A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (best novels for teenagers .TXT) 📕

Failure in a Modern Utopia

Section 1

The old Utopias—save for the breeding schemes of Plato and

Campanella—ignored that reproductive competition among

individualities which is the substance of life, and dealt

essentially with its incidentals. The endless variety of men, their

endless gradation of quality, over which the hand of selection

plays, and to which we owe the unmanageable complication of real

life, is tacitly set aside. The real world is a vast disorder of

accidents and incalculable forces in which men survive or fail. A

Modern Utopia, unlike its predecessors, dare not pretend to change

the last condition; it may order and humanise the conflict, but men

must still survive or fail.

Most Utopias present themselves as going concerns, as happiness in

being; they make it an essential condition that a happy land can

have no history, and all the citizens one is permitted to see are

well looking and upright and mentally and morally in tune. But we

are under the dominion of a logic that obliges us to take over the

actual population of the world with only such moral and mental and

physical improvements as lie within their inherent possibilities,

and it is our business to ask what Utopia will do with its

congenital invalids, its idiots and madmen, its drunkards and men of

vicious mind, its cruel and furtive souls, its stupid people, too

stupid to be of use to the community, its lumpish, unteachable and

unimaginative people? And what will it do with the man who is “poor”

all round, the rather spiritless, rather incompetent low-grade man

who on earth sits in the den of the sweater, tramps the streets

under the banner of the unemployed, or trembles—in another man’s

cast-off clothing, and with an infinity of hat-touching—on the

verge of rural employment?

These people will have to be in the descendant phase, the species

must be engaged in eliminating them; there is no escape from that,

and conversely the people of exceptional quality must be ascendant.

The better sort of people, so far as they can be distinguished,

must have the fullest freedom of public service, and the fullest

opportunity of parentage. And it must be open to every man to

approve himself worthy of ascendency.

The way of Nature in this process is to kill the weaker and the

sillier, to crush them, to starve them, to overwhelm them, using the

stronger and more cunning as her weapon. But man is the unnatural

animal, the rebel child of Nature, and more and more does he turn

himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him. He sees

with a growing resentment the multitude of suffering ineffectual

lives over which his species tramples in its ascent. In the Modern

Utopia he will have set himself to change the ancient law. No longer

will it be that failures must suffer and perish lest their breed

increase, but the breed of failure must not increase, lest they

suffer and perish, and the race with them.

Now we need not argue here to prove that the resources of the world

and the energy of mankind, were they organised sanely, are amply

sufficient to supply every material need of every living human

being. And if it can be so contrived that every human being shall

live in a state of reasonable physical and mental comfort, without

the reproduction of inferior types, there is no reason whatever why

that should not be secured. But there must be a competition in life

of some sort to determine who are to be pushed to the edge, and who

are to prevail and multiply. Whatever we do, man will remain a

competitive creature, and though moral and intellectual training

may vary and enlarge his conception of success and fortify him

with refinements and consolations, no Utopia will ever save him

completely from the emotional drama of struggle, from exultations

and humiliations, from pride and prostration and shame. He lives in

success and failure just as inevitably as he lives in space and

time.

But we may do much to make the margin of failure endurable. On

earth, for all the extravagance of charity, the struggle for the

mass of men at the bottom resolves itself into a struggle, and often

a very foul and ugly struggle, for food, shelter, and clothing.

Deaths outright from exposure and starvation are now perhaps

uncommon, but for the multitude there are only miserable houses,

uncomfortable clothes, and bad and insufficient food; fractional

starvation and exposure, that is to say. A Utopia planned upon

modern lines will certainly have put an end to that. It will insist

upon every citizen being being properly housed, well nourished, and

in good health, reasonably clean and clothed healthily, and upon

that insistence its labour laws will be founded. In a phrasing

that will be familiar to everyone interested in social reform,

it will maintain a standard of life. Any house, unless it be a

public monument, that does not come up to its rising standard of

healthiness and convenience, the Utopian State will incontinently

pull down, and pile the material and charge the owner for the

labour; any house unduly crowded or dirty, it must in some effectual

manner, directly or indirectly, confiscate and clear and clean. And

any citizen indecently dressed, or ragged and dirty, or publicly

unhealthy, or sleeping abroad homeless, or in any way neglected or

derelict, must come under its care. It will find him work if he can

and will work, it will take him to it, it will register him and lend

him the money wherewith to lead a comely life until work can be

found or made for him, and it will give him credit and shelter him

and strengthen him if he is ill. In default of private enterprises

it will provide inns for him and food, and it will—by itself acting

as the reserve employer—maintain a minimum wage which will cover

the cost of a decent life. The State will stand at the back of the

economic struggle as the reserve employer of labour. This most

excellent idea does, as a matter of fact, underlie the British

institution of the workhouse, but it is jumbled up with the relief

of old age and infirmity, it is administered parochially and on the

supposition that all population is static and localised whereas

every year it becomes more migratory; it is administered without

any regard to the rising standards of comfort and self-respect in

a progressive civilisation, and it is administered grudgingly. The

thing that is done is done as unwilling charity by administrators

who are often, in the rural districts at least, competing for

low-priced labour, and who regard want of employment as a crime. But

if it were possible for any citizen in need of money to resort to a

place of public