A Modern Utopia

opian Im

ure us as curiously settled down in Utopia, as working for a low wage at wood-carving, until the authorities at the central registry in Paris can solve the perplexing problem we have set

ts lower apartments; the windows of the rooms look either outward or inward to the quadrangle, and the doors give upon artificially-lit passages with staircases passing up and down. These passages are carpeted with a sort of cork carpet, but are otherwise bare. The lower story is occupied by the equivalent of a London club, kitchens and other offices, dining-room, writing-room, smoking and assembly rooms, a barber's shop, and a library. A colonnade with seats runs about the quadrangle, and in the middle is a grass-plot. In the centre of this a bronze figure, a sleeping child, reposes above a little basin and fountain, in which water lilies are growing. The place has been designed by an architect happily free from the hampering traditions of Greek temple building, and of Roman and

re found in these colonnades, but the larger stores are usually housed in buildings specially adapted to their needs. The majority of the residential edifices are far finer and more substantial than our own modest shelter, though w

one of these latter can be taken and furnished according to his personal taste. A pleasant boudoir, a private library and study, a private garden plot, are among the commonest of such luxuries. Devices to secure roof gardens, loggias, verandahs, and such-like open-air privacies to the more sumptuous of these apartments, give interest and variety to Utopian architecture. There are sometimes little cooking corners in these flats-as one would call the

two or three theatres and the larger shops, and hither, too, in the case of Lucerne, the head of the swift railway to Paris and England and Scotland, and to the Rhineland and Germany will

tion with the rest of the world, with doctor, shop, and so forth, and may even have a pneumatic tube for books and small parcels to the nearest post-office. But the solitary homestead, as a permanent residence, will be something of a luxury-t

here will be any agricultural labourers drawing wages in Utopia. I am inclined to imagine farming done by tenant associations, by little democratic unlimited liability companies working under elected managers, and paying not a fixed rent but a share of the produce to the State. Such companies could reconstruct annually to weed out indolent members. [Footnote: Schemes for the co-operative association of producers will be found in Dr. Hertzka's Freeland.] A minimum standard of efficiency in farming would be insured by fixing a mini

t resident in the Lucerne ward over the age of fifteen, of the ugliest local building. The old little urban and local governing bodies, we find, have long since been superseded by great provincial municipalities for all the more serious administrative purposes, but they still survive to discharge a number of curious minor functions, and not the least among these is this sort of ?sthetic ostracism. Every year every minor local governing body pulls down a building selected by local plebiscit

attle men, and the like-for children. The things are made in the rough by machinery, and then finished by hand, because the work of unskilful but int

ules of the game as between employer and employed in this particular industry hang on the wall behind us; they are drawn up by a conference of the Common Council of Wages Workers with the employers, a common council which has re

, one is reminded inevitably of an art school. Every now and then he carves a little himself or makes a sketch or departs to the machinery to order some change in the rough shapes it is turning out. Our work is by no means confined to animals. After a time I am

water-slide that brings our trees from the purple forest overhead. Above us, but nearly hidden, hums the machine shed, but we see a corner of the tank into which, with a mighty splash, the pine trees are delivered. Ever

omes the memory of the open end of the shed looking out upon the lake, the blue-green lake, the boats mirrored in

about midday, and then we walk home, through this beautif

s of that universal eye which has turned upon us, we should have those ridiculous sham numbers on our consciences; but that general restlessness, that brooding stress that pursues t

sleep and the place in which I dine, very much as I went to and fro in that real world into which I fell five-and-forty years ago. I find about me mountains and horizons that limit my view, institutions that vanish also without an explanation, beyond the limit of sight, and a great complexity of things I do not understand and about which, to tell the truth, I do not formulate acute curiosities. People, very unrepresentative people, people just as casual as people

