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

at most two to a marriage, and with a high and

rising standard of comfort and circumspection it is unlikely that

the birth-rate will ever rise very greatly again. The Utopians will

hold that if you keep the children from profitable employment for

the sake of the future, then, if you want any but the exceptionally

rich, secure, pious, unselfish, or reckless to bear children freely,

you must be prepared to throw the cost of their maintenance upon the

general community.

 

In short, Utopia will hold that sound childbearing and rearing is a

service done, not to a particular man, but to the whole community,

and all its legal arrangements for motherhood will be based on that

conception.

 

Section 4

 

And after these preliminaries we must proceed to ask, first, what

will be the Utopian marriage law, and then what sort of customs and

opinions are likely to be superadded to that law?

 

The trend of our reasoning has brought us to the conclusion that the

Utopian State will feel justified in intervening between men and

women on two accounts, first on account of paternity, and secondly

on account of the clash of freedoms that may otherwise arise. The

Utopian State will effectually interfere with and prescribe

conditions for all sorts of contract, and for this sort of contract

in particular it will be in agreement with almost every earthly

State, in defining in the completest fashion what things a man or

woman may be bound to do, and what they cannot be bound to do. From

the point of view of a statesman, marriage is the union of a man

and woman in a manner so intimate as to involve the probability of

offspring, and it is of primary importance to the State, first in

order to secure good births, and secondly good home conditions, that

these unions should not be free, nor promiscuous, nor practically

universal throughout the adult population.

 

Prolific marriage must be a profitable privilege. It must occur only

under certain obvious conditions, the contracting parties must be in

health and condition, free from specific transmissible taints, above

a certain minimum age, and sufficiently intelligent and energetic

to have acquired a minimum education. The man at least must be

in receipt of a net income above the minimum wage, after any

outstanding charges against him have been paid. All this much

it is surely reasonable to insist upon before the State becomes

responsible for the prospective children. The age at which men and

women may contract to marry is difficult to determine. But if we

are, as far as possible, to put women on an equality with men, if we

are to insist upon a universally educated population, and if we are

seeking to reduce the infantile death-rate to zero, it must be much

higher than it is in any terrestrial State. The woman should be at

least one-and-twenty; the man twenty-six or twenty-seven.

 

One imagines the parties to a projected marriage first obtaining

licenses which will testify that these conditions are satisfied.

From the point of view of the theoretical Utopian State, these

licenses are the feature of primary importance. Then, no doubt, that

universal register at Paris would come into play. As a matter of

justice, there must be no deception between the two people, and the

State will ensure that in certain broad essentials this is so. They

would have to communicate their joint intention to a public office

after their personal licenses were granted, and each would be

supplied with a copy of the index card of the projected mate, on

which would be recorded his or her age, previous marriages, legally

important diseases, offspring, domiciles, public appointments,

criminal convictions, registered assignments of property, and so

forth. Possibly it might be advisable to have a little ceremony for

each party, for each in the absence of the other, in which this

record could be read over in the presence of witnesses, together

with some prescribed form of address of counsel in the matter. There

would then be a reasonable interval for consideration and withdrawal

on the part of either spouse. In the event of the two people

persisting in their resolution, they would after this minimum

interval signify as much to the local official and the necessary

entry would be made in the registers. These formalities would be

quite independent of any religious ceremonial the contracting

parties might choose, for with religious belief and procedure the

modern State has no concern.

 

So much for the preliminary conditions of matrimony. For those men

and women who chose to ignore these conditions and to achieve any

sort of union they liked the State would have no concern, unless

offspring were born illegitimately. In that case, as we have

already suggested, it would be only reasonable to make the parents

chargeable with every duty, with maintenance, education, and so

forth, that in the normal course of things would fall to the State.

It would be necessary to impose a life assurance payment upon these

parents, and to exact effectual guarantees against every possible

evasion of the responsibility they had incurred. But the further

control of private morality, beyond the protection of the immature

from corruption and evil example, will be no concern of the State’s.

When a child comes in, the future of the species comes in; and

the State comes in as the guardian of interests wider than the

individual’s; but the adult’s private life is the entirely private

life into which the State may not intrude.

 

Now what will be the nature of the Utopian contract of

matrimony?

