section 1
in a few days mr. barnstaple had recovered strength of body and mind. he no longer lay in bed in a loggia, filled with self-pity and the beauty of a world subdued; he went about freely and was soon walking long distances over the utopian countryside, seeking acquaintances and learning more and more of this wonderland of accomplished human desires.
for that is how it most impressed him. nearly all the greater evils of human life had been conquered; war, pestilence and malaise, famine and poverty had been swept out of human experience. the dreams of artists, of perfected and lovely bodies and of a world transfigured to harmony and beauty had been realized; the spirits of order and organization ruled triumphant. every aspect of human life had been changed by these achievements.
the climate of this valley of rest was bland and sunny like the climate of south europe, but nearly everything characteristic of the italian or spanish scene had gone. here were no bent and aged crones carrying burthens, no chattering pursuit by beggars, no ragged workers lowering by the wayside. the puny terracing, the distressing accumulations of hand cultivation, the gnarled olives, hacked vines, the little patches of grain or fruit, and the grudged litigious irrigation of those primitive conditions, gave place to sweeping schemes of conservation, to a broad and subtle handling of slope and soil and sunshine. no meagre goats nor sheep, child-tended, cropped among the stones, no tethered cattle ate their apportioned circles of herbage and no more. there were no hovels by the wayside, no shrines with tortured, blood-oozing images, no slinking mis-begotten curs nor beaten beasts sweating and panting between their overloaded paniers at the steeper places of rutted, rock-strewn and dung-strewn roads. instead the great smooth indestructible ways swept in easy gradients through the land, leaping gorges and crossing valleys upon wide-arched viaducts, piercing cathedral-like aisles through the hillsides, throwing off bastions to command some special splendour of the land. here were resting places and shelters, stairways clambering to pleasant arbours and summer-houses where friends might talk and lovers shelter and rejoice. here were groves and avenues of such trees as he had never seen before. for on earth as yet there is scarcely such a thing as an altogether healthy fully grown tree, nearly all our trees are bored and consumed by parasites, rotten and tumorous with fungi, more gnarled and crippled and disease-twisted even than mankind.
the landscape had absorbed the patient design of five-and-twenty centuries. in one place mr. barnstaple found great works in progress; a bridge was being replaced, not because it was outworn, but because someone had produced a bolder, more delightful design.
for a time he did not observe the absence of telephonic or telegraphic communication; the posts and wires that mark a modern countryside had disappeared. the reasons for that difference he was to learn later. nor did he at first miss the railway, the railway station and the wayside inn. he perceived that the frequent buildings must have specific functions, that people came and went from them with an appearance of interest and preoccupation, that from some of them seemed to come a hum and whir of activity; work of many sorts was certainly in progress; but his ideas of the mechanical organization of this new world were too vague and tentative as yet for him to attempt to fix any significance to this sort of place or that. he walked agape like a savage in a garden.
he never came to nor saw any towns. the reason for any such close accumulations of human beings had largely disappeared. in certain places, he learnt, there were gatherings of people for studies, mutual stimulation, or other convenient exchanges, in great series of communicating buildings; but he never visited any of these centres.
and about this world went the tall people of utopia, fair and wonderful, smiling or making some friendly gesture as they passed him but giving him little chance for questions or intercourse. they travelled swiftly in machines upon the high road or walked, and ever and again the shadow of a silent soaring aeroplane would pass over him. he went a little in awe of these people and felt himself a queer creature when he met their eyes. for like the gods of greece and rome theirs was a cleansed and perfected humanity, and it seemed to him that they were gods. even the great tame beasts that walked freely about this world had a certain divinity that checked the expression of mr. barnstaple’s friendliness.
section 2
presently he found a companion for his rambles, a boy of thirteen, a cousin of lychnis, named crystal. he was a curly-headed youngster, brown-eyed as she was; and he was reading history in a holiday stage of his education.
so far as mr. barnstaple could gather the more serious part of his intellectual training was in mathematical work interrelated to physical and chemical science, but all that was beyond an earthling’s range of ideas. much of this work seemed to be done in co-operation with other boys, and to be what we should call research on earth. nor could mr. barnstaple master the nature of some other sort of study which seemed to turn upon refinements of expression. but the history brought them together. the boy was just learning about the growth of the utopian social system out of the efforts and experiences of the ages of confusion. his imagination was alive with the tragic struggles upon which the present order of utopia was founded, he had a hundred questions for mr. barnstaple, and he was full of explicit information which was destined presently to sink down and become part of the foundations of his adult mind. mr. barnstaple was as good as a book to him, and he was as good as a guide to mr. barnstaple. they went about together talking upon a footing of the completest equality, this rather exceptionally intelligent earthling and this utopian stripling, who topped him by perhaps an inch when they stood side by side.
