A Modern Utopia

Sa

n possession of some clear, general ideas about my own world, and I can broach almost at once the thoughts that have been growing and accumulating since my arriv

nts, certain men and women of a distinctive costume and bearing, and I know now that these people constitute an order, the samurai, the "voluntary nobility," which is essential in the scheme of the Utopian State. I know that this order is open to every physically and mentally healthy adult in the Utopian State who will observe its prescribed austere rule of living, that much of the responsible work of the State is reserved for it, and I am inclined now at the first onset of realisatio

would face unthinkable complications-we must assume also that a great succession of persons of extraordinary character and mental gifts, who on earth died in childhood or at birth, or who never learnt to read, or who lived and died amidst savage or brutalising surroundings that gave their gifts no scope, did in Utopia encounter happier chances, and take up the development and application of social theory-from the time of the first Utopists in a steady onward progress down to the present hour. [Footnote: One might assume as an alternative to this that amidst the four-fifths of the Greek

that swept aside obstructions, and abolished centres of decay; there were prejudices tempered to an ordered criticism, and hatreds that merged at last in tolerant reactions. It was several hundred

rvaded with the recognition of the fact that self-seeking is no more the whole of human life than the satisfaction of hunger; that it is an essential of a man's existence no doubt, and that under stress of evil circumstances it may as entirely obsess him as would the food hunt during famine, but that life may pass beyond to an illimitable world of emotions and effort. Every sane person consists of possibilities beyond the unavoidable needs, is capable of disinterested feeling, even if it amounts only to enthusiasm for a sport or an industrial employment well done, for an art, or for a locality or class. In our world now, as in the Utopian past, this impersonal en

directed itself to research and discussion, to the elaboration of its ideal, to the discussion of a plan of campaign, but at some stage it must have assumed a more militant organisation, and have prevailed against and assimilated the pre-existing political organisations, and to all intents and pur

le of life still remained to be invented. All sorts of people were thinking of something in that way about the time of my coming. The idea, as it reached me, was pretty crude in several respects. It ignored the high possibility of a synthesis of languages in the future; it came from a literary man, who wrote only English, and, as I read him-he was a little vague in his proposals-it was to be a purely English-speaking movem

some par

nd fragmentary basis of accumulated conclusions, ours had a fairly comprehensive science of human association, and a very careful analysis of the failures of precedin

gether, and now there are no new religions, no n

esting phase, perhap

anet alone for a time! Tell

early social and political speculations than our earth has yet undertaken. The social speculations of the Greeks, for example, had just the same primary defect as the economic speculations of the eighteenth century-they began with the assumption that the general conditions of the prevalent state of affairs were permanent.] But, on the other hand, the assumption that men are unclassifiable, because practically homogeneous, which underlies mo

e distinguished, called, respectively, the Poietic, the Kinetic, the Dull, and the Base. The former two are supposed to constitute the living tissue of the State; the latter are the fulcra and resistances, the bone and cover of its body. They are not hereditary classes, nor is there any attempt to develop any class by special breeding, simply becaus

he invention or discovery is primarily beauty then we have the artistic type of Poietic mind; when it is not so, we have the true scientific man. The range of discovery may be narrowed as it is in the art of Whistler or the science of a cytologist, or it may embrace a wide extent of relevance, until at last both artist or scientific inquirer merge in the universal reference of the true philosopher. To the accumulated activities of the Poietic type, re

ople, but they do not do, and they do not desire to do, new things. The more vigorous individuals of this class are the most teachable people in the world, and they are generally more moral and more trustworthy than the Poietic types. They live,-while the Poietics are always something of experimentalists with life. The characteristics of either of these two classes may be associated with a good or bad physique, with excessive or defective ener

ministrator and without it an uninventive, laborious, common mathematician, or common scholar, or common scientific man; while at the other end is the mainly emotional, unoriginal man, the type to which-at a low level of personal energy-my botanist inclines. The second type includes, amidst its

d they would be considerably in the minority in the world, but it is quite possible that will not be the reader's opinion. It is clearly a matter of an arbitrary line.) They are the stupid people, the incompetent people, the formal, imitative people, the people who, in any properly organised State,

rns not so much the quality of their imagination as a certain bias in it, that to a statesman makes it a matter for special attention. The Base have a narrower and more persistent egoistic reference than the common run of humanity; they may boast, but they have no frankness; they have rela

