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

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transmission to the subordinate local stations, in response to their

inquiries. So the inventory of the State would watch its every man

and the wide world write its history as the fabric of its destiny

flowed on. At last, when the citizen died, would come the last entry

of all, his age and the cause of his death and the date and place of

his cremation, and his card would be taken out and passed on to the

universal pedigree, to a place of greater quiet, to the ever-growing

galleries of the records of the dead.

 

Such a record is inevitable if a Modern Utopia is to be

achieved.

 

Yet at this, too, our blond-haired friend would no doubt rebel. One

of the many things to which some will make claim as a right, is that

of going unrecognised and secret whither one will. But that, so far

as one’s fellow wayfarers were concerned, would still be possible.

Only the State would share the secret of one’s little concealment.

To the eighteenth-century Liberal, to the old-fashioned

nineteenth-century Liberal, that is to say to all professed

Liberals, brought up to be against the Government on principle, this

organised clairvoyance will be the most hateful of dreams. Perhaps,

too, the Individualist would see it in that light. But these are

only the mental habits acquired in an evil time. The old Liberalism

assumed bad government, the more powerful the government the worse

it was, just as it assumed the natural righteousness of the free

individual. Darkness and secrecy were, indeed, the natural refuges

of liberty when every government had in it the near possibility of

tyranny, and the Englishman or American looked at the papers of a

Russian or a German as one might look at the chains of a slave. You

imagine that father of the old Liberalism, Rousseau, slinking off

from his offspring at the door of the Foundling Hospital, and you

can understand what a crime against natural virtue this quiet eye of

the State would have seemed to him. But suppose we do not assume

that government is necessarily bad, and the individual necessarily

good—and the hypothesis upon which we are working practically

abolishes either alternative—then we alter the case altogether. The

government of a modern Utopia will be no perfection of intentions

ignorantly ruling the world…. [Footnote: In the typical modern

State of our own world, with its population of many millions, and

its extreme facility of movement, undistinguished men who adopt an

alias can make themselves untraceable with the utmost ease. The

temptation of the opportunities thus offered has developed a new

type of criminality, the Deeming or Crossman type, base men who

subsist and feed their heavy imaginations in the wooing, betrayal,

ill-treatment, and sometimes even the murder of undistinguished

women. This is a large, a growing, and, what is gravest, a prolific

class, fostered by the practical anonymity of the common man. It is

only the murderers who attract much public attention, but the supply

of low-class prostitutes is also largely due to these free

adventures of the base. It is one of the bye products of State

Liberalism, and at present it is very probably drawing ahead in the

race against the development of police organisation.]

 

Such is the eye of the State that is now slowly beginning to

apprehend our existence as two queer and inexplicable parties

disturbing the fine order of its field of vision, the eye that will

presently be focussing itself upon us with a growing astonishment

and interrogation. “Who in the name of Galton and Bertillon,” one

fancies Utopia exclaiming, “are you?”

 

I perceive I shall cut a queer figure in that focus. I shall affect

a certain spurious ease of carriage no doubt. “The fact is, I shall

begin….”

 

Section 7

 

And now see how an initial hypothesis may pursue and overtake its

maker. Our thumbmarks have been taken, they have travelled by

pneumatic tube to the central office of the municipality hard by

Lucerne, and have gone on thence to the headquarters of the index at

Paris. There, after a rough preliminary classification, I imagine

them photographed on glass, and flung by means of a lantern in

colossal images upon a screen, all finely squared, and the careful

experts marking and measuring their several convolutions. And then

off goes a brisk clerk to the long galleries of the index

building.

 

I have told them they will find no sign of us, but you see him going

from gallery to gallery, from bay to bay, from drawer to drawer, and

from card to card. “Here he is!” he mutters to himself, and he whips

out a card and reads. “But that is impossible!” he says….

 

You figure us returning after a day or so of such Utopian

experiences as I must presently describe, to the central office in

Lucerne, even as we have been told to do.

 

I make my way to the desk of the man who has dealt with us before.

“Well?” I say, cheerfully, “have you heard?”

 

His expression dashes me a little. “We’ve heard,” he says, and adds,

“it’s very peculiar.”

 

“I told you you wouldn’t find out about us,” I say,

triumphantly.

 

“But we have,” he says; “but that makes your freak none the less

remarkable.”

 

“You’ve heard! You know who we are! Well—tell us! We had an idea,

but we’re beginning to doubt.”

 

“You,” says the official, addressing the botanist, “are–-!”

 

And he breathes his name. Then he turns to me and gives me mine.

 

For a moment I am dumbfounded. Then I think of the entries we made

at the inn in the Urserenthal, and then in a flash I have the truth.

I rap the desk smartly with my finger-tips and shake my index-finger

in my friend’s face.

 

“By Jove!” I say in English. “They’ve got our doubles!”

