but my friend and his great trouble turn my mind from these questions of locomotion and the freedoms that cluster about them. in spite of myself i find myself framing his case. he is a lover, the most conventional of anglican lovers, with a heart that has had its training, i should think, in the clean but limited schoolroom of mrs. henry wood. . . .
in utopia i think they will fly with stronger pinions, it will not be in the superficialities of life merely that movement will be wide and free, they will mount higher and swoop more steeply than he in his cage can believe. what will their range be, their prohibitions? what jars to our preconceptions will he and i receive here?
my mind flows with the free, thin flow that it has at the end of an eventful day, and as we walk along in silence towards our inn i rove from issue to issue, i find myself ranging amidst the fundamental things of the individual life and all the perplexity of desires and passions. i turn my questionings to the most difficult of all sets of compromises, those mitigations of spontaneous freedom that constitute the marriage laws, the mystery of balancing justice against the good of the future, amidst these violent and elusive passions. where falls the balance of freedoms here? i pass for a time from utopianising altogether, to ask the question that, after all, schopenhauer failed completely to answer, why sometimes in the case of hurtful, pointless, and destructive things we want so vehemently. . . .
i come back from this unavailing glance into the deeps to the general question of freedoms in this new relation. i find myself far adrift from the case of the frognal botanist, and asking how far a modern utopia will deal with personal morals.
as plato demonstrated long ago, the principles of the relation of state control to personal morals may be best discussed in the case of intoxication, the most isolated and least complicated of all this group of problems. but plato’s treatment of this issue as a question of who may or may not have the use of wine, though suitable enough in considering a small state in which everybody was the effectual inspector of everybody, is entirely beside the mark under modern conditions, in which we are to have an extraordinarily higher standard of individual privacy and an amplitude and quantity of migration inconceivable to the academic imagination. we may accept his principle and put this particular freedom (of the use of wine) among the distinctive privileges of maturity, and still find all that a modern would think of as the drink question untouched.
that question in utopia will differ perhaps in the proportion of its factors, but in no other respect, from what it is upon earth. the same desirable ends will be sought, the maintenance of public order and decency, the reduction of inducements to form this bad and wasteful habit to their lowest possible minimum, and the complete protection of the immature. but the modern utopians, having systematised their sociology, will have given some attention to the psychology of minor officials, a matter altogether too much neglected by the social reformer on earth. they will not put into the hands of a common policeman powers direct and indirect that would be dangerous to the public in the hands of a judge. and they will have avoided the immeasurable error of making their control of the drink traffic a source of public revenue. privacies they will not invade, but they will certainly restrict the public consumption of intoxicants to specified licensed places and the sale of them to unmistakable adults, and they will make the temptation of the young a grave offence. in so migratory a population as the modern utopian, the licensing of inns and bars would be under the same control as the railways and high roads. inns exist for the stranger and not for the locality, and we shall meet with nothing there to correspond with our terrestrial absurdity of local option.
the utopians will certainly control this trade, and as certainly punish personal excesses. public drunkenness (as distinguished from the mere elation that follows a generous but controlled use of wine) will be an offence against public decency, and will be dealt with in some very drastic manner. it will, of course, be an aggravation of, and not an excuse for, crime.
but i doubt whether the state will go beyond that. whether an adult shall use wine or beer or spirits, or not, seems to me entirely a matter for his doctor and his own private conscience. i doubt if we explorers shall meet any drunken men, and i doubt not we shall meet many who have never availed themselves of their adult freedom in this respect. the conditions of physical happiness will be better understood in utopia, it will be worth while to be well there, and the intelligent citizen will watch himself closely. half and more of the drunkenness of earth is an attempt to lighten dull days and hopelessly sordid and disagreeable lives, and in utopia they do not suffer these things. assuredly utopia will be temperate, not only drinking, but eating with the soundest discretion. yet i do not think wine and good ale will be altogether wanting there, nor good, mellow whisky, nor, upon occasion, the engaging various liqueur. i do not think so. my botanist, who abstains altogether, is of another opinion. we differ here and leave the question to the earnest reader. i have the utmost respect for all teetotalers, prohibitionists, and haters and persecutors of innkeepers, their energy of reform awakens responsive notes in me, and to their species i look for a large part of the urgent repair of our earth; yet for all that ——
there is burgundy, for example, a bottle of soft and kindly burgundy, taken to make a sunshine on one’s lunch when four strenuous hours of toil have left one on the further side of appetite. or ale, a foaming tankard of ale, ten miles of sturdy tramping in the sleet and slush as a prelude, and then good bread and good butter and a ripe hollow stilton and celery and ale — ale with a certain quantitative freedom. or, again, where is the sin in a glass of tawny port three or four times, or it may be five, a year, when the walnuts come round in their season? if you drink no port, then what are walnuts for? such things i hold for the reward of vast intervals of abstinence; they justify your wide, immaculate margin, which is else a mere unmeaning blankness on the page of palate god has given you! i write of these things as a fleshly man, confessedly and knowingly fleshly, and more than usually aware of my liability to err; i know myself for a gross creature more given to sedentary world-mending than to brisk activities, and not one-tenth as active as the dullest newspaper boy in london. yet still i have my uses, uses that vanish in monotony, and still i must ask why should we bury the talent of these bright sensations altogether? under no circumstances can i think of my utopians maintaining their fine order of life on ginger ale and lemonade and the ale that is kops’. those terrible temperance drinks, solutions of qualified sugar mixed with vast volumes of gas, as, for example, soda, seltzer, lemonade, and fire-extincteurs hand grenades — minerals, they call such stuff in england — fill a man with wind and self-righteousness. indeed they do! coffee destroys brain and kidney, a fact now universally recognised and advertised throughout america; and tea, except for a kind of green tea best used with discretion in punch, tans the entrails and turns honest stomachs into leather bags. rather would i be metchnikoffed [footnote: see the nature of man, by professor elie metchnikoff.] at once and have a clean, good stomach of german silver. no! if we are to have no ale in utopia, give me the one clean temperance drink that is worthy to set beside wine, and that is simple water. best it is when not quite pure and with a trace of organic matter, for then it tastes and sparkles. . . .
my botanist would still argue.
thank heaven this is my book, and that the ultimate decision rests with me. it is open to him to write his own utopia and arrange that everybody shall do nothing except by the consent of the savants of the republic, either in his eating, drinking, dressing or lodging, even as cabet proposed. it is open to him to try a news from nowhere utopia with the wine left out. i have my short way with him here quite effectually. i turn in the entrance of our inn to the civil but by no means obsequious landlord, and with a careful ambiguity of manner for the thing may be considered an outrage, and i try to make it possible the idea is a jest — put my test demand. . . .
“you see, my dear teetotaler? — he sets before me tray and glass and . . . ” here follows the necessary experiment and a deep sigh. . . . “yes, a bottle of quite excellent light beer! so there are also cakes and ale in utopia! let us in this saner and more beautiful world drink perdition to all earthly excesses. let us drink more particularly to the coming of the day when men beyond there will learn to distinguish between qualitative and quantitative questions, to temper good intentions with good intelligence, and righteousness with wisdom. one of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the good.”