of unique individuals in mass, one may, for practical purposes, deal with it far more conveniently by disregarding its uniquenesses and its mixed cases altogether, and supposing it to be an assembly of poietic, kinetic, dull, and base people. In many respects it behaves as if it were that. The State, dealing as it does only with non-individualised affairs, is not only justified in disregarding, but is bo

fashion:-To contrive a revolutionary movement that shall absorb all existing governments and fuse them with it

velopment of an efficient and settled social and political organisation; the statesman has given way to the politician who has incorporated the wisdom of the statesman with his own energy, the original genius in arts, letters, science, and every department of activity to the cultivated and scholarly man. The kinetic man of wide range, who has assimilated his poietic predecessor, succeeds with far more readiness than his poietic contemporary in almost every human activity. The latter is by his very nature undisciplined and experimental, and is positively hampered by precedents and good order. With this substitution of the efficient for the creative type, the State ceases to grow, first in this department of activity, and then in that, and so long as its conditions remain the same it remains orderly and efficient. But it has lost its power of initiative and change; its power of adaptation is gone, and with that secular change of conditions which is the law of life, stresses must ar

eed, I am listening to my Utopian self, then they not onl

e how they

y unmanageably complex. Comte's separation of the activities of a State into the spiritual and material does, to a certain extent, anticipate this opposition of poietic and kinetic, but the intimate texture of his mind was dull and hard, the conception slipped from him again, and his suppression of literary activities, and his imposition of a rule of life upon the poietic types, who are least able to sustain it, mark how deeply he went under

§ 2). But just as in the case of births it was possible for the State to frame limiting conditions within which individuality plays more freely than in the void, so the founders of this modern Utopia believed it possible to define conditions under which every individual born with poietic gifts should be enabled and encouraged to give them a full development, in art, philosophy, invention, or discovery. Certain general conditions presented themselves as obviousl

ult research, a problem in its nature irresolvably complex, and admitting of no systematic solution. But my double told me of a great variety of devices by which poietic me

r of literature and the philosophical and sociological sciences, every higher educational establishment carried its studentships, its fellowships, its occasional lectureships, and to produce a poem, a novel, a speculative work of force or merit, was to become the object of a generous competition between rival Universities. In Utopia, any author has the option either of publishing his works through the public bookseller as a private speculation, or, if he is of sufficient merit, of accepting a University endowment and conceding his copyright to the University press. All sorts of grants in the

nding of the importance of poietic activities in the majority of the sam

with faces strengthened by discipline and touched with devotion, is the Utopian reality; but that for them, the whole fabric of these fair appearances would crumble and tarnish, shrink and shrivel, until at last, back I should be amidst the grime and disorders of the life of earth. Tell me about these samurai, who remi

amurai are engaged in administrative work. Practically the whole of the responsible rule of the world is in their hands; all our head teachers and disciplinary heads of colleges, our judges, barristers, employers of labour beyond a certain limit, practising medical men, legislators, must be samurai, and all the executive committees, and so forth, that play so large a part in our affairs are drawn by lot exclusively from them. The or

he follows

ovided he fol

e phrase, 'volun

the whole world. No one could complain of an unjust exclusion, for the only thing t

have been made exclusive of

clude the dull, to be unattractive to the base, and to d

has su

he quality of all its problems has been raised, and there has been no war, no grinding poverty, not half the disease, and an enormous increase

aid. "I expect there was fighting?" He n

his as well as it can, but, of course, like all general propositions, it does not do it in any case with absolute precision. On the whole, it is so good that most men who, like myself, are doing poietic work, and who would be just as well off without obedience, find a satisfaction in adhesion. At first, in the militant days, it was a trifle hard and uncompromi

is desk, took it up as if to sho

tion exacts a little exertion, as evidence of good faith, and it is designed to weed out the duller dull and many of the base. Our schooling period ends now about fourtee

ur popu

hat exc

re

ses, but one or other must be followed and a satisfactory examination passed at the end-perhap

man is sometimes

ng examination may at any time in later life sit for it again-and agai

aren't there people who c

nervous i

le of great though ir

eople among our samurai. Passing an examination is a proof of a ce

ain 'ordin

what is

others can follo

cepted as sufficient for this qualification. There may have been a reason in the past for this provision; in those days there were many daughters of prosperous parents-and even some sons-who did nothing whatever but idle uninterestingly in the world, and the organisation might have suffered by their invasion, but that reason has gone now, and the requirement remains a merely ceremonial requirement. But, on the other hand, another has developed. Our Founders made a collection of several volumes, which they called, collectively, the Book of the Samurai, a compilation of articles and extracts, poems and prose pieces, which were supposed to embody the idea of the order. It was to play the part for the samurai that the Bible did for the ancient Hebr