 

The botanist snaps his fingers. “Of course! I didn’t think of

that.”

 

“Do you mind,” I say to this official, “telling us some more about

ourselves?”

 

“I can’t think why you keep it up,” he remarks, and then almost

wearily tells me the facts about my Utopian self. They are a little

difficult to understand. He says I am one of the samurai, which

sounds Japanese, “but you will be degraded,” he says, with a gesture

almost of despair. He describes my position in this world in phrases

that convey very little.

 

“The queer thing,” he remarks, “is that you were in Norway only

three days ago.”

 

“I am there still. At least–-. I’m sorry to be so much trouble to

you, but do you mind following up that last clue and inquiring if

the person to whom the thumbmark really belongs isn’t in Norway

still?”

 

The idea needs explanation. He says something incomprehensible about

a pilgrimage. “Sooner or later,” I say, “you will have to believe

there are two of us with the same thumbmark. I won’t trouble you

with any apparent nonsense about other planets and so forth again.

Here I am. If I was in Norway a few days ago, you ought to be able

to trace my journey hither. And my friend?”

 

“He was in India.” The official is beginning to look perplexed.

 

“It seems to me,” I say, “that the difficulties in this case are

only just beginning. How did I get from Norway hither? Does my

friend look like hopping from India to the Saint Gotthard at one

hop? The situation is a little more difficult than that–-”

 

“But here!” says the official, and waves what are no doubt

photographic copies of the index cards.

 

“But we are not those individuals!”

 

“You are those individuals.”

 

“You will see,” I say.

 

He dabs his finger argumentatively upon the thumbmarks. “I see

now,” he says.

 

“There is a mistake,” I maintain, “an unprecedented mistake. There’s

the difficulty. If you inquire you will find it begin to unravel.

What reason is there for us to remain casual workmen here, when you

allege we are men of position in the world, if there isn’t something

wrong? We shall stick to this wood-carving work you have found us

here, and meanwhile I think you ought to inquire again. That’s how

the thing shapes to me.”

 

“Your case will certainly have to be considered further,” he says,

with the faintest of threatening notes in his tone. “But at the same

time”—hand out to those copies from the index again—“there you

are, you know!”

 

Section 8

 

When my botanist and I have talked over and exhausted every

possibility of our immediate position, we should turn, I think, to

more general questions.

 

I should tell him the thing that was becoming more and more apparent

in my own mind. Here, I should say, is a world, obviously on the

face of it well organised. Compared with our world, it is like a

well-oiled engine beside a scrap-heap. It has even got this

confounded visual organ swivelling about in the most alert and

lively fashion. But that’s by the way…. You have only to look at

all these houses below. (We should be sitting on a seat on the

Gutsch and looking down on the Lucerne of Utopia, a Lucerne that

would, I insist, quite arbitrarily, still keep the Wasserthurm and

the Kapellbrucke.) You have only to mark the beauty, the simple

cleanliness and balance of this world, you have only to see the free

carriage, the unaffected graciousness of even the common people, to

understand how fine and complete the arrangements of this world must

be. How are they made so? We of the twentieth century are not going

to accept the sweetish, faintly nasty slops of Rousseauism that so

gratified our great-great-grandparents in the eighteenth. We know

that order and justice do not come by Nature—“if only the policeman

would go away.” These things mean intention, will, carried to a

scale that our poor vacillating, hot and cold earth has never known.

What I am really seeing more and more clearly is the will beneath

this visible Utopia. Convenient houses, admirable engineering that

is no offence amidst natural beauties, beautiful bodies, and a

universally gracious carriage, these are only the outward and

visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. Such an order means

discipline. It means triumph over the petty egotisms and vanities

that keep men on our earth apart; it means devotion and a nobler

hope; it cannot exist without a gigantic process of inquiry, trial,

forethought and patience in an atmosphere of mutual trust and

concession. Such a world as this Utopia is not made by the chance

occasional co-operations of self-indulgent men, by autocratic rulers

or by the bawling wisdom of the democratic leader. And an

unrestricted competition for gain, an enlightened selfishness, that

too fails us….

 

I have compared the system of indexing humanity we have come upon to

an eye, an eye so sensitive and alert that two strangers cannot

appear anywhere upon the planet without discovery. Now an eye does

not see without a brain, an eye does not turn round and look without

a will and purpose. A Utopia that deals only with appliances and

arrangements is a dream of superficialities; the essential problem

here, the body within these garments, is a moral and an intellectual

problem. Behind all this material order, these perfected

communications, perfected public services and economic organisations,

there must be men and women willing these things. There must be a

considerable number and a succession of these men and women of will.

No single person, no transitory group of people, could order and

sustain this vast complexity. They must have a collective if not

a common width of aim, and that involves a spoken or written

literature, a living literature to