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

A great and increasing

number of people are persuaded that “half-breeds” are peculiarly

evil creatures—as hunchbacks and bastards were supposed to be in

the middle ages. The full legend of the wickedness of the half-breed

is best to be learnt from a drunken mean white from Virginia or the

Cape. The half-breed, one hears, combines all the vices of either

parent, he is wretchedly poor in health and spirit, but vindictive,

powerful, and dangerous to an extreme degree, his morals—the mean

white has high and exacting standards—are indescribable even in

whispers in a saloon, and so on, and so on. There is really not an

atom of evidence an unprejudiced mind would accept to sustain any

belief of the sort. There is nothing to show that the children of

racial admixture are, as a class, inherently either better or worse

in any respect than either parent. There is an equally baseless

theory that they are better, a theory displayed to a fine degree of

foolishness in the article on Shakespeare in the Encyclopaedia

Britannica. Both theories belong to the vast edifice of sham science

that smothers the realities of modern knowledge. It may be that most

“half-breeds” are failures in life, but that proves nothing. They

are, in an enormous number of cases, illegitimate and outcast from

the normal education of either race; they are brought up in homes

that are the battle-grounds of conflicting cultures; they labour

under a heavy premium of disadvantage. There is, of course, a

passing suggestion of Darwin’s to account for atavism that might go

to support the theory of the vileness of half-breeds, if it had ever

been proved. But, then, it never has been proved. There is no proof

in the matter at all.

 

Section 3

 

Suppose, now, there is such a thing as an all-round inferior race.

Is that any reason why we should propose to preserve it for ever in

a condition of tutelage? Whether there is a race so inferior I do

not know, but certainly there is no race so superior as to be

trusted with human charges. The true answer to Aristotle’s plea for

slavery, that there are “natural slaves,” lies in the fact that

there are no “natural” masters. Power is no more to be committed to

men without discipline and restriction than alcohol. The true

objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but

that it corrupts the superior. There is only one sane and logical

thing to be done with a really inferior race, and that is to

exterminate it.

 

Now there are various ways of exterminating a race, and most of them

are cruel. You may end it with fire and sword after the old Hebrew

fashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniards

did the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowly

with deleterious commodities, as the Americans do with most of their

Indians; you may incite it to wear clothing to which it is not

accustomed and to live under new and strange conditions that will

expose it to infectious diseases to which you yourselves are immune,

as the missionaries do the Polynesians; you may resort to honest

simple murder, as we English did with the Tasmanians; or you can

maintain such conditions as conduce to “race suicide,” as the

British administration does in Fiji. Suppose, then, for a moment,

that there is an all-round inferior race; a Modern Utopia is under

the hard logic of life, and it would have to exterminate such a race

as quickly as it could. On the whole, the Fijian device seems the

least cruel. But Utopia would do that without any clumsiness of race

distinction, in exactly the same manner, and by the same machinery,

as it exterminates all its own defective and inferior strains; that

is to say, as we have already discussed in Chapter the Fifth,

section 1, by its marriage laws, and by the laws of the minimum

wage. That extinction need never be discriminatory. If any of the

race did, after all, prove to be fit to survive, they would

survive—they would be picked out with a sure and automatic justice

from the over-ready condemnation of all their kind.

 

Is there, however, an all-round inferior race in the world? Even the

Australian black-fellow is, perhaps, not quite so entirely eligible

for extinction as a good, wholesome, horse-racing, sheep-farming

Australian white may think. These queer little races, the

black-fellows, the Pigmies, the Bushmen, may have their little

gifts, a greater keenness, a greater fineness of this sense or that,

a quaintness of the imagination or what not, that may serve as their

little unique addition to the totality of our Utopian civilisation.

We are supposing that every individual alive on earth is alive in

Utopia, and so all the surviving “black-fellows” are there. Every

one of them in Utopia has had what none have had on earth, a fair

education and fair treatment, justice, and opportunity. Suppose that

the common idea is right about the general inferiority of these

people, then it would follow that in Utopia most of them are

childless, and working at or about the minimum wage, and some will

have passed out of all possibility of offspring under the hand of

the offended law; but still—cannot we imagine some few of these

little people—whom you must suppose neither naked nor clothed in

the European style, but robed in the Utopian fashion—may have found

some delicate art to practise, some peculiar sort of carving, for

example, that justifies God in creating them? Utopia has sound

sanitary laws, sound social laws, sound economic laws; what harm are

these people going to do?

 

Some may be even prosperous and admired, may have married women of

their own or some other race, and so may be transmitting that

distinctive thin thread of excellence, to take its due place in the

great synthesis of the future.