Hen

died a litt

great red-faced man, with fiery hair, a noisy, intolerant maker

ied the

like wine; in our world he wrote wine; r

he revising and bracing of our Canon is work for poiet

seen him. On earth he wrot

night that

e pit from

hatever G

onquerable

are in Utopia also. We put that in the Canon

work by living men and work of inferior quality, and a satisfactory knowledg

of uniformity in yo

ion comes the physical, the man must be in sound health, free from certain foul, avoidable, and demoralising diseases, and in good training. We rej

But you said

y and girl emotions-men of my way of thinking, at any rate, don't-we want to get our samurai with experiences, with a settled mature conviction. Our hygiene and regimen are rapidly pushing back old age and death, and keep

f youth that knows the desirability

breaks the Rule after his adult adhesion at five-and-twenty is no more i

what is

lf-indulgent. We think that a constant resistance to little seductions is good for a man's quality. At any rate, it shows that a man is prepared

ea

educated, and at about the same level of physical refinement, it is practically impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. We never settled the hy

eat f

le flayed carcases of brutes dripping blood, were hung f

ll in London-in m

er face, and did not say whatever

ng debtor, is profoundly distasteful to Utopian ideas, and our State insists pretty effectually now upon the participation of the lender in the borrower's risks. This, however, is only one part of a series of limitations of the same character. It is felt that to buy simply in order to sell again brings out many unsocial human qualities; it makes a man seek to enhance profits and falsify values, and so the samurai are forbidden to buy to sell on

aid. "We are obsessed by the power of money. These rules will work out as

new industries, have become rich men, and many men who have grown ric

-making business must be confined to men who are not sam

ve

the evidenc

discoveries in the economy of distribution, or who have called attention by intellige

n't they

ould th

h is p

explain t

ave made leisure, movement, any sort of freedom, life itself, purchaseable. The more fools you! A poor working man with you is a man in discomfort and fear. No wonder your rich have power. But here a reasonable leisure, a decent life, is to be had by every man on easier terms than by selling himself to the rich. And rich as men

here is the

f things. But little or no power over his fellows-unles

at else may not

perience that actors and actresses as a class are loud, ignoble, and insincere. If they have not such flamboyant qualities then they are tepid and ineffectual players. Nor may the samurai do personal services, except in the matter of medicine or surgery; they may not be barbers, for example, nor inn waiters, nor boot cleaners. But, nowadays, we hav

world as ordered as yours. I

n and man or side and side. That lesson was learnt long ago before the coming of the samurai. Gentlemen of honour, according to the old standards, rode horses, raced chariots, fought, and played competitive games of skill, and the dull, cowardly and base came in thousands to admire, and howl, and bet. The gentlemen of honour degenerated fast enough into a sort of a

r earthly games have a fine side. There is a ga

s, fives, billiards-. You will find clubs and a class of men to play all these things in Utopia, but not the samurai. And they must play their games as games, not as displays; the price of a privacy for playing cricket, so that they could charge for admission, would be overwhelmingly high.... Negroes are often very clever at cricket. For a time, most of the samurai had their

rohibitions? You have forbidden alcohol, drugs, smoking, betting, a

ule for your e

emember rightly, fo

ery direction; he tends to eat too much and too elaborately, to drink too much, to become lazy faster than his work can be reduced, to waste his interest upon displays, and to make love too much and too elaborately. He gets out of training, and concentrates upon egoistic or erotic broodings. The past history of our race is very largely a history of social collapses due to demoralisation by indulgences following security and abundance. In the time of our Founders the signs of a world-wide epoch of prosperity and relaxat

pau

me to help

tificial whets, and also and equally that no appetite should be starved. A man must come from the table satisfied, but not replete. And, in the matter of love, a straight and clean desire for a clean and straight fellow-creature was our Founders' ideal. They enjoined marriage between equals as the samurai's duty to the race, and they framed directions of the precisest sort to prevent that uxorious inseparableness, that con

