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Title: Bread and Roses Subtitle: An Utopian Survey and Blueprint Date: December 1944 Source: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.213271/page/n7 Notes: London, December, 1943 -May, 1944. Authors: Ethel Mannin Topics: Green anarchism, Religion, Utopia, Anarcho syndicalism, Anarcho communism, Antifa, Anti fascist, Utopian socialism
Throughout the ages, from the earliest times, men of all nations
have dreamed of that ‘ideal commonwealth whose inhabitants
exist under perfect conditions’. What constitutes ‘perfect con-
ditions’ is obviously a matter of personal preferences and preju-
dices, but there is a common basis to the visionary dream in all
its forms — the increase of human happiness, or, perhaps, more
accurately, well-being — the greatest good for the greatest number,
whether it is the Golden Age of ancient Greek and Roman
mythology, or the confused contemporary dreams of a ‘brave
new world’.
Plato’s influence upon the Utopian dream has, of course, been
enormous. Re-reading his Republic today it is very strongly
brought home to one that not without good reason has he been
called ‘the father of Fascism’; his insistence on the State, his
disregard for personal freedom, and much in his attitude to
women is what we today call ‘Fascist’. Plutarch’s conception of
the ideal commonwealth as visualised in his Life of Lycurgus is
even more so, Lycurgus being the complete dictator. Thomas
Campanella, in the seventeenth century, is, in The City of the Sun ,
in the same Platonic Fascist tradition. Bacon, contemporary
with Campanella, in his New Atlantis was less concerned with
government, and saw the progress of science as the basic source
of human happiness: whilst Sir Thomas More, over a century
earlier than Bacon, owes something to Plato in his conception of
government, but had a more human and a broader vision, and
it was he who gave to this dream of the Ideal Commonwealth
the name of Utopia, from two Greek words meaning Nowhere.
In the seventeenth century we get Winstanley’s socialist dream
of a commonwealth in which money is abolished along with
private ownership, Hobbes’s Leviathan , with the State supreme
authority and money its life-blood, Harrington’s Oceana , with its
redistribution of landed property, which was a part, though only a
part, of Lycurgus’s programme. At the end of the nineteenth
century there was Edward Bellamy’s picture of a socialist America
in his Looking Backward , and William Morris’s picture of a socialist
England in his News from Nowhere , both of them a break with the
State conception of government. The twentieth century has
given us H. G. Wells’s A Modem Utopia , but this again is in the
Platonic tradition; and from the late J. D. Unwin comes, posthumously,
and incomplete, a conception of a monarchist new
society called Hopousia , a name derived from a Greek word
meaning Where. Then we have a kind of blue-print for an
English Utopia in Sir Richard Acland’s book, How It Can be Done
— which should have been sub-titled, ‘Socialism Without Tears’ —
and a tremendous spate of White Papers on post-war reconstruction, and booklets and pamphlets issued in series under such titles
as Target for Tomorrow , Oxford Pamphlets on Home Affairs , Re-Building
Britain Series , Fabian Research Series , Reconstruction Digests , Changing
Britain , Common Wealth Bulletins , Tomorrow Booklets — to mention
only a few. ... It is enough to drive one back to the social
satires of Swift and Butler — if not right back to Aristophanes !
But satire is unconstructive, and however tedious and limited*
the White Papers and blue-prints they are an expression of the
old, deep, ineradicable dream. Unfortunately, where those two
great Englishmen, Sir Thomas More and William Morris, saw
the dream whole, our present-day Planners — to use the current
word — concentrate on details, each on his favourite reform —
better housing, equal education, pensions for all — a brave new
world constructed on the crumbling foundations of the bad old
world. And with all this orgy of ’ planning ’ and ‘ reconstruction ’
where, outside, perhaps, of Priestley’s play, They Came to a City , is
the authentic vision? Priestley may be basing his vision upon
an illusion of the U.S.S.R., but it still remains a vision. Lenin
had a vision; the Spanish anarchists during the 1936-8 Civil
War had a vision; but in this country, it would seem, Utopia
is to be translated into terms of the Beveridge Report and Mr.
Churchill’s uninspired programme of ‘houses, jobs, security’ —
as though all that human beings needed for happiness was the
roof overhead, employment, freedom from want. As though men
had abandoned the dream that they came to a city — a free city
of the sun. . . . Well might they cry, ‘We asked for a dream,
and ye give us a White Paper ! ’
For some time past, now, there has been a murmuring amongst
the people, and that ‘ things have got to be different ’ is the general
expression of that murmur. ‘We can’t go back to 1939,’ is how
Richard Acland defines the attitude of the common people;
Priestley protests against the defeatist ‘ We-must-have-changes-
but-thcre-won’t-be-any ’ attitude; he himself sees the ‘signposts’
to the needed changes in Acland’s programme. Whether or not
the mass of people believe in their hearts that there won’t
be any changes — any real changes — I, personally, would not be
prepared to say; nor do I believe that Acland’s proposals would
give us the real changes. But that a very strong feeling persists,
throughout the working-classes and the lower middle-classes, that
‘things have got to be different — somehow ’, seems to meundeniable.
The Beveridge Report, with its provision for human beings‘from
the womb to the tomb to use the popular derisive phrase concern-
ing it, and all the White Papers and blue-prints of the Planners,
is the anxious answer to this murmur amongst the common people.
But though the people murmur, the politicians have no vision.
The people ask for a brave new world, and they are offered homes
— ‘pre-fabricated’, of all ghastly notions — employment, security,
all the old make-shifts. For all their talk the politicians are not
concerned to rebuild Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant
land; they have no vision in which they see ‘this green England
reborn, waking in the cool of morning with the dew upon it . . .
every man in his own sanctuary of the spirit, holding steadily
to the whole through the detail.’ They are Planners who,
fundamentally, have no plan.
Collect material from far and wide, and sort it all out into neat
little heaps — education, housing, public health, social services,
the Scott and Uthwatt reports, taxation, ‘the coal problem’,
‘the problem of population’, ‘the economics of peace’; collect it
from the Common Wealth people, the Fabians, the Labour
Party, the Communists, the British Council, the British Association for Labour Legislation, the London Council for Social
Sendee, the Association for Education in Citizenship, the Council
for Educational Advance — this, that and the other party, council,
society, association — collect it and sort it and summarize it,
until you are all but engulfed in it and your head spins, and still
it does not make a plan — in the sense that Plato’s Republic ,
Plutarch’s Sparta under Lycurgus, More’s Utopia , were plans.
It no more makes a plan than a heap of leayes makes a tree. It
is not even a Paradise on paper. It has no pattern.
‘Modern Utopianism’, writes H. J. Massingham in his The
Tree of Life ‘makes no attempt to go outside the terms of reference
to the existing order or disorder. The Doctrine of Creation is
completely outside it. . . . ’
In this book it is proposed to go outside those terms of reference,
and attempt to offer ‘a doctrine of Creation’. It is proposed to
hold steadily to the whole through the detail.
Utopia is the everlasting dream of the Good Life in the heart
of man.
It is also the sanity, the basic wisdom, in the mind of man
under the rubble that civilisation, with its industrialisation and
its illusion of progress, has imposed.
‘Things have got to be different.’ We are agreed upon that.
In the following chapters we will consider what sort of things,
and how they could be different, to the common advantage.
That something is fundamentally wrong with society as we at
present know it is evident from recurrent cycles of unemployment
between wars, poverty in a world of plenty, and science put to
destructive instead of creative uses. The economics of this society
are the economics of the mad-house. A ‘New Deal’ in this
society consists of throwing fish back into the sea, ploughing
wheat back into the land, burning coffee and cotton in order to
avoid ‘glutting’ the markets and to keep up the prices. In Eng-
land, during the trade boom which followed the last war, before
the slump came, there were still a million and a half unemployed.
Under the existing system the unemployed can only be fully
absorbed in a world at war — that is to say that whereas they
cannot be absorbed for creative purposes they can be absorbed
for destructive purposes. They can be employed killing and
destroying, or in producing the weapons for killing and destroy-
ing. If we were confronted with children who, when they were
not either smashing windows or collecting stones with which to
smash windows, found themselves with nothing to do, we should
be very shocked; something must be very wrong with such
children, we should say, that they could only occupy themselves
destructively. But there might not be anything, fundamentally,
wrong with the children; they might simply be lacking in any
natural creative outlet, and thus disposed of their energies and
passed the time as best they could. Similarly, there is nothing
fundamentally wrong with human nature; what is wrong is the
shape which civilisation, with all its twistings and turnings —
fallaciously called ‘progress’ — has assumed.
Human nature is capable of being incredibly base, stupid,
brutal. The end of 1943 in England saw a mob hue-and-cry, the
lynch-law mentality rampant, when a man who had never been
charged or tried — and a very sick man at that — was released
from prison after three years; there was a hanging-in-effigy in a
public place, and a demand for the wretched man’s reimprisonment. Soon after this, in a so-called socialist country, 50,000
people turned out to see four men hanged, and after the motor-
lorries on which the men had been standing with the nooses
round their necks had driven off, leaving them hanging, ‘when
it was clear that all four were dead the crowd drew close to the
gallows’. Back in the ’thirties a similarly huge crowd thronged
an open place just outside Paris to see a man beheaded, standing
on the roofs of cars parked all round, as at a race meeting. It is
easy to say, with such things in mind, ‘There is no hope for
humanity ’, to see it only as incredibly base in the mass, and only
isolated individuals as fine. There are pictures on the other side,
too — the heroic struggles and sacrifices of peoples for justice and
freedom, the stubborn resistance of the unarmed Bardoli peasants
against the Bombay government in 1928, the epic struggle of
Easter Week in Dublin, 1916, matched only by the epic of the
Asturian miners against the government in 1934, the mass
risings in the cause of bread and justice in this country in the early
nineteenth century, the sway of popular opinion'in 1919 against
Churchill’s intervention against the Russian revolution, the
heartening incident of the Jolly George , when British dockworkers
refused to load munitions intended to be used against the Russian
revolutionaries. . . . Human nature in the mass can be base
and ugly; but it can also be fine and beautiful.
There is hope for humanity all right: all it needs is to be
given a chance — the creative chance. The need is not for
palliatives and compromises and reforms, but for a new way
of life. Beveridge plans are designed to make life livable for
the masses within the system — to avert social revolution. Sir
Richard Acland, with his Common Wealth scheme, aims at a
form of socialism-without-tears, an attempt at pacifying the
capitalist with compensation for his confiscated property — a sort
of social appeasement, which will still leave a class system of
society, and which offers no new approach to life and no recognition
of ‘the soul of man’. Neither Sir William Beveridge nor Sir
Richard Acland are likely to take mankind far along the road
to Utopia.
No leader can do this; no politician; no one man with any one
scheme; nor a hundred men with a hundred schemes. Only
the people themselves can find the way — out of the dream in their
hearts, out of their impassioned desire for that new world which
is only brought about by a new way of living. Impracticable?
Within ‘ the terms of reference to the existing order or disorder ’,
yes. But Utopia is outside of those terms of reference. Utopia
is concerned with the soul of man, and through that recognition
the brotherhood of man.
Nobody, perhaps, reads Oscar Wilde’s little book The Soul of
Man nowadays, though Robert Ross described it as ‘unique in
English literature’. The present writer read it first twenty-five
years ago and has just re-read it with intense pleasure. It is an
indictment of the social system and a vindication of individualism.
Wilde declares, ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia
is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country
at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity
lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.
Progress is the realisation of Utopias.’
Wilde was a natural anarchist. He saw all authority as degrad-
ing — to those who exercised it and those over whom it is exercised.
‘When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used’, he maintained,
‘it produces a good effect, by creating, or at any rate bringing
out, the spirit of revolt and Individualism that is to kill it. When
it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied
by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising. People,
in that case, are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is
being put on them, and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse
comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they
are probably thinking other people’s thoughts, living by other
people’s standards, wearing practically what one may call other
peoples second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a
single moment. “He who would be free”, says a fine thinker,
“ must not conform.” And authority, by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind of over-fed barbarism amongst
us.’
That ‘coarse comfort, like petted animals’ is exactly the aim
of such palliatives as the Beveridge Plan. Wilde saw Individualism
as ‘what, through Socialism, we are to attain to. As a natural
result the State must give up all idea of government. It must
give it up because, as a wise man once said many centuries before
Christ, there is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there is
no such thing as governing mankind. All modes of government
are failures. . . . High hopes were once formed of democracy;
but democracy simply means the bludgeoning of the people by
the people for the people. It has been found out’.
Wilde’s Utopian conception of the State was a voluntary
association for the organisation of labour and the distribution
of necessary commodities. The State was to use the machine
to make what is useful ; Man was to produce, out of his creativeness, what was beautiful, what gave him joy to make — since all
work that is not done with pleasure is ‘morally injurious’.
Wilde wanted all unpleasant, uninteresting, ugly work, done
by the machine — ‘Machinery must work for us in coal mines,
and do all sanitary services, and be the stokers of steamers, and
clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything
that is tedious and distressing. At present machinery competes
against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve
man. . . . On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine,
the future of the world depends.’
(Wilde did not live to see the machine as a colossal and diabolic
agent for the destruction of man, raining death and destruction
from the skies at the rate of thousands of tons per minute.)
There are two very clearly defined schools of thought on this
question of the machine. It is to be regarded as the enemy of
civilisation; or as the potential servant of it. William Morris was
another artist who was aware of the potentiality for good of
the machine. Like Wilde, he visualised it ‘being used freely
for releasing people from the more mechanical and repulsive
part of necessary labour’, and insisted that it was ‘allowing
machines to be our masters and not our servants ’ that brutalised
and uglified life. He believed that ‘a state of social order would
probably lead at first to a great development of machinery for
really useful purposes, because people will still be anxious about
getting through the work uecessary to holding society together;
but that after a while they will find that there is not so much work
to do as they expected, and that then they will have leisure to
reconsider the whole subject; and if it seems to them that a
certain industry would be carried on more pleasantly as regards
the worker, and more effectually as regards the goods, by using
hand-work rather than machinery, they will certainly get rid
of their machinery, because it will be possible for them to do so.
It isn’t possible now; we are not at liberty to do so; we are slaves
to the monsters which we have created. And I have a kind of
hope that the very elaboration of machinery in a society whose
purpose is not the multiplication of labour, as it now is, but the
carrying on of a pleasant life, as it would be under social order —
that the elaboration of machinery, I say, will lead to the sim-
plification of life, and so once more to the limitation of
machinery .’
A modern writer, Mr. Wilfred Wellock, in a thoughtful little
booklet, A Mechanistic or a Human Society , takes Morris’s line, and
in spite of his admiration of ‘the Golden Age of husbandry and
craftsmanship of the pre-industrial era’, acknowledges that
‘ machinery is not in itself evil ; it all depends upon its nature and
the uses to which it is put’. He points out that every tool is a
machine, and that ‘in cultivating the land man passed from
the spade to the plough, first of wood, then of iron, afterwards
to the use of oxen and later of horses, and finally to the tractor,
first light, then heavy, with many blades. Whether and where
a line should be drawn in the use of machinery depends upon
many factors, chief of which, in agriculture, e.g. are the nature
of soil and the nature of man, both living things capable of rapid
dissolution if subjected to wrong treatment. History proves that
these two entities, man and soil, thrive and flourish or decay
and perish together, that customs and social ends which exploit
and degrade the one, exploit and exhaust the other. The
spiritual exhaustion of Roman civilisation synchronised with
the exhaustion of the soil on which it lived, as the Sahara
desert testifies. On the other hand, the non-aggressive Chinese
have maintained the fertility of their soil for thousands of
years ’.
Mr. Wellock deplores 'the de-humanisation of man by the
mechanistic civilisation born of the Industrial Revolution’.
He has all of Eric Gill’s love of personalness in work, of work
as craftsmanship, and, like Massingham, quotes the village chair-
maker as an example of one of our few remaining craftsmen; and
he has all of Massingham’s deep love of the English countryside,
her homely farmsteads 'which embody the best spirit and con-
stitute the glory and the strength of England and all that is solid
and abiding in it’. He views with abhorrence the prospect of
these farms being replaced by 'big agricultural units fed on
chemicals and run by mass-machinery and mass-men’. Wellock
wants what he calls ‘the politics of creative living’, as an alter-
native to ' power politics ’ ; he visualises a new society which will
rest on 'three pillars: the soil, personal functional responsibility,
and the acceptance of what are essentially Christian values’.
Massingham wants what he calls the Doctrine of Creation as
part of daily life, the shadow of the Church upon the fields,
so that it becomes ‘the Tree of Life, rooted in the earth but its
crown in heaven’. He sees such integration as 'true to the nature
of the universe. It is this synthesis,’ he adds, 'religion, nature,
craft, husbandry, all in one — we have to rediscover.’
Massingham quotes R. D. Knowles in his book Britain's
Problem as asserting, ‘ . . . today the machine has become a thing
of terror; it stalks here, and it stalks there; in the field, through
the farm, in the office, in the shop, in the factory, in the mine.
And wherever it stalks falls a shadow — the shadow of unemployment and under-consumption ’. Commenting on this Massingham
points out 'Yet it is not the machine itself which has been responsible for this degradation, since electricity and the internal-combustion engine could and should be of the utmost service in the diffusion of property’, adding that 'It is the machine in combination with a predatory philosophy which has degraded work
and finally gone on without it, and this is the work of the economic system which has degraded property and has gone on into a
functionless finance’.
Those who regard the machine as the enemy and destroyer of
civilisation, maintain that only by de-industrialisation and return
to the cultivation of the soil and handcrafts will mankind come to
the Good Life. Eric Gill, in attacking the machine as the destroyer
of ‘the dignity of labour’, and of the labourer as a person,
serving his fellow-men and enjoying the service, because of its
creativeness and personalness, acknowledged the fact that
civilisation had reached a stage at which it was impossible to put
the clock back, but he saw ‘ the decay and eventual disappearance
of industrialism ’, as ‘inevitable’, because ‘the motive which
sustains it is not man’s vocation to holiness, and holiness is
necessarily the ultimate value in human affairs ’. 1 He maintained
that the clock of civilisation would run on and down, like the clock
of Roman civilisation , 2 and then, with the disappearance of
industrialism, work would once more become, as in the Middle
Ages, related to art and to happiness, instead of something
depersonalised — mechanised — and therefore apart from these
things.
Here, then, are two sharply-defined attitudes — Gill’s attitude,
endorsed as much by the D. H. Lawrence-ites (‘They talk of the
triumph of the machine, But the machine will never triumph’)
as by the Aldous Huxley-ites, who find in Brave New World a
modern vindication of Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’, the attitude
that the machine is wholly evil, and that it will ultimately destroy
the civilisation dependent on it, and the attitude maintained by
Morris and Wilde, and in recent times by H. J. Massingham
and Wilfred Wellock, that, rightly used, the machine could be
made to serve and enrich human life.
Aldous Huxley himself does not maintain that the machine is
wholly evil. He regards it as harmful and dangerous, because it
tends to destroy the creative impulse in human beings, which he
regards as ‘the source of man’s most solid, least transitory happiness.
The machine robs the majority of human beings of the
very possibility of this happiness’. But he insists that it must
stay — that as a matter of sheer practicality, at this stage of
civilisation, its use cannot be discontinued. ‘The machines
must stay; it is obvious. They must stay, even though, used as
they are now being used, they inflict on humanity an enormous
psychological injury that must, if uncared for, prove mortal.
The only remedy is systematic inconsistency.’ There must be, he
contends, a de-mechanisation of leisure, so that creative leisure
can balance the uncreative hours of mechanical work. But
that there can only be this de-mechanisation if the desire for it is
created. ‘The vital problem of our age is the problem of recon-
ciling manhood with the citizenship of a modern industrialised
state.’ In our present mechanised society human beings are
only free to live, in the real sense, outside of their working hours —
and even then their leisure is devoted to mechanised pleasure for
the most part. Huxley recognises that the difficulties of reconciling man’s humanity with his mechanised world are enormously
great — ‘But so are the penalties of failure’.
Oscar Wilde, living in a less highly-industrialised age, could
afford to be more optimistic. He anticipated a time when ‘while
Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure —
which, and not labour, is the aim of man — or making beautiful
things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating
the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing
all the necessary and unpleasant work’. But this happy state of
affairs, Wilde acknowledged, could only exist in a new social
order, where the machine, instead of being private property,
used competitively for the making of private profit, was the
property of all, and used for the common good.
