the utopia of a modern dreamer must needs differ in one fundamental aspect from the nowheres and utopias men planned before darwin quickened the thought of the world. those were all perfect and static states, a balance of happiness won for ever against the forces of unrest and disorder that inhere in things. one beheld a healthy and simple generation enjoying the fruits of the earth in an atmosphere of virtue and happiness, to be followed by other virtuous, happy, and entirely similar generations, until the gods grew weary. change and development were dammed back by invincible dams for ever. but the modern utopia must be not static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage, leading to a long ascent of stages. nowadays we do not resist and overcome the great stream of things, but rather float upon it. we build now not citadels, but ships of state. for one ordered arrangement of citizens rejoicing in an equality of happiness safe and assured to them and their children for ever, we have to plan “a flexible common compromise, in which a perpetually novel succession of individualities may converge most effectually upon a comprehensive onward development.” that is the first, most generalised difference between a utopia based upon modern conceptions and all the utopias that were written in the former 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.
