A Modern Utopia, H. G. Wells [i like reading books .txt] 📗

>the single man as in the race as a whole, there is neither health

nor happiness. The permanent idleness of a human being is not

only burthensome to the world, but his own secure misery. But

unprofitable occupation is also intended by idleness, and it may be

considered whether that freedom also will be open to the Utopian.

Conceivably it will, like privacy, locomotion, and almost all the

freedoms of life, and on the same terms—if he possess the money to

pay for it.

 

That last condition may produce a shock in minds accustomed to the

proposition that money is the root of all evil, and to the idea that

Utopia necessarily implies something rather oaken and hand-made and

primitive in all these relations. Of course, money is not the root

of any evil in the world; the root of all evil in the world, and the

root of all good too, is the Will to Live, and money becomes harmful

only when by bad laws and bad economic organisation it is more

easily attained by bad men than good. It is as reasonable to say

food is the root of all disease, because so many people suffer from

excessive and unwise eating. The sane economic ideal is to make the

possession of money the clear indication of public serviceableness,

and the more nearly that ideal is attained, the smaller is the

justification of poverty and the less the hardship of being poor. In

barbaric and disorderly countries it is almost honourable to be

indigent and unquestionably virtuous to give to a beggar, and even

in the more or less civilised societies of earth, so many children

come into life hopelessly handicapped, that austerity to the poor

is regarded as the meanest of mean virtues. But in Utopia everyone

will have had an education and a certain minimum of nutrition and

training; everyone will be insured against ill-health and accidents;

there will be the most efficient organisation for balancing the

pressure of employment and the presence of disengaged labour, and so

to be moneyless will be clear evidence of unworthiness. In Utopia,

no one will dream of giving to a casual beggar, and no one will

dream of begging.

 

There will need to be, in the place of the British casual wards,

simple but comfortable inns with a low tariff—controlled to a

certain extent no doubt, and even in some cases maintained, by the

State. This tariff will have such a definite relation to the minimum

permissible wage, that a man who has incurred no liabilities through

marriage or the like relationship, will be able to live in comfort

and decency upon that minimum wage, pay his small insurance premium

against disease, death, disablement, or ripening years, and have a

margin for clothing and other personal expenses. But he will get

neither shelter nor food, except at the price of his freedom, unless

he can produce money.

 

But suppose a man without money in a district where employment is

not to be found for him; suppose the amount of employment to have

diminished in the district with such suddenness as to have stranded

him there. Or suppose he has quarrelled with the only possible

employer, or that he does not like his particular work. Then no

doubt the Utopian State, which wants everyone to be just as happy as

the future welfare of the race permits, will come to his assistance.

One imagines him resorting to a neat and business-like post-office,

and stating his case to a civil and intelligent official. In any

sane State the economic conditions of every quarter of the earth

will be watched as constantly as its meteorological phases, and a

daily map of the country within a radius of three or four hundred

miles showing all the places where labour is needed will hang upon

the post-office wall. To this his attention will be directed. The

man out of work will decide to try his luck in this place or that,

and the public servant, the official, will make a note of his name,

verify his identity—the freedom of Utopia will not be incompatible

with the universal registration of thumbmarks—and issue passes for

travel and coupons for any necessary inn accommodation on his way to

the chosen destination. There he will seek a new employer.

 

Such a free change of locality once or twice a year from a region of

restricted employment to a region of labour shortage will be among

the general privileges of the Utopian citizen.

 

But suppose that in no district in the world is there work within

the capacity of this particular man?

 

Before we suppose that, we must take into consideration the general

assumption one is permitted to make in all Utopian speculations. All

Utopians will be reasonably well educated upon Utopian lines; there

will be no illiterates unless they are unteachable imbeciles, no

rule-of-thumb toilers as inadaptable as trained beasts. The Utopian

worker will be as versatile as any well-educated man is on earth

to-day, and no Trade Union will impose a limit to his activities.

The world will be his Union. If the work he does best and likes best

is not to be found, there is still the work he likes second best.

Lacking his proper employment, he will turn to some kindred

trade.

 

But even with that adaptability, it may be that sometimes he will

not find work. Such a disproportion between the work to be done and

the people to do it may arise as to present a surplus of labour

everywhere. This disproportion may be due to two causes: to an

increase of population without a corresponding increase of

enterprises, or to a diminution of employment throughout the world

due to the completion of great enterprises, to economies achieved,

or to the operation of new and more efficient labour-saving

appliances. Through either cause, a World State may find itself

doing well except for an excess of citizens of mediocre and lower

quality.

