn to certain friends of
mine in Bombay and London than I am towards my next door neighbor,
with whom the only recognizable bond is our common animus against a
rapacious landlord. So long as the vertical affiliation with people of
the same views in politics or religion or philosophy is a spiritual
affiliation a great deal of good may come out of it. When, however,
the things that draw people together as members of a vertical group
are used as a means of inflicting similar opinions or practices upon
the local community, without respect to its regional qualities, the
results are little less than disastrous. The rain falls on the just and
the unjust; more than that, the food that we grow, the houses that we
build, the roads that we lay down, the thoughts that we think, belong
to us as members of the human species who have inherited the earth and
the fullness thereof; and it is absurd to let differences in our idola
prevent us from participating equally in this common heritage.

At long last, the things that unite human beings as human beings,
the social inheritance that enables them to realize their stature as
human beings, are more important than any particular element that the
partisan may lay hold of. Whether our partisanism consists in being
first and foremost an American or first and foremost a Theosophist,
it tends to limit the world with which we may have commerce and so
impoverishes the personality. The person who insists upon being a
hundred per cent. American has by that very emphasis become something
less than half a man. By fastening attention upon a segment of the
world, the partisan creates a segment of a personality. It is these
segments or sects that any movement which aims at a general good in the
community must contend against. So long as work for the common welfare
meets with irrelevant partisanisms, so long will we lack the means of
creating whole men and women; and so long will the main concerns of
civilization be side-tracked.


6

What a vision these partisan utopias present! They are like the
scattered bones that the prophet saw in the terrible valley, and one
doubts whether even the breath of the Lord could knit them together
again into real bodies....

One of these partisan utopias issues from a bundle of red-tape;
everything is filed and ticketed and labelled there; and anything in
life that cannot be treated in this fashion does not exist. Another
is a mechanical contraption; somehow it seems to litter little
mechanical contraptions; and its aim is, it would seem, to do away with
vegetation and reproduction, so that everything under the sun might be
performed with the sterile accuracy of the machine. A third utopia of
the partisan calls human beings, with all their color and thickness,
“individuals,” and makes the good life a matter of legal relationships
without any regard to their necessities in time and space; such a
utopia could almost be carried in one’s pocket, so much is it a matter
of verbal statement. We need not go down the line. Singly, it is plain
that not one of these utopias would create a happy community; while if
all of these partisanisms could be realized the result could scarcely
be anything else than discord--such a discord as now exists and every
day becomes more raucous.

It would seem that we are at an impasse. Even if I have absurdly
exaggerated the futility of the reformers and revolutionaries, their
lack of any fundamental program and their inability to conceive an
essential reorientation in modern society, come out pretty plainly. If
our analysis did not prove this, the atmosphere of disillusion which we
breathe today, and which permeates every branch of literature, would
tell as much. In so far as we have accepted the modern social order we
are in ruin; and the next war that now threatens will, if it actually
comes to pass, only carry the ruin a little further. In so far as
we have pinned our hopes to current movements for reconstruction or
revolution, our plans are sickly and debilitated. In fact, the only
genuine signs of life seem to be in regions like Ireland, Denmark,
India, and China, which have stood outside the movement of industrial
civilization and have retained the values of an order which elsewhere
has been undermined and almost destroyed. It is not a pretty situation
to face; and small wonder that we are so slow and so reluctant to face
it. Whichever way we look, bankruptcy seems to threaten us.

It is time we endeavored to cash in the paper roubles of the partisan.
If our civilization is to hold together we must place its intellectual
currency on a new basis; we must exchange our abstract idealisms, our
abstract programs, our paperized pursuit of happiness for some of the
golden coinage of life, even though we cannot have our gold without
mixing it with baser metals.




CHAPTER TWELVE

  How the half-worlds go, and how eutopia may come; and what we
      need before we can build Jerusalem in any green and pleasant
      land.




CHAPTER TWELVE


1

The sort of thinking that has created our utopias has placed desire
above reality; and so their chief fulfillment has been in the realm of
fantasy. This is true of the classic utopias that we have surveyed,
and it is true--though not perhaps quite so apparent--of the partial
utopias that were formulated by the various reconstruction movements
during the last century.

While the classic utopias have so far been nearer to reality that
they have projected a whole community, living and working and mating
and spanning the gamut of man’s activity, their projections have
nevertheless been literally up in the air, since they did not usually
arise out of any real environment or attempt to meet the conditions
that this environment presented. This defect has been suggested by the
very name of Utopia, for as Professor Patrick Geddes points out, Sir
Thomas More was an inveterate punster, and Utopia is a mock-name for
either Outopia, which means no-place, or Eutopia--the good place.

It is time to bring our utopian idola and our everyday world into
contact; indeed, it is high time, for the idola that have so far served
us are now disintegrating so rapidly that our mental world will soon
be as empty of useful furniture as a deserted house, while wholesale
dilapidation and ruin threaten the institutions that once seemed
permanent. Unless we can weave a new pattern for our lives the outlook
for our civilization is almost as dismal as Herr Spengler finds it
in Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Our choice is not between eutopia
and the world as it is, but between eutopia and nothing--or rather,
nothingness. Other civilizations have proved inimical to the good
life and have failed and past away; and there is nothing but our own
will-to-eutopia to prevent us from following them.

If this dissipation of Western Civilization is to cease, the first
step in reconstruction is to make over our inner world, and to give
our knowledge and our projections a new foundation. The problem
of realizing the potential powers of the community--which is the
fundamental problem of eutopian reconstruction--is not simply a matter
of economics or eugenics or ethics as the various specialist thinkers
and their political followers have emphasized. Max Beer, in his History
of British Socialism, points out that Bacon looked for the happiness of
mankind chiefly in the application of science and industry. But by now
it is plain that if this alone were sufficient, we could all live in
heaven tomorrow. Beer points out that More, on the other hand, looked
to social reform and religious ethics to transform society; and it is
equally plain that if the souls of men could be transformed without
altering their material and institutional activities, Christianity,
Mohammedanism, and Buddhism might have created an earthly paradise
almost any time this last two thousand years. The truth is, as Beer
sees, that these two conceptions are still at war with each other:
idealism and science continue to function in separate compartments;
and yet “the happiness of man on earth” depends upon their combination.

If we are to build up genuine eutopias, instead of permitting ourselves
to pattern our behavior in terms of fake utopias like Coketown, the
Country House, the National State, and all the other partial and
inadequate myths to which we have given allegiance, we must examine
anew the idola which will assist us in reconstituting our environment.
So we are forced to consider the place of science and art in our social
life, and to discuss what must be done in order to make them bear more
concretely upon “the improvement of man’s estate.”


2

There was a time when the world of knowledge and the world of dreams
were not separated; when the artist and the scientist, for all
practical purposes, saw the “outside world” through the same kind of
spectacles.

What we call “science” today was in its primitive state part and
parcel of that common stock of knowledge and belief which makes up a
community’s literature, or, as Dr. Beattie Crozier would have said, its
“Bible.” The departure of science from this main body of literature
begins for the Western World, probably, with the death of Plato and
the institution of Aristotle’s collections in natural history; and
from that point onwards the separate sciences, increasingly isolate
themselves from the general body of knowledge, and utilize methods
which had been unknown to the earlier philosophers and sages; so that
by the time the twentieth century dawns the process of differentiation
has been completed, and philosophy, once the compendium of the
sciences, has disappeared except as a sort of impalpable, viscous
residue.

When Aristotle divided his writing into the exoteric and esoteric
groups, into the popular and the scientific, he definitely
recognized the existence of two separate branches of literature,
two different ways of taking account of the world, two disparate
methods of approaching its problems. The first branch was that of
the philosophers, the prophets, the poets, and the plain people. Its
background was the generality of human experience: its methods were
those of discussion and conference: its criteria were those of formal
dialectics: its interests were specifically those of the community,
and nothing human was foreign to it. With the petrification of
Greek thought that followed the collapse of the Alexandrian school,
the second branch was slow in coming into its own. As late as the
eighteenth century its adherents were called natural philosophers, to
distinguish them from the more humane variety; and it is only with the
nineteenth century that the subject became universally known as science
and its practitioners as scientists.

