A Modern Utopia | Page 4

time.
Our business here is to be Utopian, to make vivid and credible, if we
can, first this facet and then that, of an imaginary whole and happy
world. Our deliberate intention is to be not, indeed, impossible, but
most distinctly impracticable, by every scale that reaches only between
to-day and to-morrow. We are to turn our backs for a space upon the
insistent examination of the thing that is, and face towards the freer air,
the ampler spaces of the thing that perhaps might be, to the projection
of a State or city "worth while," to designing upon the sheet of our
imaginations the picture of a life conceivably possible, and yet better
worth living than our own. That is our present enterprise. We are going
to lay down certain necessary starting propositions, and then we shall
proceed to explore the sort of world these propositions give us....
It is no doubt an optimistic enterprise. But it is good for awhile to be
free from the carping note that must needs be audible when we discuss
our present imperfections, to release ourselves from practical
difficulties and the tangle of ways and means. It is good to stop by the
track for a space, put aside the knapsack, wipe the brows, and talk a
little of the upper slopes of the mountain we think we are climbing,
would but the trees let us see it.
There is to be no inquiry here of policy and method. This is to be a

holiday from politics and movements and methods. But for all that, we
must needs define certain limitations. Were we free to have our
untrammelled desire, I suppose we should follow Morris to his
Nowhere, we should change the nature of man and the nature of things
together; we should make the whole race wise, tolerant, noble,
perfect--wave our hands to a splendid anarchy, every man doing as it
pleases him, and none pleased to do evil, in a world as good in its
essential nature, as ripe and sunny, as the world before the Fall. But
that golden age, that perfect world, comes out into the possibilities of
space and time. In space and time the pervading Will to Live sustains
for evermore a perpetuity of aggressions. Our proposal here is upon a
more practical plane at least than that. We are to restrict ourselves first
to the limitations of human possibility as we know them in the men and
women of this world to-day, and then to all the inhumanity, all the
insubordination of nature. We are to shape our state in a world of
uncertain seasons, sudden catastrophes, antagonistic diseases, and
inimical beasts and vermin, out of men and women with like passions,
like uncertainties of mood and desire to our own. And, moreover, we
are going to accept this world of conflict, to adopt no attitude of
renunciation towards it, to face it in no ascetic spirit, but in the mood of
the Western peoples, whose purpose is to survive and overcome. So
much we adopt in common with those who deal not in Utopias, but in
the world of Here and Now.
Certain liberties, however, following the best Utopian precedents, we
may take with existing fact. We assume that the tone of public thought
may be entirely different from what it is in the present world. We
permit ourselves a free hand with the mental conflict of life, within the
possibilities of the human mind as we know it. We permit ourselves
also a free hand with all the apparatus of existence that man has, so to
speak, made for himself, with houses, roads, clothing, canals,
machinery, with laws, boundaries, conventions, and traditions, with
schools, with literature and religious organisation, with creeds and
customs, with everything, in fact, that it lies within man's power to alter.
That, indeed, is the cardinal assumption of all Utopian speculations old
and new; the Republic and Laws of Plato, and More's Utopia, Howells'
implicit Altruria, and Bellamy's future Boston, Comte's great Western
Republic, Hertzka's Freeland, Cabet's Icaria, and Campanella's City of

the Sun, are built, just as we shall build, upon that, upon the hypothesis
of the complete emancipation of a community of men from tradition,
from habits, from legal bonds, and that subtler servitude possessions
entail. And much of the essential value of all such speculations lies in
this assumption of emancipation, lies in that regard towards human
freedom, in the undying interest of the human power of self-escape, the
power to resist the causation of the past, and to evade, initiate,
endeavour, and overcome.
Section 2
There are very definite artistic limitations also.
There must always be a certain effect of hardness and thinness about
Utopian speculations. Their common fault is to be comprehensively
jejune. That which is the