 

But the first cause may be anticipated by wise marriage laws…. The

full discussion of these laws will come later, but here one may

insist that Utopia will control the increase of its population.

Without the determination and ability to limit that increase as well

as to stimulate it whenever it is necessary, no Utopia is possible.

That was clearly demonstrated by Malthus for all time.

 

The second cause is not so easily anticipated, but then, though its

immediate result in glutting the labour market is similar, its final

consequences are entirely different from those of the first. The

whole trend of a scientific mechanical civilisation is continually

to replace labour by machinery and to increase it in its

effectiveness by organisation, and so quite independently of any

increase in population labour must either fall in value until it

can compete against and check the cheapening process, or if that

is prevented, as it will be in Utopia, by a minimum wage, come out

of employment. There is no apparent limit to this process. But a

surplus of efficient labour at the minimum wage is exactly the

condition that should stimulate new enterprises, and that in a State

saturated with science and prolific in invention will stimulate new

enterprises. An increasing surplus of available labour without an

absolute increase of population, an increasing surplus of labour

due to increasing economy and not to proliferation, and which,

therefore, does not press on and disarrange the food supply, is

surely the ideal condition for a progressive civilisation. I am

inclined to think that, since labour will be regarded as a

delocalised and fluid force, it will be the World State and not the

big municipalities ruling the force areas that will be the reserve

employer of labour. Very probably it will be convenient for the

State to hand over the surplus labour for municipal purposes, but

that is another question. All over the world the labour exchanges

will be reporting the fluctuating pressure of economic demand and

transferring workers from this region of excess to that of scarcity;

and whenever the excess is universal, the World State—failing an

adequate development of private enterprise—will either reduce the

working day and so absorb the excess, or set on foot some permanent

special works of its own, paying the minimum wage and allowing them

to progress just as slowly or just as rapidly as the ebb and flow of

labour dictated. But with sane marriage and birth laws there is no

reason to suppose such calls upon the resources and initiative of

the world more than temporary and exceptional occasions.

 

Section 4

 

The existence of our blond bare-footed friend was evidence enough

that in a modern Utopia a man will be free to be just as idle or

uselessly busy as it pleases him, after he has earned the minimum

wage. He must do that, of course, to pay for his keep, to pay his

assurance tax against ill-health or old age, and any charge or debt

paternity may have brought upon him. The World State of the modern

Utopist is no state of moral compulsions. If, for example, under the

restricted Utopian scheme of inheritance, a man inherited sufficient

money to release him from the need to toil, he would be free to go

where he pleased and do what he liked. A certain proportion of men

at ease is good for the world; work as a moral obligation is the

morality of slaves, and so long as no one is overworked there is no

need to worry because some few are underworked. Utopia does not

exist as a solace for envy. From leisure, in a good moral and

intellectual atmosphere, come experiments, come philosophy and the

new departures.

 

In any modern Utopia there must be many leisurely people. We are all

too obsessed in the real world by the strenuous ideal, by the idea

that the vehement incessant fool is the only righteous man. Nothing

done in a hurry, nothing done under strain, is really well done. A

State where all are working hard, where none go to and fro, easily

and freely, loses touch with the purpose of freedom.

 

But inherited independence will be the rarest and least permanent of

Utopian facts, for the most part that wider freedom will have to be

earned, and the inducements to men and women to raise their personal

value far above the minimum wage will be very great indeed. Thereby

will come privacies, more space in which to live, liberty to go

everywhere and do no end of things, the power and freedom to

initiate interesting enterprises and assist and co-operate with

interesting people, and indeed all the best things of life. The

modern Utopia will give a universal security indeed, and exercise

the minimum of compulsions to toil, but it will offer some acutely

desirable prizes. The aim of all these devices, the minimum wage,

the standard of life, provision for all the feeble and unemployed

and so forth, is not to rob life of incentives but to change their

nature, to make life not less energetic, but less panic-stricken and

violent and base, to shift the incidence of the struggle for

existence from our lower to our higher emotions, so to anticipate

and neutralise the motives of the cowardly and bestial, that the

ambitious and energetic imagination which is man’s finest quality

may become the incentive and determining factor in survival.

 

Section 5

 

After we have paid for our lunch in the little inn that corresponds

to Wassen, the botanist and I would no doubt spend the rest of the

forenoon in the discussion of various aspects and possibilities of

Utopian labour laws. We should examine our remaining change, copper

coins of an appearance ornamental rather than reassuring, and we

should decide that after what we had gathered from the man with the

blond hair, it would, on the whole,