Wilde’s socialism was the easy idealism of a man who had not
thought very deeply on sociological issues. He was first and
last an artist and an aesthete; he wanted a world in which there
would be boundless leisure for the creation and enjoyment of
beautiful things; he wanted a society in which the soul of man
might have room for expansion to this end ; and he believed in a
kind of socialism as the means to this end. Unfortunately
socialism is no guarantee that the machine will be used for the
service of man, but only for the State. Whether men work on
machine belts, in coal-mines, in the stoke-holds of ships, for private
employers or the State, is all one so far as the unpleasantness and
soullessness of the work itself is concerned, and no socialist or
communist manifesto has ever yet protested against the domination of the machine as a destroyer of the Good Life and the Soul
of Man, but only against that domination being used for private
profit.
It has never been a part of any socialist or communist programme to release man from the machine; these revolutionaries
are concerned with the great corporate body of the State, with
the ownership of the land and the means of production; they want
all the factories hissing and humming in the service of the State;
they want the great tractors rolling over the land, and they
dismiss as romantic and reactionary any talk of de-industrialisation and return to handcrafts; they don’t want labour personalised
and individualised; they want it efficiency-ised and organised;
they are passionate devotees of the machine — provided it is not
privately owned. It is not too long ago to remember the pride
with which the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics hailed the
advent of tractors on the collectivised farms ; every Russian film
showed peasants waving and cheering the arrival of a tractor, and
Russian youth of both sexes grinning from ear to ear with pride
and pleasure as they drove the machines into the good earth.
Instead of slowing down in the factories, they introduced English
and American engineers to show them how to speed-up, and the
apex was reached when a frightful system of speeded-up production called Stakhanovism was introduced. Their poetry became
Songs of the Machine; operas and ballets were devoted to the
glorification of industry; their music reproduced the clangour
of the factory machines, with a horrible deliberateness. They
made gramophone records of this cacophony, and had their
factory poems translated into other tongues, so that workers
of other lands might draw inspiration from communist ‘culture’
. . . ‘Social realism’ it was called. Contemporary Russian
painting in the ’thirties, when this first began to be talked about
was as full of factory scenes as Nazi painting was of Aryan
blondes and pictures of the Fuhrer .
Socialism could give us the machine in the service of man,
but it will need to be, as Oscar Wilde realised, a socialism
divorced from the State; it will need to be the socialism of
Utopia (a socialist State is by no means necessarily an ideal
commonwealth — witness the U.S.S.R. where in spite of having
got rid of the capitalist system there is neither social equality nor
freedom) something remote from any form of political orthodoxy,
because, as Blake has said, ‘Religion is politics and politics is
brotherhood’, and it is a basic principle of Utopia, as the present
writer sees it, that the Good Life can only be founded on the
brotherhood of man. It is impossible to feel that either Massing-
ham or Wellock share the optimism concerning the future of the
machine which Wilde expressed in his Soul of Man . Both, whilst
acknowledging the uses of the machine, hope for a return to the
handcrafts and the affinity between the peasant and the soil,
of the pre-industrial era. Wellock has stated specifically that
‘we ought to bring back those fireside arts and handicrafts which
once enriched the home-life of our country as nothing has done
since ’. He finds a clear-cut definition of the function of machinery
impossible, since it must necessarily depend upon the demands
of society, but he believes ‘that as the advantages and satisfactions of creative labour are realised, the tendency will be to cut
out hundreds of desires and demands which have been artificially
stimulated by a profit-making economy, and to concentrate on
quality production, and thus more and more to substitute craft
for machinery in all directions*. He adds, significantly, that ‘to
determine the proper sphere of the machine will be one of the
main tasks of the creative revolution*. This is amplified in his
book, where he says, ‘Inventions and discoveries which have
facilitated good production of the things men need, and improved
the quality of human life, have occurred ever since man appeared
on the earth, and no doubt will continue to do so*. From this
he proceeds to his argument that machinery is not in itself evil,
but that our modern civilisation has perverted its uses, so that
its evil aspect has gained the ascendant. Massingham perceives
in various war-time indications of self-help, and self-acting
heroism, the tradition of the old England still living in the
‘shoddy new*. ‘These feelers *, he declares, ‘are one with the thrifty
use of the hedgerow and the garden, the struggle for an honest
loaf against both State and vested interest, the speeding, if not
the God-speeding, of the rusty plough. None can be rightly
called a return to nature or a return to God, still less to both at
once. But they are a means to that end, and the only means.
They are the laying of the first stones and in the true English
tradition, country-born and intuitively religious, and up to the
eighteenth century never radically separated*. He sees every
authentic English village as a trinity of church-houses-fields,
‘ a microcosm of God-Man-Earth, each in profound and purposed
relation to the other*. He seeks, like Adrian Bell, and as Gill
sought, the re-integration of man with God, not in the meaningless glib jargon of the church, but as a living reality of daily life,
part of the Doctrine of Creation. He asserts that the connection
between church and fields has been lost as the connection between
work and play has been lost, and ‘it is this synthesis — religion,
nature, craft, husbandry, all in one — we have to rediscover*.
In our present competitive world everyone grabs for himself;
everyone wants more money, even the comfortably-ofF, even the
rich. If a man, particularly a young man, declares that he is
not interested in making money he is considered either a hypocrite
or a crank. If a young man declares that he is not interested in
‘getting on* he is considered ‘no good*, a person of no initiative
or enterprise. To ‘make good* means to ‘make money*. Jesus
completely failed to make good. At the age of thirty he threw
up a good trade — carpentry — to become a preacher, and for three
years lived from hand to mouth, taking no thought for the morrow,
and having at times not where to lay his head, and was finally
executed, as we know, between a couple of thieves, as an agitator
subversive to the State. Any young person, asked what he or she
intends to ‘do’ in life, and replying, ‘Just be\ is regarded as
lacking in natural ambition — since an ambition to be, in the
sense of ‘accepting life simply and naturally and enjoying if,
is not considered a natural ambition . . . outside of Utopia.
Nobody is ambitious in Utopia; there is no place for ambition
in the brotherhood of man. The slogan of the French Revolution
serves Utopia well enough — Liberty Egalitt, Fraternite.
But in Utopia these brave words are more than a slogan;
they are a reality. As this writer sees it they represent the basic
principles of that ‘ideal commonwealth whose inhabitants live
under perfect conditions’.
, It is pertinent to consider exactly what is meant by each
of these fine words, for we live in an age when words are carelessly used, and are, not infrequently, robbed of all meaning.
The word Freedom has a fine ring about it, yet no word is more
mis-used today; no word is emptier of true meaning; politicians
mouth it as an American chews gum. It has become a political
catch-phrase. There is the Atlantic Charter which gives freedom to all peoples, the right to determine their own form of
government — but not to India, not to Africa, not to the Arabs.
There are the Four Freedoms — or is it Five? — with as little
meaning. Whenever a country goes to war it is for its
conception of freedom. ‘Your freedom is at stake,’ the governments cry, to the peoples, ‘To arms!’ and the peoples obey,
obedience to governments having become a habit of their civilisation. There was never a war yet that was not fought for freedom —
or the illusion of it. Yet the world is in chains. Where are the
free peoples of the world? Do they exist anywhere outside of
Utopia? You who read this — how free are you? You, woman-
of-the-house, imprisoned in your life; you, man-in-an-office,
imprisoned in your job. You who think yourselves progressive —
how free are you? You, chained by moral fears you do not own
except secretly in the sleepless nights of your guilt and anxiety,
to an unhappy marriage, an unhappy love-affair, to the demands
of families and outworn loves — the chains we call ‘loyalties’
and ‘duties’, the chains of conscience and moral upbringing.
You whose very lives can be conscripted an it please your government ... all in the cause of what governments call ‘Freedom’.
But what governments call Freedom is not what is understood
by that term in Utopia. In the everyday world freedom is liberty
to ‘do what you like, as long as you do what you’re told’. In
this government-controlled world the only free peoples are a few
nomad desert and Arctic tribes ; when they come within reach of
civilisation their freedom is imperilled immediately. The
Romanies are probably the freest people in the world, but they
only remain so by keeping moving; they must always be moving
on, beyond reach of the long arm of the law. Where laws begin
to operate there is an end of freedom. Natural liberty is a state
in which there are no laws, and natural liberty is what, in Utopia,
is understood by freedom. To the mind steeped in the traditions
of governmental control this immediately suggests nature-red-
in-tooth-and-claw, the survival-of-the-fittest, chaos, and all that
is popularly understood by anarchy. Natural liberty is subject
to natural laws. No man liveth to himself alone : there is the dis-
cipline that life itself imposes, and the natural laws of co-operation
and mutual aid. ‘All government,’ William Godwin wrote in his
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ‘corresponds in a certain degree to what the Greeks denominated a tyranny. ... By its very
nature a positive institution has a tendency to suspend the elasticity and progress of mind. We should not forget that government
is, abstractly taken, an evil, a usurpation upon private judgment
and individual conscience of mankind’.
How the Utopians arrange their affairs without the coercion
of State and government we will consider later; it is here only
necessary to indicate the fundamental principles upon which an
Utopian society is based, and a first principle of such a society
must be freedom, since only under freedom does Man attain
to his true stature, and only in freedom is happiness — that
happiness which is what Havelock Ellis calls ‘ the deepest organic
satisfaction’ — possible. And endlessly we come back to the profound truth of the assertion of modern psychology, ‘Be happy
and you will be good ’. At this point there is always someone to
protest, ‘But what about people who find their happiness in
anti-social conduct? The Borgias, presumably, were happy
when poisoning their'guests, but it was hardly happiness for their
victims. Isn’t this where your be-happy-and-you-will-be-good
philosophy breaks down?’ The answer to that is that the Borgias
may have found pleasure in their poisonings, but not happiness.
The criminal is never happy; his conduct is the expression of his
fundamental unhappiness. Happy people no more wish to commit homicide than they wish to commit suicide. (It is an interesting and significant psychological fact that suicides very
frequently show homicidal tendencies.) Given the ‘perfect
conditions’ of Utopia it is reasonable to suppose that there
will be no crime, no anti-social conduct, at least within a generation or two. ‘Utopia within our time’ would involve a carrying-
over of neuroses from our present deplorable society, nor would
the children be immune, since they would have had a bad start.
There would be, necessarily, what the communists call ‘the
period of transition’, but ultimately society would emerge as
good because it was happy — because it was integrated, whole.
The implications of this Utopian freedom are tremendous.
In society as we at present know it we have no conception of
freedom in the real sense. We consider ourselves ‘free’ if we
manage to live our own lives — as we say — in defiance of the
conventional moral code; to be indifferent to public opinion we
consider great liberty; we count it freedom to swim, somehow,
against the tide. Whereas in truth freedom is swimming in whatever direction we choose in a tideless sea, unhampered. In our
existing society there is no real freedom even for the most daring,
the most rebellious, the most courageous; a certain measure
may be had — at a price, which is a contradiction in terms, for
the essence of freedom is that it is free.
Only through a passionate, dynamic, desire for real freedom
can humanity hope to achieve Utopia. Which is another way of
saying, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is within you’. Lin Yutang, in
The Importance of Living quotes Bernard Shaw as rightly saying
that ‘ the only kind of liberty worth having is the liberty of the
oppressed to squeal when hurt and the liberty to remove the
conditions which hurt them’. This is true of liberty in our
existing society, but in Utopia there are, obviously, no oppressed
and thus its freedom is freedom to live in the fullest sense. Liberty
to protest against injustice and oppression, and to fight these
evils, is a very limited conception of freedom. As the Distributists
assert, ‘The right of liberty is not restricted to one particular
liberty, to liberty of religion, conscience, action, and so on; it is the
right of choice in all things in which the exercise of the choice
does not injure the right of choice of others’. The full implications of Utopian freedom we will consider in detail later.
Here, concerned with basic principles, let us consider the
nature of this free society — not its structure ; that also will come up
for consideration later. The nature of the present system in
democratic countries is competitive, because capitalist. In a
communist country, in which the abolition of capitalism automatically disposes of competition, the nature of the system is
theoretically communistic; in practice, to judge by the only
communist regime by which to judge, the U.S.S.R., it becomes
bureaucratic, as undemocratic as a Fascist regime, and, with the
rise of bureaucracy and a privileged class of intellectuals and state
officials, as lacking in the equality — which is the essence of true
communism — as a capitalist or a Fascist society. The equality
and fraternity of the French revolutionary slogan are essential
to a truly free society. Such a society must be classless. It must
be communistic in the sense in which the early Christians were
communistic — with all things in common ; its basic law cannot
be better defined than by the Marxist, ‘From each according
to his ability; to each according to his needs ’, but whilst accepting
this basic principle of Marxism it radically differs from the
Marxist interpretation of communism in its refusal to grant
authority to the State. A free society is, in fact, a Stateless society,
in which man lives in brotherhood with man, on terms of equality,
ungovemed, and with all things in common.
Without “that spirit of the brotherhood of man there can be
no equality, no freedom. In a competitive system of society
there can obviously be no such fraternal spirit; in such a society
the law is each for himself and the survival of the fittest. In an
Utopian society the law is the law of mutual aid — of co-operation,
that is to say, and brotherhood.
This, perhaps, brings forth the protest that before Utopia
can be realised there must be a new spirit in the heart of Man,
that there must be a new Golden Age . . . and that the Golden
Age is a classical myth, that only in the dreams of idealists has
humanity ever lived a life in which it was ‘happy and free, and
ungoverned, and at peace’. That the realisation of Utopia
calls for a new spirit in the heart of man is true; but that the
Golden Age was never historical fact is debatable. H. J. Massingham contends 1 that it existed in the Stone Age before the coming
of the Neolithic peoples, and that it exists fragmentarily today
amongst ‘primitive communities huddled in Jo odd corners of the
world, mostly in the extreme north or south’. He sees it as the
heaven that lay about the infancy of the world, destroyed by that
organisation of society we call civilisation, with its artificial
culture, its industrialisation, its mechanisation. Massingham
considers that the perfectability of man, ‘so far from being a
Utopian idea, is a practicable achievement’. ‘There is nothing’,
he adds, ‘in the raw material of human nature to prevent its
realisation. Thus, the theory of modern anthropology that pro-
gress consists in the elimination of the “savagery” which lies at
the roots of humanity has to be completely reversed.’ The virtues
of primitive peoples have been recognised by various travellers
and anthropologists. Massingham speaks of ‘The Negrito Semang
of the Malay Peninsula as practising’ a perfect Christian communism without being Christians. They have no division of
classes or formal authority and yet are described as cheerful,
modest, frank and virtuous. He quotes Seligman as saying of
the Veddas of Ceylon that they are ‘extremely courteous, merry
and truthful’, and Nansen’s finding of Christian communism
amongst the Eskimos. After citing numerous other examples of
Christian virtues amongst primitive peoples, he says, ‘ In community after community of primitives, whole continents or climates
apart, we find the same tale repeated with so little variation as to
become monotonous. . . . There runs a kind of Esperanto
language of peace and goodwill which the Cave Man bellows
through his tusks from the four corners of the world. . . . But
when civilisation introduces religious, totemic, class, political,
property, or other disciplinary inhibitions, then stresses and
disharmonies are set up in the community. . . . The unspoiled
primitive combines a beauty, peacefulness and equanimity both
of individual disposition and of community life, with an absence
of all those social, economic, and political institutions inseparable
from civilisation’. He refers in this connection to the ‘undirected,
unorganised, unprogressive and uncontaminated life force of
human nature’.
. It is this uncontaminated life force deep within human nature
that has to be tapped, to be released for the realisation of Utopia.
How is this to be achieved? If there is any concise cut-and-
dried answer to so long and broad and deep a question it is perhaps
best expressed in the single world — education. Through the re-
education of humanity to the conception of a new Golden Age,
and the necessity for it. The need is for a renaissance of spiritual
values in opposition to the current materialism. It is a task for
the teachers and preachers, and under this heading writers and
poets should be included, for a poem, or a play, or a book, or a
story, may have a greater educative value, yield a brighter
spiritual illumination, than any lesson or lecture or sermon;
sudden realisation may come from a single sentence of inspired
utterance — The Christian Church could greatly serve this needed
spiritual renaissance, but it needs first a spiritual renaissance
of its own. Bland pink parsons, over-fed and underworked,
mouthing platitudes in pulpits to middle-class congregations,
have as little relation to Christian inspiration as they have to the
pale Galilean himself. The founder of the Christian religion had
a message for humanity, and for nearly two thousand years the
Church has been failing to pass it on. It has mumbled at the
people, and the people have mumbled the orthodox responses,
and fine churches have been built and dedicated to Christ, candles
have been burnt and incense scattered and fine robes worn,
but Jesus of Nazareth walked with fishermen by the sea, and
preached from a hillside, under the open sky, and everything
he said was very simple, with the profundity of simple things.
He bade us love one another, and forgive one another; he bade
us love our enemies, and turn the other cheek, and be humble,
and without riches, and pointed out that the Kingdom of Heaven
is within us.
But the bland pink parsons have come between us and the pale
Nazarene; there is no more room for him in the great churches
than there was in the inn, and his profound, simple, inspired
utterances are lost in all the mumbo-jumbo. The Church has
had great power, great influence, but never, ironically enough,
in the cause of Christian teaching. It has, nevertheless, immense
educative potentiality. But first the priests and ministers, the
vicars and deans and bishops and archbishops, all these ‘pro-
fessional Christians’, must not merely preach and teach the doctrines of Jesus but themselves lead simple, humble Christian
lives. At present the only outstanding practising Christian is a
man who does not profess Christianity, the Hindu, Mahatma
Gandhi, whose tremendous moral influence over the masses is
significant.
If, through our teachers and preachers and writers and poets,
humanity can be re-educated to new values — to the conception qf
a co-operative instead of a competitive form of society, a con-
ception of the real meaning of freedom and brotherhood — the
ideal commonwealth, in which men and women live happily,
fully, and at peace, becomes practicable along with the perfectability of man. Utopia becomes realisable as man becomes
ready for it.
Having laid it down that the basic principles upon which the
ideal commonwealth of Utopia rests are freedom, equality,
and brotherhood, and that to secure these principles in practice
there can be no centralised government, no State, we can proceed
to the consideration of Utopian administration.
Utopia, as Sir Thomas More wrote, is ‘the only commonwealth
that truly deserves that name’ because, ‘in all other places it
is visible, that while people talk of a commonwealth, every man
seeks only his own wealth; but there, where no man has any
property, all men zealously pursue the good of the public . . .
in other commonwealths every man knows that unless he provides for himself, how flourishing soever the commonwealth
may be, he must die of hunger; so that he sees the necessity of
preferring his own concerns to the public; but in Utopia, where
every man has a right to everything, they all know that if care
is taken to keep the public stores full, no private man can want
anything; for among them there is no unequal distribution
so that no man is poor, none in necessity; and though no man has
anything, yet they are all rich. ... *
In order to secure this equal distribution of goods in common,
and for the smooth running of the community generally, there has,
obviously, to be some form of organisation, and it is both interesting and useful to consider the provision made by the various
planners of Utopias.
Plato evolved a highly complex system of government. Fascist
that he was, he was all for ‘law and order’, and the masses well
and truly organised. There were to be ‘Guardians’, divided
into two classes — the ‘Rulers’, who were to have undergone a
higher education, and who were to be ‘legislative and deliberative’, and the ‘Auxiliaries’, who were to be executive, and sub-
ordinate to the ‘Rulers’; in addition to these two classes of
‘Guardians’ there was a third order in the State — the ‘Craftsmen’, whose function was purely productive.
Plutarch’s ‘ideal commonwealth’ was Sparta under Lycurgus
‘the law-giver’ — and it was a barefaced dictatorship. Whether
Lycurgus was real or legendary, or half-real, half-legendary, is for
present purposes of no importance. What is of interest is Plutarch’s conception of an ideal State as set forth in his Life of
Lycurgus. He admits the controversy connected with the birth,
travels, death, of ‘the law-giver*, and concerning the laws
attributed to him, but that he himself believed in him, historically,
is evidenced by his assertion that he stood ‘in the rank of glory
far beyond the founders of all the other Grecian States’.
According to Plutarch, when Lycurgus came to power he
consulted die Delphic oracle, and being assured that Apollo
promised him that he should establish the most excellent con-
stitution in the world he set to work, roping in the support of the
nobility for the purpose, in the best Fascist fashion. ‘When
matters were ripe he ordered thirty of the principal citizens to
appear armed in the market-place by break of day, to strike
terror into the heart of such as might desire to oppose him.’
