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 renaissance 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 renaissance 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” pauperism 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 percent 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