In the Phædrus Socrates had expressed the humanist outlook of
literature by saying: “Trees and fields, you know, cannot teach me
anything, but men in the city can.” The shortest way of describing the
attitude of science is to say that it resolutely turned its back on
men in the city and devoted itself to the trees and fields and stars
and the rest of brute nature. If it paid attention to men at all it
saw them--if we may abuse an old quotation--as trees walking. Socrates
had said: Know thyself. The scientist said: Know the world that lies
outside man’s dominion. As science progressed these attitudes became
more rigid, unfortunately, and a conflict grew up between literature
and science, between the humanities and natural philosophy, which
has given both art and science the peculiar twist we shall presently
examine.

Now the developments in modern science go back, through the Arabic
thinkers, to ancient Greece; but the great advances that have been
made date back scarcely three centuries. On the basis of the precise
knowledge of physical relations which became available in mathematics,
physics, mechanics, and chemistry the startling changes which have been
crudely labelled the “industrial revolution” were carried through. If
the essential relationship between the world of ideas and the world
of action were ever in doubt, the industrial revolution, especially
in its later phases, would be a final demonstration; for beneath the
ostensible skyscrapers, subways, factories, telephone lines, and sewers
of the modern industrial city lie the immaterial foundations of western
physical science, laid down stone by stone in the remote, theoretic
researches of Boyle, Faraday, Kelvin, Leibniz, and the rest of that
great galaxy. With the far reaching effect of the idola of physical
science it is hardly necessary to deal. Everyone realizes how dependent
the advance in technology has been upon theoretic science, even though
the scientist himself, as Kropotkin pointed out, is sometimes slow in
admitting the debt of science itself to practical invention. The actual
world of machinery is at present, it seems fair to say, a parasite upon
this body of knowledge, and it would speedily starve to death if the
host were annihilated.

Science has provided the factual data by means of which the
industrialist, the inventor, and the engineer have transformed
the physical world; and without doubt the physical world has been
transformed. Unfortunately, when science has furnished the data its
work is at an end: whether one uses the knowledge of chemicals to
cure a patient or to poison one’s grandmother is, from the standpoint
of science, an extraneous and uninteresting question. So it follows
that while science has given us the means of making over the world,
the ends to which the world has been made over have had, essentially,
nothing to do with science. Accordingly, as I have suggested, the idola
of the Country House and Coketown and the National State, which were
built up by literature and art, have given the effective direction to
these transformations. So far, science has not been used by people
who regarded man and his institutions scientifically. The application
of the scientific method to man and his institutions has hardly been
attempted.

Even when one qualifies this last generalization, its outline remains
pretty sharp. The development of what are called the social sciences
was dimly outlined in Bacon’s Novum Organon; but it was not till the
eighteenth century, with Quesnay and Montesquieu, that the movement
gained any real headway, and down to this day a large part of what is
called science in Economics, Politics, and Sociology is only disguised
literature--work in which the jargon of science is accepted as a
substitute for the scientific method of arriving at factual truth, and
in which the effort to mold conduct overwhelms the attempt to reach
correct conclusions. Indeed, among the economists and sociologists
there has been a persistent dribble of discussion as to whether or not
their subjects entitled them to the august designation of scientists.

It is not without reason that the social and human sciences have been
distrusted by the devotees of physical science, so that, for example,
the British Association has long had a single section devoted to
the social sciences in which Sociology, the mother of them all, is
permitted to enter as a subclassification of Anthropology! The nearer
the investigator gets to man, the more easily he is overwhelmed with
the complexity of his subject; and the more tempted he is to adopt the
swift and easy partisan methods of the novelist, the poet, the prophet.
The mere concealment of this act of seduction under the rough, grey
cover of scientific jargon means frequently that the social scientist
has added to the offense of not being a good scientist by not even
being a good literary man.

Hence there is a great gap between the more external part of the world
which has been affected by science, and that part, nearer to man and
man’s institutions, which has yet for the greater part to be conquered.
While the physical equipment of New York compares with that of fourth
century Athens as Athens itself would compare with an Aurignacian cave,
the life of men in the city is perhaps more disordered and futile and
incomplete than the author of the Republic found it. The moral of
this contrast need hardly be pointed in so many words. The idolum of
science is incomplete; for it chiefly touches life in its physical
sector; and it remains to complete the span so that every activity and
condition may be described, measured, and grasped in scientific terms.
With the vast modern improvement in our physical arrangements in view,
it must occur to almost anyone that a permanent advance in social
life depends upon a much more thorough and realistic acquaintance with
the facts than the social sciences have yet been able to provide.
Before an army moves over the land it is well for it to have moved in
someone’s mind over a topographic map. Lacking such maps, all our day
to day improvements have been wasteful sallies into eutopia, proceeding
without order, without a sufficient equipment, and without any general
plan.


3

There is a point up to which each science may well be left to cultivate
its field for its own sake, without any regard for the fruits. Mr.
Thorstein Veblen, in The Place of Science in Civilization, has well
pointed out the way in which science arises out of idle curiosity;
and science, studied and advanced for its own sake, is surely one of
the great playthings of the race. In this aspect, while science seeks
a quite different path to the contemplative life than art takes, its
end is the same--the dominant interest is an esthetic one, the joy of
pure perception. Science is thus a sort of world in itself, and it is
self-sufficient: there is no need for it to make contact with the real
world in which we fight and love and earn our daily bread. In its own
world, science is no better and no worse than theosophy or astrology or
fables about deity.

But the divorce of science from the daily life of the community is not
altogether an advantage. If it fosters a whole-hearted cultivation
of science for its own values, it tends to lose sight of realities
without which its values are meaningless. It is hard perhaps to locate
the point at which science, divorced from every day realities, ceases
to have any social relevance; but it seems to me that such a point
exists; and when the sciences remain disparate and unrelated one to
the other, they tend to pass over from a public world to the private
world of the specialist; and the knowledge which obtains in that world
can with difficulty be brought out again to irrigate the common life
of the community; or if it is brought out, as bacteriology is brought
out in relation to the treatment of disease, it is divorced from a
consideration of the total situation in a way that makes so many
specialist advances in medicine, for example, the stamping ground for
the fanatic.

This loss of contact, I believe, is highly dangerous; for it lessens
the effect of scientific discipline upon daily affairs quite as much as
a cloistered religion, by erecting impossible sanctions, opens the way
for much unalloyed slackness and baseness, and by demanding that Pistol
and Falstaff live like Christ prevents these biological rapscallions
from achieving so much as the level of Robin Hood. The upshot of this
dissociation of science and social life is that superstition takes
the place of science among the common run of men, as a more easily
apprehended version of reality.

Today the whole corpus of knowledge is in an anarchic state, and it
lacks order precisely because it lacks any definite relations to
the community which creates it, and for which it, in turn, provides
the spectacles through which the world is seen. Against the gains
that have come from the increasing specialization of the sciences,
we have to set off the losses which the community suffers from the
development of crude forms of science, and from quackeries like
astrology and spiritualism which succeed in giving a complete account
of man’s place in the universe in terms that are fairly intelligible
to the lay mind. It seems to me, then, that in the cultivation of the
sciences a definite hierarchy of values must be established which
shall have some relation to the essential needs of the community. The
independence of science from human values is a gross superstition:
the desire for order, for security, for esthetically satisfactory
patterns--along with the desire for fame or the favor of princes--have
all played their parts in the development of science. Though the logic
of science may discount the human factor as far as possible in its
internal operations, it is because men have placed a certain value upon
disinterested intellectual operations that these activities are pursued
in modern communities to the exclusion of other interests and claims.

Let us put the problem concretely. A community which cultivates
chemical science to the point at which it is able to wipe out a whole
city by a few explosions of poisonous gas is in a pretty treacherous
situation. If the science that it possesses has not helped to found a
eutopia, it has at any rate provided the foundations for a kakotopia,
or bad place: in short, for a hell. Indeed scientific knowledge has
not merely heightened the possibilities of life in the modern world:
it has lowered the depths. When science is not touched by a sense of
values it works--as it fairly consistently has worked during the past
century--towards a complete dehumanization of the social order. The
plea that each of the sciences must be permitted to go its own way
without control should be immediately rebutted by pointing out that
they obviously need a little guidance when their applications in war
and industry are so plainly disastrous.

We must be prepared to recognize that “truths” do not stand together
on a high and lofty pedestal: some are important and some are trivial,
some are innocent and some are dangerous, and while the pursuit of
truth is a good in itself--_and complete freedom in that pursuit
is a_ sine qua non _of a good social life_--certain departments of
investigation may need to be offset and corrected by work in other
fields. In a modern Western European community, a sociological insight
into the causes and conditions of war and peace is a needed corrective
to the crudities of applied physical science and without such
correction the mere increase of scientific knowledge, of which we boast
so vacuously, may be highly inimical to the practice of the good life
in the community.


