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

demonstrated long ago, the principles of the relation of

State control to personal morals may be best discussed in the case

of intoxication, the most isolated and least complicated of all this

group of problems. But Plato’s treatment of this issue as a question

of who may or may not have the use of wine, though suitable enough

in considering a small State in which everybody was the effectual

inspector of everybody, is entirely beside the mark under modern

conditions, in which we are to have an extraordinarily higher

standard of individual privacy and an amplitude and quantity of

migration inconceivable to the Academic imagination. We may accept

his principle and put this particular freedom (of the use of wine)

among the distinctive privileges of maturity, and still find all

that a modern would think of as the Drink Question untouched.

 

That question in Utopia will differ perhaps in the proportion of its

factors, but in no other respect, from what it is upon earth. The

same desirable ends will be sought, the maintenance of public order

and decency, the reduction of inducements to form this bad and

wasteful habit to their lowest possible minimum, and the complete

protection of the immature. But the modern Utopians, having

systematised their sociology, will have given some attention to the

psychology of minor officials, a matter altogether too much

neglected by the social reformer on earth. They will not put into

the hands of a common policeman powers direct and indirect that

would be dangerous to the public in the hands of a judge. And they

will have avoided the immeasurable error of making their control of

the drink traffic a source of public revenue. Privacies they will

not invade, but they will certainly restrict the public consumption

of intoxicants to specified licensed places and the sale of them to

unmistakable adults, and they will make the temptation of the young

a grave offence. In so migratory a population as the Modern Utopian,

the licensing of inns and bars would be under the same control as

the railways and high roads. Inns exist for the stranger and not for

the locality, and we shall meet with nothing there to correspond

with our terrestrial absurdity of Local Option.

 

The Utopians will certainly control this trade, and as certainly

punish personal excesses. Public drunkenness (as distinguished from

the mere elation that follows a generous but controlled use of wine)

will be an offence against public decency, and will be dealt with in

some very drastic manner. It will, of course, be an aggravation of,

and not an excuse for, crime.

 

But I doubt whether the State will go beyond that. Whether an adult

shall use wine or beer or spirits, or not, seems to me entirely a

matter for his doctor and his own private conscience. I doubt if we

explorers shall meet any drunken men, and I doubt not we shall meet

many who have never availed themselves of their adult freedom in

this respect. The conditions of physical happiness will be better

understood in Utopia, it will be worth while to be well there, and

the intelligent citizen will watch himself closely. Half and more of

the drunkenness of earth is an attempt to lighten dull days and

hopelessly sordid and disagreeable lives, and in Utopia they do not

suffer these things. Assuredly Utopia will be temperate, not only

drinking, but eating with the soundest discretion. Yet I do not

think wine and good ale will be altogether wanting there, nor good,

mellow whisky, nor, upon occasion, the engaging various liqueur.

I do not think so. My botanist, who abstains altogether, is of

another opinion. We differ here and leave the question to the

earnest reader. I have the utmost respect for all Teetotalers,

Prohibitionists, and Haters and Persecutors of Innkeepers, their

energy of reform awakens responsive notes in me, and to their

species I look for a large part of the urgent repair of our earth;

yet for all that–-

 

There is Burgundy, for example, a bottle of soft and kindly

Burgundy, taken to make a sunshine on one’s lunch when four

strenuous hours of toil have left one on the further side of

appetite. Or ale, a foaming tankard of ale, ten miles of sturdy

tramping in the sleet and slush as a prelude, and then good bread

and good butter and a ripe hollow Stilton and celery and ale—ale

with a certain quantitative freedom. Or, again, where is the sin in

a glass of tawny port three or four times, or it may be five, a

year, when the walnuts come round in their season? If you drink no

port, then what are walnuts for? Such things I hold for the reward

of vast intervals of abstinence; they justify your wide, immaculate

margin, which is else a mere unmeaning blankness on the page of

palate God has given you! I write of these things as a fleshly man,

confessedly and knowingly fleshly, and more than usually aware of my

liability to err; I know myself for a gross creature more given to

sedentary world-mending than to brisk activities, and not one-tenth

as active as the dullest newspaper boy in London. Yet still I have

my uses, uses that vanish in monotony, and still I must ask why

should we bury the talent of these bright sensations altogether?

Under no circumstances can I think of my Utopians maintaining their

fine order of life on ginger ale and lemonade and the ale that is

Kops’. Those terrible Temperance Drinks, solutions of qualified

sugar mixed with vast volumes of gas, as, for example, soda,

seltzer, lemonade, and fire-extincteurs hand grenades—minerals,

they call such stuff in England—fill a man with wind and

self-righteousness. Indeed they do! Coffee destroys brain and

kidney, a fact now universally recognised and advertised throughout

America; and tea, except for a kind of green tea best used with

discretion in punch, tans the entrails and turns honest stomachs

into leather bags. Rather would I be Metchnikoffed [Footnote: See

The Nature of Man, by Professor Elie Metchnikoff.] at once and have

a clean, good stomach of German silver. No! If we are to have no ale

in Utopia, give me the one clean temperance drink that is worthy to

set beside wine, and that is simple water. Best it is when not quite

pure and with a trace of organic matter, for then it tastes and

sparkles….

 

My botanist would still argue.

 

Thank Heaven this is my book, and that the ultimate decision rests

with me. It is open to him to write his own Utopia and arrange that

everybody shall do nothing except by the consent of the savants of

the Republic, either in his eating, drinking, dressing or lodging,

even as Cabet proposed. It is open to him to try a News from Nowhere

Utopia with the wine left out. I have my short way with him here

quite effectually. I turn in the entrance of our inn to the civil

but by no means obsequious landlord, and with a careful ambiguity of

manner for the thing may be considered an outrage, and I try to make

it possible the idea is a jest—put my test demand….

 

“You see, my dear Teetotaler?—he sets before me tray and glass

and…” Here follows the necessary experiment and a deep sigh….

“Yes, a bottle of quite excellent light beer! So there are also

cakes and ale in Utopia! Let us in this saner and more beautiful

world drink perdition to all earthly excesses. Let us drink more

particularly to the coming of the day when men beyond there will

learn to distinguish between qualitative and quantitative questions,

to temper good intentions with good intelligence, and righteousness

with wisdom. One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the

unteachable wildness of the Good.”

 

Section 7

 

So presently to bed and to sleep, but not at once to sleep. At first

my brain, like a dog in unfamiliar quarters, must turn itself round

for a time or so before it lies down. This strange mystery of a

world of which I have seen so little as yet—a mountain slope, a

twilit road, a traffic of ambiguous vehicles and dim shapes, the

window lights of many homes—fills me with curiosities. Figures and

incidents come and go, the people we have passed, our landlord,

quietly attentive and yet, I feel, with the keenest curiosity

peeping from his eyes, the unfamiliar forms of the house parts and

furnishings, the unfamiliar courses of the meal. Outside this little

bedroom is a world, a whole unimagined world. A thousand million

things lie outside in the darkness beyond this lit inn of ours,

unthought-of possibilities, overlooked considerations, surprises,

riddles, incommensurables, a whole monstrous intricate universe of

consequences that I have to do my best to unravel. I attempt

impossible recapitulations and mingle the weird quality of dream

stuff with my thoughts.

 

Athwart all this tumult of my memory goes this queer figure of my

unanticipated companion, so obsessed by himself and his own

egotistical love that this sudden change to another world seems only

a change of scene for his gnawing, uninvigorating passion. It occurs

to me that she also must have an equivalent in Utopia, and then that

idea and all ideas grow thin and vague, and are dissolved at last in

the rising tide of sleep….