A Modern Utopia - H. G. Wells (best color ebook reader txt) 📗
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the species, in the case of the Utopian World State it absolutely
represents the species. The individual emerges from the species,
makes his experiment, and either fails, dies, and comes to an end,
or succeeds and impresses himself in offspring, in consequences and
results, intellectual, material and moral, upon the world.
Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of
all its successful individuals since the beginning, and the World
State of the Modern Utopist will, in its economic aspect, be a
compendium of established economic experience, about which
individual enterprise will be continually experimenting, either to
fail and pass, or to succeed and at last become incorporated with
the undying organism of the World State. This organism is the
universal rule, the common restriction, the rising level platform
on which individualities stand.
The World State in this ideal presents itself as the sole landowner
of the earth, with the great local governments I have adumbrated,
the local municipalities, holding, as it were, feudally under it as
landlords. The State or these subordinates holds all the sources of
energy, and either directly or through its tenants, farmers and
agents, develops these sources, and renders the energy available for
the work of life. It or its tenants will produce food, and so human
energy, and the exploitation of coal and electric power, and the
powers of wind and wave and water will be within its right. It will
pour out this energy by assignment and lease and acquiescence and
what not upon its individual citizens. It will maintain order,
maintain roads, maintain a cheap and efficient administration of
justice, maintain cheap and rapid locomotion and be the common
carrier of the planet, convey and distribute labour, control, let,
or administer all natural productions, pay for and secure healthy
births and a healthy and vigorous new generation, maintain the
public health, coin money and sustain standards of measurement,
subsidise research, and reward such commercially unprofitable
undertakings as benefit the community as a whole; subsidise when
needful chairs of criticism and authors and publications, and
collect and distribute information. The energy developed and the
employment afforded by the State will descend like water that the
sun has sucked out of the sea to fall upon a mountain range, and
back to the sea again it will come at last, debouching in ground
rent and royalty and license fees, in the fees of travellers and
profits upon carrying and coinage and the like, in death duty,
transfer tax, legacy and forfeiture, returning to the sea. Between
the clouds and the sea it will run, as a river system runs, down
through a great region of individual enterprise and interplay, whose
freedom it will sustain. In that intermediate region between the
kindred heights and deeps those beginnings and promises will arise
that are the essential significance, the essential substance, of
life. From our human point of view the mountains and sea are for
the habitable lands that lie between. So likewise the State is
for Individualities. The State is for Individuals, the law is for
freedoms, the world is for experiment, experience, and change: these
are the fundamental beliefs upon which a modern Utopia must go.
Section 5
Within this scheme, which makes the State the source of all energy,
and the final legatee, what will be the nature of the property a man
may own? Under modern conditions—indeed, under any conditions—a
man without some negotiable property is a man without freedom, and
the extent of his property is very largely the measure of his
freedom. Without any property, without even shelter or food, a man
has no choice but to set about getting these things; he is in
servitude to his needs until he has secured property to satisfy
them. But with a certain small property a man is free to do many
things, to take a fortnight’s holiday when he chooses, for example,
and to try this new departure from his work or that; with so much
more, he may take a year of freedom and go to the ends of the earth;
with so much more, he may obtain elaborate apparatus and try
curious novelties, build himself houses and make gardens, establish
businesses and make experiments at large. Very speedily, under
terrestrial conditions, the property of a man may reach such
proportions that his freedom oppresses the freedom of others. Here,
again, is a quantitative question, an adjustment of conflicting
freedoms, a quantitative question that too many people insist on
making a qualitative one.
The object sought in the code of property laws that one would find
in operation in Utopia would be the same object that pervades the
whole Utopian organisation, namely, a universal maximum of
individual freedom. Whatever far-reaching movements the State or
great rich men or private corporations may make, the starvation by
any complication of employment, the unwilling deportation, the
destruction of alternatives to servile submissions, must not
ensue. Beyond such qualifications, the object of Modern Utopian
statesmanship will be to secure to a man the freedom given by all
his legitimate property, that is to say, by all the values his toil
or skill or foresight and courage have brought into being. Whatever
he has justly made he has a right to keep, that is obvious enough;
but he will also have a right to sell and exchange, and so this
question of what may be property takes really the form of what may
a man buy in Utopia?