The question of government, of its sustaining ideas, of race, and the wider future, hang like the arch of the sky over these daily incidents, very great indeed, but very remote. These people about me are everyday people, people not so very far from the minimum wage, accustomed much as the everyday people of earth are accustomed to take their world as they find it. Such enquiries as I attempt are pretty

en; they are both dark and sallow, and they affect amber and crimson in their garments. Their faces strike me as a little unintelligent, and there is a faint touch of middle-aged coquetry in their bearing that I do not like. Yet on earth we should consider them women of exceptional refinement. But the botanist evidently

ack upon my priv

ther they do not wear hats or bonnets. There is little difference in deportment between one class and another; they all are graceful and bear themselves with quiet dignity, and among a group of them a European woman of fashion in her lace and feathers, her hat and metal ornaments, her mixed accumulations of "trimmings," would look like a barbarian tricked out with the miscellaneous plunder of a museum. Boys and girls wear much the same sort of costume-brown leather shoes, then a sort of combination of hose and close-fitting trousers that reaches from toe to waist, and over this a beltless jacket fitting very well, or a belted tunic. Many slender women wear the same sort of costum

have no natural taste on earth will have inartistic equivalents. Everyone will not be quiet in tone, or harmonious, or beautiful. Occasionally, as I go through the streets to my work, I shall turn round to glance again at some robe shot with gold embroidery, some slashing of the sleeves, some eccentricity

ull faces, faces with an uncongenial animation, alien faces, and among these some with an immediate quality of appeal. I should see desirable men approaching me, and I should think; "

I but talk together?" I should think. Women will pass me lightly, women with open and inviting faces, but they will not attract me, and there will come beautiful women, wom

t by the end of old Kapelbrucke,

in my mind that after all this is the "someone" I am seeking, this Utopian self of mine. I had at first an idea of a grotesque encounter, as of something happening in a looking glass, but presently it dawns on me that my Utopian self must be a very different person from me. His training will be different, his mental content diffe

hand from the Great Index in Paris, but I am told to wait another twenty-four hours. I cease absolutely to be interested in anythi

will certainly be the botanist who will notic

rm of a temperate object

d only one or two mules on the day of our arrival, and there seems not a cat

yself to be drawn from my secret musi

free movement of familiar animals. Utopian houses, streets and drains will be planned and built to make rats, mice, and such-like house parasites impossible; the race of cats and dogs-providing, as it does, living fastnesses to which such diseases as plague, influenza, catarr

bably call a "dear old doggie"-which the botanist would make believe did not possess any sensible odour-and it has faithful brown eyes and understands everything you say. The botanist would make believe it understood

lanation and says quietly, "I do not like

more for a man than for all the brutes on the earth, and I can see, what the botanist I think canno

om me, but I am much more inclined to think he is simply more childish. Always it is make-believe. He believes that horses are beautiful creatures for example, dogs are beautiful creatures, that some women are inexpressibly lovely, and he makes believe that this is always so. Never a word of criticism of horse or dog or woman! Never a word of criticism of his impeccable friends! Then there is his botany. He makes believe that all the vegetable kingdom is mystically perfect and exemplary, that all flowers smell deliciously and are exquisitely beautiful, that Drosera does not hurt flies very much, and that onions do not smell. Most of the universe does not interest this nature lover at all. But I know, and I am querulously incapable of understanding why everyone else does not know, that a horse is beautiful in one way

st esteem. There is no perfection, there is no enduring treasure. This pet dog's beautiful affection, I say, or this other sensuous or imaginative

ch incompatibilities. If I cannot imagine thoughts and feelings in a dog's brain that cannot possibly be the

tand about dogs. To me they're human beings-and more! There used to

e of conscience-has suddenly jerked back the memory of that beer

gh I have been fairly popular with kittens. Bu

o demand the sacrifice of the love of animals, which is, in its way, a very fine thing indeed, so much the more re

ting insistence upon sa

asures. You cannot focus all good things at the same time. That is my chief discovery in these meditations at Lucerne. Much of the rest of this

