The Story of Utopias

get rid of the personal flavor of Andreae: 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 Andreae⁠—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 Andreae: 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 Andreae turns his back upon he knows quite well; for he has lived in Herrenburg, Koenigsbrunn, Tuebingen, Strasbourg, 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.

II

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 fireproof 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.

III

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, bakeshops, 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