The young king, Charilaus, ruling in partnership with Archelaus
at the time, was at first alarmed and fled, but was finally reassured,
and agreed to co-operate with Lycurgus — whose first action
was to establish a senate of twenty-eight — two of the thirty who
had first associated themselves with him having, according to
Aristotle, deserted through fear. Plutarch, himself, however,
inclined to the belief that twenty-eight senators were appointed
in order that, with the two kings, the whole body might consist
of thirty members. Plato admired this constitution as a means of
keeping in order kings hitherto too imperious and unrestrained,
and as highly contributing to the preservation of the State,
the senators, says Plutarch, ‘adhering to the kings whenever
they saw the people too encroaching, and, on the other hand,
supporting the people when the kings attempted to make themselves absolute.
Lycurgus next obtained from Delphi an oracle on behalf of
the constitution; it was called the rhetra , or decree. What it
decreed was that the people should be divided into classes and
tribes, a senate of thirty persons established, including the two
kings, and the people occasionally summoned to an assembly.
These assemblies were held in the open air, as Lycurgus considered that holding such meetings in fine halls and buildings
distracted attention from the business in hand. ‘The people thus
assembled had no right to propose any subject of debate, and were
only authorised to ratify or reject what might be proposed to
them by the senate and kings. 5 (Later kings inserted into the
rhetra a clause that ‘If the people attempt to corrupt any law,
the senate and chiefs shall retire — that is to say, dissolve the
assembly and annul the alterations. It is hardly surprising to
read that this government finally degenerated into ‘ an oligarchy,
whose power was exercised with such wantonness and violence
that it wanted indeed a bridle.)
After this Lycurgus proceeded to redivide the lands, ‘For he
found a prodigious inequality, the city overcharged with many
indigent persons, who had no land, and the wealth centred in the
hands of a few. Plutarch does not indicate by what means
Lycurgus* 'persuaded' the ' Haves' to give to the 'Have-Nots',
cancelling all former divisions of land and making new ones,
‘in such a manner that they might be perfectly equal in their
possessions and way of living'. But though he had success with
the re-division of the land, when it came to goods he encountered
some opposition, and 'perceived that they could not bear to
have their goods taken from them’. He therefore set to work
upon the currency, as a means of disposing of inequality of
possession. He stopped the gold and silver currency and ordered
the use of iron money, and ‘ to a great quantity and weight of
this he assigned but a small value'. When this became current
many kinds of injustice ceased, for 'who would steal or take a
bribe, who would defraud or rob, when he could not conceal the
booty’. This iron coin was not valid in the rest of Greece, but
was ridiculed and despised, 'so that the Spartans had no means
of purchasing any foreign or curious wares ; nor did any merchant-
ship unload in their harbours. . . . Thus luxury, losing by
degrees the means that cherished and supported it, died away of
itself; even they who had great possessions had no advantage
from them, since they could not be displayed in public, but must
lie, useless, in unregarded repositories’. The people, with no
outlet for soft indulgence, or the making of luxury goods, concentrated on the excellence of workmanship of their strictly
‘utility’ articles, therefore.
Having settled all that, Lycurgus then introduced a new law
forbidding people tp eat at home, or to fatten animals for private
consumption. They were all required to eat the same frugal
meals in what we should now call ‘communal kitchens’, so that
there should be no self-indulgence, ‘for so not only their manners
would be corrupted, but their bodies disordered; abandoned to
all manner of sensuality and dissoluteness, they would require
long sleep, warm baths, and the same indulgence as in perpetual
sickness’. Further, since it was illegal to eat at home, anyone
coming to the public tables without appetite provoked comment,
and was reproached ‘as an intemperate and effeminate person
that was sick of the common diet’.
At this point the nobility considered that Lycurgus had gone
too far, and proceeded to stone him in the assembly. He fled
to a temple, but an angry young man pursued him, and, when
Lycurgus turned, struck at him with a stick, and put out an eye.
'Lycurgus then stopped short, and, without giving way to passion,
showed the people his eye beat out, and his face streaming with
blood.’ The people were then shamed, and, with mob treachery,
turned the young man, Alcander, over to Lycurgus . . . who
took him home with him and made him his personal servant.
The young man was so struck with his master’s ‘mildness and
goodness of heart, his strict temperance and indefatigable industry,
that he proclaimed it to his friends that Lycurgus was ‘not
that proud and severe man he might have been taken for, but,
above all others, gentle and engaging in his behaviour.
For a long time this eating in common was observed with
great exactness, and even kings were not exempt from it. Lycurgus waged war,
also, on any kind of elaborateness or decoration in the home; everything had to be strictly utilitarian.
Plutarch tells us that Lycurgus was short and sententious
in his speech. When asked why he did not establish a popular
government he replied, ‘Go, and first make a trial of it in thy
own family*. He believed in few words and few laws, but those
few were far-reaching and the essence of Fascism. The men
were required to be manly, the woman womanly, and the young
were taught ideals of national ambition and glory in warfare.
As to freedom: ‘No man was at liberty to live as he pleased;
the city being like one great camp, where all had their stated
allowance, and knew their public charge, each man concluding
that he was born, not for himself but for his country . . . like bees
they acted with one impulse for the common good, and always
assembled about their prince.’
Lycurgus filled vacancies in his senate by the selection of
worthy men of full threescore years old — they had to be the wisest
and best amongst the good and wise. The candidates were
elected according to the volume of acclaim from the assembly
as they passed through. ‘He that had the most and loudest
acclamation was declared duly elected.’
Like the people in Russia today, the Spartans under Lycurgus
were not allowed to travel outside of their own country. It was
feared that they might ‘contract foreign manners, gain trace
of a life of little discipline, and of a different form of government’.
Foreigners could not come to Sparta, either, without good reason,
‘for along with foreigners come new subjects for discourse; new
discourse produces new opinions ; and from these there necessarily
spring new passions and desires, which, like discords in music,
would disturb the established government’.
In conclusion Plutarch observes that under the constitution
established by Lycurgus, ‘ Sparta continued superior to the rest of
Greece, both in its government at home and reputation abroad’.
It retained this constitution, according to Plutarch, for five centuries, and during the reign of fourteen successive lings.
Sir Thomas More also favoured the idea of a ‘ Prince ’, whose
election was for life, unless he was removed ‘ upon some suspicion
of design to enslave the people’. In More’s Utopia each city
sent three senators — chosen for their wisdom — to a supreme council in the capital, ‘to consult about their common concerns’.
The jurisdiction of each city was to extend for twenty miles or so,
and below the senators there was to be a system of magistrates,
elected annually.
A century later we get Sir Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis , with
supreme authority vested in a wise and virtuous king ruling
a nation ‘compounded of all goodness’. The king of this Utopia
ordained that every twelve years — not oftener! — two ships should
set out on several voyages, with a mission of three of the fellows
or brethreiuof Salamon’s House aboard. (Salamon’s House was
an order or society founded by the king, and named after King
Solomon, ‘dedicated to the study of the works and creatures of
God ... for the finding out of the true nature of things, whereby
.God might have the more glory in his workmanship of them,
and men the more fruit in their use of them ’.) Their errand being
to collect knowledge of the affairs and state of the countries
visited, ‘especially of the sciences, arts, manufactures, and inventions of all the world’, and to bring back ‘Books, instruments,
and patterns in every kind’. ‘New Atlantis’ was governed by
‘ the father of Salamon’s House ’, whose public appearances were
attended with kingly state, but the nature of his government
Bacon does not tell us, being vastly more concerned with the
wisdom and learning emanating from Salamon’s House, and the
island’s enrichment with observatories, laboratories for scientific
experiment and invention, and gardens for botanical experiment.
Thomas Campanella, writing in Italy at the same time as
Bacon in England, expresses in his Utopian The City of the Sun,
a similar preoccupation with natural science, but his conception
of government is vastly more complex. Like Plato’s and Plutarch’s
it is a Fascist conception. The people of his Utopia have a
leader, a supreme authority, ‘head over all, in temporal and
spiritual matters’. He is called Hoh, or Metaphysic, and he is
assisted by three princes of equal power, Pon, Sin and Mor — in
the modern tongue, Power, Wisdom, and Love. Power is supreme
in all military matters, and has the control of munitions, fortifications,
armories, and so forth. Wisdom is ‘the ruler of the
liberal arts, of mechanics, of all sciences, with their magistrates
and doctors, and of the discipline of the schools’. There are
twelve doctors, all under the control of Wisdom, and they have
between them one book which they call Wisdom. They are
Astrologus, Cosmographus, Arithmeticus, Geometra, Histriographus,
Poeta, Logicus, Rhetor, Grammaticus, Medicus,
Physiologus, Politicus, and Moralis. The walls of the City of the
Sun, at the dictates of Wisdom, are covered with fine paintings,
and expositions of natural phenomena — the stars in their courses,
the elements, animals, insects, trees, and flowers. Love attends
to the charge of the race, to the education of children, and all
domestic matters.
The inhabitants of the City of the Sun have all things in
common, not merely material things — including wives — but
honours and pleasures, and self-love is replaced by love of the
State. The government includes various magistrates representing
various duties and virtues — such as Fortitude, Chastity, Liberality,
Criminal and Civil Justice, Truth, Kindness, Gratitude, Cheerfulness,
Exercise, Sobriety. They are selected for the duties for
which, from youth, they have shown the most aptitude. All other
officials are chosen by Hoh and his assistants, and ‘ by the teachers
of that art over which they are fit to preside. And these teachers
know well who is most suited for rule. Certain men are proposed
by the magistrates in council . . . and he opposes who knows
anything against those brought forward for election, or, if not,
speaks in favour of them. But no one attains to the dignity of
Hoh except him who knows the histories of the nations, and their
customs and sacrifices and law, and their form of government,
whether a republic or a monarch. . . . But beyond everything
else it is necessary that Hoh should understand metaphysics and
theology; that he should know thoroughly the derivations,
foundations and demonstrations of all the arts and sciences; the
likeness and difference of things ; necessity, fate, and the harmonies
of the universe; power, wisdom, and the love of things and of
God; the stages of life and its symbols; everything relating to
the heavens, the earth and the sea ; and the ideas of God, as much
as mortal man can know of Him. He must also be well read in the
Prophets and in astrology. And thus they knew long beforehand
who will be Hoh. He is not chosen to so great a dignity unless
he has attained his thirty-fifth year.'
After this it seems superfluous to add that ‘Hoh is ashamed
to be ignorant of any possible thing’. There are councils and
assemblies ; the magistrates can be changed if it can be shown that
they have failed in their duties, but Hoh and his assistants are
never changed, except by arrangement between themselves.
‘All things are in common, and their dispensation is by the
authority of the magistrates.’ The individual’s life is completely
ordered for him by those in authority — what he shall wear,
what he shall eat, how he shall employ his leisure, what games
he shall play, even with whom — in the interests of breeding to
the advantage of the State — he shall mate. It is specifically stated,
‘the race is managed for the good of the commonwealth and not
of private individuals, and the magistrates must be obeyed. . . .
The breeding of children has reference to the commonwealth
and not to individuals, except in so far as they are constituents
of the commonwealth \ The children are brought up by the
State, for the State, and ‘male and female breeders of the best
natures’ are distributed ‘according to philosophic rules’ — an
idea which Plato shares, except that he would make the distribu-
tion of beautiful women by lot to avoid jealousy on the part
of the men, and any ill-feeling against the magistrates.
It is curious that a man who himself so vehemently resisted
authority as did Campanella should have conceived so authoritarian an Utopia.
His Civitas Solis ( The City of the Sun ) was written
during his twenty-eight years’ imprisonment for his complicity
in a conspiracy against Spanish rule in Calabria, but he was in
trouble for his rebelliousness long before then. Despite his own
rebelliousness, his Utopians were ‘docile’, and devoted to the
idea of leadership, and of work as ‘discipline’. He had much
in common with Bacon on the scientific side, but even more with
Plato in the matter of government.
Seventeenth-century England produced three other ‘Utopias’
after Bacon’s — Gerrard Winstanley’s Platform (The Law of
Freedom in a Platform , or True Magistracy Restored) in 1651, Thomas
Hobbes’s Leviathan in the same year, and James Harrington’s
Oceana in 1656. Hobbes and Harrington have in common a belief
in private property. Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’ was the State. He
favoured an absolute monarchy as the most suitable form of
government, as Bacon did, but there the likeness between the two
Utopian conceptions ends, for Hobbes was preoccupied not with
science but with money, which he regarded as the blood of the
social body. Bernstein calls him ‘the philsopher of State absolutism’ and of ‘order at any price’.
Harrington maintained that the determining element of power
in a State was property in general and land in particular, and
that the executive power ought not to be vested for any length
of time in the same men or class of men, and to this end he worked
out in his Oceana — which was England as he would have liked
it to be — an elaborate system of vote by ballot and rotation
of magistrates and legislators. His Utopian England was a
republic of property-owners subject to an agrarian law which was
to limit the portion of land held to that yielding a revenue of
£3,000. His government was by class-election; ‘Oceana’ was
territorially divided up into fifty ‘Tribes’, these into ‘Hundreds’,
and these again into ‘Parishes’. There was a ‘popular assembly’
and a Senate; the former had 600 members elected by citizens
with less than £100 income, and 450 elected by citizens with
over £100 incomes; the Senate consisted of 300 members elected
by the poorer voters. The popular assembly could reject clauses
in any Bill put forward by the Senate and refer their rejections
back to the Senate for reconsideration and a second presentation
in a modified form. What was finally agreed upon by the assembly
became the law of the land. The people themselves were divided
into ‘freemen’ and citizens, and ‘servants’ — a servant could not
participate in the government of the commonwealth, because
of his economic dependence, that is to say his servitude, but
Harrington held that any industrious member of the community
could, with application, achieve independence — that is, freedom,
and that making certain posts of honour dependent on income was
a stimulus to industry. It was his conception of ‘democracy’.
Winstanley had quite different ideas. He was, as Bernstein
says, ‘a socialist ahead of his age’, anticipating the contentions
of the nineteenth century socialists that great private riches
and the private ownership of land mean the exploitation of the
many by the few. We are indebted to Bernstein for rescuing
Winstanley’s Utopia from the oblivion into which it appears to have
fallen. 1 Much has been written on Lilburne and the ‘Levellers’,
and on Winstanley and Everard and the ‘Digger Movement’,
or ‘True Levellers’, but that Winstanley had a detailed positive
programme has been in recent years strangely ignored, yet of it
he wrote, ‘Though this Platform be like a piece of Timber rough
hewd, yet the discreet workman may take it, and frame a handsome building out of it’.
Winstanley was strongly opposed to any kind of despotic
rule. He demanded that ‘all Officers in a true Magistracie of
the Commonwealth are to be chosen Officers’, and they were to
be chosen newly every year, on the principle that ‘When publique
Officers remain long, they will degenerate. . . . Great Offices
in a Land and Army have changed the disposition of many sweet-
spirited men. Nature tells us that if Water stand long, it corrupts,
whereas running water keeps sweet and fit for common use’.
He considered that ‘ the original Root of magistracy is common
preservation, and it rose first in a private Family’. He saw Adam
as the first Governor or Officer. His ‘ Golden Rule ’ of Government was ‘Let the wise help the foolish, and let the strong help
the weak’. In every town, city, parish, there was to be a ‘peace-
maker* and four different kinds of overseers — overseers to preserve peace, as it were assistants to the peacemaker, overseers for
the various trades, overseers for the common storehouses (there
being no money in Winstanley’s Utopia, but everyone giving of
his labour according to his ability, and taking from the common
storehouses in accordance with his need) and general overseers.
There were also soldiers, taskmasters, and executioners. Every
county had a Judge, and every town its Peacemaker, in addition
to the overseers and soldiers, and these together formed the County
Senate. For the whole country there was a Parliament, a
Commonwealth, a Ministry, a Postmaster, and an Army. Men
over sixty automatically became overseers of the general welfare —
observance of laws, etc. All other officers were to be elected
annually. In time of peace the soldiers were to act as constables.
The duty of the postmasters was to provide an Intelligence
Service of events, their reports to be sent to the capital for com-
pilation into a monthly report to be issued in book form, these
books to be distributed to the local postmasters whose duty it
was to keep their communities informed of the contents. The
duty of the Ministers was to convene meetings of the community
members on the weekly day of rest — which it was their duty to
ensure was observed. At these meetings the reports on the
affairs of the country received by the postmasters were to be read,
also sections of the Law of the Land, so that no one might be in
ignorance of it, and there were to be, also, lectures and discussions, the subjects to be history, arts, sciences, natural history
and no one ... to propound phantastic theories, but only to
relate what he has himself ascertained by study and observation.
. . . Everyone who speaks of any Herb, Plant, Art, or Nature
of mankind, is required to speak nothing by imagination, but
what he hath found out by his own industry and observation
in trial’ — which was a considerable advance on the custom
of the times to accept without question whatever was according
to Pliny \
These ‘discourses’ were to be held, sometimes, in a foreign
language, ‘so that the citizens of the English commonwealth
may be able to learn of their neighbours and gain their respect
and love’. Winstanley had something in common with Bacon
in his contention that ‘to know the secrets of nature, is to know
the works of God within the creation, is to know God himself,
for God dwells in every visible work or body’. He believed,
passionately, in the fundamental principle of the common
ownership of the earth; in its ‘free enjoyment’ he saw true
commonwealth freedom. He was opposed to all buying and
selling, but he held that the buying and selling of land, or the
fruits of the land, should be punishable with death. His revolu-
tionary ideas concerning money and education we will discuss
later; it need only be said here that in the seventeenth century
they anticipated Morris and Bellamy in the nineteenth.
Morris’s Utopian community lived according to the law of
‘common consent’. The country was divided up into communes,
wards, parishes, divisions with very little to distinguish them,
and, ‘In such a district . . . some neighbours think that some-
thing ought to be done or undone; a new town-hall built, a
clearance of inconvenient houses; or say a stone bridge substituted for some ugly old iron one. . . . Well, at the next
ordinary meeting of the neighbours, or Mote, as we call it ... a
neighbour proposes the change, and of course if everybody
agrees there is an end of discussion, except about details. Equally,
if no one backs the proposer — “seconds ” him it used to be called —
the matter drops for the time being ; a thing not likely to happen
amongst reasonable men, however, as the proposer is sure to
have talked it over with others before the Mote. But supposing
the affair proposed and seconded, if a few of the neighbours
disagree to it . . . they don’t count heads that time, but put off
the formal discussion to the next Mote ; and meantime arguments
pro and con are flying about, and some get printed, so that everybody knows what is going on; and when the Mote comes to-
gether again there is a regular discussion and at last a vote by
show of hands. If the division is a close one, the question
is again put off for further discussion; if the division is a wide
one, the minority are asked if they will yield to the more
general opinion, which they often, nay, most commonly do . 1
If they refuse, the question is debated a third time, when, if
the minority has not perceptibly grown, they always give way;
. . . they are convinced, not perhaps that their view is the
wrong one, but they cannot persuade or force the community to
adopt it .’
The decision does not press hardly on the minority because
no one is obliged to work on a proposition — such as the building
of a new bridge — if he is not in agreement with its being carried
out. Morris freely acknowledges ‘the tyranny of a majority’
in society, but points out that all work done is either beneficial
or hurtful to every member of society. ‘The man is benefited
by the bridge-building if it turns out a good thing, and hurt
by it if it turns out a bad one, whether he puts a hand to it
or not.’
Morris’s Utopians — significantly — turned the Parliament
House of the pre-Utopian era into a dung-market. Morris, like
Wilde, was opposed to government in the generally accepted
sense. He made no claim to being an anarchist — indeed he dismissed anarchism as ‘impossible’ — but his Utopians, nevertheless, lived according to the anarchist law of mutual aid, of co-
operation. He makes his Utopian spokesman declare, ‘A man
no more needs an elaborate system of government, with its
army, navy, and police, to force him to give way to the will of the
majority of his equals , than he wants a similar machinery to make
him understand that his head and a stone wall cannot occupy
the same space at the same moment.’ As might be expected of so
anarchistic a community, there were in Morris’s ‘Nowhere’ no
politics. He held politics in contempt. He saw them as a
crystallisation of people into parties, ‘ permanently hostile to one
another, with different theories as to the build of the universe
and the progress of time and the whole thing completely false,
a pretence at serious difference of opinion on fundamental issues.
If this issue had existed as a reality, he maintained, people so
divided ‘ could not have dealt together, bought and sold together,
gambled together, cheated other people together, but must have
fought whenever they met ; which would not have suited them at
all. The game of the master of politics was to cajole or force the
public to pay the expense of a luxurious life and exciting amusement for a few cliques of ambitious persons; and the pretence
of serious difference of opinion, belied by every action of their
lives, was quite good enough for that”. 1 As to relations with
foreign nations, the whole system of rival and contending
nations which played so great a part in the ‘government of the
world of civilisation has disappeared along with the inequality
betwixt man and man in society’.