 

And, indeed, coming along that terrace in Utopia, I see a little

figure, a little bright-eyed, bearded man, inky black, frizzy

haired, and clad in a white tunic and black hose, and with a mantle

of lemon yellow wrapped about his shoulders. He walks, as most

Utopians walk, as though he had reason to be proud of something, as

though he had no reason to be afraid of anything in the world. He

carries a portfolio in his hand. It is that, I suppose, as much as

his hair, that recalls the Quartier Latin to my mind.

 

Section 4

 

I had already discussed the question of race with the botanist at

Lucerne.

 

“But you would not like,” he cried in horror, “your daughter to

marry a Chinaman or a negro?”

 

“Of course,” said I, “when you say Chinaman, you think of a creature

with a pigtail, long nails, and insanitary habits, and when you say

negro you think of a filthy-headed, black creature in an old hat.

You do this because your imagination is too feeble to disentangle

the inherent qualities of a thing from its habitual associations.”

 

“Insult isn’t argument,” said the botanist.

 

“Neither is unsound implication. You make a question of race into a

question of unequal cultures. You would not like your daughter to

marry the sort of negro who steals hens, but then you would also not

like your daughter to marry a pure English hunchback with a squint,

or a drunken cab tout of Norman blood. As a matter of fact, very few

well-bred English girls do commit that sort of indiscretion. But you

don’t think it necessary to generalise against men of your own race

because there are drunken cab touts, and why should you generalise

against negroes? Because the proportion of undesirables is higher

among negroes, that does not justify a sweeping condemnation. You

may have to condemn most, but why _all_? There may be—neither of us

knows enough to deny—negroes who are handsome, capable,

courageous.”

 

“Ugh!” said the botanist.

 

“How detestable you must find Othello!”

 

It is my Utopia, and for a moment I could almost find it in my heart

to spite the botanist by creating a modern Desdemona and her lover

sooty black to the lips, there before our eyes. But I am not so sure

of my case as that, and for the moment there shall come nothing more

than a swart-faced, dusky Burmese woman in the dress of the Greater

Rule, with her tall Englishman (as he might be on earth) at her

side. That, however, is a digression from my conversation with the

botanist.

 

“And the Chinaman?” said the botanist.

 

“I think we shall have all the buff and yellow peoples intermingling

pretty freely.”

 

“Chinamen and white women, for example.”

 

“Yes,” I said, “you’ve got to swallow that, anyhow; you shall

swallow that.”

 

He finds the idea too revolting for comment.

 

I try and make the thing seem easier for him. “Do try,” I said, “to

grasp a Modern Utopian’s conditions. The Chinaman will speak the

same language as his wife—whatever her race may be—he will wear

costume of the common civilised fashion, he will have much the same

education as his European rival, read the same literature, bow to

the same traditions. And you must remember a wife in Utopia is

singularly not subject to her husband….”

 

The botanist proclaims his invincible conclusion: “Everyone would

cut her!”

 

“This is Utopia,” I said, and then sought once more to tranquillise

his mind. “No doubt among the vulgar, coarse-minded people outside

the Rule there may be something of the sort. Every earthly moral

blockhead, a little educated, perhaps, is to be found in Utopia. You

will, no doubt, find the ‘cut’ and the ‘boycott,’ and all those nice

little devices by which dull people get a keen edge on life, in

their place here, and their place here is somewhere–-”

 

I turned a thumb earthward. “There!”

 

The botanist did not answer for a little while. Then he said, with

some temper and great emphasis: “Well, I’m jolly glad anyhow that

I’m not to be a permanent resident in this Utopia, if our daughters

are to be married to Hottentots by regulation. I’m jolly glad.”

 

He turned his back on me.

 

Now did I say anything of the sort? …

 

I had to bring him, I suppose; there’s no getting away from him in

this life. But, as I have already observed, the happy ancients went

to their Utopias without this sort of company.

 

Section 5

 

What gives the botanist so great an advantage in all his

Anti-Utopian utterances is his unconsciousness of his own

limitations. He thinks in little pieces that lie about loose, and

nothing has any necessary link with anything else in his mind. So

that I cannot retort upon him by asking him, if he objects to this

synthesis of all nations, tongues and peoples in a World State, what

alternative ideal he proposes.

 

People of this sort do not even feel the need of alternatives.

Beyond the scope of a few personal projects, meeting Her again, and

things like that, they do not feel that there is a future. They are

unencumbered by any baggage of convictions whatever, in relation to

that. That, at least, is the only way in which I can explain our

friend’s high intellectual mobility. Attempts to correlate

statesmanship, which they regard with interest as a dramatic

interplay of personalities, with any secular movement of humanity,

they class with the differential calculus and Darwinism, as things

far too difficult to be anything but finally and subtly wrong.

 

So the argument must pass into a direct address to the reader.

 

If you are not prepared to regard a world-wide synthesis of all

cultures and polities and races into one World State