4

If the sciences are to be cultivated anew with respect for a definite
hierarchy of human values, it seems to me that the sciences must be
focussed again upon particular local communities, and the problems
which they offer for solution. Just as geometry in Egypt arose out of
the need for annually surveying the boundaries that the Nile wiped
out, and as astronomy developed in Chaldea in order to determine the
shift of the seasons for the planting of crops, as geology in modern
times developed out of the questions that a practical stone mason, like
Hugh Miller, found himself confronted with--so may the sciences which
are today incomplete and partial develop along the necessary lines
by a survey of existing conditions and intellectual resources in a
particular community.

On one hand, science must be in contact with the whole idolum of
scientific thought--with that vast overworld of scientific effort which
is the product of no single place or people or time. On the other
hand, it must be related to the definite local community, limited in
time and in space, in which its researches and its speculations will
be realized and applied. Out of these surveys of existing conditions
we should find, I believe, that in social psychology, in anthropology,
in economics there are a vast number of facts and relations which
remain to be described; and that, similarly, certain departments
like craniology and jurisprudence and folklore have been vastly
overcultivated in proportion to any genuine importance that their
researches may have upon our control over the community’s development.
Such an investigation would bring out, above all, the weakness of
contemporary sociological thought, with its diabetic flatulence of
special sociologies, and its lack of any general agreement as to the
field which is to be cultivated.

Apart from its great function as a plaything, science is valuable
only to the extent that its researches can be brought to bear upon
the conditions in a particular community, in a definite region. The
difference between science as a plaything and science as an instrument
for enabling us to establish more effective relations with other men
and with the rest of our environment, is the difference between firing
a shot at a target and firing at a buck for provender. The practice
one gets in firing at a target is great fun, and incidentally it
improves one’s marksmanship; such idle sport is perhaps one of the
stigmata of a civilized community. Nevertheless, unless one’s skill
can be definitely brought home it remains a personal achievement; and
the community as a whole is not a pound of meat the better for it. If
science is to play the significant part that Bacon and Andreæ and Plato
and the other great humanists desired it to, it must be definitely
brought home and realized in our here and now.

The need for this humanization of science has already been perceived in
Great Britain. During the last decade a movement has gathered headway
in the schools and extended itself to associations outside the schools.
The title of this movement is “Regional Survey,” and its point of
origin is, I believe, the Outlook Tower in Edinburgh which was well
described more than two decades ago as the “world’s first sociological
laboratory.”

The aim of the Regional Survey is to take a geographic region and
explore it in every aspect. It differs from the social survey with
which we are acquainted in America in that it is not chiefly a survey
of evils; it is, rather, a survey of the existing conditions in all
their aspects; and it emphasizes to a much greater extent than the
social survey the natural characteristics of the environment, as they
are discovered by the geologist, the zoologist, the ecologist--in
addition to the development of natural and human conditions in the
historic past, as presented by the anthropologist, the archæologist,
and the historian. In short, the regional survey attempts a local
synthesis of all the specialist “knowledges.”

Such a survey has been conducted in the Southeastern counties of
England under the auspices of various local scientific societies;
and the result of it is a complete description of the community’s
foundations, its past, its manner of working and living, its
institutions, its regional peculiarities, and its utilization of
physical, vital, and social resources. Each of the sciences draws
upon its general body of knowledge to illuminate the points under
observation; and when problems arise which point definitely to the
lack of scientific or scholarly data, new trails are opened and new
territory defined.

In looking at the community through the Regional Survey, the
investigator is dealing with a real thing and not with an arbitrary
idolum. In so far as the local community has certain elements in common
with similar regions in other countries, or has absorbed elements from
other civilizations, these things will be given their full value,
instead of being disregarded because they weaken the identity of the
local community with that precious myth, the National State. The
greater part of the data that is thus brought to light may be plotted
on a map, graphically presented in a chart, or photographed. In Saffron
Walden, England, there is an admirable little museum devoted to such
an exhibition of its region; and in the Outlook Tower, at Edinburgh,
there used to be a library and an apparatus of exhibition by which one
could begin at the point where one was standing and work outwards, in
thought, to embrace the whole wide world. Knowledge that is presented
in this fashion is available so that whoever runs may read; it has
every feature, therefore, of popular science as it is purveyed in the
cheap newspaper and magazine, whilst it remains real science and is not
presented as something that verges from a miracle to a superstition.

The knowledge embodied in the Regional Survey has a coherence and
pithiness which no isolated study of science can possibly possess. It
is presented in such a form that it can be assimilated by every member
of the community who has the rudiments of an education, and it thus
differs from the isolated discipline which necessarily remains the
heritage of the specialist. Above all, this knowledge is not that of
“subjects,” taken as so many water tight and unrelated compartments:
it is a knowledge of a whole region, seen in all its aspects; so that
the relations between the work aspect and the soil aspect, between the
play aspect and the work aspect, become fairly simple and intelligible.
This common tissue of definite, verifiable, localized knowledge is what
all our partisan utopias and reconstruction programs have lacked; and
lacking it, have been one-sided and ignorant and abstract--devising
paper programs for the reconstruction of a paper world.

Regional survey, then, is the bridge by which the specialist whose face
is turned towards the library and the laboratory, and the active worker
in the field, whose face is turned towards the city and region in which
he lives, may come into contact; and out of this contact our plans and
our eutopias may be founded on such a permanent foundation of facts
as the scientist can build for us, while the sciences themselves will
be cultivated with some regard for the human values and standards, as
embodied in the needs and the ideals of the local community. This is
the first step out of the present impasse: we must return to the real
world, and face it, and survey it in its complicated totality. Our
castles-in-air must have their foundations in solid ground.


5

The needed reorientation of science is important; but by itself it is
not enough. Knowledge is a tool rather than a motor; and if we know
the world without being able to react upon it, we are guilty of that
aimless pragmatism which consists of devising all sorts of ingenious
machines and being quite incapable of subordinating them to any
coherent and attractive pattern.

Now, men are moved by their instinctive impulses and by such
emotionally colored pattern-ideas or idola as the dreamer is capable
of projecting. When we create these pattern-ideas, we enlarge the
environment, so that our behavior is guided by the conditions which we
seek to establish and enjoy in an imaginary world. However crude the
Marxian analysis of society may have been, it at least had the merit of
presenting a great dream--the dream of a titanic struggle between the
possessors and the dispossessed in which every worker had a definite
part to play. Without these dreams, the advances in social science
will be just as disorderly and fusty as the applications of physical
science have been in our material affairs, where in the absence of any
genuine scale of values, a patent collar button is regarded as equally
important as a tungsten filament if the button happens to bring the
inventor as great a financial reward.


6

Up to about the middle of the seventeenth century, before modern
physical science had rigorously defined its field, the breach between
literature and science, which Aristotle had made, was not altogether
complete; and while the humanist ideal was intact both literature and
science were regarded as coeval phases of man’s intellectual activity.
The two dominating figures of the Renascence, Leonardo da Vinci and
Michael Angelo, were artists, technicians, and men of science; and in
a comparison between a translation of Michael Angelo’s sonnets and a
photograph of St. Peter’s the sonnets come off rather well.

The great contribution of the Renascence was the ideal of fully
energized human beings, able to span life in all its manifestations,
as artists, scientists, technicians, philosophers, and what not. This
ideal exercised a powerful influence on lesser figures, like the
Admirable Crichton and Sir Walter Raleigh, and even down to the time
of Descartes it contributed to that exuberance of the intellectual
life which was the Renascence at its best. When John Amos Comenius
wrote his remarkable little book called The Labyrinth of the World
and the Paradise of the Heart in 1623, he combined the outlooks of
science and art in a remarkable synthesis; for the first part of this
work is a picturesque survey of the actual world as Comenius found
it, and the second a picture of the transition to the heavenly world
promised in the Christian religion. The idea behind Comenius’ Labyrinth
was the same that inspired Andreæ; and were it not for the complete
otherworldliness of this theological utopia, the Paradise of the Heart,
Comenius’ discourse would take a high place in the history of utopian
thought.

