A Modern Utopia - H. G. Wells (best color ebook reader txt) 📗
- Author: H. G. Wells
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surface and something of the tint of yellow ivory; the colour is a
little irregular, and a partial confession of girders and pillars
breaks this front of tender colour with lines and mouldings of
greenish gray, that blend with the tones of the leaden gutters and
rain pipes from the light red roof. At one point only does any
explicit effort towards artistic effect appear, and that is in the
great arched gateway opposite my window. Two or three abundant
yellow roses climb over the face of the building, and when I look
out of my window in the early morning—for the usual Utopian working
day commences within an hour of sunrise—I see Pilatus above this
outlook, rosy in the morning sky.
This quadrangle type of building is the prevalent element in Utopian
Lucerne, and one may go from end to end of the town along corridors
and covered colonnades without emerging by a gateway into the open
roads at all. Small shops are found in these colonnades, but the
larger stores are usually housed in buildings specially adapted to
their needs. The majority of the residential edifices are far finer
and more substantial than our own modest shelter, though we gather
from such chance glimpses as we get of their arrangements that the
labour-saving ideal runs through every grade of this servantless
world; and what we should consider a complete house in earthly
England is hardly known here.
The autonomy of the household has been reduced far below terrestrial
conditions by hotels and clubs, and all sorts of co-operative
expedients. People who do not live in hotels seem usually to live in
clubs. The fairly prosperous Utopian belongs, in most cases, to one
or two residential clubs of congenial men and women. These clubs
usually possess in addition to furnished bedrooms more or less
elaborate suites of apartments, and if a man prefers it one of these
latter can be taken and furnished according to his personal taste. A
pleasant boudoir, a private library and study, a private garden
plot, are among the commonest of such luxuries. Devices to secure
roof gardens, loggias, verandahs, and such-like open-air privacies
to the more sumptuous of these apartments, give interest and variety
to Utopian architecture. There are sometimes little cooking corners
in these flats—as one would call them on earth—but the ordinary
Utopian would no more think of a special private kitchen for his
dinners than he would think of a private flour mill or dairy farm.
Business, private work, and professional practice go on sometimes in
the house apartments, but often in special offices in the great
warren of the business quarter. A common garden, an infant school,
play rooms, and a playing garden for children, are universal
features of the club quadrangles.
Two or three main roads with their tramways, their cyclists’ paths,
and swift traffic paths, will converge on the urban centre, where
the public offices will stand in a group close to the two or three
theatres and the larger shops, and hither, too, in the case of
Lucerne, the head of the swift railway to Paris and England and
Scotland, and to the Rhineland and Germany will run. And as one
walks out from the town centre one will come to that mingling of
homesteads and open country which will be the common condition of
all the more habitable parts of the globe.
Here and there, no doubt, will stand quite solitary homesteads,
homesteads that will nevertheless be lit and warmed by cables from
the central force station, that will share the common water supply,
will have their perfected telephonic connection with the rest of
the world, with doctor, shop, and so forth, and may even have
a pneumatic tube for books and small parcels to the nearest
post-office. But the solitary homestead, as a permanent residence,
will be something of a luxury—the resort of rather wealthy garden
lovers; and most people with a bias for retirement will probably get
as much residential solitude as they care for in the hire of a
holiday chalet in a forest, by remote lagoons or high up the
mountain side.
The solitary house may indeed prove to be very rare indeed in
Utopia. The same forces, the same facilitation of communications
that will diffuse the towns will tend to little concentrations of
the agricultural population over the country side. The field workers
will probably take their food with them to their work during the
day, and for the convenience of an interesting dinner and of
civilised intercourse after the working day is over, they will most
probably live in a college quadrangle with a common room and club. I
doubt if there will be any agricultural labourers drawing wages in
Utopia. I am inclined to imagine farming done by tenant
associations, by little democratic unlimited liability companies
working under elected managers, and paying not a fixed rent but a
share of the produce to the State. Such companies could reconstruct
annually to weed out indolent members. [Footnote: Schemes for the
co-operative association of producers will be found in Dr. Hertzka’s
Freeland.] A minimum standard of efficiency in farming would be
insured by fixing a minimum beneath which the rent must not fall,
and perhaps by inspection. The general laws respecting the standard
of life would, of course, apply to such associations. This type of
co-operation presents itself to me as socially the best arrangement
for productive agriculture and horticulture, but such enterprises
as stock breeding, seed farming and the stocking and loan of
agricultural implements are probably, and agricultural research and
experiment certainly, best handled directly by large companies or
the municipality or the State.