breaks the Ru

e either her

er for a novel

een matter f

law as well as a regimen? I mea

thers. But the samurai, both men and women, and the women under the Lesser Rule also, all have a particular dress. No difference is made between women under either the Great or the Lesser Rule. You have seen the men's dre

aring variants of that simple formula. "It seems to me a very beautiful dr

they sometimes, well-take a good

d in my eyes. "T

the R

fussy," said my dou

utiful, if you like," he added. "The more real beauty of form and

mean, who found an interest and an advantage in emphasising their individual womanly beauty. There is

s it in her own private circle, or with rare occasional onslaughts upon the public eye. Her everyday mood and the disposition of most people is against being con

no changin

are not our dresses a

aid, forced for a time towards the mysterious philo

t are the

What is all my

iosity to hear of the last portion of the Rule,

eir fellowship who cares for their conversation for an hour, at least, at the nearest club-house of the samurai once on three chosen days in every week. Moreover, they must read aloud from the Book of the Samurai for at least ten minutes every day. Every month they must buy and read faithfully through at least one book that has been published during the past five years, and the only intervention with private choice in that matter is the prescription of a certain minimum of length for the monthly book or books. But the full Rule in these minor compulsory matters is voluminous and detailed, and it abounds wi

omen samurai which is refused to men, and that is to marry outside the Rule, and women married to men not under the Rule are also free to become samurai. Here, too, it will be manifest there is scope for novels and the drama of life. In practice, it seems that it is only men of great poietic distinction outside the Rule, or great commercial leaders, who have wives under it. The tendency of such unions is either to bring the husband under the Rule, or take the wife out of

double told

ergo discipline, to renounce the richness and elaboration of the sensuous life, to master emotions and control impulses, to keep

ke his religio

t as thirst and pride and all desires may be perverted in an age of abundant opportunities, and men may be degraded and wasted by intemperance in drinking, by display, or by ambition, so too the nobler complex of desires that constitutes religion may be turned to evil by the dull, the base, and the careless. Slovenly indulgence in religious inclinations, a failure to think hard and discriminate as fairly as possible in religious matters, is just as alien to the men under the Rule as it would be to drink deeply because they were thirsty, eat until glutted, evade a bath because the day was chilly, or make love to any bright-eyed girl who chanced to look pretty in the dusk. Utopia, which is to have every type of character that one finds on earth, will have its temples

d that vitiates all terrestrial theology. They will hold God to be complex and of an endless variety of aspects, to be expressed by no universal formula nor approved in any uniform manner. Just as the language of Utopia will be a synthesis, even so will its God be. The aspect of God is different in the measure of every man's individuality, and the intimate thing of religion must, therefore, exist in human solitude, between man and God alone. Religion in its quintessence is a relation between God and man; it is perversion to make it a relation between man and man, and a

the most striking of all the rules of the samurai aims. For seven consecutive days in the year, at least, each man or woman under the Rule must go right out of all the life of man into some wild and solitary place, must speak to no man or woman, and have no sort of intercourse with mankind. They must go bookless and weaponless, without pen or paper, or money. Provisions must be taken for the p

en suggested, swordplay and tests that verged on torture, climbing in giddy places and the like, before this was chosen. Partly, it is to ensure good training and sturdiness of body and mind, but partly, also, it is to draw their mind

uented lines upon the sea. Some are dangerous and laborious routes; some merely desolate; and there are even some sea journeys that one may take in the halcyon days as one drifts through a dream. Upon the seas one must go in a little undecked sailing boat, that may be rowed in a calm; all the other journeys one must do

good?"

gear by sea to Tromso, and then inland to a starting-place, and took my ice-axe and rücksack, and said good-bye to the world. I crossed over four glaciers; I climbed three high mountain passes, and slept on moss in desolate valle

women d

es. Equally with the men. Unless t

ed to him, and what he thou

k at the little office as I go up my mountain side. The first day and night I'm a little disposed to shirk the job-every year it's the same-a l

nce of anyone o

f each other. If they come within sight of each other, they must shun an encount

urse. Go on telling

fort and bad weather. I only begin

rry about los

se we should be worrying with maps the whole time. But I'm only sure of

d t

I saw the glow of the sun always, just over the edge of the world. But I had chosen the days of the new moon, so that I could have a glimpse of the stars.... Years ago, I went from the Nile across the Libyan Desert east, and then the stars-the stars in the later days of that journey-brought me near weeping.... You begin to feel alone on the third day, when you find yourself out on some shining snowfield, and nothing of mankind visible in the whole w

mus

ink of

will be red and dull, and air and water will lie frozen together in a common snowfield where now the forests of the tropics are steaming.... I think very much of that, and whether it i