There is no genuine logical basis, as far as I can see, in the
dissociation of science and art, of knowing and dreaming, of
intellectual activities and emotional activities. The division between
the two is simply one of convenience; for both these activities are
simply different modes in which human beings create order out of the
chaos in which they find themselves. Such is the humanist view. As an
instance of this, when the Royal Society was projected in England in
the middle of the seventeenth century, Johann Andreæ advised his friend
Samuel Hartlib, then in London, not to neglect the humanities while
furthering the pursuit of the physical sciences. Unfortunately, the men
who gathered together to form the Royal Society were specialists in
physical science; and in the lapse of the humanist tradition through
the religious acerbities of the time, they had lost some of their
desire for a complete life. As a result, the original charter of the
society confined its work to the physical sciences.

Insignificant as it now appears in the annals of science, this decision
seems to me to mark a definite turning point in human thought.
Henceforth the scientist was to be one sort of person and the artist
another; henceforth the idolum of science and the idolum of art were
not to be cemented together in a single personality; henceforth, in
fact, the dehumanization of art and science begins. It is interesting
to note that with the divorce of the humanities from science, art and
science entered upon separate careers which, for all their diversities,
are curiously similar. Both art and science, for example, ceased to be
the common property of the community; and each of them split up into a
multiplying host of specialisms. In this process, art and science made
many notable advances; so that this period is usually spoken of as a
period of enlightenment or progress; but the result on the community
was what we discovered in our examination of Coketown and the Country
House.


7

We must now consider the development of the arts in the modern
community. At the height of the Middle Age, as in fifth century Athens,
the arts formed together a living unity. A citizen did not go into
a concert hall to hear music, to a church to say his prayers, to a
theatre to see a play, to a picture gallery to view pictures: it was
a mean town, indeed, that could not boast a cathedral and a couple of
churches; and in these buildings, drama and music and architecture and
painting and sculpture were united for the purpose of ringing changes
on the emotional nature of men and converting them to accept the
theological vision of otherworldly utopia.

The splitting up of these arts into a number of separate boxes was
part of that movement towards individualism and protestantism whose
effects most people are familiar with in the field of religion alone.
Henceforward, music, drama, painting, and the other arts developed
largely in isolation; and each of them was forced to build up a
separate world. The greater part of the gains that were made in these
worlds was not carried over into the community at large, but remained
the possession of the artists themselves or their private patrons and
critics in the Country House. With such exceptions as the Italian and
Japanese woodcuts of the eighteenth century, and the few survivals
of ballad and drama that slipt over from the Middle Age, popular art
became another name for all that was coarse and stunted and depressed.
The popular architecture of the nineteenth century is the sordid
little redbrick rabbit hutch: popular religion is embodied in the
stunted sheet-iron or brick chapel (as it is called in England) of the
Baptists and Methodists: popular music is the latest barrel organ lilt:
popular painting is the calendar lithograph: and popular literature is
the dime novel.

The divorce of the art of the cultivated classes from that of the whole
community tended to deprive it of any other standards than the artist
himself was content to erect. Here again the comparison with science
is curiously pertinent. The world of art is in a sense a separate
world, and it can be cultivated for a time without reference to the
desires and emotions of the community out of which it has sprung. But
the motto “Art for art’s sake” turns out in practice to be something
quite different--namely, art for the artist’s sake; and art which is
produced in this manner, without any external standard of performance,
is frequently just an instrument for overcoming a neurosis or enabling
the artist to restore his personal equilibrium. Divorced from his
community, the artist was driven back upon himself: instead of seeking
to create a beauty which all men might share, he devoted himself to
projecting a poignant angle of his personal vision--an angle which I
shall call the picturesque. The cause of this divorce I have already
pointed out in the chapter on the Country House; it is with the effects
of this divorce, for which the artist was not greatly to blame, that we
are here concerned.

This conflict between “beauty” and the “picturesque” is perhaps common
to all the arts, and with sufficient factual detail I might be able to
trace its effects on literature and music. For the sake of clearness
and simplicity I shall confine myself to painting and sculpture, with
the proviso that our conclusions will apply, by and large, to the whole
field.

Let me emphasize, before going any further, that I am using the terms
“beauty” and the “picturesque” in quite different senses from the vague
ones that are usually attached to them; and that I use them without
any preliminary judgment as to their place and value in the good life.
The picturesque, in the quite arbitrary sense in which the word is
used here, is an abstract quality of vision, sound, or meaning which
creates what we might call pure esthetic experience. In painting, the
picturesque probably arose with the discovery, on the part of the
leisured classes in the Country House, that it was possible to achieve
rapture, a sort of esthetic trance, a complete state of beatitude, by
the more or less prolonged contemplation of a pictorial subject. Up to
the time of this discovery, painting was simply a branch of interior
decoration; the great paintings of the Christian World served, for the
public, as illustrations to that outline of history which mediæval
theology provided: they had a habitat, a social destination.

With the splitting off of the picturesque from the main body
of ecclesiastical art, painting came into its own as an end in
itself, apart from any place that it might have in the scheme of
the community’s affairs. The symptom of this change is the rise of
landscape painting: in the search for pure esthetic experience the
painter began to look for themes which were divorced from any human
interest but that of pure contemplation. During the last century
this split between painting as a form of social art and painting as a
means of achieving contemplative ecstasy has become deeper: even those
academic painters who followed the methods of the older artists no
longer have the same field to work in, whilst the revolutionist--the
impressionists of one period, the cubists of another, and the
post-impressionists or expressionists of a third--are forced by the
general irrelevance of art in Coketown to produce work which only the
more or less initiate will appreciate.

Now, I would not for worlds underrate the gains which have been
achieved by the divorce of art from the whole life of the community.
In their isolation from the social group that produced them the modern
artists have been able to pursue their solitary way to limits which
the common man is probably incapable of reaching: they have widened
the field of esthetic delight and have introduced new values into the
world of painting, values which will remain even though the disease
which created them disappears, just as one can salvage a pearl from an
oyster whose sickness is healed. The view from the mountain top is none
the worse because many people are afflicted with dizziness and nausea
before they have reached the summit; and, like the pursuit of truth,
the pursuit of esthetic values is a good in itself apart from any
values which may be realized in the community. On these terms, Cézanne
and Van Gogh and Ryder, to mention a few of the dead, will hold their
own, and keep the boundaries of art from ever shrinking again, I trust,
to its academic limits.

Nevertheless, the effects of focussing on the picturesque can no more
be overlooked in art than the dangers of specialization in science. It
is almost a banality to point out how, historically, as the picturesque
developed in art, beauty has tended to disappear from life. Whilst
the cultivated few have become gloriously alive to more exquisite
sensations than their ancestors had probably ever experienced, the
“mutilated many” have been forced to live in great cities and in abject
country towns of a blackness and ugliness such as the world, if we are
to judge by the records that exist, has never seen before. In other
words, we have become more sensitive to experiences--to the contents of
our inner worlds--only to become more callous to things, to the brash
surfaces of the world without. In our preoccupation with the inner
worlds we have to a large extent lost our hold upon beauty, which,
in the limiting sense in which the word is used here, is the quality
by which anything, from a torso to a building, shows its adaptation
to an end and its sensitiveness to esthetic values--values which are
abstracted and intensified in the pure picturesque--that are involved
in such an adaptation. In this sense, the beautiful, as Emerson said,
rests on the foundations of the necessary: it is the outward token of
an inward grace; its appearance is the manifestation of a humanized
life; and its existence and development constitute, in fact, a sort of
index to a community’s vitality.

The divorce of the artist from the community, and the turning away of
his energies from beauty, in which the picturesque might be fulfilled,
to the picturesque itself, separate from any practical needs, has
scarcely been compensated by the advances that have been made in the
separate world of art. The result has been that work which should
have been done by artists of great capacity has been done by people of
minor or degraded ability. Anonymous jerrybuilders have erected the
greater number of our houses, absurd engineers have laid out our towns
with no thought for anything but sewers and paving contracts; rapacious
and illiterate men who have achieved success in business discourse to
the multitude on what constitutes the good life--and so on. There is
really no end to the number of things which we do badly in the modern
community, for want of the artist to do them at all.

This generalization applies to the whole range of the arts. The
greater part of the creative dreaming and planning which constitutes
literature and art has had very little bearing upon the community in
which we live, and has done little to equip us with patterns, with
images and ideals, by means of which we might react creatively upon
our environment. Yet it should be obvious that if the inspiration for
the good life is to come from anywhere, it must come from no other
people than the great artists. An intense social life, as Gabriel
Tarde pointed out in his fine utopian fantasy, Underground Man, has
“for its indispensable condition the esthetic life and the universal
propagation of the religion of truth and beauty.” The common man, when
he is in love, has a little glimpse of the way in which the drudgery
of the daily world may be transmuted through emotional stimulus; it
is the business of the artist to make the transmutation permanent,
for the only difference between the artist and the common man is that
the artist is, so to say, in love all the while. It is out of the
vivid patterns of the artist’s ecstasy that he draws men together and
gives them the vision to shape their lives and the destiny of their
community anew.