the boy had the broad facts of utopian history at his fingers’ ends. he could explain and find an interest in explaining how artificial and upheld the peace and beauty of utopia still were. utopians were in essence, he said, very much what their ancestors had been in the beginnings of the newer stone-age, fifteen thousand or twenty thousand years ago. they were still very much what earthlings had been in the corresponding period. since then there had been only six hundred or seven hundred generations and no time for any very fundamental changes in the race. there had not been even a general admixture of races. on utopia as on earth there had been dusky and brown peoples, and they remained distinct. the various races mingled socially but did not interbreed very much; rather they purified and intensified their racial gifts and beauties. there was often very passionate love between people of contrasted race, but rarely did such love come to procreation. there had been a certain deliberate elimination of ugly, malignant, narrow, stupid and gloomy types during the past dozen centuries or so; but except for the fuller realization of his latent possibilities, the common man in utopia was very little different from the ordinary energetic and able people of a later stone-age or early bronze-age community. they were infinitely better nourished, trained and educated, and mentally and physically their condition was clean and fit, but they were the same flesh and nature as we are.
“but,” said mr. barnstaple, and struggled with that idea for a time. “do you mean to tell me that half the babies born on earth today might grow to be such gods as these people i meet?”
“given our air, given our atmosphere.”
“given your heritage.”
“given our freedom.”
in the past of utopia, in the age of confusion, mr. barnstaple had to remember, everyone had grown up with a crippled or a thwarted will, hampered by vain restrictions or misled by plausible delusions. utopia still bore it in mind that human nature was fundamentally animal and savage and had to be adapted to social needs, but utopia had learnt the better methods of adaptation — after endless failures of compulsion, cruelty and deception. “on earth we tame our animals with hot irons and our fellow men by violence and fraud,” said mr. barnstaple, and described the schools and books, newspapers and public discussions of the early twentieth century to his incredulous companion. “you cannot imagine how beaten and fearful even decent people are upon earth. you learn of the age of confusion in your histories but you do not know what the realities of a bad mental atmosphere, an atmosphere of feeble laws, hates and superstitions, are. as night goes round the earth always there are hundreds of thousands of people who should be sleeping, lying awake, fearing a bully, fearing a cruel competition, dreading lest they cannot make good, ill of some illness they cannot comprehend, distressed by some irrational quarrel, maddened by some thwarted instinct or some suppressed and perverted desire.” . . .
crystal admitted that it was hard to think now of the age of confusion in terms of misery. much of the every-day misery of earth was now inconceivable. very slowly utopia had evolved its present harmony of law and custom and education. man was no longer crippled and compelled; it was recognized that he was fundamentally an animal and that his daily life must follow the round of appetites satisfied and instincts released. the daily texture of utopian life was woven of various and interesting foods and drinks, of free and entertaining exercise and work, of sweet sleep and of the interest and happiness of fearless and spiteless love-making. inhibition was at a minimum. but where the power of utopian education began was after the animal had been satisfied and disposed of. the jewel on the reptile’s head that had brought utopia out of the confusions of human life, was curiosity, the play impulse, prolonged and expanded in adult life into an insatiable appetite for knowledge and an habitual creative urgency. all utopians had become as little children, learners and makers.
it was strange to hear this boy speaking so plainly and clearly of the educational process to which he was being subjected, and particularly to find he could talk so frankly of love.
an earthly bashfulness almost prevented mr. barnstaple from asking, “but you — you do not make love?”
“i have had curiosities,” said the boy, evidently saying what he had been taught to say. “but it is not necessary nor becoming to make love too early in life nor to let desire take hold of one. it weakens youth to become too early possessed by desire — which often will not leave one again. it spoils and cripples the imagination. i want to do good work as my father has done before me.”
mr. barnstaple glanced at the beautiful young profile at his side and was suddenly troubled by memories of a certain study number four at school, and of some ugly phases of his adolescence, the stuffy, secret room, the hot and ugly fact. he felt a beastlier earthling than ever. “heigho!” he sighed. “but this world of yours is as clean as starlight and as sweet as cold water on a dusty day.”
“many people i love,” said the boy, “but not with passion. some day that will come. but one must not be too eager and anxious to meet passionate love or one might make-believe and give or snatch at a sham. . . . there is no hurry. no one will prevent me when my time comes. all good things come to one in this world in their own good time.”
but work one does not wait for; one’s work, since it concerns one’s own self only, one goes to meet. crystal thought very much about the work that he might do. it seemed to mr. barnstaple that work, in the sense of uncongenial toil, had almost disappeared from utopia. yet all utopia was working. everyone was doing work that fitted natural aptitudes and appealed to the imagination of the worker. everyone worked happily and eagerly — as those people we call geniuses do on our earth.
for suddenly mr. barnstaple found himself telling crystal of the happiness of the true artist, of the true scientific worker, of the original man even on earth as it is today. they, too, like the utopians, do work that concerns themselves and is in their own nature for great ends. of all earthlings they are the most enviable.