Edward Bellamy, the American author, writing his Looking
Backward? two years before Morris’s News from Nowhere , worked
out a complicated system of the State control of industry, on the
basis of a vast industrial army, to replace government as commonly understood.
He placed his Utopia in the year 2000, when
the world was a federation of autonomous nations, but looking
forward ‘to an eventual unification of the world as one nation!.
It was a socialist society of equality and common ownership,
with the State as the employer. Dealing with his Utopia from the
American angle, Bellamy saw a group of men at Washington
directing the industries of the entire nation, and the general of
the great industrial army was the President of the United States,
‘or rather the most important function of the presidency is the
headship. of the industrial army’. Promotion is from the ranks,
as in a military army — ‘through three grades to the officer’s
grade, and thence up through the lieutenancies to the captaincy
or foremanship, and superintendency or colonel’s rank. Next,
with an intervening grade in some of the larger grades, comes the
general of the guild, under whose immediate control all the
operations of the trade are conducted. This officer is at the
head of the national bureau representing his trade, and is responsible for its work to the administration. The general of his guild
holds a splendid position, and one which amply satisfies the
ambition of most men, but above his rank, which may be compared ... to that of a general of a division or major-general,
is that of the chiefs of the ten great departments or groups of
allied trades. The chiefs of these ten grand divisions of the
industrial army may be compared to your commanders of army
corps, or lieutenant-generals, each having from a dozen to a score
of generals of separate guilds reporting to him. Above these ten
great officers, who form his council, is the general-in-chief,
who is the president of the United States. The general-in-chief of
the industrial army must have passed through all the grades
below him, from the common labourers up\
Promotion is simply according to merit. Generals are chosen
from amongst the superintendents by votes from retired members
of the guild in question — retiring a^e being forty-five. The elec-
tors practise impartiality, allied wi thTcnowledge of the special
qualifications called for, and the record of each candidate. By
retiring from national service at forty-five the citizens of this
Utopia are enabled to devote the rest of their long lives to the
pursuit of literary, artistic, scientific, or scholarly interests, to
travel and social relaxations. Owing to the better conditions
and the freedom from care, forty-five in that Utopia is the equivalent of thirty-five in our world.
Bellamy shared Morris’s belief in the perfectability of man,
and crime was practically extinct in his Utopia, though there
were still courts of law — but without lawyers — for such offenders
against society as remained.
In the twentieth century we get Wells; and a reversion to the
Platonic tradition; and the late J. D. Unwin, who, after asserting
the need for decentralisation, and that an integrated society can
hold together without the State, goes on to outline a system of
government complete with ministers, parliament, J.P.’s, and a
monarchy. He contends that his ‘Hopousia’ is a State ‘only
in so far as it is an organised political “commonwealth. . . . The
State exists in the sense that there is an authority that enforces
the maintenance of rights; but this “State” is the community,
each corporation and profession playing its own separate and
definite part. . . . There are no general elections. Parliament is
a permanent entity meeting once a year to receive a report
concerning the state of affairs during the past year, to consider
any particular subject any member may care to raise, and to take
such steps as will increase the security, joy, and prosperity of
men\ A new Prime Minister is appointed every seven years
by the Queen, who selects him from a list of recommendations
from a council of ex-Prime Ministers, Heads of Professions and
Presidents of Trades.
Despite his anarchistic assertions regarding the State, it is
clear that Unwin could not visualise man living harmoniously
with man in a free ungoverned society, such as Morris envisaged,
any more than, apparently, can the Communists, who for all
their talk of the ultimate ‘ withering away of the State ’, according
to the Marx-Engels formula, have steadily supported the yearly
increasing power of the State in the U.S.S.R. (Let it be here
clearly understood that when I refer to ‘ the Communists ’ I mean
Stalinists. One who believes in all things in common, the land
and the means of production, and that all men should be socially
equal, is obviously a communist in the broad sense — one, that is,
who believes in common ownership, and who would have believed
in ‘from each according to his ability and to each according to
his needs 5 even if Marx had never said it, and if Lenin had never
lived. There was, after all, the practical living communism
of the Early Christians. . . . The Stalinists are apt to behave as
though communism was something invented by that ‘eminent
Victorian’ Karl Marx.)
H. G. Wells’s Utopian organisation has close reference — on
his own admission — to Plato’s. It classifies people into four
main classes for political and social purposes: the Poietic, or
creative class, the Kinetic class, ‘merging insensibly along the
boundary into the less representative constituents of the Poietic
group, but distinguished by a more restricted range of imagina-
tion’. At one end of the Kinetic class come the intellectuals — the
mathematicians and the scholars and scientists, whilst at the other
end come the great actors, the popular politicians and preachers.
‘ Between these two extremes is a long and wide region of varieties,
into which one would put most of the people who form the
reputable workmen, the men of substance, the trustworthy men
and women, the pillars of society on earth.’ It sounds, for Utopia,
singularly bourgeois — the middle-classes of our present society,
the privileged classes of the intellectuals in the U.S.S.R. Between
these two classes in the Wellsian scheme come the Dull and the
Base. The former are persons of ‘ altogether inadequate imagination . . . the stupid people, the incompetent people, the formal,
imitative people . . . they count neither for work nor for distinction in the State’. The Base are the people with no moral
sense, and who count, therefore, as ‘an antagonism to the State
organisation ’.
Wells visualises a World State, and the Rules of his Modern
Utopia ‘ensure a considerable understanding of the importance
of poietic activities in the majority of the samurai , in whose hands
as a class all the real power of the world resides’. The samurai
are an order of ‘voluntary nobility’, like Plato’s ‘Guardians*.
Anyone, of any nationality, may qualify for this privileged order.
Like Plato’s Guardians, the samurai are to be required to live
austerely,- as the price of the honour they enjoy, and in order to
weed out the self-indulgent — tobacco and alcohol to be forbidden, and a Rule of Chastity, though not of celibacy, observed.
It is all as ethical and disciplinarian as Plato. Mr. Wells does not
believe, as Morris and Wilde believed, that there is most freedom
where there is least law. He maintains, indeed, that ‘there is
no freedom under anarchy’, and speaks of ‘the essential fallacy of
the cult called Individualism’, conceiving it as the antithesis
of socialism or communism — which in an anarchist-communist
society it is not, but on the contrary; but of this more later.
Wells finds ‘the final hope of the world in the evolving inter-
play of unique individualities’, and sees the State in Utopia
as chipping away ‘all those spendthrift liberties that waste
liberty’, and through this attaining the maximum of general
freedom. The Common Rule, by which his Modern Utopians
were to live, was ‘planned to exclude the dull, to be unattractive
to the base, and to direct and co-ordinate all sound citizens of
good intent’.
In Mr. Wells’s Utopia man is still a long way off perfection;
there are still policemen and punishments. Wells does not
acknowledge that perfectability of man which Massingham
envisages, and which Morris, in his Utopian scheme of things,
takes for granted. Wells declares definitely that, ‘In a modern
Utopia there will, indeed, be no perfection; in Utopia there must
also be friction, conflicts, and waste, but the waste will be enormously less than in our world.’ (Morris, on the other hand,
maintained that friction, whether between individuals, socially,
politically, or between nations, was due to the lack of freedom
in the lives they lived. He protested vehemently against the idea
that ‘human nature’ was full of ineradicable Original Sin. He
contrasted the human nature of ‘paupers, of slaves, of slave-
holders’, with the human nature of ‘wealthy free-men’. He
believed, in short, with Robert Browning, ‘Oh, make us happy
and you make us good ! ’ His Utopia was to be run on the principle
on which A. S. Neill runs the community of his free school —
‘ Not be good and you will be happy, but be happy and you will
be good’. Morris makes his Utopian mouth-piece declare, conclusively, ‘Experience shows that it is so’, which is Neill’s own
experience in the microcosm of his school.
There, then, are the classic ‘ideal’ commonwealths — Plato’s
Republic , Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus , More’s Utopia , Bacon’s New
Atlantis , Campanella’s City of the Sun , Winstanley’s Law of Freedom ,
Hobbes’s Leviathan , Harrington’s Oceana , Bellamy’s Looking
Backward , Morris’s News from Nowhere , and the contemporary
contributions from Unwin and Wells. What emerges — from the
point of view of conception of government or organisation —
from this survey? There is little to choose between the Fascist
conceptions of Plato and Plutarch, and Campanella follows
directly in that tradition — there are to be guardians, senators,
magistrates — in each case a hierarchy of intellectuals, of philo-
sophers, or priest-philosophers, and you get the hierarchy again
in More, who owes something to Plato, the senators and magis-
trates, with a prince at the head. Bacon offers the scientific
Utopia and in the matter of government contents himself with a
benevolent monarchy. Hobbes wants everyone well and truly
governed, ‘order at any price’, and even the socialist, Winstanley,
has overseers, judges, constables — officers of all descriptions.
In Harrington again comes the insistence on officials — big fleas
and lesser fleas; Bellamy favours a kind of industrial militarism,
Wells reverts to the Platonic conception of government, and
Unwin wants a highly complex State complete with monarchy.
Only in Morris’s ‘Nowhere’ do we find any real libertarian spirit,
any strong feeling for the freedom of the individual, in the
approach to government. (In modern times there has been the
glimpse of a free Utopia in James Hilton’s novel, Lost Horizon ,
but it is a glimpse only, making no claim to being a detailed
picture of an ideal commonwealth, any more than Wilde’s
treatise on The Soul of Man Under Socialism could be so
regarded.)
Even Rousseau, that life-long and impassioned champion
of freedom, believed in ‘law and order’. His ideal, as set forth
in the Dedication (to the Republic of Geneva) of his essay on
‘The Origin of Inequality ’, in his Social Contract , written in 1754,
was of a well-governed democratic State — which for him was
his birthplace, the Republic of Geneva itself. He declares in his
Dedication that in his ‘researches after the best rules common
sense can lay down ’ for the constitution of a government ‘ most
in conformity with natural law, and most favourable to society,
to the maintenance of public order and to the happiness of
individuals’, he was struck at finding them all within the walls
of Geneva.
In spite of his devotion to liberty, personal and social, there
was nothing anarchistic about Rousseau. He believed in the
State, the rightness of State authority, and insisted on the
individual’s recognition of that authority and loyalty to it.
His ideal of government was ‘ the right of legislation vested in
all the citizens’, but not that each man should be at liberty to
propose new laws at pleasure, ‘but that this right should belong
exclusively to the magistrates; and that even they should use it
with so much caution, the people, on its side, be so reserved in
giving its consent to such laws, and the promulgation of them be
attended with so much solemnity, that before the ^constitution
could be upset by them, there might be time enough for all to be
convinced, that it is above all the great antiquity of the laws which
makes them sacred and venerable, that men soon learn to despise
laws which they see daily altered, and that States, by accustoming
themselves to neglect their ancient customs under the pretext of
improvement, often introduce greater evils than those they
endeavour to remove'. He would have regarded as ill-governed
a Republic in which the people believed they could dispense
with the magistrates, or denied them full authority, imprudently ' keeping to themselves the administration of civil affairs
and the execution of their own laws. ‘Such’, he observed, ‘must
have been the rude constitution of primitive governments,
directly emerging from a state of nature; and this was another
of the vices that contributed to the downfall of the Republic
of Athens.' He regarded the Romans as ‘a model for all free
peoples ', and points the moral of their inability to govern themselves when they had escaped from the oppression of the Tarquins.
His attitude was the attitude of all reformists — a gradual acclimatisation to freedom. As he saw it, ‘It is with liberty as it is with
those solid and succulent foods, or with those generous wines
which are well adapted to nourish and fortify robust constitutions
that are used to them, but ruin and intoxicate weak and delicate
constitutions to which they are not suited. People once accustomed to masters -are not in a condition to do without them. If
they attempt to shake off the yoke, they still more estrange themselves from freedom, as, by mistaking it for an unbridled license
to which it is diametrically opposed, they nearly always' manage,
by their revolutions, to hand themselves over to seducers, who
only make their chains heavier than before'. Which is exactly
the argument of the imperialists who declare that the ‘backward ’ peoples they dominate are not ready for self-government,
and if given independence would become the prey of warring
factions from within or marauding hosts from without. Rousseau
was no revolutionary, in spite of his anti-monarchism and his
anti-clericalism, and however much he might shock by his
religious and moral unorthodoxy; he was a republican, and an
impassioned one, at a time when it was politically revolutionary,
to be a republican, but in the deeper sense he was a disciplinarian
— a fact which occasionally emerges even in the sphere in which
he was most radical, the educational sphere. What he sought —
and in Geneva found — was a disciplined freedom, a law-abiding
liberty, ‘a community in which the individuals, content with
sanctioning their laws, and deciding the most important affairs
in general assembly, had established honoured tribunals, carefully
distinguishing the several departments, and elected year by year
some of the most capable and upright of their fellow-citizens to
administer justice and govern the State; a community, in short, in
which the virtue of the magistrates thus bearing witness to the
wisdom of the people, each class reciprocally did the other honour.
If in such a case any fatal misunderstandings arose to disturb the
public peace, even these intervals of blindness and error would
bear the marks of moderation, mutual esteem, and a common
respect for the laws; which are sure signs and pledges of a reconciliation as lasting as sincere’. The more he reflected on the
civil and political condition of the Republic of Geneva, he
declared, the less could he conceive ‘ that the nature of human
affairs could admit of a better’. Apart from the excellence of the
constitution, the Republic was free of wars and conquerors, its
boundaries were fixed, it had no enemies, and it was neither
wealthy enough ‘ to be enervated by effeminacy ’ and ‘ the pursuit
of frivolous pleasures’, nor poor enough to require assistance from
abroad; it was peaceful, happy, and virtuous, ‘a free city situated
between several nations, none of which should have any interest
in attacking it, while each had an interest in preventing it from
being attacked by the others; in short, a Republic which should
have nothing to tempt the ambition of its neighbours, but might
reasonably depend on their assistance in case of need’. A
scrupulous obedience to the laws was the essence of Rousseau’s
conception of good government.
There is much, obviously, to be said for a wisely governed
democracy, but a great deal more, from the Utopian point of view,
for the abolition of the State; just as there is much to be said for
the strict, just parent, but even more for the parent who has the
wisdom to leave the child to discover the natural discipline that
life itself imposes. In the matter of child education Rousseau
urged this natural discipline, the authority of things , as opposed
to persons , but when it comes to the State he is the complete
authoritarian, devoted to law and order and its scrupulous
observation, because, like so many, he could not conceive the
perfectability of civilised man, though he believed man to be
naturally good. He was conscious of the superiority, from the
point of view of happiness, of ‘ the noble savage ’, who 4 breathes
only peace and liberty’, and ‘desires only to live and be free from
labour’, and was acutely conscious of the complexity of civilised
life, its drudgery and anxieties, its enslavement to power and
reputation and wealth, but he could not conceive of man in
society returning to the basic simplicities of natural laws. He
refers, in his discourse on inequality, to men such as himself
‘whose passions have destroyed their original simplicity, who can
no longer subsist on plants or acorns, or live without laws and
magistrates’. For them there must be ‘wise and good princes’
and ‘deserving rulers’, and just laws democratically conceived
and administered, and loyally respected. Rousseau regarded
it as ‘one of the most important functions of government to
prevent extreme inequality of fortunes’. This was to be done
‘ not by taking away wealth from its possessors, but by depriving
all men of means to accumulate it; not by building hospitals
for the poor, but by securing the citizens from becoming poor’.
He maintained that a wise administration could prevent the evils
of inequality, and that ‘wherever men love their country, respect
the laws, and live simply, little remains to be done in order to
make them happy’. He declared, roundly, that ‘when the State
is dissolved, the abuse of government, whatever it is, bears
the common name of anarchy ’ . . . that dreaded word, that
had to wait for Proudhon to give new meaning to. (Godwin,
in his Enquiry , some forty years after Rousseau, advocated the
abolition of the State, and all laws and courts, and maintained
that society, divided up into small communities, had no need of
government, but did not use the word anarchism or anarchy.)
Man’s passion for being governed might be described as the
chief neurosis of civilisation. . . . From Plato down to Rousseau
there is this preoccupation with the State, in one form or another.
It is not until we reach the end of the eighteenth century and
William Godwin that we get any conception of man ungoverned
and free.
And that Utopia must be the stateless society of the anarchist
ideal, a free and ungoverned society living according to the
natural law of mutual aid, the present writer is convinced. And
that it must be communist-anarchist. As to whether in practice
this works out as anarcho-syndicalism, or along the lines of
Morris’s Utopian idea of Motes for the discussion of local affairs,
would depend upon the degree of industrialisation maintained.
Morris’s Utopia was de-industrialised, a condition made possible
by the abolition of the use of force, and by the simplification of the
life of the people generally. Where competition and the profit-
motive is abolished there is no need of — or indeed point in —
intense manufacture, and, therefore, of manufacturing districts.
There is thus a dispersal of population; the towns and cities
invade the country — and bring new life to it, and there is general
social readjustment, not difficult amongst free and classless people
living according to the natural law of mutual aid.
Morris’s idea is not impracticable; on the other hand he was
writing in the nineteenth century, and the world has become a
good deal more mechanistic since then. In planning his Utopia,
Morris had not to consider a civilisation in which figured radio,
cinemas, aeroplanes, and high-speed mechanical transport of all
kinds. He had not to contend with a generation that has grown
up with the radio and cinema as part of its education. His world
was simple, despite the Industrial Revolution, compared with that
which confronts any one planning a Utopia in the middle of the
twentieth century, and in the midst of the chaos of the second
world-war. Morris had only the Industrial Revolution to contend
with when considering ‘ the fallacy of progress ’ ; the present-day
planners of Utopias have to contend with a still greater revolution
— the revolution represented by the radio, the cinema, and aerial
transport at two hundred and more miles an hour.
Ideally, there are no radios, cinemas, aeroplanes, motor-
cars, speed-boats, in Utopia, any more than there are tanks,
submarines, bombers ; but if we are considering ‘ possible worlds ’
we have to face the fact that de-industrialisation — at least to the
extent to which Morris dreamed of it — has become impossible,
even in a stateless, non-capitalistic society. The writer on modern
Utopias must go forward from the machine-age; he cannot go
back. Morris, writing in the nineteenth century, placed his
Utopia somewhere late in the twentieth century. (He refers to
‘the crude ideas of the first half of the twentieth century’.) He
did not make his society go back to the pre-industrial Revolution
era, but he had his people, by changing the system, and their
way of living, modify their degree of industrialisation. The modern
Utopia-maker has a great deal more to modify, because civilisation today is a great deal more complex. Its organisation,
therefore, will be necessarily more complex — even in Utopia.
Since it would not be possible to de-industrialise to anything like
the extent to which Morris dreamed, therefore, even with a
revolutionised system and way of life, a more complex form of
organisation than he envisaged would be called for, and in an
anarchist society anarcho-syndicalism would probably best solve
the problem.
This form of organisation would mean that the men and
women in every trade, industry, profession — for of course brain-
workers, intellectuals, artists would have their syndicates like
the manual workers — and the agricultural workers, would not
merely be organised in their respective syndicates in the way
in which workers are at present organised in their respective
trade unions, but would own the fields, factories and workshops
in which they laboured — the miners would own the mines, the
agrarian workers the land, the factory workers the industry in
which they operated, and so on. The farms would be collectivised; the transport system would be controlled by the transport
syndicate.
But at this point we can leave theorising and go direct to the
Spanish anarcho-syndicalist experiment of 1936 and study the
theory in practice. In about three months, Gaston Laval tells
us, in his useful report, Social Reconstruction in Spain , 1 throughout
the province of Aragon most of the villages became organised
agrarian collectives. The local authorities were replaced by
revolutionary anti-fascist committees whose first step was to
summon an assembly of all the inhabitants of the locality to
decide what was to be done for the common good. Groups
were organised to gather in the crop and thresh it. ‘Collective
work, Laval writes, ‘began spontaneously. Then as this wheat
could not be given to anyone in particular without being unfair
to all, it was put under the control of a local committee, for
th£ use of all the inhabitants, either for consumption or for the
purpose of exchange of manufactured goods, such as clothes,
boots, etc., for those who were most in need.’ The land was
divided into zones, and groups of workers were formed, each
group with its delegate. The delegates met twice a week with
the councillor of agriculture and stock breeding — so as to co-
ordinate all the different activities — to decide such matters as
whether certain fields should be ploughed, or whether the next
task should be the pruning of the vines or the olive-trees, or
the sowing of beetroots. Groups were chosen to attend to the
work decided upon, and went, if necessary, from one zone to
another.