8

No matter how the modern artist may use or fritter away his abilities,
it is plain that he has an enormous reservoir of power at his disposal.
What, for instance, has made America so wholly devoted to the conquest
of material things? Why are we so given over to collecting those vast
miscellanies of goods which are temptingly displayed in the advertising
sections of our illustrated weeklies and monthly magazines? The
necessity for ameliorating the hard, crude life of the pioneer has
indeed been an important influence; but the traditions of this life
in turn produced all the minor “artists” or “artlings” who write and
draw for the popular papers, who create the plots of plays and motion
picture scenarios; and since most of these poor wretches have never
been educated in the humanist sense to any degree--since they know no
other environment than New York or Los Angeles or Gopher Prairie, since
they are acquainted with the achievements of no other age than their
own, they have devoted themselves wholeheartedly to idealizing a great
many of the things that are crude or ugly or stupid in their beloved
community. So the idola of business have been perpetuated by “artlings”
who themselves know only the standards of the business man.

Because of the limited horizons of the American artist, therefore, the
rising generation aspires after the things that Messrs. Jack London,
Rupert Hughes, Scott Fitzgerald, and heaven knows who else have
thought good and fine; the younger generation talks like the heroes
and heroines of a melodrama by Mr. Samuel Shipman, when they do not
attain the higher level of comic cuts; the younger generation thrills
to the type of beauty which Mr. Penryhn Stanlaws sets before its gaze.
The notion that the common man despises art is absurd. The common man
worships art and lives by it; and when good art is not available he
takes the second best or the tenth best or the hundredth best. The
success of Mr. Eugene O’Neil, one of the few playwrights of any girth
who has contributed to the American stage, proves that the only way
that people can be kept away from good art is by not providing it. The
younger generation might just as well have had its idea-patterns shaped
by Sophocles, Praxiteles, and Plato, if our genuine artists were not so
aloof to their responsibilities, and if they were intellectually mature
enough to accept the full burden of their vocation. It is a sign of a
terrific neurosis--and no mark at all of esthetic aptitude--that our
genuine art is so completely disoriented and so thoroughly out of touch
with the community. We must turn to a man of such uneven parts as Mr.
Nicholas Vachel Lindsay before we have anything like a recognition of
the classic rôle of the artist.

Art for the artist’s sake is largely a symptom of that neurotic
individualism which drives the artist out of a public world which
baffles him into a private world where he may reign in solitude as
an unruly demiurge. Art for the public’s sake, on the other hand,
substitutes the vices of the extrovert for the vices of the introvert.
When I say that art must have some vital contact with the community I
do not mean, let me emphasize, that the artist must cater to public
whim or demand. Art in its social setting is neither a personal
cathartic for the artist, nor a salve to quiet the itching vanity of
the community: it is essentially a means by which people who have had
a strange diversity of experiences have their activities emotionally
canalized into patterns and molds which they are able to share pretty
completely with each other. Pure art is inevitably propaganda. I mean
by this that it is meant to be propagated, and that in so far as it
fails to impregnate the community in which it exists with its ideas
and images, in so far as the community is not changed for better or
worse by its existence, its claims are spurious. Propagandist art, on
the other hand, is inevitably impure since instead of bringing people
together on a common emotional plane, as men, it tends to accentuate
their differences, and to void emotions which are proper to art into a
realm where the emotions of the missionary’s tent or the soapboxer’s
platform hold exclusive sway. It is just because the “artist” in
America has been impure in motive--a propagandist for Pollyanna in
the face of Euripides, a propagandist for “just folks” in the face of
Swift, a propagandist for niceness in the face of Rabelais--that he has
failed miserably as an artist, and has left our communities to stew so
completely in their own savorless juice.


9

For examples of what the artist might be, and what his proper relation
to the community might be when he was mature enough to recognize it
and discipline himself to it, let us look at Mr. William Butler Yeats
or A. E. There are doubtless a good many other examples that might be
offered in Europe; but these are particularly good; for the reason that
with A. E. one can see in his The National Being how the conceptions
of art enter into the tissues of all his plans for renovating life in
the Irish Countryside. In the work of these artists and their fellows
we have a clue to one of the most promising attempts to establish a
concrete eutopia which shall rise out of the real facts of the everyday
environment and, at the same time, turn upon them and mold them
creatively a little nearer the heart’s desire.

In the account of Four Years which Mr. Yeats published in The
Dial he explains his attitude towards the literature and social
life of Ireland; and I recommend that account to all the forlorn
revolutionaries and reformers who wonder why the dry bones of their
doctrines remain dry bones, instead of knitting themselves together and
becoming alive. This passage in particular, defines the relation of the
artist both to the tradition of his art and to the community in which
he must find a root:

“The Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage coven, asserted
that an artist or a poet must paint or write in the style of his own
day, and this with the Fairy Queen and the Lyrical Ballads and Blake’s
early poems in its ears, and plain to the eyes, in book and gallery,
those great masterpieces of later Egypt, founded upon that work of the
ancient kingdom already further in time from Later Egypt than Later
Egypt is from us.” He dismisses this claim with the just assertion
that the artist is free to choose any style that suits his mood and
subject; for in the world of art time and space are irrelevant; and
he goes on to say, “We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the
uneducated classes knew and even sang, and might we not make those
stories current among the educated classes, rediscovering, for the
work’s sake, what I have called ‘the applied arts of literature,’ the
association of literature, that is, with music, speech, and dance; and
at last, it might be, so deepen the political passion of the nation
that all, artist and poet, craftsman and day laborer, would accept a
common design. Perhaps even these images, once created and associated
with river and mountain, might move of themselves and with some
powerful, even turbulent life, like those painted horses that trample
the rice-fields of Japan.”

By citing Mr. Yeats’ conceptions I do not mean to limit the artist
to a single function--that of patterning the good life. It is quite
plain that pure esthetic experience is a good in itself; and when the
artist has rendered this experience in a picture, a poem, a novel, a
philosophy, he has performed a unique and indispensable piece of work.
Could italics keep this passage from being ignored I should employ them.

What I have called the picturesque is in reality just as
self-sustaining and delightful as the radiant good health which Sir
Thomas More rated so highly in his Utopia. If the community went to
the dogs, it would still be exuberantly self-sustaining, whilst anyone
had the time or the capacity to enjoy it. What I protest against is
the way in which the field of the genuine artist, during these last
three hundred years, has been whittled away, so that it has become
more and more a mark of the artist to concern himself solely with
the narrow province of pure esthetic experience, and to protest his
complete aloofness from anything that lies outside this realm. Such an
attitude would have struck Euripides or Milton or Goethe or Wagner as
undignified and stupid, I am sure, because art is as large as life, and
it does not gain in vigor or intensity by reducing its scope to that of
the puppet stage. The point is that there is an artistic function to be
performed in the community, for the community, as well as in the world
of art, for those who are lifted up to art.

“Nations, races, and individual men,” as Mr. Yeats says again, “are
unified by an image, or a bundle of related images, symbolical and
provocative of the state of mind that is of all states of mind not
impossible, the most difficult to that man, race, or nation because
only the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without despair
rouses the will to full intensity.”

Whether these images shall be provided by patrioteers, hack editors,
politicians, advertising men and commercialized “artists” or whether
they shall be created by genuine playwrights and poets and philosophers
is an important question. The function of creating these images is an
artistic one, and the artist who evades his responsibility is making
life for himself and his kind more difficult, since in the long run
a community whose sacred literature is written by Colonel Diver and
Scadder and Jefferson Brick--the great heroes of Civilization as the
star of empire westward makes its way--will make even the most solitary
cultivation of the arts a thorny and difficult task.

In the good life, the purely esthetic element has a prominent place;
but unless the artist is capable of moving men to the good life, the
esthetic element is bound to be driven farther and farther away from
the common realities, until the world of the artist will scarcely be
distinguishable from the phantasia of dementia præcox. Already, the
symptoms of this corrosive futility have appeared in literature and
painting in Western Europe and America; and such light as comes forth
from this art is but the phosphorescence of decay. If the arts are not
to disintegrate utterly, must they not focus more and more upon eutopia?