“if such men are not happy on earth,” said mr. barnstaple, “it is because they are touched with vulgarity and still heed the soiled successes and honours and satisfactions of vulgar men, still feel neglect and limitation that should concern them no more. but to him who has seen the sun shine in utopia surely the utmost honour and glory of earth can signify no more and be no more desirable than the complimentary spittle of the chieftain and a string of barbaric beads.”
section 3
crystal was still of an age to be proud of his savoir faire. he showed mr. barnstaple his books and told him of his tutors and exercises.
utopia still made use of printed books; books were still the simplest, clearest way of bringing statement before a tranquil mind. crystal’s books were very beautifully bound in flexible leather that his mother had tooled for him very prettily, and they were made of hand-made paper. the lettering was some fluent phonetic script that mr. barnstaple could not understand. it reminded him of arabic; and frequent sketches, outline maps and diagrams were interpolated. crystal was advised in his holiday reading by a tutor for whom he prepared a sort of exercise report, and he supplemented his reading by visits to museums; but there was no educational museum convenient in the valley of peace for mr. barnstaple to visit.
crystal had passed out of the opening stage of education which was carried on, he said, upon large educational estates given up wholly to the lives of children. education up to eleven or twelve seemed to be much more carefully watched and guarded and taken care of in utopia than upon earth. shocks to the imagination, fear and evil suggestions were warded off as carefully as were infection and physical disaster; by eight or nine the foundations of a utopian character were surely laid, habits of cleanliness, truth, candour and helpfulness, confidence in the world, fearlessness and a sense of belonging to the great purpose of the race.
only after nine or ten did the child go outside the garden of its early growth and begin to see the ordinary ways of the world. until that age the care of the children was largely in the hands of nurses and teachers, but after that time the parents became more of a factor than they had been in a youngster’s life. it was always a custom for the parents of a child to be near and to see that child in its nursery days, but just when earthly parents tended to separate from their children as they went away to school or went into business, utopian parentage grew to be something closer. there was an idea in utopia that between parent and child there was a necessary temperamental sympathy; children looked forward to the friendship and company of their parents, and parents looked forward to the interest of their children’s adolescence, and though a parent had practically no power over a son or daughter, he or she took naturally the position of advocate, adviser and sympathetic friend. the friendship was all the franker and closer because of that lack of power, and all the easier because age for age the utopians were so much younger and fresher-minded than earthlings. crystal it seemed had a very great passion for his mother. he was very proud of his father, who was a wonderful painter and designer; but it was his mother who possessed the boy’s heart.
on his second walk with mr. barnstaple he said he was going to hear from his mother, and mr. barnstaple was shown the equivalent of correspondence in utopia. crystal carried a little bundle of wires and light rods; and presently coming to a place where a pillar stood in the midst of a lawn he spread this affair out like a long cat’s cradle and tapped a little stud in the pillar with a key that he carried on a light gold chain about his neck. then he took up a receiver attached to his apparatus, and spoke aloud and listened and presently heard a voice.
it was a very pleasant woman’s voice; it talked to crystal for a time without interruption, and then crystal talked back, and afterwards there were other voices, some of which crystal answered and some which he heard without replying. then he gathered up his apparatus again.
this mr. barnstaple learnt was the utopian equivalent of letter and telephone. for in utopia, except by previous arrangement, people do not talk together on the telephone. a message is sent to the station of the district in which the recipient is known to be, and there it waits until he chooses to tap his accumulated messages. and any that one wishes to repeat can be repeated. then he talks back to the senders and dispatches any other messages he wishes. the transmission is wireless. the little pillars supply electric power for transmission or for any other purpose the utopians require. for example, the gardeners resort to them to run their mowers and diggers and rakes and rollers.
far away across the valley crystal pointed out the district station at which this correspondence gathered and was dispersed. only a few people were on duty there; almost all the connexions were automatic. the messages came and went from any part of the planet.
this set mr. barnstaple going upon a long string of questions.
he discovered for the first time that the message organization of utopia had a complete knowledge of the whereabouts of every soul upon the planet. it had a record of every living person and it knew in what message district he was. everyone was indexed and noted.
