A Modern Utopia - H. G. Wells (best color ebook reader txt) 📗

be advisable to come to the

point with the labour question forthwith. At last we should draw the

deep breath of resolution and arise and ask for the Public Office.

We should know by this time that the labour bureau sheltered with

the post-office and other public services in one building.

 

The public office of Utopia would of course contain a few surprises

for two men from terrestrial England. You imagine us entering, the

botanist lagging a little behind me, and my first attempts to be

offhand and commonplace in a demand for work.

 

The office is in charge of a quick-eyed little woman of six and

thirty perhaps, and she regards us with a certain keenness of

scrutiny.

 

“Where are your papers?” she asks.

 

I think for a moment of the documents in my pocket, my passport

chequered with visas and addressed in my commendation and in the

name of her late Majesty by We, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoigne

Cecil, Marquess of Salisbury, Earl of Salisbury, Viscount Cranborne,

Baron Cecil, and so forth, to all whom it may concern, my Carte

d’Identite (useful on minor occasions) of the Touring Club de

France, my green ticket to the Reading Room of the British Museum,

and my Lettre d’Indication from the London and County Bank. A

foolish humour prompts me to unfold all these, hand them to her

and take the consequences, but I resist.

 

“Lost,” I say, briefly.

 

“Both lost?” she asks, looking at my friend.

 

“Both,” I answer.

 

“How?”

 

I astonish myself by the readiness of my answer.

 

“I fell down a snow slope and they came out of my pocket.”

 

“And exactly the same thing happened to both of you?”

 

“No. He’d given me his to put with my own.” She raised her eyebrows.

“His pocket is defective,” I add, a little hastily.

 

Her manners are too Utopian for her to follow that up. She seems to

reflect on procedure.

 

“What are your numbers?” she asks, abruptly.

 

A vision of that confounded visitors’ book at the inn above comes

into my mind. “Let me see,” I say, and pat my forehead and

reflect, refraining from the official eye before me. “Let me

see.”

 

“What is yours?” she asks the botanist.

 

“A. B.,” he says, slowly, “little a, nine four seven, I

think–-”

 

“Don’t you know?”

 

“Not exactly,” says the botanist, very agreeably. “No.”

 

“Do you mean to say neither of you know your own numbers?” says the

little post-mistress, with a rising note.

 

“Yes,” I say, with an engaging smile and trying to keep up a good

social tone. “It’s queer, isn’t it? We’ve both forgotten.”

 

“You’re joking,” she suggests.

 

“Well,” I temporise.

 

“I suppose you’ve got your thumbs?”

 

“The fact is–-” I say and hesitate. “We’ve got our thumbs, of

course.”

 

“Then I shall have to send a thumb-print down to the office and get

your number from that. But are you sure you haven’t your papers or

numbers? It’s very queer.”

 

We admit rather sheepishly that it’s queer, and question one another

silently.

 

She turns thoughtfully for the thumbmarking slab, and as she does

so, a man enters the office. At the sight of him she asks with a

note of relief, “What am I to do, sir, here?”

 

He looks from her to us gravely, and his eye lights to curiosity at

our dress. “What is the matter, madam?” he asks, in a courteous

voice.

 

She explains.

 

So far the impression we have had of our Utopia is one of a quite

unearthly sanity, of good management and comprehensive design in

every material thing, and it has seemed to us a little incongruous

that all the Utopians we have talked to, our host of last night,

the post-mistress and our garrulous tramp, have been of the most

commonplace type. But suddenly there looks out from this man’s pose

and regard a different quality, a quality altogether nearer that of

the beautiful tramway and of the gracious order of the mountain

houses. He is a well-built man of perhaps five and thirty, with the

easy movement that comes with perfect physical condition, his face

is clean shaven and shows the firm mouth of a disciplined man, and

his grey eyes are clear and steady. His legs are clad in some woven

stuff deep-red in colour, and over this he wears a white shirt

fitting pretty closely, and with a woven purple hem. His general

effect reminds me somehow of the Knights Templars. On his head is a

cap of thin leather and still thinner steel, and with the vestiges

of ear-guards—rather like an attenuated version of the caps that

were worn by Cromwell’s Ironsides.

 

He looks at us and we interpolate a word or so as she explains and

feel a good deal of embarrassment at the foolish position we have

made for ourselves. I determine to cut my way out of this

entanglement before it complicates itself further.

 

“The fact is–-” I say.

 

“Yes?” he says, with a faint smile.

 

“We’ve perhaps been disingenuous. Our position is so entirely

exceptional, so difficult to explain–-”

 

“What have you been doing?”

 

“No,” I say, with decision; “it can’t be explained like that.”

 

He looks down at his feet. “Go on,” he says.

 

I try to give the thing a quiet, matter-of-fact air. “You see,” I

say, in the tone one adopts for really lucid explanations, “we come

from another world. Consequently, whatever thumbmark registration

or numbering you have in this planet doesn’t apply to us, and we

don’t know our numbers because we haven’t got any. We are really,

you know, explorers, strangers–-”

 

“But what world do you mean?”