10

It comes to this then: our plans for a new social order have been as
dull as mud because, in the first place, they have been abstract and
cockney, and have not taken into account the immense diversity and
complexity of man’s environment; and in the second place, they have not
created any vivid patterns that would move men to great things. They
have not been “informed by science and ennobled by the arts.”

Through the paralysis of the arts and sciences our contemporary
programs for revolution and reform have done very little to lift our
heads over the disorderly and bedraggled environments in which we
conduct our daily business. This failure to create a common pattern
for the good life in each region has made such excellent efforts as
the garden city movement seem weak and ineffectual when we place them
alongside the towns that mediæval civilization, which had such a common
pattern, created. Without the common background of eutopian idola,
all our efforts at rehabilitation--the new architecture, the garden
city movement, the electrification of industry, the organization of
great industrial guilds such as the Building Trades have achieved in
England and the garment workers seem on the point of effecting in
America--without these common idola, I say, all our practical efforts
are spotty and inconsecutive and incomplete. It was not, let us
remember, by any legislative device that the cities of the industrial
age were monotonously patterned in the image of Coketown. It was rather
because everyone within these horrid centers accepted the same values
and pursued the same ends--as they were projected by economists like
Ricardo, industrialists like Stephenson, and lyric poets like Samuel
Smiles--that the plans of the jerrybuilder and the engineer expressed
to perfection the brutality and social disharmony of the community.
The same process that gave us Coketown can, when our world of ideas is
transformed, give us something better than Coketown.

The chief use of the classic utopias that we have surveyed is to
suggest that the same methods which are used by the utopian thinkers
to project an ideal community on paper may be employed, in a practical
way, to develop a better community on earth. The weakness of the
utopian thinkers consisted in the assumption that the dreams and
projects of any single man might be realized in society at large.
From the bitter frustration of Fourier, Cabet, Hertzka, and even John
Ruskin those who are in search of the beloved community may well take
a warning. Where the critics of the utopian method were, I believe,
wrong was in holding that the business of projecting prouder worlds was
a futile and footling pastime. These anti-utopian critics overlooked
the fact that one of the main factors that condition any future are
the attitudes and beliefs which people have in relation to that
future--that, as Mr. John Dewey would say, in any judgment of practise
one’s belief in a hypothesis is one of the things that affect its
realization.

When we have projected the pattern of an ideal community and tend
to warp our conduct in conformity with that pattern, we overcome
the momentum of actual institutions. In feeling free to project new
patterns, in holding that human beings can will a change in their
institutions and habits of life, the utopians were, I believe, on solid
ground; and the utopian philosophies were a great improvement over the
more nebulous religious and ethical systems of the past in that they
saw the necessity for giving their ideals form and life. In fact, it
has been in the pictures of ideal commonwealths such as Plato’s that
the “ideal” and the “actual” have met.

It is true that the pure utopians have overlooked the fact that every
institution has a momentum of its own: its speed may be quickened or
reduced, it may be switched on another track, as the Roman Church
during the Reformation was switched from the main line of civilization
to a subsidiary route; and at times, in the catastrophe of war or
revolution, an institution may jump the track altogether and be
wrecked. The critical problem for the eutopian, the problem of the
transition from one set of institutions to another, from one way of
life to another, was overlooked. Plato’s Republic, for example, was
a fairly attractive place; but one wonders in what Greek city in the
Fourth Century B.C. the transition could have taken place. A transition
implies not merely a goal but a starting point: if we are to move the
world, as Archimedes threatened to with his lever, we must have some
ground to stand on. It is only by paying attention to the limitations
of each region, and by allowing for the driving force of history, that
we can make the earth come to terms with man’s idola. This is perhaps
the most difficult lesson that the eutopian must learn.


11

What, then, is the first step out of the present disorder? The first
step, it seems to me, is to ignore all the fake utopias and social
myths that have proved either so sterile or so disastrous during the
last few centuries. There is perhaps no logical reason why the myth of
the national state should not be preserved; but it is a myth which has
done very little, on the whole, to promote the good life, and has on
the contrary done a great deal to make the good life impossible; and to
continue to cling to it in the face of perpetual wars, pestilences, and
spiritual devastations is the sort of fanaticism which will probably
seem as blind and cruel to future generations as persecutions for
Christian heresy do to the present one. On the same grounds, there are
a number of other social myths, like the proletarian myth, which run
so badly against the grain of reality that they cannot be preserved
without ignoring a great many values which are essential to a humane
existence; and on pragmatic grounds it would be fine and beneficial to
drop them quickly into limbo. There is no reason to think that there
will be a quick conversion from these myths: the holocaust of war has
only intensified the myth of the National State; and our experience
with religious myths suggests on the contrary that the forms at any
rate will be preserved long after the last shred of reality has
disappeared. But the sooner those who are capable of intellectual
criticism abandon these particular myths, the sooner will these idola
fall into the state which has been happily described as “innocuous
desuetude.”

If our knowledge of human behavior counts for anything, however, we
cannot put aside old myths without creating new ones. The eighteenth
century agnostics very wisely realized that if they wished to maintain
the values which had been created by Deism, they could not abandon God
without inventing him all over again. In turning away from obsolete and
disastrous social myths I do not suggest that we give up the habit of
making myths; for that habit, for good or bad, seems to be ingrained
in the human psyche. The nearest we can get to rationality is not to
efface our myths but to attempt to infuse them with right reason, and
to alter them or exchange them for other myths when they appear to work
badly.

Here is where we reap the full benefit of the great utopian tradition.
In turning away from the social myths that hamper us, we do not jump
blindly into a blankness: we rather ally ourselves with a different
order of social myth which has always been vivified and enriched by the
arts and sciences.

The idolum of eutopia which we may seek to project in this or that
region is not a _carte blanche_ which any one may fill in at his will
and caprice; certain lines have already been fixed; certain spaces have
already been filled. There is a consensus among all utopian writers,
to begin with, that the land and natural resources belong undividedly
to the community; and even when it is worked by separate people or
associations, as in Utopia and Freeland the increment of the land--the
economic rent--belongs to the community as a whole. There is also
a pretty common notion among the Utopians that, as land is a common
possession, so is work a common function; and no one is let off from
some sort of labor of body or mind because of any inherited privileges
or dignities that he can point to. Finally, there is the almost equally
common notion, among the utopians, that the perpetuation of the species
leaves plenty of room for improvement, and that, as far as human
knowledge and foresight are worth anything, it should be applied to
propagation; so that the most reckless and ill-bred shall not burden
the community with the support of their offspring while those of finer
capacity are neglected or overwhelmed in numbers.

Besides these general conditions for the good life which the utopians
unite to emphasize, there are certain other points in the utopian
tradition of which one writer or another has given the classic
statement.

With Plato we see the enormous importance of birth and education; we
recognize the part good breeding, in every sense of the word, must
play in the good community. Sir Thomas More makes us aware of the fact
that a community becomes a community to the extent that it has shared
possessions, and he suggests that the local group might develop such a
common life as the old colleges of Oxford have enjoyed. When we turn
to Christianopolis, we are reminded that the daily life and work of
the community must be infused with the spirit of science, and that an
acute practical intelligence such as we find today among the engineers
need not be divorced from the practice of the humanities. Even the
nineteenth century utopias have a contribution to make. They remind
us by their overemphasis that all the proud and mighty idealisms in
the world are so many shadows unless they are supported by the whole
economic fabric--so that “eutopia” is not merely a matter of spiritual
conversion, as the ancient religions taught, but of economic and
geotechnic reconstruction. Finally, from James Buckingham and Ebenezer
Howard we can learn the importance of converting the idolum of eutopia
into plans and layouts and detailed projections, such as a townplanner
might utilize; and we may suspect that a eutopia which cannot be
converted into such specific plans will continue, as the saying is, to
remain up in the air.

Taken together, there is a powerful impulse towards creating a good
environment for the good life in the classic utopias we have examined:
from one or another utopia we may draw elements which will enrich
every part of the community’s life. By following the utopian tradition
we shall not merely escape from the fake utopias that have dominated
us: we shall return to reality. More than that, we shall return upon
reality and perhaps--who can tell?--we shall re-create it!


12

In discussing the foundations of Eutopia I am conscious of a certain
abstractness in my method of argument; conscious that I have not been a
good utopian in dealing with these proud idola that we may project in
every region. Let us come down to earth now and realize what all this
amounts to when we turn away from the library and mingle again on the
highways that lead past our door.