to mr. barnstaple, accustomed to the crudities and dishonesties of earthly governments, this was an almost terrifying discovery. “on earth that would be the means of unending blackmail and tyranny,” he said. “everyone would lie open to espionage. we had a fellow at scotland yard. if he had been in your communication department would have made life in utopia intolerable in week. you cannot imagine the nuisance he was.” . . .
mr. barnstaple had to explain to crystal what blackmail meant. it was like that in utopia to begin with, crystal said. just as on earth so in utopia there was the same natural disposition to use knowledge and power to the disadvantage of one’s fellows, and the same jealousy of having one’s personal facts known. in the stone-age in utopia men kept their true names secret and could only be spoken of by nicknames. they feared magic abuses. “some savages still do that on earth,” said mr. barnstaple. it was only very slowly that utopians came to trust doctors and dentists and only very slowly that doctors and dentists became trustworthy. it was a matter of scores of centuries before the chief abuses of the confidences and trusts necessary to a modern social organization could be effectively corrected.
every young utopian had to learn the five principles of liberty, without which civilization is impossible. the first was the principle of privacy. this is that all individual personal facts are private between the citizen and the public organization to which he entrusts them, and can be used only for his convenience and with his sanction. of course all such facts are available for statistical uses, but not as individual personal facts. and the second principle is the principle of free movement. a citizen, subject to the due discharge of his public obligations, may go without permission or explanation to any part of the utopian planet. all the means of transport are freely at his service. every utopian may change his surroundings, his climate and his social atmosphere as he will. the third principle is the principle of unlimited knowledge. all that is known in utopia, except individual personal facts about living people, is on record and as easily available as a perfected series of indices, libraries, museums and inquiry offices can make it. whatever the utopian desires to know he may know with the utmost clearness, exactness and facility so far as his powers of knowing and his industry go. nothing is kept from him and nothing is misrepresented to him. and that brought mr. barnstaple to the fourth principle of liberty, which was that lying is the blackest crime.
crystal’s definition of lying was a sweeping one; the inexact statement of facts, even the suppression of a material fact, was lying.
“where there are lies there cannot be freedom.”
mr. barnstaple was mightily taken by this idea. it seemed at once quite fresh to him and one that he had always unconsciously entertained. half the difference between utopia and our world he asserted lay in this, that our atmosphere was dense and poisonous with lies and shams.888
“when one comes to think of it,” said mr. barnstaple, and began to expatiate to crystal upon all the falsehoods of human life. the fundamental assumptions of earthly associations were still largely lies, false assumptions of necessary and unavoidable differences in flags and nationality, pretences of function and power in monarchy; impostures of organized learning, religious and moral dogmas and shams. and one must live in it; one is a part of it. you are restrained, taxed, distressed and killed by these insane unrealities. “lying the primary crime! how simple that is! how true and necessary it is! that dogma is the fundamental distinction of the scientific world-state from all preceding states.” and going on from that mr. barnstaple launched out into a long and loud tirade against the suppression and falsifications of earthly newspapers.
it was a question very near his heart. the london newspapers had ceased to be impartial vehicles of news; they omitted, they mutilated, they misstated. they were no better than propaganda rags. rags! nature, within its field, was shiningly accurate and full, but that was a purely scientific paper; it did not touch the every-day news. the press, he held, was the only possible salt of contemporary life, and if the salt had lost its savour —!
the poor man found himself orating as though he was back at his sydenham breakfast-table after a bad morning’s paper.
“once upon a time utopia was in just such a tangle,” said crystal consolingly. “but there is a proverb, ‘truth comes back where once she has visited.’ you need not trouble so much as you do. some day even your press may grow clear.”
“how do you manage about newspapers and criticism?” said mr. barnstaple.
crystal explained that there was a complete distinction between news and discussion in utopia. there were houses — one was in sight — which were used as reading-rooms. one went to these places to learn the news. thither went the reports of all the things that were happening on the planet, things found, things discovered, things done. the reports were made as they were needed; there were no advertisement contracts to demand the same bulk of news every day. for some time crystal said the reports had been very full and amusing about the earthlings, but he had not been reading the paper for many days because of the interest in history the earthling affair had aroused in him. there was always news of fresh scientific discoveries that stirred the imagination. one frequent item of public interest and excitement was the laying out of some wide scheme of research. the new spatial work that arden and greenlake had died for was producing much news. and when people died in utopia it was the custom to tell the story of their lives. crystal promised to take mr. barnstaple to a news place and entertain him by reading him some of the utopian descriptions of earthly life which had been derived from the earthlings, and mr. barnstaple asked that when this was done he might also hear about arden and greenlake, who had been not only great discoverers, but great lovers, and of serpentine and cedar, for whom he had conceived an intense admiration. utopian news lacked of course the high spice of an earthly newspaper; the intriguing murders and amusing misbehaviours, the entertaining and exciting consequences of sexual ignorance and sexual blunderings, the libel cases and detected swindles, the great processional movements of royalty across the general traffic, and the romantic fluctuations of the stock exchange and sport. but where the news of utopia lacked liveliness, the liveliness of discussion made up for it. for the fifth principle of liberty in utopia was free discussion and criticism.