But I should do little to investigate this question; these are
presented as quite incidental impressions. You must suppose that for
the most part our walks and observations keep us within the more
urban quarters of Lucerne. From a number of beautifully printed
placards at the street corners, adorned with caricatures of
considerable pungency, we discover an odd little election is in
progress. This is the selection, upon strictly democratic lines,
with a suffrage that includes every permanent resident in the
Lucerne ward over the age of fifteen, of the ugliest local building.
The old little urban and local governing bodies, we find, have long
since been superseded by great provincial municipalities for all the
more serious administrative purposes, but they still survive to
discharge a number of curious minor functions, and not the least
among these is this sort of aesthetic ostracism. Every year every
minor local governing body pulls down a building selected by local
plebiscite, and the greater Government pays a slight compensation to
the owner, and resumes possession of the land it occupies. The idea
would strike us at first as simply whimsical, but in practice it
appears to work as a cheap and practical device for the aesthetic
education of builders, engineers, business men, opulent persons, and
the general body of the public. But when we come to consider its
application to our own world we should perceive it was the most
Utopian thing we had so far encountered.
Section 2
The factory that employs us is something very different from the
ordinary earthly model. Our business is to finish making little
wooden toys—bears, cattle men, and the like—for children. The
things are made in the rough by machinery, and then finished by
hand, because the work of unskilful but interested men—and it
really is an extremely amusing employment—is found to give a
personality and interest to these objects no machine can ever
attain.
We carvers—who are the riffraff of Utopia—work in a long shed
together, nominally by time; we must keep at the job for the length
of the spell, but we are expected to finish a certain number of toys
for each spell of work. The rules of the game as between employer
and employed in this particular industry hang on the wall behind us;
they are drawn up by a conference of the Common Council of Wages
Workers with the employers, a common council which has resulted in
Utopia from a synthesis of the old Trades Unions, and which has
become a constitutional power; but any man who has skill or humour
is presently making his own bargain with our employer more or less
above that datum line.
Our employer is a quiet blue-eyed man with a humorous smile. He
dresses wholly in an indigo blue, that later we come to consider a
sort of voluntary uniform for Utopian artists. As he walks about
the workshop, stopping to laugh at this production or praise that,
one is reminded inevitably of an art school. Every now and then
he carves a little himself or makes a sketch or departs to the
machinery to order some change in the rough shapes it is turning
out. Our work is by no means confined to animals. After a time I am
told to specialise in a comical little Roman-nosed pony; but several
of the better paid carvers work up caricature images of eminent
Utopians. Over these our employer is most disposed to meditate, and
from them he darts off most frequently to improve the type.
It is high summer, and our shed lies open at either end. On one hand
is a steep mountain side down which there comes, now bridging a
chasm, now a mere straight groove across a meadow, now hidden among
green branches, the water-slide that brings our trees from the
purple forest overhead. Above us, but nearly hidden, hums the
machine shed, but we see a corner of the tank into which, with a
mighty splash, the pine trees are delivered. Every now and then,
bringing with him a gust of resinous smell, a white-clad machinist
will come in with a basketful of crude, unwrought little images, and
will turn them out upon the table from which we carvers select
them.
(Whenever I think of Utopia that faint and fluctuating smell of
resin returns to me, and whenever I smell resin, comes the memory of
the open end of the shed looking out upon the lake, the blue-green
lake, the boats mirrored in the water, and far and high beyond
floats the atmospheric fairyland of the mountains of Glarus, twenty
miles away.)
The cessation of the second and last spell of work comes about
midday, and then we walk home, through this beautiful intricacy of a
town to our cheap hotel beside the lake.
We should go our way with a curious contentment, for all that we
were earning scarcely more than the minimum wage. We should have, of
course, our uneasiness about the final decisions of that universal
eye which has turned upon us, we should have those ridiculous sham
numbers on our consciences; but that general restlessness, that
brooding stress that pursues the weekly worker on earth, that aching
anxiety that drives him so often to stupid betting, stupid drinking,
and violent and mean offences will have vanished out of mortal
experience.
Section 3
I should find myself contrasting my position with my preconceptions
about a Utopian visit. I had always imagined myself as standing
outside the general machinery of the State—in the distinguished
visitors’ gallery, as it were—and getting the new world in a series
of comprehensive perspective views. But this Utopia, for all the
sweeping floats of generalisation I do my best to maintain, is
swallowing me up. I find myself going between my work and the room
in which I sleep and the place in which I dine, very much as I went
to and fro in that real world into which I fell five-and-forty years
ago. I find about me mountains and horizons that limit my view,
institutions that vanish also without an explanation, beyond the
limit of sight, and a great complexity of things I do not understand
and about which,
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