“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.”
III
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 belongs 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 practice 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 cooperative 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 Kenya Highlands of Africa; but Hertzka’s “individualism” comes to almost the same thing.
IV
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