any utopian was free to criticize and discuss anything in the whole universe provided he told no lies about it directly or indirectly; he could be as respectful or disrespectful as he pleased; he could propose anything however subversive. he could break into poetry or fiction as he chose. he could express himself in any literary form he liked or by sketch or caricature as the mood took him. only he must refrain from lying; that was the one rigid rule of controversy. he could get what he had to say printed and distributed to the news rooms. there it was read or neglected as the visitors chanced to approve of it or not. often if they liked what they read they would carry off a copy with them. crystal had some new fantastic fiction about the exploration of space among his books; imaginative stories that boys were reading very eagerly; they were pamphlets of thirty or forty pages printed on a beautiful paper that he said was made directly from flax and certain reeds. the librarians noted what books and papers were read and taken away, and these they replaced with fresh copies. the piles that went unread were presently reduced to one or two copies and the rest went back to the pulping mills. but many of the poets and philosophers, and story-tellers whose imaginations found no wide popularity were nevertheless treasured and their memories kept alive by a few devoted admirers.
section 4
“i am not at all clear in my mind about one thing,” said mr. barnstaple. “i have seen no coins and nothing like money passing in this world. by all outward appearance this might be a communism such as was figured in a book we used to value on earth, a book called news from nowhere by an earthling named william morris. it was a graceful impossible book. in that dream everyone worked for the joy of working and took what he needed. but i have never believed in communism because i recognize, as here in utopia you seem to recognize, the natural fierceness and greediness of the untutored man. there is joy in creation for others to use, but no natural joy in unrequited service. the sense of justice to himself is greater in man than the sense of service. somehow here you must balance the work anyone does for utopia against what he destroys or consumes. how do you do it?”
crystal considered. “there were communists in utopia in the last age of confusion. in some parts of our planet they tried to abolish money suddenly and violently and brought about great economic confusion and want and misery. to step straight to communism failed — very tragically. and yet utopia today is practically a communism, and except by way of curiosity i have never had a coin in my hand in all my life.”
in utopia just as upon earth, he explained, money came as a great discovery; as a method of freedom. hitherto, before the invention of money, all service between man and man had been done through bondage or barter. life was a thing of slavery and narrow choice. but money opened up the possibility of giving a worker a free choice in his reward. it took utopia three thousand years and more to realize that possibility. the idea of money abounded in pitfalls and was easily corruptible; utopia floundered its way to economic lucidity through long centuries of credit and debt, false and debased money; extravagant usury and every possibility of speculative abuse. in the matter of money more than in any other human concern, human cunning has set itself most vilely and treacherously to prey upon human necessity. utopia once carried, as earth carries now, a load of parasitic souls, speculators, forestallers, gamblers and bargain-pressing shylocks, exacting every conceivable advantage out of the weaknesses of the monetary system; she had needed centuries of economic sanitation. it was only when utopia had got to the beginnings of world-wide political unity and when there were sufficiently full statistics of world resources and world production, that human society could at last give the individual worker the assurance of a coin of steadfast significance, a coin that would mean for him today or tomorrow or at any time the certainty of a set quantity of elemental values. and with peace throughout the planet and increasing social stability, interest, which is the measure of danger and uncertainty, dwindled at last to nothing. banking became a public service perforce, because it no longer offered profit to the individual banker. “rentier classes,” crystal conveyed, “are not a permanent element in any community. they mark a phase of transition between a period of insecurity and high interest and a period of complete security and no interest. they are a dawn phenomenon.”
mr. barnstaple digested this statement after an interval of incredulity. he satisfied himself by a few questions that young utopia really had some idea of what a rentier class was, what its moral and imaginative limitations were likely to be and the role it may have played in the intellectual development of the world by providing a class of independent minds.