 

From the first of the two points of view named above, that of

parentage, it is obvious that one unavoidable condition will be the

chastity of the wife. Her infidelity being demonstrated, must at

once terminate the marriage and release both her husband and the

State from any liability for the support of her illegitimate

offspring. That, at any rate, is beyond controversy; a marriage

contract that does not involve that, is a triumph of metaphysics

over common sense. It will be obvious that under Utopian conditions

it is the State that will suffer injury by a wife’s misconduct, and

that a husband who condones anything of the sort will participate in

her offence. A woman, therefore, who is divorced on this account

will be divorced as a public offender, and not in the key of a

personal quarrel; not as one who has inflicted a private and

personal wrong. This, too, lies within the primary implications of

marriage.

 

Beyond that, what conditions should a marriage contract in Utopia

involve?

 

A reciprocal restraint on the part of the husband is clearly of no

importance whatever, so far as the first end of matrimony goes, the

protection of the community from inferior births. It is no wrong to

the State. But it does carry with it a variable amount of emotional

offence to the wife; it may wound her pride and cause her violent

perturbations of jealousy; it may lead to her neglect, her solitude

and unhappiness, and it may even work to her physical injury. There

should be an implication that it is not to occur. She has bound

herself to the man for the good of the State, and clearly it is

reasonable that she should look to the State for relief if it does

occur. The extent of the offence given her is the exact measure

of her injury; if she does not mind nobody minds, and if her

self-respect does not suffer nothing whatever is lost to the world;

and so it should rest with her to establish his misconduct, and, if

she thinks fit, to terminate the marriage.

 

A failure on either side to perform the elementary duties of

companionship, desertion, for example, should obviously give the

other mate the right to relief, and clearly the development of any

disqualifying habit, drunkenness, or drug-taking, or the like, or

any serious crime or acts of violence, should give grounds for a

final release. Moreover, the modern Utopian State intervenes between

the sexes only because of the coming generation, and for it to

sustain restrictions upon conduct in a continually fruitless

marriage is obviously to lapse into purely moral intervention. It

seems reasonable, therefore, to set a term to a marriage that

remains childless, to let it expire at the end of three or four or

five unfruitful years, but with no restriction upon the right of

the husband and wife to marry each other again.

 

These are the fairly easy primaries of this question. We now come to

the more difficult issues of the matter. The first of these is the

question of the economic relationships of husband and wife, having

regard to the fact that even in Utopia women, at least until they

become mothers, are likely to be on the average poorer than men. The

second is the question of the duration of a marriage. But the two

interlock, and are, perhaps, best treated together in one common

section. And they both ramify in the most complicated manner into

the consideration of the general morale of the community.

 

Section 5

 

This question of marriage is the most complicated and difficult in

the whole range of Utopian problems. But it is happily not the most

urgent necessity that it should be absolutely solved. The urgent and

necessary problem is the ruler. With rulers rightly contrived and a

provisional defective marriage law a Utopia may be conceived as

existing and studying to perfect itself, but without rulers a Utopia

is impossible though the theory of its matrimony be complete. And

the difficulty in this question is not simply the difficulty of a

complicated chess problem, for example, in which the whole tangle

of considerations does at least lie in one plane, but a series of

problems upon different levels and containing incommensurable

factors.

 

It is very easy to repeat our initial propositions, to recall that

we are on another planet, and that all the customs and traditions of

the earth are set aside, but the faintest realisation of that

demands a feat of psychological insight. We have all grown up into

an invincible mould of suggestion about sexual things; we regard

this with approval, that with horror, and this again with contempt,

very largely because the thing has always been put to us in this

light or that. The more emancipated we think ourselves the more

subtle are our bonds. The disentanglement of what is inherent in

these feelings from what is acquired is an extraordinary complex

undertaking. Probably all men and women have a more or less powerful

disposition to jealousy, but what exactly they will be jealous about

and what exactly they will suffer seems part of the superposed

factor. Probably all men and women are capable of ideal emotions and

wishes beyond merely physical desires, but the shape these take are

almost entirely a reaction to external images. And you really cannot

strip the external off; you cannot get your stark natural man,

jealous, but not jealous about anything in particular, imaginative

without any imaginings, proud at large. Emotional dispositions can

no more exist without form than a man without air. Only a very

observant man who had lived all over the planet Earth, in all sorts

of social strata, and with every race and tongue, and who was

endowed with great imaginative insight, could hope to understand the

possibilities and the limitations of human plasticity in this

matter, and say what any men and any women could be induced to do

willingly, and just exactly what no man and no woman could stand,

provided one had the training of them. Though very young men will

tell you readily enough. The proceedings of other races and other

ages do not seem to carry conviction; what our ancestors did, or

what the Greeks or