In Aragon 75 per cent of the small proprietors were responsive
to the new order, and those who were not were not coerced.
Consumers’ tickets for industrial products were issued for these
non-co-operators in the same way as for the collectivists . . .
very different tactics from those employed by the Bolsheviks
of the October Revolution; Lenin’s coercion of the peasants
was a major blunder, and ultimately resulted in one of the
most frightful famines in history.
On the industrial side — in Alcoy, in September, 1936, the
textile syndicate ‘officially took possession of forty-one cloth
factories, eight underwear factories, ten spinning mills, four
dyeing plants, four finishing mills, twenty-four flock mills, and
of eleven rag warehouses, which composed the whole organisation of the weaving industry of Alcoy. This committee under-
took the whole business of production. Its organisation was on
federal lines — conducted both from above and below — pressure
from below, direction from above. Each factory committee was
composed of a delegate from each branch, and this same representation was found in the directive committee of the syndicate.
The whole organisation rested on this method of division of
labour. The factory committees were elected in meetings held
in the factories, and were composed of clerical as well as manual
workers.
GastOn Laval investigated numerous other industries and
found them successfully organised in the same manner. He
concludes his report, ‘At the time of writing — twenty thousand
workers in Alcoy are conducting production by means of their
unions, and proving that industry can do much better without
capitalists, without share-holders, and without employers, whose
rivalries prevent the most rational use of raw material and of
human effort. They have demonstrated that everything goes
much better without government intervention \
The socialisation of the wood industry in Cuenca, and the
collectivisation of transport in Barcelona, afford further examples
of what can be achieved along these co-operative lines. Restaurants, theatres, cinemas, public health services, were all
collectivised in syndicates. The Sanitary Syndicate in Catalonia
functioned so successfully that ‘ no peasant cut off in a mountain
village lacked the attention of the doctor in the nearest village,
nor of the nearest general clinic in the case of a more serious
illness, and in the event of dangerous cases, transport by ambu-
lance to the nearest hospital’.
Had the experiment been allowed to develop Spain might
have shown the whole Western world a new and happier way
of life. As it was, it survived long enough for an exciting indication of ‘possible worlds’ — a practical, workable alternative to
centralisation of government and control generally.
It is interesting to compare what Gaston Laval reports of
local committees and discussion in Aragon regarding the crops,
etc., with what Morris writes on ‘how matters are managed’
in his Utopia. He makes his Utopian observe, in a discussion
on politics, ‘as a rule, the immediate outcome shows which
opinion on a given subject is the right one; it is a matter of
fact, not of speculation. For instance, it is clearly not easy
to knock up a political party on the question as to whether
haymaking shall begin this week or next, when all men agree
that it must at latest begin the week after next, and when any
man can go down into the fields himself and see whether the
seeds are ripe enough for the cutting’.
Perhaps it may be objected, ‘All this may work well enough
for the organisation of agriculture and industry, but if there
is no central government how is taxation to be imposed for
social service and the upkeep of armies and navies? Are you
going to have army and navy syndicates, and to whom will
people pay their taxes?’
Such questions indicate an inability to think other than in
terms of the existing order. In Utopia there is no taxation —
even under a rational system of society that was not fully Utopian
taxation could be abolished. The anarcho-syndicalist experi-
ment in Catalonia succeeded in abolishing taxation to some
extent; in some districts it even dispensed with money. But
we will consider the whole question of money and exchange
in a later chapter.
Obviously Utopia can only exist in an Utopian world; it is
an affair of the brotherhood of man, not of one nation or race.
Morris, writing of his socialist England, and Bellamy of his
socialist America, visualised their Utopias in a changed world,
nQt isolated amidst the old order of civilisation. And in a world
living in the spirit of the brotherhood of man, a world without
frontiers or governments, to what end would there be armies
and navies? More, in his Utopia , wrote, Tn France there is yet
a more pestiferous sort of people, for the whole country is full
of soldiers, still kept up in time of peace; if such a state of a
nation can be called a peace; and these are kept in pay upon
the same account that you plead for those idle retainers about
noblemen; this being a maxim of those pretended statesmen
that it is necessary, for public safety, to have a good body of
veteran soldiers ever in readiness.’ Armies and navies exist
for the protection of governments and States and their pos-
sessions; wars are fought between the Haves and the Havenots,
for the balance of power between States, for the domination —
for purposes of money and power — of one nation by another;
in a world in which governments and frontiers have been swept
away war is automatically abolished. Morris, in his essay,
How We Live and How We Might Live , defined war as competition
between nations — competition for world-markets — and saw our
present system as ‘based on a state of perpetual war’. War
is the antithesis of mutual aid. It is, in Morris’s words, ‘pursuing your own advantage at the cost of someone else’s’. In
the world as it is today, its whole civilisation based on competition, the struggle for world-markets, it is inevitable. Even a
non-capitalistic country like the U.S.S.R. has found it inevitable — because it is isolated in a capitalistic world, and
because, too, in spite of being non-capitalistic it is still imperialistic.
Imperialist interests constitute the prime cause of war. Or,
to put it more simply, in the words of the eighteenth century
American Quaker, John Woolman, ‘the seeds of war have
nourishment in our possessions’. We have already cited the
anthropological research of H. J. Massingham, in his The Golden
Age , to disprove the popular contention that primitive man is
‘savage’. If further authority is needed, apart from the authori-
ties Mr. Massingham himself quotes, there are such other dis-
tinguished authorities as Gerald Heard, in his Source of Civilisa-
tion, Verrier Elwin, in his Leaves from the Jungle, Dr. R. L. Worrall,
in his Footsteps of War, Karl Kautsky, in his Ethics and the Materialist
Conception of History, W. J. Perry, in his The Growth of Civilisation,
Elliot Smith, in his Human History, to name only a few, all of
whose observations and researches bear witness to the anthropological fact that man only becomes war-like as he becomes
‘civilised’ and acquires possessions. As Dr. Worrall points out,
civilisation produces wealth, and wealth produces property, and
property produces the power of a ruling class. ‘The story of
warfare’, he writes, ‘is that of the increasingly violent behaviour
of ruling groups, doubtless stimulated by a variety of causes
once it had become organised. The institution of private property,
so often associated in its beginnings with rulers, the very fact
itself of possessing power and desiring more, have doubtless
played important parts in accentuating this form of behaviour.
In the case of the later warrior aristocracies, there is no doubt
that these two incentives have been potent. Fear of rivals has
also played an important part in the process; so, also, the army
itself, once in existence, has produced a profound effect upon
all those who have come into close touch with it.’
In an admirable essay on ‘Colonial Peoples and Civilisation’
in ‘a study of Empire’ entitled, Why Were They Proud?, the
writer points out that ‘Civilised man, only too clearly, has
taken the offensive against both his less civilised brother and
the animal world; and if there be any truth in the theories so
admirably developed in Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, it is the acquisitive aggressor who stands in more danger of extermination than
his prey, provided only that his victims maintain a social consciousness and can act as a group for group interests! . . .
Already it is clear that Western civilisation, the most acquisitive,
the most aggressive of cultures, is a force destructive of itself.
The seeds of its own decay, like the dragon’s teeth, have brought
forth their crop of armed men. War — unemployment — economic
slumps; such are the fruits of our labours’. The writer includes
Japan as among the influences of Western civilisation, being
part of that hybrid culture — with the worst aspects of Western
‘civilisation’ in its make-up — which dominates the Asia of today.
In Utopia, the absence of private property — which includes
the absence of imperialist possessions— disposes of the necessity
for war. Perhaps, you will protest, ‘ But what about civil wars —
such as the recent Spanish civil war? Wars of conflicting political
ideologies?’ Such wars could not happen in Utopia because,
as has been indicated, there are no politics in Utopia, no States,
no governments, no frontiers; the Spanish war was a struggle
for power between opposing political parties, the anti-Fascist
forces, the Republicans, Communists, Anarchists, the indepen-
dent Marxists (the P.O.U.M.), against the forces of the Church
and State and private property as represented by General Franco
and his followers. To approve of the achievements of the anarchists in that struggle is not to admire the tactics through which
they were achieved — the tactics of violence. What was achieved
through violence in that struggle was overthrown by violence,
within two years. The tactics of non-violent resistance to the
Nationalist forces might have taken longer — the tactics, that is to
say, of non-co-operation, of what might at first have the appearance of acceptance of defeat — but might well have had more
lasting results ; they certainly could not have been more disastrous
than the tactics of violence, the doing of wrong — in the sense of
killing and destruction — that good might come.
Supposing, for the sake of argument, that we are contem-
plating an isolated Utopia in an imperfect world, or an Utopian
world in the transitional stage in which there are still anti-
social beings in sufficient number to form a formidable opposition to the ideal commonwealth — the Utopians, with their ethics
of the brotherhood of man, would not resort to violence. They
would refuse co-operation with any aggressor to the point of
death; they would oppose the enemy from within, with every
means short of bloodshed within their power, and in the end
theirs would be the victory — because it is profoundly true that when
the strong have devoured each other ‘ the meek shall inherit the
earth ’, however incredible that may seem to the purely materialist
conception of living. In Utopia, where education is something
more than scholarship, even in the transitional stages the majority
would know this, and dispense with the technique of homicide
as a relic of the old bad barbarian days before ‘the change’.
That there should be imperialism in the Utopian conception
of living is as unthinkable as that there should be war, because
imperialism is opposed to the whole principle of the brotherhood
of man. The Utopians have no Atlantic Charters which make
glib promises of freedom and the right of self-government to all
peoples whilst reserving the right to maintain dominion over
millions of coloured people in the interests of exploiting their
labour and their land. The Utopians do not subscribe to the
humbug of dominating other races for their ‘ own good ’, because
of their ‘inability to rule themselves’; they have no sense of
‘trustee-ship’ and the ‘White Man’s Burden’, no sense of any
superiority in the possession of a white skin. They do not pay
lip-service to the brotherhood of man; they live it.
The abolition of frontiers and nationalisms, the acknowledg-
ment of the brotherhood of man, united in the one human race,
would still leave national characteristics of temperament, physi-
ology, language, art, architecture, food, mode of life, clothes —
variety in the human race is not disposed of by disposing of
national rivalries, antagonisms, prejudices; and without these
impedimenta to good relations the people of different countries
will be a great deal more interesting to each other and free to
gain from each other's cultures. In whatever country one hap-
pens to have been born, whatever language one speaks, what-
ever the colour of one’s skin, hair, eyes, whatever God one
believes in, or whether one belives in none, we are, as Morris
says, ‘all bent on the same enterprise, making the most of our
lives \
At present living presents innumerable problems — in short,
‘the problem of life is to live’; but in the Utopian world in
which men and women are free, living co-operatively, no one
coercing, or robbing, or exploiting anyone else, living presents
no major problems, and the small inevitable problems of human
relationships are — with the new spirit in the heart of man, and
the rationality of the world in which he lives — readily soluble.
It is not necessary, in the Utopian world, that every country
should order its affairs along the same lines, any more than it
is necessary that all housewives should run their homes along
the same lines. What is essential is the basic principle of the
brotherhood of man — with all that that implies of a non-capitalistic, non-imperialist, and, on the positive side, co-operative society
in each country. What suits the temperament of one country
will not in every case suit another. There may well be breeds
of people whose idea of Utopia is freedom to lie in the sun and
have the bananas fall ripe into their laps, and who prefer to go
naked and unashamed and live in rushhuts. Why should they
be required to conform to Western ideas of civilisation? And
though the complexity of Western civilisation calls for. some
organisation for harmonious living, some communities may
prefer the figurehead of a king or prince or president, or some
form of democratic government; some people like a disciplined
and ordered existence, to be well and truly governed — given
an acceptance of the principle of the brotherhood of man it is
immaterial what form of organisation the people of different
countries choose, though it seems likely that as men and women
developed in real freedom and the spirit of mutual aid, the idea
of any centralised government, however democratic, would
cease to appeal. Centralised government need not prevent
social equality, but it is open to the risk of developing into a
bureaucracy, and the beginning of bureaucracy is an end of
freedom . 1 **
The present writer inclines towards the anarcho-syndicalist
conception of organisation because it has been demonstrated
that it is workable in this complex modern civilisation, workable,
that is, for the common good, whereas William Morris’s conception might well involve a degree of de-industrialisation im-
possible in a world whose complexities Morris himself had not
foreseen. Discussing the general principles of an anarcho-
syndicalist system to replace centralised government, Herbert
Read, in his The Philosophy of Anarchism , 2 points out that something in the nature of a parliament of industry to adjust mutual
relations between the various collectives and to decide on general
questions of policy will be necessary, adding ‘but this parliament will be in no sense an administrative or executive body.
It will form a kind' of industrial diplomatic service, adjusting
relations and preserving peace, but possessing no legislative
powers and no privileged status. There might also be a corresponding body to represent the interests of the consumers, and
to arrange questions of price and distribution with the collectives.
It is interesting to compare this with Kropotkin’s conception
(in his Memoirs of a Revolutionist ) of a new society of equals
‘composed of a multitude of associations, federated for all the
purposes which require federation; trade federations for production of all sorts — agricultural, industrial, intellectual, artistic; communes for consumption, making provision for dwellings, gas works, supplies of food, sanitary arrangements, etc.;
federations of communes amongst themselves, and federations
of communes with trade organisations ; and finally, wider groups
covering the country, or several countries, composed of men
who collaborate for the satisfaction of such economic, intellectual, artistic, and moral needs as are not limited to a given
territory. All these will combine directly, by means of free
agreements between them, just as the railway companies or the
postal departments of various countries co-operate now, without
having a central railway or postal government, even though
the former are actuated by merely egoistic aims, and the latter
belong to different and often hostile States. . . . There will be
full freedom for the development of new forms of production,
invention, and organisation; individual initiative will be en-
couraged, and the tendency towards uniformity and centralisation will be discouraged’.
He adds what is important in an ideal commonwealth —
‘Moreover, this society will not be crystallised into certain unchangeable forms, but will continually modify its aspect, because
it will be a living, evolving organism; no need of government
will be felt, because free agreement and federation can take
its place in all those functions which governments consider as
theirs at the present time, and because, the causes of conflict
being reduced in number, those conflicts which may still arise
can be submitted to arbitration.’
Kropotkin’s great work, Mutual Aid , was — is — a challenge to
the dogma of the struggle for existence and the survival of
the fittest. In the introduction to the recently-published Pelican
edition of this work — which has become a classic — it is suggested
that ‘this book may yet help to make an epoch’. Certainly
any new form of human society must be based on this natural
law if it is to bring man anywhere near Utopia. Only through
this natural law is real freedom, equality, and brotherhood
possible. Outside of it is the chaos of perpetual struggle, perpetual war — a destroying of civilisation from within.
Before we leave this question of the government, or, more
accurately, the organisation of the ideal commonwealth, other
aspects of social life must be considered — aspects which are
either government-controlled at present or would be so controlled in Utopia,
Let us take first the question of social services — hospitals,
medical service, old age pensions. (The question of schools,
maternity clinics, creches, will be dealt with in' the chapters on
education, woman, and the child.)
In Utopia, where there is no private enterprise and no charity,
it follows that all hospitals are publicly owned. There is a
hospitals’ syndicate in the same way that there is an entertainments’ syndicate (in which all the cinemas and theatres would
be organised). The Sanitary Syndicate operating in Catalonia
during the two years of the anarcho-syndicalist regime has
already been mentioned. Medical aid was everywhere socialised
and made freely available to all; this socialisation included the
services of midwives and nurses, and dispensaries were set up
in every village. In Utopia, of course, the standard of the people’s
health is much higher than under the old bad class-system of
society. For one thing there is no such thing as malnutrition
in Utopia, and no such thing as slums or over-crowding.
Then, also, there is a more intelligent attitude to food; the
teaching of food-values is part of the education in the schools.
The Utopians fully understand what is meant by a ‘balanced’
meal, and appreciate its value, and therefore they do not eat
the wrong foods — foods which ruin their digestions and tempers.
Whether anyone is a vegetarian or not, or a teetotaller or not,
is purely a matter of personal preference, but in general the
Utopians eat little meat, and they know the use, without the
abuse, of wine and good home-brewed ale. Campanella makes
his Utopians ‘observe the difference between useful and harmful
foods, and for this they employ the science of medicine. They
always change their food. First they eat flesh, then fish, then
afterwards they go back to flesh, and nature is never incommoded or weakened’. Two meals a day was the average for
adult people, except the old, who had three, and growing youth
was allowed four. In addition to fish and flesh they ate butter,
honey, cheese, ‘garden herbs, and vegetables of all kinds’. As
regards drinking, they were ‘extremely moderate’ — that is to
say wine was never given to children under ten, ‘unless the
state of their health demands it’. After ten years old the children
took wine diluted with water, and the women also always took
it diluted, ‘but the old men of fifty and upwards use little or no
water’. In the summer they lived largely on fruits, and in the
autumn they ate grapes, ‘since they are given by God to remove
melancholy and sadness’, and in this way, by eating the most
healthy things, according to the time of the year, they lived
generally to be a hundred years old, but often reached two
hundred.
In More’s Utopia both dinner and supper began with the
reading of a lecture on morality, meals being taken communally
in large halls. Dinner was a meal to be disposed of as quickly
as possible, but supper was to be lingered over, since there was
nothing but sleep to be considered after it. They never supped
without music, and fruit was always served after meat; perfumes
were burned and perfumes and sweet waters sprinkled, ‘ in
short, they want nothing that may cheer up their spirits; they
give themselves a large allowance that way, and indulge themselves in all such pleasures as are attended with no inconvenience’.
It would seem certain, therefore, that they drank wine.
Morris, we know, liked to drink with his meals, and considered
water ‘unsuitable’, and good red wine flows as freely in his
Utopia as in G. K. Chesterton’s poems. His workmen at the
roadside have wine and game-pie in their luncheon-baskets.
No doubt spring-water and raw fruit and vegetables would
have been healthier, but the Utopian enjoys life, and who
would wish for longevity at the price of enjoyment? Those
joyless people who seem to spend their lives going round looking
for things not to do — not smoking, not drinking alcoholic drinks,
not indulging their sexual desires — have no place in the Utopian
scheme of things. There are people who have no taste for nicotine, and others unfortunate enough to have no taste for wines
— though it is doubtful whether this is indeed a matter of palate
but, rather, a matter of inhibition, and in Utopia, where
living is all joyous, there is no such inhibition, any more than
there is drunkenness. In Utopia the people understand very
well what Voltaire meant when he urged, ‘Use, do not abuse;
neither abstinence nor excess maketh a man happy’.
The Utopians understand dietetics and physiology, and so
know what liberties they can take with their digestive systems.
They manage to be healthy without being food-faddists. (There
comes to mind a picture in an American magazine of a weedy
little man being examined by a doctor, who is saying to him,
‘If I were you I should lay off the health-foods for a bit!’)
Gobbett, it may be remembered, maintained a robust physique
on a diet that consisted mainly of bread and meat and ale;
he declared emphatically, ‘No garden stuff!’ Which proves
nothing except that given a good constitution it is possible to
break all the rules with impunity. There is this vigorous picture
of Cobbett, and thqre are dyspeptic looking people who exist
on ‘garden stuff’, coarse bran, concoctions called ‘oat-biks’ or
something of the kind, and the whole, as likely as not, washed
down with ‘ pip-and-peel water’, or a dandelion coffee or herb
tea, all of which may be excessively healthy — and excessively is
probably the key-word — but which no one could call gay.
And the Utopians are nothing if not gay. They are gay in
their work and in their leisure; gay in their religion and gay
in love; gay in their attire and in their homes; they drink gaily
and eat gaily, recognising fully that, as Llewelyn Powys asserted,
‘To pour out water from a jug, to break bread, to open a bottle
of wine, are lordly offices ’.
They are long-lived because they do not wear themselves
out, as people quite literally do in our present conditions of
living, with the wear and tear of too much work and the wrong
kind of work — that is to say useless work, done only for the
profit-motive, or uncreative work, or mechanical or unpleasant
work which could be alleviated by a proper division of labour
and an intelligent use of the machine — and with worry over
making money, and the strain of ‘re-creations’ which in fact
are misnamed since they do not re-create. The Utopians, too,
eat and drink sensibly on the whole, live and work under healthy
conditions, and possess a natural zest for life; their attitude is
that it matters less how long you live than how much, and
so, ceasing to worry, they retain their youth for a long time,
and do not whittle their years away.