“life is intolerant of all independent classes,” said crystal, evidently repeating an axiom. “either you must earn or you must rob. . . . we have got rid of robbing.”
the youngster still speaking by his book went on to explain how the gradual disuse of money came about. it was an outcome of the general progressive organization of the economic system, the substitution of collective enterprises for competitive enterprises and of wholesale for retail dealing. there had been a time in utopia when money changed hands at each little transaction and service. one paid money if one wanted a newspaper or a match or a bunch of flowers or a ride on a street conveyance. everybody went about the world with pockets full of small coins paying on every slight occasion. then as economic science became more stable and exact the methods of the club and the covering subscription extended. people were able to buy passes that carried them by all the available means of transport for a year or for ten years or for life. the state learnt from clubs and hotels provide matches, newspapers, stationery and transport for a fixed annual charge. the same inclusive system spread from small and incidental things great and essential matters, to housing and food and even clothing. the state postal system knew where every utopian citizen was, was presently able in conjunction with the public banking system to guarantee his credit in any part of the world. people ceased to draw coin for their work; the various departments of service, and of economic, educational and scientific activity would credit the individual with his earnings in the public bank an debit him with his customary charges for all the normal services of life.
“something of this sort is going on on earth even now,” said mr. barnstaple. “we use money in the last resort, but a vast volume of our business is already a matter of book-keeping.”
centuries of unity and energy had given utopia very complete control of many fountains of natural energy upon the planet, and this was the heritage of every child born therein. he was credited at his birth with a sum sufficient to educate and maintain him up to four — or five-and-twenty, and then he was expected to choose some occupation to replenish his account.
“but if he doesn’t?” said mr. barnstaple.
“everyone does.”
“but if he didn’t?”
“he’d be miserable and uncomfortable. i’ve never heard of such a case. i suppose he’d be discussed. psychologists might examine him. . . . but one must do something.”
“but suppose utopia had no work for him to do?”
crystal could not imagine that. “there is always something to be done.”
“but in utopia once, in the old times, you had unemployment?”
“that was part of the confusion. there was a sort of hypertrophy of debt; it had become paralysis. why, when they had unemployment at that same time there was neither enough houses nor food nor clothing. they had unemployment and shortage at one and the same time. it is incredible.”
“does everyone earn about the same amount of pay?”
“energetic and creative people are often given big grants if they seem to need the help of others or a command of natural resources. . . . and artists sometimes grow rich if their work is much desired.”
“such a gold chain as yours you had to buy?”
“from the maker in his shop. my mother bought it.”
“then there are shops?”
“you shall see some. places where people go to see new and delightful things.”
“and if an artist grows rich, what can he do with his money?”
“take time and material to make some surpassingly beautiful thing to leave the world. or collect and help with the work of other artists. or do whatever else he pleases to teach and fine the common sense of beauty in utopia. or just do nothing. . . . utopia can afford it — if he can.”
section 5
“cedar and lion,” said mr. barnstaple, “explained to the rest of us how it is that your government is as it were broken up and dispersed among the people who have special knowledge of the matters involved. the balance between interests, we gathered, was maintained by those who studied the general psychology and the educational organization of utopia. at first it was very strange to our earthly minds that there should be nowhere a pretended omniscience and a practical omnipotence, that is to say a sovereign thing, a person or an assembly whose fiat was final. mr. burleigh and mr. catskill thought that such a thing was absolutely necessary, and so, less surely, did i. ‘who will decide?’ was their riddle. they expected to be taken to see the president or the supreme council of utopia. i suppose it seems to you the most natural of things that there should be nothing of the sort, and that a question should go simply and naturally to the man who knows best about it.”
“subject to free criticism,” said crystal.
“subject to the same process that has made him eminent and responsible. but don’t people thrust themselves forward even here — out of vanity? and don’t people get thrust forward in front of the best — out of spite?”
“there is plenty of spite and vanity in every utopian soul,” said crystal. “but people speak very plainly and criticism is very searching and free. so that we learn to search our motives before we praise or question.”
“what you say and do shows up here plainly at its true value,” said mr. barnstaple. “you cannot throw mud in the noise and darkness unchallenged or get a false claim acknowledged in the disorder.”
“some years ago there was a man, an artist, who made a great trouble about the work of my father. often artistic criticism is very bitter here, but he was bitter beyond measure. he caricatured my father and abused him incessantly. he followed him from place to place. he tried to prevent the allocation of material to him. he was quite ineffective. some people answered him, but for the most part he was disregarded. . . . ”
the boy stopped short.
“well?”
“he killed himself. he could not escape from his own foolishness. everyone knew what he had said and done. . . . ”
“but in the past there were kings and councils and conferences in utopia,” said mr. barnstaple, returning to the main point.
“my books teach me that our state could have grown up in no other way. we had to have these general dealers in human relationship, politicians and lawyers, as a necessary stage in political and social development. just as we had to have soldiers and policemen to save people from mutual violence. it was only very slowly that politicians and lawyers came to admit the need for special knowledge in the things they had to do. politicians would draw boundaries without any proper knowledge of ethnology or economic geography, and lawyers decide about will and purpose with the crudest knowledge of psychology. they produced the most preposterous and unworkable arrangements in the gravest fashion.”
