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 dropped 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.
V
Sanity and health and goodwill 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 cooperation 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.
VI
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 landmasses, 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 bureaus, 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