Utopia has little use for hospitals. In the Utopian world
it is only a matter of time — of the transition period from the
bad old times to the ideal conditions — before the scourges of
tuberculosis, cancer, venereal disease, influenza, and the com-
mon cold, die out, because the healthy organism is not suscep-
tible to disease . 1 * * The Utopians achieve health not merely
because of healthier living conditions and rational ideas about
fopd and recreation, but because happiness is also a contributory
factor to health, as it is to the preservation of youth. It is not
only our unhealthy living conditions today — too many hours
devoted to indoor work, too much indoor 4 recreation ’, ignorance
concerning food-values — that are conducive to ill-health today,
but our mental conditions; illness, today, is escape from responsibility for many people. 44 It is enough to make one ill!”
we say when we are worried and over- worked, and if the con-
ditions of strain continue we do, in fact, become ill; we break
down, as a machine breaks down, lacking oil, or misused. We
may call it being 4 run down’, or a 'nervous breakdown’, but
the truth is that our unconscious has found a way out for us,
an escape from the strain and difficulties. That is why the
'nervous breakdown’ is so seldom found amongst working-class
people; they can’t afford it; it is an essentially middle and
upper-class luxury. The nervous breakdown is unknown in
Utopia, for the good reason that there is no psychological need
for it.
Beyond the transition period in Utopia the aged present no
problem, for they have grown old in a healthy life and instead
of being frail and infirm are active members of the community
— if not as vigorous as in their youth — to the end. They are
not at three-score years and ten worn out with a life-time of
drudgery, or, on the other hand, self-destroyed by a flabby
parasitic existence and a gross self-indulgence. What we call
‘social services' are needed in our world because of the lack
of mutual aid in society itself. Our hospitals, alms-houses, sana-
toria, our infirmaries and workhouses and pensions schemes, are
society’s apologies for man’s inhumanity to man. Where there
is love — in the real sense of brotherhood — there is no need for
charity. Charity is merely the cold substitute for love. As Blake
said —
‘ Mercy could be no more
If there was nobody poor.’
Finally, in this matter of the organisation of affairs in Utopia
we must consider the part played by two very powerful factors
in life as we know it today — the press and the radio, whose
influence is such that they may be considered as an integral
part of the machinery of government.
In Utopia, of course, as there is no centralised government
there are no newspapers with any political axes to grind, and
newspapers are what their name implies, papers devoted to
news, in which is included news of new books and plays, con-
certs, films, art exhibitions, or any other diversion. There is no
news of divorces, rapes, murders, thefts. So far as the first is
concerned the Utopians do not consider that the arrangement
of their private lives calls for any legal regulations, or that
domestic re-arrangements are of the slightest interest to anyone
outside of the persons concerned. Such crimes as rape, murder,
theft, belong to the transitional period carried over from the pre-
ceding Dark Ages of injustice and each against all, but when
they occur, which is very rarely, and decreasingly, those guilty
of them are regarded as either mentally deranged or in some way
psychologically maladjusted to society, and are treated as sick
people, not as criminals, and sick people are not considered
news. The Utopians have delicacy in such matters.
The Utopian press has no power of any kind. It carries no
advertising — for the good reason that there is no such racket in
Utopia, since there is no competition. It has no policy nar-
rower than the imparting of news and the ventilating of views.
All publications and newspapers are controlled by a syndicate
of editors, writers, printers, and the syndicate periodically takes
a concensus of popular opinion and produces what is called
for — news-sheets, literary reviews, magazines devoted to articles
and fiction, others devoted to public opinion on every aspect
of social life, industrial, artistic, education, domestic. The
newspaper as we know it does not exist.
Bellamy visualised a number of papers and periodicals supported by the subscriptions of groups of people who demanded
them, and who elected editors. 'Supposing some of my neighbours or myself think we ought to have a newspaper reflecting
our opinions and devoted especially to our locality, trade, or
profession, we go about among the people till we get the names
of such a number that their annual subscriptions will meet the
cost of the paper, which is little or big according to the largeness
of the constituency.’
Actually the arrangements the Utopians make concerning
the production and distribution of their newspapers and periodicals are unimportant; the important thing is that freed from
private ownership and government control the press as a propaganda machine ceases to exist — its unscrupulousness, vulgarity,
sensationalism, become part of the fading history of the Dark
Ages of private enterprise and competitiveness, and the corruption inseparable from these things.
The radio syndicate in Utopia broadcasts news, when it is
found that there is a strong feeling that the mass of people
want to hear the day to day news as well as read it in their
daily news-sheets, but for the most part better uses are found
for radio, such as the relaying of concerts and interesting talks.
The broadest possible consensus of public opinion is taken from
time to time as to what is wanted and what not wanted. The
radio in Utopia is not the social nuisance it is in our world.
No Utopian would dream of allowing his radio to disturb the
peace of his neighbours; he would consider such conduct barbarian, anti-social, and calling for curative treatment.
The Utopians have been educated to a strong social sense;
they have discovered how to live harmoniously together; they
have learned the value of mutual considerateness, and look
back in amazement and horror on the days when each lived
for himself, grabbing what he could, and when existence was a
freely acknowledged 'struggle’. Freed from the artificialities of
governments Utopian humanity has reverted to the natural law
of co-operation, and each has become aware of his oneness
with each.
Reference was made in the previous chapter to a transitional
period in Utopia during which time there would be an un-
avoidable carry-over — of neuroses and false values and prejudices — from the bad old days of competitive life. This implies
a gradual re-education of the older generation, and some new
form of education for the generation that would grow up under
the changed conditions. It is necessary to consider, therefore,
what we mean, ideally, by education.
At present what we understand by education is the acquisition
of knowledge — book-learning — scholarship; we mean examinations and degrees; we mean culture. Where we go wrong, of
course, is in the confusing of education with culture. We assume
that an educated person — that is to say a person who has received
a good deal of schooling — is a cultured person, and that a
person we recognise as cultured is necessarily an educated person,
and then, upsetting this assumption we come up against the
fact that the ability to pass examinations and acquire degrees,
whilst constituting education as we understand it, does not
necessarily constitute culture, and that the cultured person may
be, in fact very oft£n is, quite uneducated in any sense of having
received a good deal of schooling. Shakespeare, A. S. Neill
has reminded us , 1 had ‘little Latin and less Greek’, and Einstein
appears to have displayed no brilliance at school. Education,
as we at present understand it, is a putting in; we are con-
sidered educated according to the amount of knowledge crammed
into us, and the more years devoted to this stuffing with facts
the better we are considered to be educated — the fallacy of
which is self-evident. Our young men and women come down
from their universities full of learning, but what really do they
know — of any real value in the business of living ? 2 ‘“Educated”
men,’ says A. S. Neill , 3 ‘are not more moral or more intelligent
than other men; ten men from the Miners’ Union would be as
intelligent as ten men from the National Union of Teachers
on a committee appointed to deal with an important subject —
say — the prevention of war or the reform of our criminal code.
If subjects were not taught in schools university training would
confine itself to real practical subjects in law and medicine and
science. Outside of the professions an academic training is
useless, possibly dangerous .* 1 Neill himself, who is an M.A.,
declares that there are a thousand classics he has never read,
that he knows nothing of the Old Masters in painting, and
nothing of botany, astronomy, logic, or Greek history. He
observes that Charlie Chaplin, Stalin, Einstein, are effective in
their several spheres without necessarily being able to pass
the London Matric. ...
Neill does not deny the importance of education; on the
contrary he asserts that it is all-important, that it is every-
thing, but by education he understands creation, not learning.
He insists that education is a drawing out, not a putting
in; not an absorption of facts, but a release of creative
energy.
Long before the modern ‘free school' idea developed
through the application of the theories of A. S. Neill and Bertrand
Russell — who learned much from Neill, as Neill did from Homer
Lane — William Morris saw the futility of the orthodox educational
system. He makes the Utopian who does all the explaining in
his News from Nowhere protest that he does not see how the
word ‘school’ can have anything to do with children. There
can be a school of hearing, he says, or a school of painting
. . . and as to the word ‘education’, he knows that it must
come from the Latin educere , meaning to lead out , but as commonly used ‘I have never met anybody who could give me a
clear explanation of what it means’. Morris made it clear that
he had no use for education in the sense of a system of teaching.
Schools disappeared along with the Houses of Parliament in
his Utopia, but the children all knew, from an early age, a
great many things; they could all swim and ride, cook, mow,
carpenter, thatch, and as to book-learning, ‘ Most children,
seeing books lying about, manage to read by the time they
are four years old’, and they picked up other languages, Welsh,
Irish, French, German, from their elders sometimes even before
they could read. As a rule the children did little reading, except
for a few storybooks, till they were about fifteen. ‘We don’t
encourage bookishness/ Morris makes his Utopian mouthpiece
explain, ‘though you will find some children who will take to
books early; which perhaps is not good for them; but it’s no
use thwarting them; and very often it doesn’t last long with
them, and they find their level before they are twenty years
old. You see, children are mostly given to imitating their elders,
and when they see most people about them engaged in genuinely
amusing work, like house-building and street-paving, and
gardening, and the like, that is what they want to be doing;
so I don’t think,’ he concludes, ‘that we need fear having too
many book-learned men.’
Morris realised, in short, that true education is creativeness
— release into happy creative activity according to temperament
and ability. He saw that the whole theory of so-called education
was ‘to shove a little information into a child, even if it were
by means of torture, and accompanied by twaddle which it
was well known was of no use’, and this theory expounded by
Morris in the nineteenth century still holds today. Everything
which Morris wrote of the futility of enforced school-subjects
could have been written by A. S. Neill today. Morris regarded
the thrusting of children into schools when they reached a
certain age, and regardless of their varying faculties and dispositions, as damaging, an ignoring of mental and bodily growth
which only the rebellious in spirit could survive. In Utopia,
where the children are allowed to develop freely and naturally,
to learn by doing, all information ‘lies ready to each one’s hand
when his own inclinations impel him to seek it’, and thus people
have time to grow, and acquire in due course only that informa-
tion which can serve their development as human beings, which
is of real use to them in the business of living. In his essay
How We Live and How We Might Live , Morris speaks of * educating
people to a sense of their real capacities as men’. He does not
enter into any details, either there or in his Utopia, as to how
the information people will seek when they are ready for it
shall be made available; it is rather loosely implied that there
will always be people available to whom those in search of
technical knowledge — how to weave or thatch, for example,
or bookish knowledge, such as history or literature — will be
able to turn, and there are references to libraries. In his News
from Nowhere Oxford had ‘reverted’ from eighteenth century
‘commercialism ’ to being a centre of ‘real learning — knowledge
cultivated for its own sake — the Art of Knowledge, in short’.
But on the whole books were held to be secondary to physical
activity. Impatiently dismissing her grandfather’s preoccupation
with books, a young girl protests that ‘It is the world we live
in which interests us; the world of which we are a part’. Books,
she declares, ‘were well enough for times when intelligent people
had but little else in which they could take pleasure’.
That is sound enough, in general principle; living is doing,
not reading, but Morris, since he allowed Oxford to revert to
being a real centre of learning, probably did not intend his
young girl’s anti-book tirade to be taken too literally. There
is a distillation of poetry and wisdom in books which it would
be foolish to deny — which Morris himself, maker of beautiful
books, as well as writer, certainly would not deny.
In Utopia it goes without saying that there are educational
facilities — using the word educational in the broadest sense —
available to all who seek them. In free schools children acquire
early a sense of community life, with its natural discipline from
within, not, as in the orthodox schools of our world, from adult
authority artificially imposed from above. These schools are
self-governing, the rules and the penalties for breaking them
determined by the children themselves, a system which A. S.
Neill and others — notably Bertrand Russell — who have followed
in his footsteps, have found to be the only practical one upon
which a really free school can be run. You cannot have progression unless children feel completely free to govern their own
social life, Neill writes, in That Dreadful School , 1 in the chapter
on self-government, ‘The educational value of practical civics
cannot be over-emphasised. The child realises the value of self-
government. . . . It is the broad outlook that free children
acquire that makes self-government so important. Their laws
deal with essentials , not appearances .’ Children and staff are co-
equal in the school government, and Neill observes that the
children’s loyalty to their own democracy is ‘an amazing thing.
It has no fear in it and no resentment. I have seen a boy go
through some long trial for some anti-social act; I have seen
him sentenced . . . and then the next case would come on.
The chairman elects a new jury for each trial, and as often
as not the boy who has just been sentenced is elected as a jury-
man. The sense of justice that children have has never ceased
to make me marvel. And their administrative ability is great.
As an education self-government is something of infinite value . I have
often heard sensible speeches from children who could not read
nor write’.
Those brief sentences — italicised by the present writer — contain the crux of the whole matter. Through self-government
children learn by experience, by doing; they learn the first
essential, the adjustment of their individual egos to society.
Thousands of people highly-educated in the conventional sense,
remain all their lives maladjusted to society, unhappy, neurotic,
even anti-social. What does education mean if it does not mean
learning how to live ?
Very well, then, from the age of about five the child in Utopia
begins to learn adjustment to communal living through a free
school. The child probably remains at this school until it is
about fifteen, by which time it begins to have some idea of
what it wants to do with its life. There is no compulsion about
attendance at lessons in the free school, but there is every facility
for creative outlet; there are workshops, there are painting
materials, there are hand-looms, potters 5 wheels, clay for model-
ling, there is — and this is very important — a theatre in which
the children can produce and act their own plays. There are
competent adults and older children to guide and instruct when
guidance and instruction are needed, but, and again this is
important, the guides and instructors are careful to avoid robbing
the children of responsibility and initiative. The children learn
by experience that if they lose or spoil tools, or damage machines,
it is they themselves who are the losers; without coercion from
moralising adults they learn a natural respect for the tools and
machines through which they are able to make things. Presently
the older children will begin to want to learn to read and write,
and this they will learn to do very quickly, coming to it with
minds that have not been cluttered up beforehand with useless
knowledge; they will learn quickly, also, because they want to
learn. (Neill reports cases in his school of children who work
overtime doing mathematics for fun, because they are interested,
having come to it out of that interest. ‘Children, like adults,
Neill says, ‘learn what they want to learn in life, but all the
prize-giving and marks and exams sidetrack the personality.
Only pedants can claim that learning from books is education.
Books are the least important apparatus in a school. All that
any child needs is the Three R’s; the rest should be tools and
clay and sports and theatres and paints . . . and freedom.
Round about fifteen the child probably begins to tire a little
of running wild in an orgy of pre-adolescent physical energy.
The tendencies of childhood have crystallised into a definite
bent; one child wants to paint, another is musical, another
wants to be a farmer or an engineer or an engine-driver; one
child has a passion for motor-cars; another for horses. It is
then time for the second stage of education to begin — the tech-
nical stage; the child then goes to an engineering institute, or
an academy of music or dramatic art, or an agricultural col-
lege, or an equestrian training school, or an art school, as the
case may be. If he wants to join the staff of a newspaper he
will attend a school to learn shorthand and typewriting and
something about typesetting, block-making, proof-reading, and,
because the standard of journalism in Utopia is very high,
something about the use of language. But if he wants to be a
writer he will be told to keep away from all schools, but run
away and fall in love and suffer and break his heart and mix
with all manner of people, because nothing else can help him,
his raw material being experience — the stuff of life itself. There
would be neither encouragement nor assistance, on the principle
that in this way only people with a genuine gift for writing would
persist — that they persisted in the face of difficulty and discouragement would prove their authenticity; those who merely
wanted to write for the vanity of seeing their names in print,
and who saw in it an easy way to make a living, would fall by
the wayside. Would-be writers would have to earn their livings
in some other way until such time as they had established themselves as writers; there would be no subsidising of ‘the artist’,
no setting him aside as something privileged and apart, for, as
Eric Gill was never tired of insisting, ‘the artist is not a special
kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist ’. In
Utopia, ability to write a good poem novel is not held in
higher esteem than ability to make a good chair or cook a good
dinner.
Foreign travel, so specially valuable to the writer, is, of course,
a part of Utopian education; parties of children are taken abroad
during the summer months, each year to a different country,
and those who like winter sports are taken in the winter months
as well. The object of these parties is not to drag the children
round the museums and art galleries of other countries — though
they are obviously free to visit them if they want to — but to
help them to acquire other languages, and to make them international in outlook, give them a sense of the brotherhood of
man independent of colour and language. In* the schools, too,
there will be both staff and children not merely of different
nationality but of different colour. The dreadful insularity —
to which the English are, more than any other nation, addicted
— and which makes a foreigner seem odd, if not downright
‘funny’, is completely unknown in Utopia. That people should
speak a different language, have a different coloured skin, wear
different clothes, have different customs, seems no odder to
the Utopian child than that some people are short and some
tall, some fair and some dark.
In Utopia an university city does not consist of a number of
colleges with nothing to choose between them except from the
point of view of social snobbery and family tradition; students
select their colleges according to what they want to study —
medicine, science, engineering, law, music, architecture, or
whatever it is.
Perhaps you will protest that this is all very well for people
of superior brains and special artistic abilities, for the specialists —
the artists, engineers, scientists, doctors, and , so on — but what
about the people of inferior brains, the people whose intelligence
does not fit them to be anything but hewers of wood and drawers
of water, the machine-tenders, the pick-and-shovel brigades,
the people to whom will fall all the mechanical, non-creative
jobs that will be necessary even in Utopia — is their education to
finish at fifteen?
Obviously a person’s education finishes when he or she has
no use for further education. In our present society a great
many people pass on to universities with nothing whatsoever
rotten and desperate civilization. All we can fairly do is to prescribe definite acquire-
ments as cjualifications for citizenship in general, with further specific qualifications
for professional employments; and to secure them, not by the ridiculous method of
inflicting artificial injuries on the persons who have not yet mastered them, but
to gain from them, and for whom it is all a waste of their time
and their parents’ money; other people who could gain some-
thing from this extension of education are debarred from doing
so for economic reasons. In Utopia everyone takes what they
want from the educational facilities which are freely and equally
available to all.
As the new generation grows up in Utopia there cease to be
people only fit to tend machines, because — to borrow from
the Quakers — there is ‘that of God’ in every human being, in
everyone that germ of creativeness which it is the function of
education to bring out — and which Utopian education brings
out. In Utopia, too, all dull and mechanical labour — which is
in any case minimised to the utmost — is divided up, and that
which cannot be done by machine is shared out by the whole
community, so that there is no section of the community doing
deadly or unpleasant work all the time. But all this will be
discussed when we come to consider the whole question of
work and leisure.
Education in Utopia, is, then, first of all a drawing of creativeness, the direction of childhood’s energy into creative — as opposed
to destructive — channels, and through this the discovery of each
child’s natural bent; in adolescence, or whenever the child is
ready for it, comes the groundwork of more specialised education,
the Three R’s, and after that the course of specialisation to
equip the young person to take his or her place as a useful
member of society. William Morris wanted that those who had
the capacity should be so trained that they could serve the community in more than one way. He wanted that education should
be liberal, in the broadest sense. Because a man’s trade is that
of shoemaker, for example, is no reason, he urged, why he
should settle down to make shoes in one place all his life; it
should be possible for him to go off and ‘make shoes in Rome,
say for three months, and to come back with new ideas of building, gathered from the sight of the works of past ages, amongst
other things which would perhaps be of service in Loudon’.
It is obvious that even in Utopia there must be degrees of
ability; there will always be the exceptional people who can
paint or compose or write, or all three, and who can also build
walls, cook excellent meals, repair burst pipes, into the bargain.
There will always be the geniuses and the near-geniuses; the
brilliant and versatile people; and the people whose minds are
by the natural co-operation of self-respect from within with social respect from
without.’ slow and dull and whose standard of intelligence is low; but in
Utopia is a place for them all. You do not need a brilliant,
versatile mind to do good wood-carving or lay bricks well, and
both these are very useful trades. And you may be intellectually
brilliant and a perfect fool at any manual task. The function of
Utopian education is to discover ‘the special kind of artist’ in
each human being, and the good poet is not held in greater
esteem than the good shoemaker, but each is appreciated for
the quality of his work, each recognised as a craftsman in his
own particular line; no one sneers at the shoemaker for not
knowing the difference between a ballad and a ballade, and not
caring, nor at the poet because he cannot drive a nail into a
wall without hitting his thumb. Each contributes his own particular art to society in return for what he takes from it, in
accordance with the communistic principle of from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs.