“like tristram shandy’s parish bull — which set about begetting the peace of the world at versailles,” said mr. barnstaple.
crystal looked puzzled.
“a complicated allusion to a purely earthly matter,” said mr. barnstaple. “this complete diffusion of the business of politics and law among the people with knowledge, is one of the most interesting things of all to me in this world. such a diffusion is beginning upon earth. the people who understand world-health for instance are dead against political and legal methods, and so are many of our best economists. and most people never go into a law court, and wouldn’t dream of doing so upon business of their own, from their cradles to their graves. what became of your politicians and lawyers? was there a struggle?”
“as light grew and intelligence spread they became more and more evidently unnecessary. they met at last only to appoint men of knowledge as assessors and so forth, and after a time even these appointments became foregone conclusions. their activities melted into the general body of criticism and discussion. in places there are still old buildings that used to be council chambers and law courts. the last politician to be elected to a legislative assembly died in utopia about a thousand years ago. he was an eccentric and garrulous old gentleman; he was the only candidate and one man voted for him, and he insisted upon assembling in solitary state and having all his speeches and proceedings taken down in shorthand. boys and girls who were learning stenography used to go to report him. finally he was dealt with as a mental case.”
“and the last judge?”
“i have not learnt about the last judge,” said crystal. “i must ask my tutor. i suppose there was one, but i suppose nobody asked him to judge anything. so he probably got something more respectable to do.”
section 6
“i begin to apprehend the daily life of this world,” said mr. barnstaple. “it is a life of demi-gods, very free, strongly individualized, each following an individual bent, each contributing to great racial ends. it is not only cleanly naked and sweet and lovely but full of personal dignity. it is, i see, a practical communism, planned and led up to through long centuries of education and discipline and collectivist preparation. i had never thought before that socialism could exalt and ennoble the individual and individualism degrade him, but now i see plainly that here the thing is proved. in this fortunate world — it is indeed the crown of all its health and happiness — there is no crowd. the old world, the world to which i belong, was and in my universe alas still is, the world of the crowd, the world of that detestable crawling mass of unfeatured, infected human beings.
“you have never seen a crowd, crystal; and in all your happy life you never will. you have never seen a crowd going to a football match or a race meeting or a bull-fight or a public execution or the like crowd joy; you have never watched a crowd wedge and stick in a narrow place or hoot or howl in a crisis. you have never watched it stream sluggishly along the streets to gape at a king, or yell for a war, or yell quite equally for a peace. and you have never seen the crowd, struck by some panic breeze, change from crowd proper to mob and begin to smash and hunt. all the crowd celebrations have gone out of this world; all the crowd’s gods, there is no turf here, no sport, no war demonstrations, no coronations and public funerals, no great shows, but only your little theatres. . . . happy crystal! who will never see a crowd!”
“but i have seen crowds,” said crystal.
“where?”
“i have seen cinematograph films of crowds, photographed thirty centuries ago and more. they are shown in our history museums. i have seen crowds streaming over downs after a great race meeting, photographed from an aeroplane, and crowds rioting in some public square and being dispersed by the police. thousands and thousands of swarming people. but it is true what you say. there are no more crowds in utopia. crowds and the crowd-mind have gone for ever.”
section 7
when after some days crystal had to return to his mathematical studies, his departure left mr. barnstaple very lonely. he found no other companion. lychnis seemed always near him and ready to be with him, but her want of active intellectual interests, so remarkable in this world of vast intellectual activities, estranged him from her. other utopians came and went, friendly, amused, polite, but intent upon their own business. they would question him curiously, attend perhaps to a question or so of his own, and depart with an air of being called away.
lychnis, he began to realize, was one of utopia’s failures. she was a lingering romantic type and she cherished a great sorrow in her heart. she had had two children whom she had loved passionately. they were adorably fearless, and out of foolish pride she had urged them to swim out to sea and they had been taken by a current and drowned. their father had been drowned in attempting their rescue and lychnis had very nearly shared their fate. she had been rescued. but her emotional life had stopped short at that point, had, as it were, struck an attitude and remained in it. tragedy possessed her. she turned her back on laughter and gladness and looked for distress. she had rediscovered the lost passion of pity, first pity for herself and then a desire to pity others. she took no interest any more in vigorous and complete people, but her mind concentrated upon the consolation to be found in consoling pain and distress in others. she sought her healing in healing them. she did not want to talk to mr. barnstaple of the brightness of utopia; she wanted him to talk to her of the miseries of earth and of his own miseries. that she might sympathize. but he would not tell her of his own miseries because indeed, such was his temperament, he had none; he had only exasperations and regrets.
