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

freedoms for our like and our choice, just as spacious as we can get

them—and it is only the multitudinous uncongenial, anxious also for

similar developments in some opposite direction, that checks this

expansive movement of personal selection and necessitates a

compromise on privacy.

Glancing back from our Utopian mountain side down which this

discourse marches, to the confusions of old earth, we may remark

that the need and desire for privacies there is exceptionally great

at the present time, that it was less in the past, that in the

future it may be less again, and that under the Utopian conditions

to which we shall come when presently we strike yonder road, it may

be reduced to quite manageable dimensions. But this is to be

effected not by the suppression of individualities to some common

pattern, [Footnote: More’s Utopia. “Whoso will may go in, for there

is nothing within the houses that is private or anie man’s owne.”]

but by the broadening of public charity and the general amelioration

of mind and manners. It is not by assimilation, that is to say, but

by understanding that the modern Utopia achieves itself. The ideal

community of man’s past was one with a common belief, with common

customs and common ceremonies, common manners and common formulae;

men of the same society dressed in the same fashion, each according

to his defined and understood grade, behaved in the same fashion,

loved, worshipped, and died in the same fashion. They did or felt

little that did not find a sympathetic publicity. The natural

disposition of all peoples, white, black, or brown, a natural

disposition that education seeks to destroy, is to insist upon

uniformity, to make publicity extremely unsympathetic to even the

most harmless departures from the code. To be dressed “odd,” to

behave “oddly,” to eat in a different manner or of different food,

to commit, indeed, any breach of the established convention is to

give offence and to incur hostility among unsophisticated men. But

the disposition of the more original and enterprising minds at all

times has been to make such innovations.

This is particularly in evidence in this present age. The almost

cataclysmal development of new machinery, the discovery of new

materials, and the appearance of new social possibilities through

the organised pursuit of material science, has given enormous and

unprecedented facilities to the spirit of innovation. The old local

order has been broken up or is now being broken up all over the

earth, and everywhere societies deliquesce, everywhere men are

afloat amidst the wreckage of their flooded conventions, and still

tremendously unaware of the thing that has happened. The old local

orthodoxies of behaviour, of precedence, the old accepted amusements

and employments, the old ritual of conduct in the important small

things of the daily life and the old ritual of thought in the

things that make discussion, are smashed up and scattered and mixed

discordantly together, one use with another, and no world-wide

culture of toleration, no courteous admission of differences, no

wider understanding has yet replaced them. And so publicity in the

modern earth has become confusedly unsympathetic for everyone.

Classes are intolerable to classes and sets to sets, contact

provokes aggressions, comparisons, persecutions and discomforts,

and the subtler people are excessively tormented by a sense of

observation, unsympathetic always and often hostile. To live without

some sort of segregation from the general mass is impossible in

exact proportion to one’s individual distinction.

Of course things will be very different in Utopia. Utopia will

be saturated with consideration. To us, clad as we are in

mountain-soiled tweeds and with no money but British bank-notes

negotiable only at a practically infinite distance, this must needs

be a reassuring induction. And Utopian manners will not only be

tolerant, but almost universally tolerable. Endless things will be

understood perfectly and universally that on earth are understood

only by a scattered few; baseness of bearing, grossness of manner,

will be the distinctive mark of no section of the community

whatever. The coarser reasons for privacy, therefore, will not exist

here. And that savage sort of shyness, too, that makes so many

half-educated people on earth recluse and defensive, that too the

Utopians will have escaped by their more liberal breeding. In the

cultivated State we are assuming it will be ever so much easier for

people to eat in public, rest and amuse themselves in public, and

even work in public. Our present need for privacy in many things

marks, indeed, a phase of transition from an ease in public in the

past due to homogeneity, to an ease in public in the future due to

intelligence and good breeding, and in Utopia that transition will

be complete. We must bear that in mind throughout the consideration

of this question.

Yet, after this allowance has been made, there still remains a

considerable claim for privacy in Utopia. The room, or apartments,

or home, or mansion, whatever it may be a man or woman maintains,

must be private, and under his or her complete dominion; it seems

harsh and intrusive to forbid a central garden plot or peristyle,

such as one sees in Pompeii, within the house walls, and it is

almost as difficult to deny a little private territory beyond the

house. Yet if we concede that, it is clear that without some further

provision we concede the possibility that the poorer townsman (if

there are to be rich and poor in the world) will be forced to walk

through endless miles of high fenced villa gardens before he may

expand in his little scrap of reserved open country. Such is already

the poor Londoner’s miserable fate…. Our Utopia will have, of

course, faultless roads and beautifully arranged inter-urban

communications, swift trains or motor services or what not, to

diffuse its population, and without some anticipatory provisions,

the prospect of the residential areas becoming a vast area of

defensively walled villa Edens is all too possible.