A modern Utopian most assuredly must have a practically unqualified
property in all those things that become, as it were, by possession,
extensions and expressions of his personality; his clothing, his
jewels, the tools of his employment, his books, the objects of art
he may have bought or made, his personal weapons (if Utopia have
need of such things), insignia, and so forth. All such things that
he has bought with his money or acquired—provided he is not a
professional or habitual dealer in such property—will be
inalienably his, his to give or lend or keep, free even from
taxation. So intimate is this sort of property that I have no doubt
Utopia will give a man posthumous rights over it—will permit him to
assign it to a successor with at the utmost the payment of a small
redemption. A horse, perhaps, in certain districts, or a bicycle, or
any such mechanical conveyance personally used, the Utopians might
find it well to rank with these possessions. No doubt, too, a house
and privacy owned and occupied by a man, and even a man’s own
household furniture, might be held to stand as high or almost as
high in the property scale, might be taxed as lightly and
transferred under only a slightly heavier redemption, provided he
had not let these things on hire, or otherwise alienated them from
his intimate self. A thorough-going, Democratic Socialist will no
doubt be inclined at first to object that if the Utopians make these
things a specially free sort of property in this way, men would
spend much more upon them than they would otherwise do, but indeed
that will be an excellent thing. We are too much affected by the
needy atmosphere of our own mismanaged world. In Utopia no one will
have to hunger because some love to make and have made and own and
cherish beautiful things. To give this much of property to
individuals will tend to make clothing, ornamentation, implements,
books, and all the arts finer and more beautiful, because by buying
such things a man will secure something inalienable—save in the
case of bankruptcy—for himself and for those who belong to him.
Moreover, a man may in his lifetime set aside sums to ensure special
advantages of education and care for the immature children of
himself and others, and in this manner also exercise a posthumous
right. [Footnote: But a Statute of Mortmain will set a distinct time
limit to the continuance of such benefactions. A periodic revision
of endowments is a necessary feature in any modern Utopia.]
For all other property, the Utopians will have a scantier respect;
even money unspent by a man, and debts to him that bear no interest,
will at his death stand upon a lower level than these things. What
he did not choose to gather and assimilate to himself, or assign for
the special education of his children, the State will share in the
lion’s proportion with heir and legatee.
This applies, for example, to the property that a man creates and
acquires in business enterprises, which are presumably undertaken
for gain, and as a means of living rather than for themselves. All
new machinery, all new methods, all uncertain and variable and
non-universal undertakings, are no business for the State; they
commence always as experiments of unascertained value, and next
after the invention of money, there is no invention has so
facilitated freedom and progress as the invention of the limited
liability company to do this work of trial and adventure. The
abuses, the necessary reforms of company law on earth, are no
concern of ours here and now, suffice it that in a Modern Utopia
such laws must be supposed to be as perfect as mortal laws can
possibly be made. Caveat vendor will be a sound qualification of
Caveat emptor in the beautifully codified Utopian law. Whether the
Utopian company will be allowed to prefer this class of share to
that or to issue debentures, whether indeed usury, that is to say
lending money at fixed rates of interest, will be permitted at all
in Utopia, one may venture to doubt. But whatever the nature of the
shares a man may hold, they will all be sold at his death, and
whatever he has not clearly assigned for special educational
purposes will—with possibly some fractional concession to near
survivors—lapse to the State. The “safe investment,” that
permanent, undying claim upon the community, is just one of those
things Utopia will discourage; which indeed the developing security
of civilisation quite automatically discourages through the fall in
the rate of interest. As we shall see at a later stage, the State
will insure the children of every citizen, and those legitimately
dependent upon him, against the inconvenience of his death; it will
carry out all reasonable additional dispositions he may have made
for them in the same event; and it will insure him against old age
and infirmity; and the object of Utopian economics will be to give a
man every inducement to spend his surplus money in intensifying the
quality of his surroundings, either by economic adventures and
experiments, which may yield either losses or large profits, or in
increasing the beauty, the pleasure, the abundance and promise of
life.
Besides strictly personal possessions and shares in business
adventures, Utopia will no doubt permit associations of its citizens
to have a property in various sorts of contracts and concessions, in
leases of agricultural and other land, for example; in houses they
may have built, factories and machinery they may have made, and
the like. And if a citizen prefer to adventure into business
single-handed, he will have all the freedoms of enterprise enjoyed
by a company; in business affairs he will be a company of one, and
his single share will be dealt with at his death like any other
shares…. So much for the second kind of property. And these two
kinds of property will probably exhaust the sorts of property a
Utopian may possess.
The trend of modern thought is entirely against private property in
land or natural objects or products, and in Utopia these things
will be the inalienable property of the World State. Subject to the
rights of free locomotion, land will be leased out to companies
or individuals, but—in view of the unknown necessities of the
future—never for a longer period than, let
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