she dreamt, he perceived, of being able to come to earth and give her beauty and tenderness to the sick and poor. her heart went out to the spectacle of human suffering and weakness. it went out to these things hungrily and desirously. . . .
before he detected the drift of her mind he told her many things about human sickness and poverty. but he spoke of these matters not with pity but indignation, as things that ought not to be. and when he perceived how she feasted on these things he spoke of them hardly and cheerfully as things that would presently be swept away. “but they will still have suffered,” she said. . . .
since she was always close at hand, she filled for him perhaps more than her legitimate space in the utopian spectacle. she lay across it like a shadow. he thought very frequently about her and about the pity and resentment against life and vigour that she embodied. in a world of fear, weakness, infection, darkness and confusion, pity, the act of charity, the alms and the refuge, the deed of stark devotion, might show indeed like sweet and gracious presences; but in this world of health and brave enterprises, pity betrayed itself a vicious desire. crystal, utopian youth, was as hard as his name. when he had slipped one day on some rocks and twisted and torn his ankle, he had limped but he had laughed. when mr. barnstaple was winded on a steep staircase crystal was polite rather than sympathetic. so lychnis had found no confederate in the dedication of her life to sorrow; even from mr. barnstaple she could win no sympathy. he perceived that indeed so far as temperament went he was a better utopian than she was. to him as to utopia it seemed rather an occasion for gladness than sorrow that her man and her children had met death fearlessly. they were dead; a brave stark death; the waters still glittered and the sun still shone. but her loss had revealed some underlying racial taint in her, something very ancient in the species, something that utopia was still breeding out only very slowly, the dark sacrificial disposition that bows and responds to the shadow. it was strange and yet perhaps it was inevitable that mr. barnstaple should meet again in utopia that spirit which earth knows so well, the spirit that turns from the kingdom of heaven to worship the thorns and the nails, which delights to represent its god not as the resurrection and the life but as a woeful and defeated cadaver.
she would talk to him of his sons as if she envied him because of the loss of her own, but all she said reminded him of the educational disadvantages and narrow prospects of his boys and how much stouter and finer and happier their lives would have been in utopia. he would have risked drowning them a dozen times to have saved them from being clerks and employees of other men. even by earthly standards he felt now that he had not done his best by them; he had let many things drift in their lives and in the lives of himself and his wife that he now felt he ought to have controlled. could he have his time over again he felt that he would see to it that his sons took a livelier interest in politics and science and were not so completely engulfed in the trivialities of suburban life, in tennis playing, amateur theatricals, inane flirtations and the like. they were good boys in substance he felt, but he had left them to their mother; and he had left their mother too much to herself instead of battling with her for the sake of his own ideas. they were living trivially in the shadow of one great catastrophe and with no security against another; they were living in a world of weak waste and shabby insufficiency. and is own life also had been — weak waste.
his life at sydenham began to haunt him. “i criticized everything but i altered nothing,” he said. “i was as bad as peeve. was i any more use in that world than i am in this? but on earth we are all wasters. . . . ”
he avoided lychnis for a day or so and wandered about the valley alone. he went into a great reading-room and fingered books he could not read; he was suffered to stand in a workshop, and he watched an artist make a naked girl of gold more lovely than any earthly statuette and melt her again dissatisfied; here he came upon men building, and here was work upon the fields, here was a great shaft in the hillside and something deep in the hill that flashed and scintillated strangely; they would not let him go in to it; he saw a thousand things he could not understand. he began to feel as perhaps a very intelligent dog must sometimes feel in the world of men, only that he had no master and no instincts that could find a consolation in canine abjection. the utopians went about their business in the day-time, they passed him smiling and they filled him with intolerable envy. they knew what to do. they belonged. they went by in twos and threes in the evening, communing together and sometimes singing together. lovers would pass him, their sweetly smiling faces close together, and his loneliness became an agony of hopeless desires.
because, though he fought hard to keep it below the threshold of his consciousness, mr. barnstaple desired greatly to love and be loved in utopia. the realization that no one of these people could ever conceive of any such intimacy of body or spirit with him was a humiliation more fundamental even than his uselessness. the loveliness of the utopian girls and women who glanced at him curiously or passed him with a serene indifference, crushed down his self-respect and made the utopian world altogether intolerable to him. mutely, unconsciously, these utopian goddesses concentrated upon him the uttermost abasement of caste and race inferiority. he could not keep his thoughts from love where everyone it seemed had a lover, and in this utopian world love for him was a thing grotesque and inconceivable. . . .
then one night as he lay awake distressed beyond measure by the thought of such things, an idea came to him whereby it seemed to him he might restore his self-respect and win a sort of citizenship in utopia.
so that they might even speak of him and remember him with interest and sympathy.