First of all, I conceive that we shall not attempt to envisage a single
utopia for a single unit called humanity; that is the sort of thin and
tepid abstraction which the discipline of the Regional Survey will
tend to kill off even in people who are now inured by education to
dealing only in verbal things. All the human beings on the planet are
a unity only for the sake of talking about them; and as far as that
goes, there is very little profitable conversation that can apply to a
Greenlander, a Parisian, and a Chinaman, except the mere observation
that they are all on the same little boat of a planet and would
probably be much happier if they minded their own business and were not
too insistent about inflicting their institutions and their idola upon
their neighbors.

We shall have to dismiss, as equally futile, the notion of a single
stratification of mankind, such as the working class, serving as
the foundation for our Eutopia: the notion that the working class
consists simply of urban workers is a cockney imbecility, and as soon
as one rectifies it and includes the agricultural population, we have
“humanity” pretty much all over again. Finally, if we are to give
eutopia a local habitation it will not be founded upon the National
State, for the National State is a myth which sane people will no more
sacrifice their lives to than they would hand their children into the
furnace of some tribal Moloch; and a good idolum cannot be founded on
the basis of a bad one.

As far as extent or character of territory goes, we will remember that
the planet is not as smooth as a billiard ball, and that the limits
of any genuine community rest within fairly ascertainable geographic
regions in which a certain complex of soil, climate, industry,
institutional life and historic heritage has prevailed. We shall not
attempt to legislate for all these communities at one stroke; for we
shall respect William Blake’s dictum that one law for the lion and
the ox is tyranny. There are some 15,000,000 local communities in the
world, the Postal Directory tells us; and our eutopia will necessarily
take root in one of these real communities, and include within its
co-operations as many other communities, as have similar interests
and identities. It may be that our eutopia will embrace a population
as great as that in the Metropolis of London or New York; but it is
needless to say that the land which lies beyond the limits of the
metropolis will no longer be regarded as a sort of subterranean factory
for the production of agricultural goods. In sum, as Patrick Geddes has
finely said, in the Kingdom of Eutopia--the world Eutopia--there will
be many mansions.

The inhabitants of our eutopias will have a familiarity with their
local environment and its resources, and a sense of historic
continuity, which those who dwell within the paper world of Megalopolis
and who touch their environment mainly through the newspaper and the
printed book, have completely lost. The people of Newcastle will no
longer go to London for coals, as the people in the provinces have
in a sense been doing this last century and more: there will be a
more direct utilization of local resources than would have seemed
profitable or seemly to the metropolitan world which now has command
of the market. In these varied eutopias, it is safe to say, there
will be a new realization of the fact that a cultivated life is
essentially a settled life: their citizens will have discovered that
the great privilege of travelling from Brooklyn to Bermondsey, and
from Bermondsey to Bombay is scarcely worth the trouble when the
institutions of Brooklyn, Bermondsey, and Bombay, and every other
purely industrial center, are identical--sanitary drinking devices and
canned goods and moving pictures being the same wherever mechanical
duplication of goods for a world market has taken the place of direct
adaptation to local needs.

It should not surprise us therefore if the foundations of eutopia
were established in ruined countries; that is, in countries where
metropolitan civilization has collapsed and where all its paper
prestige is no longer accepted at its paper value. There was the
beginning of a genuine eutopian movement in Denmark after the war
with Germany in the ’sixties: under the leadership of Bishop Gruntwig
came a revival of folk traditions in literature and a renascence of
education which has renewed the life of the Danish countryside and made
an intelligent farmer and an educated man out of the boor. It would
not be altogether without precedent if such a eutopian renascence took
place in Germany, in Austria, in Russia; and perhaps on another scale
in India and China and Palestine; for all these regions are now face to
face with realities which the “prosperous” paperism of our metropolitan
civilization has largely neglected.

If the inhabitants of our Eutopias will conduct their daily affairs
in a possibly more limited environment than that of the great
metropolitan centers, their mental environment will not be localized or
nationalized. For the first time perhaps in the history of the planet
our advance in science and invention has made it possible for every
age and every community to contribute to the spiritual heritage of the
local group; and the citizen of eutopia will not stultify himself by
being, let us say, a hundred per cent Frenchman when Greece, China,
England, Scandinavia and Russia can give sustenance to his spiritual
life. Our eutopians will necessarily draw from this wider environment
whatever can be assimilated by the local community; and they will thus
add any elements that may be lacking in the natural situation.

The chief business of eutopians was summed up by Voltaire in the final
injunction of Candide: Let us cultivate our garden. The aim of the real
eutopian is the culture of his environment, most distinctly not the
culture, and above all not the exploitation, of some other person’s
environment. Hence the size of our Eutopia may be big or little;
it may begin in a single village; it may embrace a whole region. A
little leaven will leaven the whole loaf; and if a genuine pattern
for the eutopian life plants itself in any particular locality it may
ramify over a whole continent as easily as Coketown duplicated itself
throughout the Western World. The notion that no effective change can
be brought about in society until millions of people have deliberated
upon it and willed it is one of the rationalizations which are dear to
the lazy and the ineffectual. Since the first step towards eutopia is
the reconstruction of our idola, the foundations for eutopia can be
laid, wherever we are, without further ado.

Our most important task at the present moment is to build castles
in the air. We need not fear, as Thoreau reminds us, that the work
will be lost. If our eutopias spring out of the realities of our
environment, it will be easy enough to place foundations under them.
Without a common design, without a grand design, all our little
bricks of reconstruction might just as well remain in the brickyard;
for a disharmony between men’s minds betokens, in the end, the speedy
dilapidation of whatever they may build. Our final word is a counsel
of perfection. When that which is perfect has come, that which is
imperfect will pass away.




BIBLIOGRAPHY


For the benefit of the reader who wishes to travel further along the
trails opened up in this survey of utopias, I am giving a list of the
principal books on the subject. This list includes all the important
utopias that are accessible in English, as well as a few that are not;
but it is not exhaustive, for the region of Utopia has its swamps and
arid places as well as its fertile and cultivated land; and no one but
a scholarly explorer need attempt to enter the more forbidding parts of
the country.

Needless to say, in dealing with our historic utopias I had a rough
criterion of selection. I set out to treat such plans for the
improvement of the human community as had been embodied in complete
pictures of an ideal commonwealth: this excluded important essays in
politics like Hobbes’ Leviathan and Harrington’s Oceana; and it ruled
out any treatment of abstract idealisms which, however important, did
not exemplify the essential utopian method. Next, I resolved to deal at
length only with those utopias which have exercised some influence on
thought and life, particularly in the Western European world. Third,
I sought to emphasize what was common in the methods and ends of the
classic utopias; making plain their relations within the world of
utopias and their relevance in the present day, rather than attempting
to show in any detail the social milieu in which each utopian wrote.
In dealing with the nineteenth century my criterion became a little
shaky; and I frankly chose the nineteenth century utopias on the basis
of their association with temporal movements like state socialism, the
single tax, and syndicalism, rather than because of their conformity
to standards which served to weed out irrelevant utopias in the earlier
centuries. In devoting a little space to Fourier and Spence and
giving short shrift to Owen I have tried to restore these interesting
and significant figures to the place that they deserve. There will
doubtless be disagreements over my selections and the amount of space
I have allotted to various writers; but at least, where there has been
madness there has also been method.

Certain parts of the argument are not covered by this list of utopias.
The best introductions to utopian literature in general are in German;
see R. Blueher’s excellent pamphlet on Moderne Utopien; Ein Beitrag
zur Geschichte des Sozialismus, Bonn: 1920. While Mr. Van Wyck Brooks
put me independently on the trail of Rabelais’ Abbey of Theleme I
must acknowledge, with as much grace as possible, that Herr Blueher
anticipated me in grasping this clue to Renascence culture; and if
any credit is due, he deserves it. The most exhaustive catalogue of
pre-nineteenth century utopias is contained in Kautsky’s Vorläufer des
Modernen Sozialismus. Max Beer’s History of British Socialism has an
excellent discussion of the relation of the Utopians to socialism. See
also Moritz Kaufmann’s Utopias; or Schemes of Social Improvement, from
Sir Thomas More to Karl Marx, London: 1879. In the excellent History
of Utopian Thought, by Dr. J. O. Hertzler (Macmillan: 1923), the
phantasists are sympathetically treated.

