let us come back to utopia. we were speaking of travel.
besides roadways and railways and tramways, for those who go to and fro in the earth the modern utopians will have very many other ways of travelling. there will be rivers, for example, with a vast variety of boats; canals with diverse sorts of haulage; there will be lakes and lagoons; and when one comes at last to the borders of the land, the pleasure craft will be there, coming and going, and the swift great passenger vessels, very big and steady, doing thirty knots an hour or more, will trace long wakes as they go dwindling out athwart the restless vastness of the sea.
they will be just beginning to fly in utopia. we owe much to m. santos dumont; the world is immeasurably more disposed to believe this wonder is coming, and coming nearly, than it was five years ago. but unless we are to suppose utopian scientific knowledge far in advance of ours — and though that supposition was not proscribed in our initial undertaking, it would be inconvenient for us and not quite in the vein of the rest of our premises — they, too, will only be in the same experimental stage as ourselves. in utopia, however, they will conduct research by the army corps while we conduct it — we don’t conduct it! we let it happen. fools make researches and wise men exploit them — that is our earthly way of dealing with the question, and we thank heaven for an assumed abundance of financially impotent and sufficiently ingenious fools.
in utopia, a great multitude of selected men, chosen volunteers, will be collaborating upon this new step in man’s struggle with the elements. bacon’s visionary house of saloman [footnote: in the new atlantis.] will be a thing realised, and it will be humming with this business. every university in the world will be urgently working for priority in this aspect of the problem or that. reports of experiments, as full and as prompt as the telegraphic reports of cricket in our more sportive atmosphere, will go about the world. all this will be passing, as it were, behind the act drop of our first experience, behind this first picture of the urbanised urseren valley. the literature of the subject will be growing and developing with the easy swiftness of an eagle’s swoop as we come down the hillside; unseen in that twilight, unthought of by us until this moment, a thousand men at a thousand glowing desks, a busy specialist press, will be perpetually sifting, criticising, condensing, and clearing the ground for further speculation. those who are concerned with the problems of public locomotion will be following these aeronautic investigations with a keen and enterprising interest, and so will the physiologist and the sociologist. that utopian research will, i say, go like an eagle’s swoop in comparison with the blind-man’s fumbling of our terrestrial way. even before our own brief utopian journey is out, we may get a glimpse of the swift ripening of all this activity that will be in progress at our coming. to-morrow, perhaps, or in a day or so, some silent, distant thing will come gliding into view over the mountains, will turn and soar and pass again beyond our astonished sight. . . .
