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

from increasing and multiplying. But this

latter condition must be respected. Instead of competing to escape

death and wretchedness, we may compete to give birth and we may heap

every sort of consolation prize upon the losers in that competition.

The modern State tends to qualify inheritance, to insist upon

education and nurture for children, to come in more and more in the

interests of the future between father and child. It is taking over

the responsibility of the general welfare of the children more and

more, and as it does so, its right to decide which children it will

shelter becomes more and more reasonable.

 

How far will such conditions be prescribed? how far can they be

prescribed in a Modern Utopia?

 

Let us set aside at once all nonsense of the sort one hears in

certain quarters about the human stud farm. [Footnote: See Mankind

in the Making, Ch. II.] State breeding of the population was a

reasonable proposal for Plato to make, in view of the biological

knowledge of his time and the purely tentative nature of his

metaphysics; but from anyone in the days after Darwin, it is

preposterous. Yet we have it given to us as the most brilliant of

modern discoveries by a certain school of sociological writers, who

seem totally unable to grasp the modification of meaning “species”

and “individual” have undergone in the last fifty years. They do not

seem capable of the suspicion that the boundaries of species have

vanished, and that individuality now carries with it the quality of

the unique! To them individuals are still defective copies of a

Platonic ideal of the species, and the purpose of breeding no more

than an approximation to that perfection. Individuality is indeed a

negligible difference to them, an impertinence, and the whole flow

of modern biological ideas has washed over them in vain.

 

But to the modern thinker individuality is the significant fact of

life, and the idea of the State, which is necessarily concerned with

the average and general, selecting individualities in order to pair

them and improve the race, an absurdity. It is like fixing a crane

on the plain in order to raise the hill tops. In the initiative of

the individual above the average, lies the reality of the future,

which the State, presenting the average, may subserve but cannot

control. And the natural centre of the emotional life, the cardinal

will, the supreme and significant expression of individuality,

should lie in the selection of a partner for procreation.

 

But compulsory pairing is one thing, and the maintenance of general

limiting conditions is another, and one well within the scope of

State activity. The State is justified in saying, before you may add

children to the community for the community to educate and in part

to support, you must be above a certain minimum of personal

efficiency, and this you must show by holding a position of solvency

and independence in the world; you must be above a certain age, and

a certain minimum of physical development, and free of any

transmissible disease. You must not be a criminal unless you have

expiated your offence. Failing these simple qualifications, if you

and some person conspire and add to the population of the State, we

will, for the sake of humanity, take over the innocent victim of

your passions, but we shall insist that you are under a debt to the

State of a peculiarly urgent sort, and one you will certainly pay,

even if it is necessary to use restraint to get the payment out of

you: it is a debt that has in the last resort your liberty as a

security, and, moreover, if this thing happens a second time, or if

it is disease or imbecility you have multiplied, we will take an

absolutely effectual guarantee that neither you nor your partner

offend again in this matter.

 

“Harsh!” you say, and “Poor Humanity!”

 

You have the gentler alternative to study in your terrestrial slums

and asylums.

 

It may be urged that to permit conspicuously inferior people to have

one or two children in this way would be to fail to attain the

desired end, but, indeed, this is not so. A suitably qualified

permission, as every statesman knows, may produce the social effects

without producing the irksome pressure of an absolute prohibition.

Amidst bright and comfortable circumstances, and with an easy and

practicable alternative, people will exercise foresight and

self-restraint to escape even the possibilities of hardship and

discomfort; and free life in Utopia is to be well worth this trouble

even for inferior people. The growing comfort, self-respect, and

intelligence of the English is shown, for example, in the fall in

the proportion of illegitimate births from 2.2 per 1,000 in 1846-50

to 1.2 per 1,000 in 1890-1900, and this without any positive

preventive laws whatever. This most desirable result is pretty

certainly not the consequence of any great exaltation of our moral

tone, but simply of a rising standard of comfort and a livelier

sense of consequences and responsibilities. If so marked a change is

possible in response to such progress as England has achieved in the

past fifty years, if discreet restraint can be so effectual as this,

it seems reasonable to suppose that in the ampler knowledge and the

cleaner, franker atmosphere of our Utopian planet the birth of a

child to diseased or inferior parents, and contrary to the sanctions

of the State, will be the rarest of disasters.

 

And the death of a child, too, that most tragic event, Utopia will

rarely know. Children are not born to die in childhood. But in our

world, at present, through the defects of our medical science and

nursing methods, through defects in our organisation, through

poverty and carelessness, and through the birth of children that

never ought to have been born, one out of every five children born

dies within five years. It may be the reader has witnessed this most

distressful of all human tragedies. It is sheer waste of suffering.