Bellamy was of the opinion that in Utopia the finest education
should be lavished on the dullest and coarsest members of the
community, on the principle that just as poor land needs most
manuring so everything possible must be done to fertilise poor
minds into productiveness. 'The naturally refined and intellectual can better dispense with aids to culture than those less
fortunate in natural endowments’. He would have the dullards
educated so that every man might have for neighbours 'intelligent, companionable persons’, instead of, as at present, intelligent, cultured people up to their necks, ‘as in a nauseous bog’
in mass stupidity and brutishness. He believed that brutishness
in human beings could be eliminated. In his Utopia, ‘All have
some inklings of the humanities,’ he wrote, ‘some appreciation
of the things of the mind, and an admiration for the still higher
culture of which they have fallen short. They have become
capable of receiving and imparting, in various degrees, but all
in some measure, the pleasures and inspirations of a refined
social life.’
H. G. Wells, in his Modern Utopia , on the other hand, regards
about three per cent of children as ‘ unteachable ’ ; these finish
their schooling period at fourteen; ‘the res go on to a college
or upper school’, from which they pass out at eighteen. ‘There
are several different college courses, but one or other must be
followed, and a satisfactory examination passed at the end —
perhaps io per cent fail — and the Rule requires that the candidate for the samurai must have passed.’
In specialised training — such as a medical course, or an
engineering or navigation course — the passing of examinations
as proof of qualification to practise as a doctor or as an engineer
or navigator has, obviously, everything to be said for it, since
no one can be allowed to kill a patient or wreck a bridge or a
ship, but in general Utopia has little use for examinations,
certainly not as a test of education. The citizens of Utopia
acquire such culture as their temperaments demand and their
minds are capable of; they know that it is not something that
can be taught. In a general sense they are all cultured, because
their educational and social system permits every man and
every woman to express the artist in him or herself, and the
sense of brotherhood which comes from their co-operative
living gives them that gentleness and considerateness we associate
with cultured people. Then, too, they have all travelled, than
which there is no more valuable form of education, and they
have gone to other countries not critically, with a false sense
of natural superiority, as people go now, but in this same spirit
of brotherhood — the spirit which dominates their lives and maces
their Utopia possible.
Herbert Read 1 contends that ‘culture is a natural growth —
that if a society has a plenitude of freedom and all the economic
essentials of a democratic order, then culture will be added
without any excessive striving after it. It will come as naturally
as the fruit to the well-planted tree’. He adds that he ‘cannot
conceive education as a training in so many separate subjects.
Education is integral; it is the encouragement of the growth
of the whole man, the complete man. It follows that it is not
entirely, nor even mainly, an affair of book learning, for that
is only the education of one part of our nature — the part of
the mind which deals with concepts and abstractions’. For the
child he contends that education should be the development
first of sensibility ; the child should learn how to use his senses —
how, to see, touch, listen — and from that go on to learn the
application of his knowledge of these faculties. He supports
Eric Gill’s contention that every man is an artist, and that no
special honour is due to anyone of any special sensibility, since
it is all an accident of birth, and the exercise of his gift is what
he owes to the society in which he lives.
Much attention is given to physical culture in the schools
in Bellamy’s Utopia. ‘The faculty of education is held to the
same responsibility for the bodies as for the minds of its charges.
The highest possible physical, as well as mental, development
of every one is the double object of a curriculum which lasts
from the age of six to that of twenty-one.’ Morris also attaches
importance to the standard of physical fitness of his Utopians,
but it is clear that their healthiness is to be attributed to their
happy, healthy lives, the riding, swimming, camping-out, running
wild, carried over into an adulthood of rational living and joy
in work, which is more natural than any set 'physical culture’
and therefore to be preferred. It should be obvious that an
education is incomplete if it does not impart both a knowledge
of the body’s functions, an appreciation of the miraculousness
of those functions, and an intelligent interest in the keeping of
the whole fine, delicate mechanism in good running order.
In the world today, even amongst so-called educated people,
the mass ignorance of elementary physiology and hygiene is
appalling. It is quite common to find women even now who
seriously believe that it is harmful to bath during menstruation,
who regard a vaginal douche as something ‘immoral’ and
indecent, and whose ignorance of their own anatomy and
functions deprives them of sexual satisfaction and makes, it
impossible for them to enlighten their no less ignorant partners.
The same dismal ignorance of the body and its functions
prevails apart from sex, and is by no means confined to the
working-classes. The popular idea of the stomach appears to
be of a sack immediately below the neck, and few people appear
to know the functions of their liver or kidneys, or where they are
located. The ignorance of food values is all part of this ignorance
concerning the body. The superstition that not to eat for a
day or two is to become weak is widely held, so that food must
be forced down even when it should be obvious that the whole
body is in revolt against food and only asks to be left alone.
It is astonishing, when one considers the amount of useless
information stuffed into children at school that these two really
important subjects, knowledge of and care of the body, and
its proper nutriment, should be so grossly neglected in civilised
society. In Utopia there is, of course, no question of ‘teaching’
children ‘the facts of life’ ; any more than of ‘ teaching ’ them
that rain comes from the sky and that birds lay eggs; there is
no more mystery about human and animal birth than the
emergence of any other form of life from eggs or spores or
spawn. There are certain obvious things that a child grows
up with knowledge of, and the knowledge of sex in relation to
birth is acquired quite simply and naturally against this background of elementary knowledge. The knowledge of physiology is not quite so simply acquired, as a certain amount of
explanation is necessary, but it is a subject of tremendous interest
to adolescents, and anatomy, the circulation of the blood, the
function and arrangement of the various organs — all is very
readily explained with the aid of charts. A certain amount is
taught in schools today, but not nearly enough, and it always
balks at sexual physiology . . . the aspect in which adolescents
are most deeply interested! In Utopia, as the young people
already have their background of knowledge of birth* and sex,
the imparting of this physiological knowledge presents no embarrassments or difficulties.
The knowledge of food values — in what foods are found
protein, starch, salts, sugar, fats, and knowledge of acids and
alkalis, the extent to which the body needs these things — fol-
lows on naturally from the study of physiology. Ignorance
of food values, and of what the body needs, and of how to
prepare food to the best advantage, so that it is palatable with-
out losing its essential properties, is responsible for the prevalence
of digestive troubles amongst civilised peoples. It is a great
deal more important to know what constitutes a balanced meal
and how to prepare it than to know historical dates and how
to do long division. And how many housewives have the slightest
idea of what constitutes a balanced meal? Very few English
housewives, certainly. It takes a world war and persistent
Ministry of Food propaganda to teach them anything so elementary as how to cook green vegetables without losing their goodness
— hitherto it had been an old English custom to boil all the
goodness out of them, and then throw that goodness down the
sink and serve up the sodden mass left behind... which, of
course, is not worth eating, since it is utterly devoid of food-
value and is tasteless into the bargain. The two major crimes
in the English kitchen are the boiling of vegetables and the
addiction to the frying-pan.
There is little doubt that the ideal diet is vegetarian, and
uncooked at that. Ideal, that is, from the point of view of
health and longevity. In Utopia, however, enjoyment of life
is considered of more importance than longevity, and not many
people with a zest for life feel that living to be two hundred
has any value if it means the sacrifice of gastronomic pleasures.
If one is never to eat, drink and be merry, they ask, what is
the point of living so long?
Nowhere in Mr. Wells’s Utopian World State is meat eaten —
not because meat-eating is condemned on dietary or hygienic
grounds, but from a sense of refinement concerning ‘ the horrible
flayed carcases of brutes dripping with blood No such squeamishness is felt over the bleeding gills of the corpses of fishes, and
no reference is made to the slaughter of game.
In general the Utopians are of the opinion that meat is a gross
and unhealthy food, and that fruit, vegetables, nuts, are cleaner
and healthier, but since the essence of the Utopian conception
of living is the maximum of individual freedom consistent with
the avoidance of anti-social conduct, there is, obviously, no
coercion in this matter. The more they learn about dietetics
and the human body the more the Utopians move towards
rationality in the matter of food as in all else. Even so, with
their fully developed, uninhibited — thanks to a real education
— zest for living they occasionally abandon the rational in favour
of enjoyment. Their education is too liberal to permit them to
be doctrinaire.
The Government White Paper on Education Reconstruction
issued in 1943 asserts that ‘there has been a very general wish,
not confined to representatives of the Churches, that religious
education should be given a more defined place in the life
and work of the schools, springing from the desire to revive the
spiritual and personal values in our society and in our national
tradition. The Church, the family, the local community and
the teacher — all have their part to play in imparting religious
instruction to the young’. The old-established rights of con-
science, 'however, are to remain inviolate, and ‘it will be open
to the parent to withdraw his child from all or any form of
religious worship or instruction’.
Probably a sure way of making the child highly interested in
this ‘religious instruction’ is for the parent to put the verboten
on it! That the child might be left alone to determine its own
religious beliefs, if any, when it is old enough to be interested
in such things, doesn't seem to occur to any of the educational
planners. All this ‘educational reconstruction’ is planned on
the basis of the existing system of grammar schools, public
schools, secondary schools, universities. It presupposes the con-
tinuance of the Church and State, of the old class system of
society. Common Wealth criticisms of the government’s proposals ignore the question of religious instruction. The W.E.A.
evades the issue. Nothing is to be hoped for from within the
existing framework; various reforms will no doubt be effected —
more nursery schools opened, the school-leaving age raised —
if indeed that is a reform — grants, exhibitions and scholarships
extended, along with facilities for adult education, and so on,
but basically it will all remain ‘the mixture as before’. The
W.’E.A. report offers a hint of vision in its declaration that
‘social judgment ought to be one of the products of a university
education. . . . The gap between academic and social thinking
must be bridged, not by sacrificing the objectivity of university
study, but by learning to apply it in a wider field of knowledge
and social experience’. The report asserts that ‘ability to profit
should be the sole test for admission to a university, as to all
types of school’. That, of course, is the Utopian contention.
To what other ends should the schools and universities — rationally — exist, other than to serve those who can profit by what
they have to offer? At present the value of what they have to
offer is open to question, and it is taken for granted that a long
and expensive education is a good education. In Utopia the
one thing that is taken for granted is that you cannot pour
human personality — in all its infinite variety — into a standardised
mould called education, leave it to cool, and turn it out all
set. The Utopians know that education in the real sense is
not a pouring in but a bringing out. Thus in Utopia education
brings out the craftsman in one man, the poet in another, and
in yet a third both the craftsman and the poet.
In Utopia all the things that so exercise the educational
planners in the world today cease to exist as problems. When
every form of educational facility, whether technical or academic,
is free to all who can profit by it, there is obviously no need
for grants or scholarships; when education itself is free, in the
sense of there being no compulsion for a child to learn what it
is not interested in, there is obviously no question of punishment,
corporal or otherwise. (The Utopians are, anyhow, far too civilised
to contemplate anything so barbarous as corporal punishment;
as to capital punishment, it is only with difficulty that they can
bring themselves to believe that it ever existed, and but for the
undoubted authenticity of their historical records would not
do so.) That only the most suitable buildings will be used for
schools goes without saying— and by suitable they understand
more than scientifically constructed from the point of view of
admitting the maximum of sunshine and air, and being sur-
rounded by gardens and fields; they also understand by ‘suitable* congenial from the child’s point of view — friendly, happy
looking buildings, that is to say. The Utopians, looking through
the old records, cannot but be appalled at the number of forbidding-looking buildings in which the children and young
people of our world were expected to acquire learning, and will
readily understand why the stuffing process known to us as
education had to be made compulsory...
There are obviously certain things that people living in a
civilised society must know; it is clear that they must know
how to read and write and do simple arithmetic; they must
know the technique of their trade or profession. This strictly
utilitarian education is, as we have seen, easily acquired, with-
out any coercion, in freedom. You may then say, quite reasonably,
But education is something more than the utilitarian
acquisition of useful knowledge; what of the ethical and cultural
aspects? If in Utopia there is to be no teaching of religion,
how is your happy, healthy, uninhibited child to develop into
something more than a noble savage? The answer to this is
that you cannot teach a child morality — taking the word in
its broadest sense — any more than you can teach it culture.
Telling a child ‘this is wrong, this is right; this is bad, this is
good* is completely useless; the child may accept these adult
valuations, but the acceptance will not prevent it doing the
‘bad’ things if to do so suits its purpose, and not doing the ‘good*
things. All that these valuations, imposed from without, authoritatively, from teacher or parent, achieve is the securing of a sense of
guilt, and perhaps fear as well, in connection with certain
things. Similarly, you can set a child to read Shakespeare and
listen to Beethoven without bringing it anywhere near an appreciation of Shakespeare or Beethoven. In Utopia you do not
try to teach children or young people that the competitive way
of life is bad and the co-operative way good, any more than
you hang Da Vinci reproductions above their beds in the hope
of guiding their cultural tastes. Through its experience of self-
government at school it learns the essential give-and-take of
communal life; it does not have to be 'taught' that you cannot
steal another person’s goods or hit people over the head if they
don’t do as you want them to do; it learns this in the only way
that is of any use — through experience. Its first lessons in co-
operation, in the natural law of mutual aid, it learns at school
— not taught by any teacher, but through the rhythm of the
communal life of the school, the microcosm of the wider world.
Its ethics are evolved out of its experience. To insist that a
child is a natural barbarian and must be taught to be good, is
to insist on the idea of Original Sin; but belief in the original
goodness of the human being, that it is born good but made
‘bad’ by moral training and artificial discipline, is a basic
principle of Utopian education. As to culture, the Utopian is
no more concerned to attempt to teach it than to attempt to
teach morality; he knows that it is something acquired through
sensibility, and the development of sensibility is all that part
of Utopian education which is not utilitarian. In the real sense
the Utopian’s education goes on all his life, and only properly
begins when the utilitarian part ends.
That in Utopia all schools are co-educational should go with-
out saying. In a rational society anything else would seem
ridiculous. As to whether the elementary schools — that is to
say the schools the children attend from about five until adolescence, when they are ready to learn the rudiments of education,
the Three R’s, and pass on to technical training — are day-
schools or boarding-schools, there must be both, though as
time goes on it is probable that there will be an increased demand
for boarding-schools, both the parents and the children preferring
it, since the children living a great part of the time away from
home affords both parents and children greater freedom. But
where there is a strong family feeling, and the children are better
living at home, then they will attend the day-schools. This
question of the home and family we will consider later.
At this point you perhaps protest, “But if there is no compulsion, what happens if a child does not want to attend school
of any kind, and the parents are not concerned to persuade
him?” It is quite simple. In that case the child does not attend
any school. As he becomes adolescent he may wish to acquire
some learning. Or he may develop school-going friends and
wish to attend school because they do. But if he doesn’t he is
nevertheless learning all the time, his natural child’s creativeness
working in happy alliance with his freedom. No Utopian parent
would think of using that moral coercion we call ‘persuasion’.
By the time he reaches adolescence the child grows tired of
running wild, and begins to identify himself with grown-ups;
he perceives the usefulness of knowing how to read and write
and add, and there is probably some special thing he wants to
learn — such as how to drive a train or build a bridge or a house.
It is all very much simpler than our professional educationists
would have us believe.
Years ago, long before the second world-war, with all the
talk of educational reconstruction in the brave new world to
follow — educational reconstruction in terms of raising the school-
leaving age, part-time compulsory education for young people
up to eighteen, the strengthening of religious influence in the
school — Bernard Shaw wrote , 1 ‘Soon everybody will be schooled
.mentally and physically, from the cradle to the end of the term
of adult compulsory military service, and finally of compulsory
civil service lasting until the age of superannuation. Always
more schooling, more compulsion ’. It might well have been
written today. He adds, significantly, ‘We must reconcile education with liberty’. This can only be achieved through an entirely
new conception of education — the conception of education as
liberation from within, as opposed to imposition from without,
which is the present conception. Utopian education is education
through freedom; it is as natural as the law which welds the
community into an harmonious whole. Through it men cortie
to the “bread and roses” of a balanced life.
Education as it is popularly understood today gives neither.
That is to say it neither equips young people to earn their bread,
nor does it given them that culture they seek. When they leave
their public schools, their high schools, their secondary schools,
their universities they are already well on into their teens; if
they have gone on to the universities they are already in their
twenties; a great deal of money has been spent on their ‘educa-
tion’, and they are completely unequipped to earn their livings.
The public school boy is fit for nothing except to pass on to a
university; the girl as often as not forgets all her expensive
schooling and gets down to realities by taking a commercial
course and learning shorthand and typing, and book-keeping —
which she could have done when she finished with her elementary
education at fourteen or fifteen. The superstition that there is
some particular virtue attaching to the passing of the examina-
tion commonly known as ‘Matric’ dies hard. Whereas, in hard
fact, what the potential employer wants to know is not ‘What
exams have you passed?’ but ‘What can you do?’ And the more
highly educated the young thing the less can the wretched
creature do. . . .
All that examinations prove is how much learning has been
absorbed; and learning is one thing, and education is quite
another. The acquisition of learning is purely an intellectual
feat; it is sterile, non-creative. It is not; education at all as the
Utopians understand the term. A. S. Neill writes in his Problem
Parent , ‘I am fairly certain that the school of the future will
be my workshop on a larger scale. Children will learn and
make what interests them, and the teachers will be people who
stand by to help in technical difficulties’. In Utopia, as we
have seen, education is basically technical, an affair of the
workshop — be it laboratory, studio, dissecting room, or work-
shop as ordinarily understood — and the rest, what is commonly
called ‘ culture ’, a matter of sensibility, of assimilation. Through
what the Utopians understand by education youpg people ‘find’
themselves; as surely as in the morass of what is called education
today they can only lose themselves.
The extent to which they do lose themselves is indicated by
their lack of self-sufficiency, their dependence on ready-made
distractions for their leisure hours — which in the modern world
means dependence on the radio and the cinema; particularly
the latter. If all the cinemas were suddenly to close, most of the
present generation of young people would simply not know
how to employ their leisure; they would be thrown on their
owfi resources — which their so-called education has not shown
them how to develop. In the summer they would restlessly
promenade the streets, which many of them do even with the
cinemas available; in the winter they would know of nothing
better to do than turn on the radio — which would be a slight
improvement on ‘going to the pictures’, for intelligent talks and
good music are sometimes to be heard even on the radio in
England and America; whereas the number of films which
are not rubbishy and shoddy, when not downright pernicious
in their falsity, are so rare as to be for all practical purposes
non-existent. If there could be no radio — with its ready-made
music and entertainment — and no cinemas, for a year, our
young people might in that time learn to amuse themselves,
learn to make their own music (in how many ordinary working-
class and middle-class homes today is there a piano or a violin
or even a reed pipe?) and sing real songs, and discover the
pleasure of handicrafts — and of intelligent conversation with a
few friends gathered round the fireside. They would be cured
of that restlessness which is the result of lack of any inner
reserves. They would learn to use their imaginations, and their
hands.
The cinema has its place in Utopia — a useful and honourable
place, both educationally and as entertainment. The film’s
potentiality as art we will consider later; we are here concerned
with its educational value. Its potentialities in this field are
immense, and in Utopia they are fully recognised and developed.
The film can show the growth of plants, the opening of buds,
the evolution of the embryo in the egg; it can show, close-up
and in slow-motion, the movements of birds, insects, beasts;
it can reveal to the child all the kingdoms of creation, and the
wonders thereof. Books and lectures can only give the bare
biological and botanical facts; these living pictures can actually
present it, visually, to the child’s eager, questioning mind.
In Utopia, therefore, as much importance is attached to the
Children’s Cinema, as to the Children’s Theatre. The Children’s
Theatre stimulates the child’s creativeness; the Children’s Cinema
stimulates his imagination. The film can take the child deep
down under the sea and high up into the heavens; it can teach
him biology, botany, geography, as no textbook and no lesson
by word-of-mouth ever could. It can bring history and legend
to life, and thrilling, romantic life at that. Adults are often to
be found in the Children’s Cinema in Utopia, as fascinated as
the children by the screen’s portrayal of the miracle and mystery
of life. Children are, of course, equally to be seen in the general
cinemas; there is no segregation of children and adults, no
dividing of films into categories, as in our world, for ‘Adults
Only’, and ‘Universal’. But pre-adolescent children are not
interested in love-stories and adult problems, and in Utopia,
therefore, their own cinema provides them with alternatives,
showing, in addition to educational films, films of special appeal
to children — cartoons of the Mickey Mouse variety, comedies
on robust Laurel-and-Hardy lines, screen-plays of adventure
and fantasy written by the children themselves, and, carried
over from the old world, some of the early Chaplin films. The
children are encouraged to notify the directors of their local
cinema of their requirements, also their criticisms, and these
local boards are composed of children and young people, who,
without interference from adults, discuss and decide upon future
programmes and policies.