This is a quantitative question, be it remembered, and not to be

dismissed by any statement of principle. Our Utopians will meet it,

I presume, by detailed regulations, very probably varying locally

with local conditions. Privacy beyond the house might be made a

privilege to be paid for in proportion to the area occupied, and the

tax on these licences of privacy might increase as the square of the

area affected. A maximum fraction of private enclosure for each

urban and suburban square mile could be fixed. A distinction could

be drawn between an absolutely private garden and a garden private

and closed only for a day or a couple of days a week, and at other

times open to the well-behaved public. Who, in a really civilised

community, would grudge that measure of invasion? Walls could be

taxed by height and length, and the enclosure of really natural

beauties, of rapids, cascades, gorges, viewpoints, and so forth

made impossible. So a reasonable compromise between the vital and

conflicting claims of the freedom of movement and the freedom of

seclusion might be attained….

And as we argue thus we draw nearer and nearer to the road that goes

up and over the Gotthard crest and down the Val Tremola towards

Italy.

What sort of road would that be?

Section 3

Freedom of movement in a Utopia planned under modern conditions must

involve something more than unrestricted pedestrian wanderings, and

the very proposition of a world-state speaking one common tongue

carries with it the idea of a world population travelled and

travelling to an extent quite beyond anything our native earth has

seen. It is now our terrestrial experience that whenever economic

and political developments set a class free to travel, that class at

once begins to travel; in England, for example, above the five or

six hundred pounds a year level, it is hard to find anyone who is

not habitually migratory, who has not been frequently, as people

say, “abroad.” In the Modern Utopia travel must be in the common

texture of life. To go into fresh climates and fresh scenery, to

meet a different complexion of humanity and a different type of home

and food and apparatus, to mark unfamiliar trees and plants and

flowers and beasts, to climb mountains, to see the snowy night of

the North and the blaze of the tropical midday, to follow great

rivers, to taste loneliness in desert places, to traverse the gloom

of tropical forests and to cross the high seas, will be an essential

part of the reward and adventure of life, even for the commonest

people…. This is a bright and pleasant particular in which a

modern Utopia must differ again, and differ diametrically, from its

predecessors.

We may conclude from what has been done in places upon our earth

that the whole Utopian world will be open and accessible and as safe

for the wayfarer as France or England is to-day. The peace of the

world will be established for ever, and everywhere, except in remote

and desolate places, there will be convenient inns, at least as

convenient and trustworthy as those of Switzerland to-day; the

touring clubs and hotel associations that have tariffed that country

and France so effectually will have had their fine Utopian

equivalents, and the whole world will be habituated to the coming

and going of strangers. The greater part of the world will be as

secure and cheaply and easily accessible to everyone as is Zermatt

or Lucerne to a Western European of the middle-class at the present

time.

On this account alone no places will be so congested as these two

are now on earth. With freedom to go everywhere, with easy access

everywhere, with no dread of difficulties about language, coinage,

custom, or law, why should everyone continue to go to just a few

special places? Such congestions are merely the measure of the

general inaccessibility and insecurity and costliness of

contemporary life, an awkward transitory phase in the first

beginnings of the travel age of mankind.

No doubt the Utopian will travel in many ways. It is unlikely there

will be any smoke-disgorging steam railway trains in Utopia, they

are already doomed on earth, already threatened with that

obsolescence that will endear them to the Ruskins of to-morrow, but

a thin spider’s web of inconspicuous special routes will cover the

land of the world, pierce the mountain masses and tunnel under the

seas. These may be double railways or monorails or what not—we are

no engineers to judge between such devices—but by means of them the

Utopian will travel about the earth from one chief point to another

at a speed of two or three hundred miles or more an hour. That

will abolish the greater distances…. One figures these main

communications as something after the manner of corridor trains,

smooth-running and roomy, open from end to end, with cars in which

one may sit and read, cars in which one may take refreshment, cars

into which the news of the day comes printing itself from the wires

beside the track; cars in which one may have privacy and sleep if

one is so disposed, bathroom cars, library cars; a train as

comfortable as a good club. There will be no distinctions of class

in such a train, because in a civilised world there would be no

offence between one kind of man and another, and for the good of the

whole world such travelling will be as cheap as it can be, and well

within the reach of any but the almost criminally poor.

Such great tramways as this will be used when the Utopians wish to

travel fast and far; thereby you will glide all over the land

surface of the planet; and feeding them and distributing from them,

innumerable minor systems, clean little electric tramways I picture

them,