't belie

ve should be, with my imagination straining and failing. Yet, in those high airs and in such solitude, a kind of exaltation comes

moment as though he dou

ere," he said. "One becomes the amba

things. One puts one's self and one'

roadways, and remembers there is still a busy world of men. And at last one turns one's feet down some slope, some gorge that leads back. You come down, perhaps, into a pine fores

mping in the pine woods for six days. Then my thoughts came round to my proper work again. I got keen to go on with it, and so I came back into the world. You come back physically clean-as though you had had your arteries and veins washed out. And your brain has been cleaned, too.... I shall stick to the mountains now until

d some boy of a doctor jabbing you with injecti

who are samurai die better than tha

go, solitary men and women sailed alone or marched alone, or clambered-quiet, resolute exiles; they stood alone amidst wildernesses of ice, on the precipitous banks of roaring torrents, in monstrous caverns, or steering a tossing boat in the l

of detachment from the immediate heats and hurries, the little graces and delights, the tensions and stimulations of the daily world. It pl

oters. Yet, by a curious exception, the supreme legislative assembly must have one-tenth, and may have one-half of its members outside the order, because, it is alleged, there is a sort of wisdom that comes of sin and laxness, which is necessary to the perfect ruling of life. My double quoted me a verse from the Canon on this matter that my unfortunate verbal memory did not retain, but it was in the nature of a prayer to save the world from "unfermented men." It would seem that Aristotle's idea of a rotation of rulers, an idea that crops up again in Harrington's Oceana, that first Utopia of "the sovereign people" (a Utopia that, through Danton's readings in English, playe

ed and inattentive. The religion of the samurai was after my heart, and it had taken hold of me very strongly.... But presently I fell questioning him upon the complications that arise in the Modern Utopia through the differences between the race

ng, I walked back through the streets of Utop

te Gallery squats, and, as the day was fine, and I had no reason for hurry, I went not by the covered

nhurrying, but not aimless, and I watched them so attentively that were you to ask me for the most elementary details of the buildings and terraces that lay

cloth, dyed an unobtrusive brown or green, over fine woollen underclothing, and so achieve a decent comfort in its simplest form. Others outside the Rule of the samurai range the spectrum for colour, and have every variety of texture; the colours attained by the Utopian dyers seem to me to be fuller and purer than the common range of stuffs on earth; and the subtle folding of the woollen materials witness that Utopian Bradford is no whit behind her earthly sister. White is extraordinarily frequent; white woo

ye that comes with cleanness of blood. In London I am apt to consider myself of a passable size and carriage; here I feel small and mean-looking. The faint suspicions of spinal curvatures, skew feet, unequal legs, and ill-grown bones, that haunt one in a London crowd, the plain intimations-in yello

hey are all the more noticeable because they are rare. But

p their digestions, they ward off gout and rheumatism, neuralgia and influenza and all those cognate decays that bend and wrinkle men and women in the middle years of existence. They have extended the level years far into the seventies, and age, when it comes, comes swiftly and easily. The feverish hurry of our earth, the decay that b

uth is

st living, among the serene-eyed women, comes youth, gaily-coloured,

irty is reached. Men marry before the middle thirties, and the women rather earlier, few are mothers before five-and-twenty. The majority of those who become samurai do so between twenty-seven and thirty-five. And, between seventeen and thirty, the Utopians have their dealings with love, and the play and excitement of love is a chief interest in life. Much freedom of act is allowed them so that their wills may grow freely

oking at a brightly-smiling, blue-eyed girl, tall, ruddy, and freckled warmly, clad like a stage Rosalind, and talking gaily to a fair young man, a novice under the Rule. A red-haired mother under the Lesser Rule goes by, green-gowned, with dark green straps crossing between her breasts, and her two s

and then one of the samurai, in cheerful altercation with a blue-robed girl of eight. "But you could have come back yesterday, Dadda," she persists. He is d

y a young negro, carrying books in his hand, a prosperous-looking, self

what my double sa