the lake shore, as I meander among these thoughts, and each of

g that the botanist has come to an e

r how he kne

wou

e a gre

a week we shall face our Utopian selves and

lls over, sits up abruptly and pu

" he says. "What is the good of

man who faces a mystification beyond his powers, an incredible disarrangement of the order of Nature. Here, for the first time in the records of Utopian science, are two cases-not simply one but two, and these in each other's company!-of duplicated thumb-marks. This, coupled wit

arded reserve of your thoroughly unoriginal man. "You are not the two persons I ascertained you were," he says, with the note of one resigned to communion with unreason; "because you"-he indicates me-"are evidently at your residence in London." I smile. "That gentleman"-

st blesses

then of such nonsense, "you will have to go

a faint a

nd by believing in

easure we poor humans have in meeting with intellectual inferiority. "The Standing Committee of Identification," he says, with an eye on a memorandum, "h

n we do?" say

or London, and a small but sufficient supply of money,"-he indicates two piles of coins and paper on either hand of him-"for a day or so there." He proceeds i

d t

tory smile, eyes us obliquely under a crumpled brow, sh

Frenchman-the inferior sort of Frenchman-the sort whose only

first Utopian city

ance travel of Utopia, and I have an idea-I know not why-that we should make the journey by night. Perhaps I thin

neatly elsewhere-and doors that we shall imagine give upon a platform. Our cloaks and hats and such-like outdoor impedimenta will be taken in the hall and neatly labelled for London, we shall exchange our shoes for slippers there, and we shall sit down like men i

London?" we shall ask a

rain for Londo

anist and I, trying not to feel too childish,

strike us both. "A good club,

those set high, gives the wall space of the long corridors to books; the middle part of the train is indeed a comfortable library with abundant armchairs and couches, each with its green-shaded light, and soft carpets upon the soundproof floor. Further on will be a ne

l yokels, to the library, and the old gentleman reading the Arabian Nigh

gh which we see a village sleeping under cloudy moonlight go flashing by. Then a skyl

red mile

do not think of reading the Utopian literature that lines the middle part of the train. I find a bed o

r the same place, wherever in space one may chance to be? And asleep, there i

-echoed by the flying track, is more perceptible now, but it is

is nothing to prevent a Channel tunnel i

is not necessary to bundle out passengers from a train in the small hours, simply because they have arriv

at city of Uto

istic intelligence has been quickened to the accomplishment of an engineer. How can one write of these things for a generation which rather admires that inconvenient and gawky muddle of ironwork and Flemish architecture, the London Tower Bridge. When before this, temerarious anticipators have written of the mi

cely begun i

esirous hands, towards the unborn possibilities of the engineer. And Dürer, too, was a Modern, with the same turn towards creative invention. In our times these men would have wanted to make viaducts, to bridge wild and inaccessible places, to cut and straddle great railways athwart the mountai

d speculation, mature and splendid books of philosophy and science, and a glorious fabric of literature will be woven and shaped, and with a teeming leisureliness, put forth. Here will be stupendous libraries, and a mighty organisation of museums. About these centres will cluster a great swarm of people, and close at hand will be another centre, for I who am an Englishman must needs s

r unspeakable clarity and makes every London twilight mysteriously beautiful. We shall go along avenues of architecture that will be emancipated from the last memories of the squat temple boxes of the Greek, the buxom curvatures of Rome; the Goth in us will have taken to steel and countless new materials as kindly as once he took to stone. The gay and swiftly moving platforms of the public ways w

going to their businesses, children meandering along to their schools, holiday makers, lovers, setting out upon a hundred quests; and here we shall ask for the two we more particularly seek. A graceful little telepho

own voice sou

ill come as soon as we

. Yet I feel an unusual emotional stir. I tremble greatl

ty that has accumulated about us in Utopia, our earthly raiment, and a change of linen and the like, have already been delivered. As we go

I say, "that I am going to see

lapses at once into h

should be thinking about brings me

nce of our hotel before I can

the place