There is no reason why ninety-nine out of every hundred children

born should not live to a ripe age. Accordingly, in any Modern

Utopia, it must be insisted they will.

 

Section 3

 

All former Utopias have, by modern standards, erred on the side of

over regulation in these matters. The amount of State interference

with the marriage and birth of the citizens of a modern Utopia

will be much less than in any terrestrial State. Here, just as in

relation to property and enterprise, the law will regulate only in

order to secure the utmost freedom and initiative.

 

Up to the beginning of this chapter, our Utopian speculations, like

many Acts of Parliament, have ignored the difference of sex. “He”

indeed is to be read as “He and She” in all that goes before. But

we may now come to the sexual aspects of the modern ideal of

a constitution of society in which, for all purposes of the

individual, women are to be as free as men. This will certainly be

realised in the Modern Utopia, if it can be realised at all—not

only for woman’s sake, but for man’s.

 

But women may be free in theory and not in practice, and as long as

they suffer from their economic inferiority, from the inability to

produce as much value as a man for the same amount of work—and

there can be no doubt of this inferiority—so long will their legal

and technical equality be a mockery. It is a fact that almost

every point in which a woman differs from a man is an economic

disadvantage to her, her incapacity for great stresses of exertion,

her frequent liability to slight illnesses, her weaker initiative,

her inferior invention and resourcefulness, her relative incapacity

for organisation and combination, and the possibilities of emotional

complications whenever she is in economic dependence on men. So long

as women are compared economically with men and boys they will be

inferior in precisely the measure in which they differ from men. All

that constitutes this difference they are supposed not to trade upon

except in one way, and that is by winning or luring a man to marry,

selling themselves in an almost irrevocable bargain, and then

following and sharing his fortunes for “better or worse.”

 

But—do not let the proposition in its first crudity alarm

you—suppose the Modern Utopia equalises things between the sexes in

the only possible way, by insisting that motherhood is a service to

the State and a legitimate claim to a living; and that, since the

State is to exercise the right of forbidding or sanctioning

motherhood, a woman who is, or is becoming, a mother, is as much

entitled to wages above the minimum wage, to support, to freedom,

and to respect and dignity as a policeman, a solicitor-general, a

king, a bishop in the State Church, a Government professor, or

anyone else the State sustains. Suppose the State secures to every

woman who is, under legitimate sanctions, becoming or likely to

become a mother, that is to say who is duly married, a certain wage

from her husband to secure her against the need of toil and anxiety,

suppose it pays her a certain gratuity upon the birth of a child,

and continues to pay at regular intervals sums sufficient to keep

her and her child in independent freedom, so long as the child

keeps up to the minimum standard of health and physical and mental

development. Suppose it pays more upon the child when it rises

markedly above certain minimum qualifications, physical or mental,

and, in fact, does its best to make thoroughly efficient motherhood

a profession worth following. And suppose in correlation with this

it forbids the industrial employment of married women and of mothers

who have children needing care, unless they are in a position to

employ qualified efficient substitutes to take care of their

offspring. What differences from terrestrial conditions will

ensue?

 

This extent of intervention will at least abolish two or three

salient hardships and evils of the civilised life. It will abolish

the hardship of the majority of widows, who on earth are poor and

encumbered exactly in proportion as they have discharged the chief

distinctive duty of a woman, and miserable, just in proportion as

their standard of life and of education is high. It will abolish the

hardship of those who do not now marry on account of poverty, or who

do not dare to have children. The fear that often turns a woman from

a beautiful to a mercenary marriage will vanish from life. In Utopia

a career of wholesome motherhood would be, under such conditions as

I have suggested, the normal and remunerative calling for a woman,

and a capable woman who has borne, bred, and begun the education

of eight or nine well-built, intelligent, and successful sons and

daughters would be an extremely prosperous woman, quite irrespective

of the economic fortunes of the man she has married. She would need

to be an exceptional woman, and she would need to have chosen a man

at least a little above the average as her partner in life. But his

death, or misbehaviour, or misfortunes would not ruin her.

 

Now such an arrangement is merely the completed induction from the

starting propositions that make some measure of education free and

compulsory for every child in the State. If you prevent people

making profit out of their children—and every civilised State—even

that compendium of old-fashioned Individualism, the United States

of America—is now disposed to admit the necessity of that

prohibition—and if you provide for the aged instead of leaving them

to their children’s sense of duty, the practical inducements to

parentage, except among very wealthy people, are greatly reduced.

The sentimental factor in the case rarely leads to more than a

solitary child or