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 cooperative 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, fingerprint, 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.
VII
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;