The chapter on the Country House might well be prefaced by Mr.
Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, a satire which seems
to me unique in scholarship and originality. The importance of our
social myths and our collective representations has been noted by a
whole school of French sociologists who follow Émile Durkheim; and the
dynamic force of ideas has been treated by Alfred Fouillée. On both
these topics there is a whole literature; and it would give a sense of
false simplicity to single out any particular essay. There is a fairly
popular discussion of the place of myths and ideals in the George
Sorel’s Reflexions on Violence, and Benjamin Kidd’s Science of Power
(especially Chapter V.).

As a loose illustration of the general method and outlook embodied
in this book I refer to the Making of the Future Series, edited by
Messrs. Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford and published by Williams
& Norgate, London. There is an able exposition of the regionalist
movement and of the fundamental realities upon which this movement
is based in two books published in that series; namely, Professor
Fleure’s Human Geography in Western Europe and C. B. Fawcett’s The
Provinces of England. Two works by the editors, The Coming Polity and
Our Social Inheritance are likewise suggestive. Professor Geddes is
the outstanding exponent of the Eutopian method both in thought and in
practical activity; and the reader should consult his City Development
(1904) and his Town-Planning towards City Development: a Report to the
Durbar of Indore, 2 vols. Indore, 1918. Both of these books are mines
from which all sorts of precious thoughts can be quarried. Remaindered
copies of the first can be obtained from John Grant, Bookseller,
Edinburgh; while the second is sold by Botsford, High Holborn, London.
Professor Geddes’ work exemplifies concretely a good part of what I
have sought to explain and define in not altogether adequate prose.




UTOPIAS


  PLATO (427 B.C.–347 B.C.). The Republic. Translated with notes
      and essays by Benjamin Jowett. Oxford: 1894. See also Plato’s
      Critias and Statesman in the same edition. The Laws, which
      is a more detailed attempt to work out the details of a good
      polity, is so lacking in Plato’s original inspiration that,
      but for Aristotle’s allusion to it, one would promptly take
      it for the work of another hand.

  MORE, SIR THOMAS (1478–1535). Utopia. Published originally in
      Latin in 1516. There are numerous modern editions. See Ideal
      Commonwealths, edited by Henry Morley.

  ANDREÆ, JOHANN VALENTIN (1586–1654). Christianopolis. Published
      in 1619 and translated in 1916 by Felix Emil Held under the
      title of Christianopolis: An Ideal State of the 17th Century.
      Oxford University Press. Mr. Held’s introduction contains an
      account of Andreæ’s life.

  BACON, FRANCIS (1561–1626). The New Atlantis. Published in
      1627. Bacon contemplated writing a second part which would
      deal with the laws of his ideal commonwealth. See Ideal
      Commonwealths.

  CAMPANELLA, TOMASSO (1568–1639). The City of the Sun. Published
      in 1637 as Civitas Solis Poetica: Idea Reipublicæ
      Philosophiæ. See Ideal Commonwealths. ALLAIS, DENIS VAIRASSE
      D’ (--). L’Histoire des Sevarambes. Written in 1672 and
      translated into English as The History of the Sevarites,
      written by one Captain Siden, London: 1675. In Kautsky’s
      Vorläufer des Modernen Sozialismus this utopia is given
      high praise and is ranked as the French parallel of More’s
      Utopia; but I feel that this is a sad error in judgment which
      perhaps arose out of the bare fact that the first law of
      the great dictator Sevarias was to put all private property
      in the hands of the state, to be disposed of absolutely by
      its authority, and to do away with distinctions of rank
      and hereditary dignity. There is little that is fresh or
      imaginative in Vairasse’s treatment, however, and there
      is nothing like More’s detailed effort to guard against
      usurpation of power by the ruling classes. As simple fiction,
      the History of the Sevarites is, however, readable. See
      also L’Histoire des Galligènes, by Tiphaigne de la Roche;
      likewise the excellent satire, Giphantia. The description of
      Salentum, under Mentor, in Fénélon’s Telemachus should not be
      neglected. The Abbé Morelly’s Basiliade is little more than a
      definition of his Code de la Nature.

  MERCIER, LOUIS SEBASTIEN (1740–1814). Memoirs of the Year 2500.
      Published in French in 1772 and translated into English,
      Liverpool: 1802.

  SPENCE, THOMAS (1750–1814). Description of Spensonia.
      Constitution of Spensonia. London: 1795. Privately printed at
      the Courier Press; Leamington Spa: 1917.

  FOURIER, CHARLES FRANÇOIS MARIE (1772–1837). Traité de
      l’Association domestique agricole. 2 vols. 1822. Le Nouveau
      Monde Industriel. 2 vols. 1829. See also Albert Brisbane in
      his General Introduction to the Social Sciences (Fourier’s
      “Social Destinies”), and Selections from the Works of
      Fourier, translated by Julia Franklin, with an introduction
      by Charles Gide, London: 1901.

  CABET, ÉTIENNE (1788–1856). Voyage en Icarie. Published in 1845
      and numerous editions followed during the next five years;
      see that of the Bureau du Populaie, Paris: 1848.

  BUCKINGHAM, JAMES SILK (1786–1855). National Evils and Practical
      Remedies, with a plan for a model town. London: 1848.

  BULWER-LYTTON, E. (1803–1873). The Coming Race; or the New
      Utopia. London: 185--. A fantastic romance about a people who
      live underground, possess detachable wings, and command a
      potency known as “vril.” It is perhaps not altogether without
      significance that this new hierarchy of industrial angels was
      conceived by Lytton in the same decade that saw the building
      of the Crystal Palace.

  PEMBERTON, ROBERT (--). The Happy Colony. London: 1854. This is
      an appeal to the working class, somewhat similar in temper
      and method to Buckingham’s appeal to the middle class.
      Pemberton had an individual system of psychology which he
      desired to apply in education. This utopia has now only a
      limited historical significance.

  BELLAMY, EDWARD (1850–1898). Looking Backward; Boston: 1888.
      Equality; Boston: 1897.

  HERTZKA, THEODOR (1845–?). Freeland: A Social Anticipation.
      First edition published in German, 1889; English translation
      published by the British Freeland Association in 1891. A
      Visit to Freeland, or the New Paradise Regained. Translation
      published by the above Association, London: 1894. The first
      work lays the foundations for the utopia; the second is the
      ideal commonwealth in action.

  MORRIS, WILLIAM (1834–1896). News from Nowhere. London: 1890.
      There have been numerous editions.

  HOWARD, EBENEZER (1850–?). Garden Cities of Tomorrow. London:
      1902. First published as Tomorrow in 1898. Unique among
      utopian books in that its eutopia has been partly realized.
      See numerous descriptions of Letchworth, the first Garden
      City.

  HUDSON, W. H. (--). A Crystal Age. London: 1906.

  THIRION, ÉMILE (1825–?). Neustria: Utopie Individualiste. Paris:
      1901. This is one of the rare, deliberately individualistic
      utopias, founded on work, liberty, and property. It assumes
      that a colony of Girondists were able to establish themselves
      in South America.

  HERZL, THEODOR (1860–1904). Altneuland. Leipzig: 1903.

  TARDE, GABRIEL (1843–1904). Underground Man. London: 1905. A deft
      and well-conceived fantasy, full of excellent criticism.
      Towards the past it is a utopia of reconstruction, towards
      the future--but herein lies much of its charm!--it is one of
      escape.

  WELLS, H. G. (1866-?). A Modern Utopia. New York: 1905.

  CRAM, RALPH ADAMS (1863–?). Walled Towns. Boston: 1919. Dr.
      Cram does not classify this work as a utopia; but the
      honest critic cannot help giving it that label. Dr. Cram
      sees no basis for eutopia without the system of values and
      the sanctions perpetuated by the Christian Church; since
      this leaves the greater part of humanity in Darkness, I
      cannot agree with him. Dr. Cram, however, is a fine scholar
      and a stimulating critic; and if one could only grant his
      assumptions his conclusions would be magnificent.

  MORLEY, HENRY. Ideal Commonwealths; Plutarch’s Lycurgus, More’s
      Utopia, Bacon’s New Atlantis, Campanella’s City of the Sun,
      and a Fragment of Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem, with an
      introduction by Henry Morley. London: G. Routledge, 1886.




Transcriber’s Notes


Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.

Chapter One did not indicate the beginning of section “5”. Transcriber
added it by referencing an earlier edition of the book.

Text mostly uses “utopia” but sometimes uses “eutopia”. Both retained
here.

Page 104: “the tale end” was printed that way.

Page 224: “perfunctory seal upon” was printed as “perfunctory real
upon”; changed here.

Page 231: “advertized” was printed that way.

Page 294: “A. E.” was the pseudonym of George William Russell.



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