 

“It’s a different planet—a long way away. Practically at an

infinite distance.”

 

He looks up in my face with the patient expression of a man who

listens to nonsense.

 

“I know it sounds impossible,” I say, “but here is the simple

fact—we appear in your world. We appeared suddenly upon the neck

of Lucendro—the Passo Lucendro—yesterday afternoon, and I defy you

to discover the faintest trace of us before that time. Down we

marched into the San Gotthard road and here we are! That’s our fact.

And as for papers–-! Where in your world have you seen papers like

this?”

 

I produce my pocket-book, extract my passport, and present it to

him.

 

His expression has changed. He takes the document and examines it,

turns it over, looks at me, and smiles that faint smile of his

again.

 

“Have some more,” I say, and proffer the card of the T.C.F.

 

I follow up that blow with my green British Museum ticket, as

tattered as a flag in a knight’s chapel.

 

“You’ll get found out,” he says, with my documents in his hand.

“You’ve got your thumbs. You’ll be measured. They’ll refer to the

central registers, and there you’ll be!”

 

“That’s just it,” I say, “we sha’n’t be.”

 

He reflects. “It’s a queer sort of joke for you two men to play,” he

decides, handing me back my documents.

 

“It’s no joke at all,” I say, replacing them in my pocket-book.

 

The post-mistress intervenes. “What would you advise me to do?”

 

“No money?” he asks.

 

“No.”

 

He makes some suggestions. “Frankly,” he says, “I think you have

escaped from some island. How you got so far as here I can’t

imagine, or what you think you’ll do…. But anyhow, there’s the

stuff for your thumbs.”

 

He points to the thumbmarking apparatus and turns to attend to his

own business.

 

Presently we emerge from the office in a state between discomfiture

and amusement, each with a tramway ticket for Lucerne in his hand

and with sufficient money to pay our expenses until the morrow. We

are to go to Lucerne because there there is a demand for

comparatively unskilled labour in carving wood, which seems to us a

sort of work within our range and a sort that will not compel our

separation.

 

Section 6

 

The old Utopias are sessile organisations; the new must square

itself to the needs of a migratory population, to an endless coming

and going, to a people as fluid and tidal as the sea. It does not

enter into the scheme of earthly statesmanship, but indeed all local

establishments, all definitions of place, are even now melting under

our eyes. Presently all the world will be awash with anonymous

stranger men.

 

Now the simple laws of custom, the homely methods of identification

that served in the little communities of the past when everyone knew

everyone, fail in the face of this liquefaction. If the modern

Utopia is indeed to be a world of responsible citizens, it must have

devised some scheme by which every person in the world can be

promptly and certainly recognised, and by which anyone missing can

be traced and found.

 

This is by no means an impossible demand. The total population of

the world is, on the most generous estimate, not more than

1,500,000,000, and the effectual indexing of this number of people,

the record of their movement hither and thither, the entry of

various material facts, such as marriage, parentage, criminal

convictions and the like, the entry of the new-born and the

elimination of the dead, colossal task though it would be, is still

not so great as to be immeasurably beyond comparison with the work

of the post-offices in the world of to-day, or the cataloguing of

such libraries as that of the British Museum, or such collections as

that of the insects in Cromwell Road. Such an index could be housed

quite comfortably on one side of Northumberland Avenue, for example.

It is only a reasonable tribute to the distinctive lucidity of the

French mind to suppose the central index housed in a vast series of

buildings at or near Paris. The index would be classified primarily

by some unchanging physical characteristic, such as we are told

the thumbmark and finger-mark afford, and to these would be

added any other physical traits that were of material value.

The classification of thumbmarks and of inalterable physical

characteristics goes on steadily, and there is every reason for

assuming it possible that each human being could be given a distinct

formula, a number or “scientific name,” under which he or she could

be docketed. [Footnote: It is quite possible that the actual

thumbmark may play only a small part in the work of identification,

but it is an obvious convenience to our thread of story to assume

that it is the one sufficient feature.] About the buildings in which

this great main index would be gathered, would be a system of other

indices with cross references to the main one, arranged under names,

under professional qualifications, under diseases, crimes and the

like.

 

These index cards might conceivably be transparent and so contrived

as to give a photographic copy promptly whenever it was needed, and

they could have an attachment into which would slip a ticket bearing

the name of the locality in which the individual was last reported.

A little army of attendants would be at work upon this index day and

night. From substations constantly engaged in checking back

thumbmarks and numbers, an incessant stream of information would

come, of births, of deaths, of arrivals at inns, of applications to

post-offices for letters, of tickets taken for long journeys, of

criminal convictions, marriages, applications for public doles and

the like. A filter of offices would sort the stream, and all day and

all night for ever a swarm of clerks would go to and fro correcting

this central register, and photographing copies of its entries