But though both children and grown-ups in Utopia like to
go occasionally to the cinema, as to the theatre, they are by
no means dependent on either for their amusements — their
education, having developed their resourcefulness, prevents any
such slavish dependence. In our world the cinema has replaced
religion as the opium of the people; in Utopia it is merely one
of many ways of pleasantly spending leisure hours. The children
and young people no less than the adults have a diversity of
amusements. Many of the older children spend a good deal
of their spare time concocting plays both for the film and the
stage; others occupy themselves rehearsing to act in these plays;
others, again, are busy directing them. The Utopian child is
nothing if not independent; nothing if not creative. And just
as he learns by doing , so he finds his recreation in doing. By
the time he is adolescent he has discovered that the world is
full of a number of things, and it is so exciting and absorbing
a discovery that he finds it difficult to believe that there was
ever a time when young people, no less than adults, depended
for the greater part of their amusement on the cinema and the
radio, and not at all upon these remarkable inventions for
educational purposes. But therein lies the difference between
Utopian education and our own conception of it; our system,
in any of its orthodox forms, aims at cramming as much learning
into the young as possible, all of it an accumulation from the
past, none of it of any real value in terms of living, and a considerable
part of it forgotten soon after ‘schooling’ is finished
with, since it was never acquired other than parrot-wise, for
the purposes of ‘exams’; whereas the Utopian conception of
education draws out of the young the creativeness which enables
them to earn their bread, in due course, according to their
natural inclination and ability, and leaves them free to develop
the sensibility to appreciate an infinite variety of life’s most
delicately perfumed and lasting roses. . . .
Consideration of the child in the community cannot, rightly,
either begin or end with its education, however. Indeed, the
most important years of the child’s life are lived before it can
begin its education in terms of schooling — that is to say its first
five years.
In the days — not so long ago — when the Soviet Union was
‘the Red Terror’, one of the crimes with which the Bolsheviks
were charged was the idea that the child was better wrested
early from parental care and brought up by the State; and it
is, in fact, a tenet of the Marxist philosophy that the care and
education of children should become a public affair, the responsibility of society in general. The Communist Manifesto
refers to the exploitation of children by their parents, and ‘the
clap-trap about the hallowed correlation of parents and child’.
But long before Marx and Engels, there was Plato, in whose
conception of Utopia the home and family were abolished for
the Guardians. The children, as soon as they were born, were
to be ‘taken in charge by officers appointed for the purpose
who may be men or women or both since offices are to be shared
by both sexes. The children of the better parents they will
carry to the creches to be reared in the care of nurses living apart
in a certain quarter of the city. Those of the inferior parents and
any children of the rest that are born defective will be hidden
away, in some appropriate manner that must be kept secret’.
The mothers were to be brought to the creches to suckle the
children — ‘but taking every precaution that no mother shall
know her own child’. The inferior children of Guardians were
to be ‘thrust out amongst the craftsmen and farmers’, who were,
as we have seen, graded lower in society than the Rulers and
Guardians. It was a duty the Guardians owed to the State to
beget their children in the prime of life — ‘a woman should bear
children for the commonwealth from her twentieth to her fortieth year; a man should begin to beget them when he was
passed “the racer’s prime in swiftness” (a reference to bringing
race-horses to the stud when they are no longer used for racing
purposes) and continue until he is fifty-five. . . . If a man either
above or below this age meddles with the begetting of children
for the commonwealth, we shall hold it an offence against
divine and human law.’
Plutarch, following directly in the Platonic tradition, made
his Lycurgus regard children as the property of the State, ‘and
therefore he would not have them begot by ordinary persons,
but by the best men in it’. Since the State considered it as important to expend as much care on the breeding of citizens as
on the breeding of horses and dogs — to breed, that is, only
from good stock — the law allowed that ‘if a man of character
should entertain a passion for a married woman on account
of her modesty and the beauty of her children, he might entreat
with her husband for admission to her company, that so planting
in a beauty-bearing soil, he might produce excellent children,
the genial offspring of excellent parents’. But after the child
was born the father was required to carry it to a tribunal of
the most ancient men of the tribe, and ‘if it was strong and
well-proportioned, they gave orders for its education, and
assigned to it one of the nine thousand shares of land ; but if it
was weakly and deformed they ordered it to be thrown . . .
into a deep cavern . . . concluding that its life could be no
advantage either to itself or to the public, since nature had not
given it at first any strength of constitution’.
As soon as the healthy Spartan children were seven years old
Lycurgus ordered them to be enrolled in companies, ‘ where they
were ail kept under the same order and discipline, and had
their exercises and recreations in common. He who showed
the most conduct and courage amongst them, was made captain
of the company. The rest kept their eyes upon him, obeyed his
orders, and bore with patience the punishment he inflicted. . . .
As for learning, they had just what was absolutely necessary.
All the rest of their education was calculated to make them
subject to command, to endure labour, to fight and conquer’.
They were submitted to the utmost rigours, in the cause of discipline, and to harden them. In The Life of Lycurgus is told
the classic story of the boy who suffered a fox he had stolen
and hidden under his tunic to tear out his bowels with teeth
and claws rather than betray the theft by crying out or releasing
the animal. The boys were encouraged to steal in order to exer-
cise their ingenuity and courage; and they were accustomed
from their childhood to take an interest in citizenship. ‘ ... if
one of them was asked, “Who is a good citizen, or who an
infamous one,” and hesitated in his answer, he was considered
a boy of slow parts, and of a soul that would not aspire to
honour ’.
Campanella, in his City of the Sun , similarly had the children
handed over at an early age to the care of the State. ‘ . . . since
individuals for the most part bring forth children wrongly and
educate them wrongly, they consider that they remove destruc-
tion from the State, and therefore, for this reason, with most
sacred fear, they commit the education of the children, who,
as it were, are the element of the republic, to the care of magistrates.’ During infancy the children were to be reared and
suckled by their mothers in temples set apart for that purpose.
At two years old the children were to be weaned and given into
the care of masters in the case of males, mistresses in the case
of females, and they were then to be ‘pleasantly instructed in the
alphabet, and in the knowledge of the pictures, and in running,
walking and wrestling; also in the historical drawings, and in
languages’. At six years old they were taught natural science
and then the mechanical sciences. Of the boys, those not very
bright in intellect were eventually sent to work on farms. It
was considered, in ‘ the city of the sun ’, that children were bred
for the preservation of the species and not for individual pleasure,
and that ‘therefore the breeding of children has reference to
the commonwealth and not to individuals, except in so far as
they are constituents of the commonwealth’.
Sir Thomas More’s attitude was more human. His Utopians
considered that the begetting of children was ‘ a debt which they
owed to human nature and to their country’. The education of
youth was entrusted to the priests, ‘ yet they do not take so much
care of instructing them in letters as in forming their minds and
manners aright; they use all possible methods to infuse very
early into the tender and flexible minds of children such opinions
as are both good in themselves and will be useful to their country.
For when deep impressions of these things are made at that age
they follow men through the whole course of their lives, and
conduce much to preserve the peace of the government, which
suffers by nothing more than by vices that rise out of ill opinions’.
H. G. Wells, in his A Modern Utopia , holds that ‘State breeding
of the population was a reasonable proposal for Plato to make,
in view of the biological knowledge of his time and the purely
tentative nature of his metaphysics; but from anyone in the
days after Darwin it is preposterous’. He considers that, judged
according to modern standards, all former Utopias have erred
on the side of over-regulation in the matter of marriage and the
breeding of children, and that the modern Utopian State would
regulate marriage contracts and their dissolution ‘only in order
to secure the utmost freedom and initiative 5 . He sees the bearing
and rearing of healthy children as a service done to the State,
and in Utopia that service recognised and rewarded, the State
making itself responsible, financially, to the mother, for the
welfare of her — legitimate — children.
In the modern Utopia, as the present writer sees it, the child
belongs neither to the nation nor to its parents; it belongs to no
one but itself. The parent has no ‘rights 5 in it; it is an individual
in its own rights. Two things rarely happen in Utopia — rarely
is there an unwanted child, and rarely does a child die. The
death of a child is the ‘wrong too great to be told. Accidents,
obviously, cannot be avoided even in Utopia, but for a child
to be ill is something quite extraordinary. In our present world
it is taken for granted that there are illnesses inevitable in child-
hood — the child is expected to have the ‘usual run of childish
ailments — measles, whooping-cough, mumps, chicken-pox, in
addition to the ‘usual coughs and colds. In Utopia, as we have
seen, the standard of health is high, the people immunised from
germs by their mental as well as their physical health. The
children in Utopia are happy and healthy, and it is therefore
something exceptional for a child to be ill.
Similarly, in Utopia, a child may be accidentally conceived,
but the attitude to sex and contraception is such that this very
rarely occurs, and when it does, rather than bear an unwanted
child, the mother considers it better to have the pregnancy
surgically interrupted by a qualified gynaecologist. This does
not lead, as some people might suppose, to irresponsibility in
the matter of begetting children. The Utopian woman has too
much respect for good health to regard an abortion as a good
thing; she knows that it is much healthier to have a baby, but
if she already has several children and it does not fit in with
her scheme of things to add to her family, or if, unintentionally,
through some failure of her contraceptive method, she finds
herself pregnant again too close to her last pregnancy, she has no
difficulty in terminating the pregnancy, and no one thinks any the
worse of her for it. In this way that saddest of spectacles, the
unwanted child, is avoided, and motherhood is the happy affair
nature intended it to be.
Now, in Utopia, as we have seen, there are no hard and fast
rules, and, short of anti-social conduct, no oughts and ought-
nots. There are therefore no ‘rules 5 touching motherhood. Some
mothers are happiest making motherhood for a few years — until
their children are into their middle teens, perhaps — a full-time
job. Other women, though they love their children, have
interests which make motherhood as a full-time job impossible
for them. For these mothers Utopia provides creches and nursery
schools where the children are competently cared for under
happy, healthy conditions. In our present world some excellent
nurseries, both day and residential, and nursery-schools, have
been set up in recent years under government authority to meet
the war-time conditions of mothers working in factories, and
children evacuated to the country. It is one of the criticisms
of our present society that it takes the major crisis of a world-war
to get rid of bad arrangements and arouse the initiative for the
establishment of good ones. In Utopia the good arrangements
do not have to be provoked by national crisis; everything is
organised for the common good, and the child is the community’s
first care.
And in Utopia the care of the child begins before it is born.
Perhaps you will say, ‘But we, too, have our pre-natal clinics’.
This is true, but we have not nearly enough of them, and women in
general are not sufficiently educated to the value and use of the
available clinics. In our world it is only the most intelligent
of our working-class women who avail themselves of periodic
medical examination and advice during pregnancy at the
maternity clinics; the great mass of them ‘can’t be bothered’,
or just don’t think it necessary, and are content to rely on the
misinformation of their neighbours and their own ingrained
superstitions. Middle and upper-class women usually consult
their family doctor, visiting him from time to time before the
confinement, but even in these classes it is quite common to find
women who consider no pre-natal care necessary — and the
attitude that if there is a miscarriage, well, so much the better
since the pregnancy was never desired in any case. . . .
In Utopia every child is a wanted child, and every child is
important, because in every child is vested the Utopian heritage
of the Good Life; they realise in Utopia that without the child
there is no Tomorrow, no carrying on of achievement, no progress. The utmost care, therefore, is taken to safeguard the health
of the expectant mother, and to minimise the risks attaching
to childbirth, and everything that medical science can do to
render childbirth painless is done . . . though if a woman should
prefer to ‘let nature take its course’ no one is going to coerce her
into accepting drugs and anaesthetics. Similarly, a woman may
be confined in her own home if she prefers it, but the maternity
homes of Utopia are such fine, well-run places that the majority
of women prefer to avail themselves of the advantages they offer.
The Utopian child, therefore, comes into the world with
everything in his favour — he is born of a healthy, happy mother,
he is assisted into the world by the ablest of gynaecologists, and
mid wives; he is surrounded from birth by intelligence and
care. The only child is rare in Utopia, though being an only
child matters less in Utopia than in our world because of the
abundance of day-nurseries and nursery-schools at which the
child learns to adapt himself to community life from his earliest
years, and because the Utopian mother appreciates the importance
of this natural education.
Childhood in Utopia is altogether a|very natural business.
In our world the child is 'brought up; in Utopia it is allowed
to grow up. In our world it is hedged round from infancy with
every kind of superstition and prejudice and fixed idea; it must do
this because it is good for it; it mustn’t do that because it is bad
for it; it is slapped and scolded and punished by parents, teachers,
‘nannies’ into a conventional mould labelled ‘the well-behaved
child ’, as though manners, politeness, etiquette have anything
whatever to do with the candid, eager, questioning animal that
is the natural child. In Utopia no one is in the least interested as
to whether the child says Please and Thank You, and whether it
has nice table manners and is ‘obedient’, none of these things —
manners, politeness, obedience — is required of it; what the
Utopians regard as important in a child is its fearlessness, its
unspoiled honesty, its unselfconsciousness. They know that the
well-behaved child is a little hypocrite, and they prefer their
children natural and honest; they are concerned with the child’s
happiness, not with its ‘pretty ways’. They are not concerned
to show their children off with personal pride, possessively; they
respect the individuality, the separateness of the child; they
do not claim that because it is flesh of their flesh it is also soul of
their soul; they do not even want that it should be. They want
that it shall be itself, and to this end instead of bringing it up
they leave it alone to grow up naturally. They believe in the
freedom of the child as they believe in the freedom of adults;
they believe in the importance of human beings growing up in
freedom; they know that when childhood is not free it is difficult
to become free in later years, that all manner of fears and phobias
and prejudices are carried over — sex fears, and fears of God,
guilt-fears — and that in spite of intellectual convictions it is not
easy to root out these fears; they know that it is useless to give
social, political, moral freedom to the person who inside himself
is in chains. They want their children, therefore, to be free in the
real sense — mentally, emotionally, spiritually free — free to accept
the full, free life of their Utopian world. And they know that
to ensure this they must begin at the beginning; that is to say from
infancy.
In the day-nurseries and nursery-schools of our present world
there would seem to be too much organising of the child’s
activities — well-meaning adults organise games, singing, dancing,
story-telling, discussion circles; toys are provided ready-made,
and whilst all this makes the question of amusement and ‘what
to do’ easy for the children it destroys initiative. Cicely Fraser,
in a booklet entitled, First — the Infant f dealing with Britain’s
war-time nurseries, makes the point that these nurseries are
so well organised that ‘No child wanders aimlessly about the
room, “looking for something to do”; for each one there is an
occupation suited to his age or development’. But looking for
something to do develops, as nothing else can, a child’s natural
resourcefulness and enterprise. In Utopia the children are never
given ready-made toys; they are provided with materials out
of which they can make things. There is no point in giving a child
a teddy-bear; what can you do with a teddy-bear except take
it to bits to see what it is stuffed with — and the stuffing can be
used for a number of creative purposes. The Utopians give their
children clay and pieces of wood and drawing materials, and all
manner of odds and ends, from which things can be created.
They know that a child can do more with a couple of old boxes
and a piece of sacking than with the most elaborate of toys. In
Utopia, if a child demands of an adult ‘What shall I do?’ the
adult says briefly, T’ve no idea’ — and leaves the child to its
own resources, knowing that only in this way can initiative be
developed.
In the day-schools and nursery-schools of Utopia, therefore,
there is no organisation of the children’s play, but instead every
facility for them to amuse themselves; there are constructive
materials available, and sand-pits and swings and see-saws,
and chutes to slide down, and a shallow pond in which to wade
and on which to sail boats which they have made themselves.
There are careful, watchful adults in the background to see that
the children come to no harm and to deal with the minor acci-
dents that invariably befall children in the course of their play,
and to give guidance and assistance where it is sought — in such
things as the proper handling of tools, the handling of a loom
or a potter’s wheel or a sewing-machine, but they keep unobtrusively to the background. If the interiors of these Utopian
nurseries and schools are not as ‘artistic’ and ‘pretty’ as in our
own world, it is because the Utopians know that quaint nufsery
friezes of animals and fairytale characters that seem so charming
to the grown-ups are completely lost on the children. The
Utopians know that colour has its own value for a child, and its
nurseries are gay with bright paint on walls, woodwork, furniture,
and rugs and curtains in the same bright, clear colours, but there
is none of that art-and-crafty quaintness so beloved by the
grown-ups of our world in nursery decoration and which takes
no account of the things that really appeal to children. Perhaps
the Utopian nurseries look rather bare and unattractive and
untidy to our eyes, but they are designed and arranged for the
use of children, not for the aesthetic pleasure and sentimentality
of adults. There are no 4 artistic ’ touches of flowers or leaves in
earthenware jugs; no ‘cultural’ touches in the shape of reproductions of ‘good’ pictures, no photographs of classic sculpture;
all is as bare as a ship. There are no corners to harbour dirt;
there are no fripperies that a child must be ‘careful’ with, but
everything strong and for use — and rough usage at that.
These nurseries are always surrounded by spacious gardens,
with trees for the children to climb, and stretches of grass for
them to play on. There may be a border of flowers under a wall,
and along the buildings themselves, but there are no flower-beds;
flower-beds look nice, but they are a source of temptation to
children, and the Utopians consider it better that the grounds
shall be for the use of the children — places in which they may
freely do things, not places in which they must be ‘careful’,
and subjected to restrictions. Children do not want gardens to
look at, but for use — to play in, to run wild in; therefore, though a
well-kept flower garden surrounding a nursery would present
a pleasing appearance to adults, the Utopians prefer the children’s
pleasure to their own, and to this end leave the grounds surround-
ing creches and schools wild, with uncut grass and tangled
shrubberies — wild places in which children can discover ‘secret’
paths and dense ‘jungles’, happy, exciting wildernesses in which
they can hide and hunt and live out the rich variety of their
fantasy-worlds, untrammelled by any adult verboten.
Perhaps at this point it will be asked — as in Utopia there
is no State to subsidise creches, clinics, day-nurseries, nursery-
schools, isn’t the charge per child going to be heavier than in our
society, to cover the upkeep of these fine places? The answer to
which is that there is no charge for any of the social services in
Utopia any more than for anything else! Why should education
be free and a charge made for the use of clinics, creches, etc.?
When the land and the means of production are the property of
the people themselves they are able to take what they want for
whatever purpose it is needed; there is no question of ‘over-
head’ and ‘upkeep’. ‘But the people who run these places will
need paying?’ No; people in Utopia do not work for money
any more than they produce for profit. They work as their contribution to the society from which they take. This whole ques-
tion of consumption and exchange in Utopia will be discussed
fully later; here it is only necessary to emphasise that Utopia is
essentially ‘ the land of the children ’, for it is recognised there that
‘childhood is the name of the world’s immediate future; of such,
and such alone, is the promise of the kingdom of man’.
There is no religious teaching of any kind in any of the Utopian
schools, and there are no Sunday schools. The Utopians firmly
believe that religious belief is something which the individual
must evolve for himself in his maturity if and when he feels the
need for it. They believe that the healthy, happy child has no
need of 'God' in any form ; he has his inward fantasy life of make-
believe, and his outward life of creativeness, of doing, and is
satisfied by these preoccupations. They believe that to attempt
to give the child an idea of ‘ God ’ in any form is to implant guilt,
and therefore fear, into the child. The child feels no need either
of prayer or worship. There is a human need for 'God' , but the
child’s simplicity knows no such need. The Utopians know
that you cannot teach a child ‘ to love God ’ you can only teach
it to fear God. They know that a young child does not really
love anyone; he certainly cannot love ‘God’, whom he cannot
conceive except as a vague and dreadful presence. Neill declared
roundly, ‘Religion to a child simply means fear. . . . And to
introduce fear into a child’s life is the worst of all crimes. For
ever the child says Nay to life; for ever is he an inferior; for ever a
coward.’ The Utopians do not believe in Original Sin. They
believe that the child is born good — perfectly pure and good,
and that there is no such thing as the bad child, but only the
unhappy child. In those rare cases in which they find such
manifestations of unhappiness they do not punish the ‘crime’,
but seek to find out the cause, in order that the emotional malad-
justment in the child may be righted.
It will be understood, therefore, that the Utopians do not
recognise what we call ‘child delinquency’. If a child sets fire
to a rick, or heaves a stone through a window, he is not hauled,
as in our world, before a children’s court for judgment and
punishment and the various methods of ‘ reform ’ that never do
reform. If his parents, or whoever has the care of him, are
unable to find out the cause of his anti-social conduct and, by
finding it out, redirect his energies from destructive into normal
constructive channels, the services of a trained psychologist
are invoked, in the same way that if he were found to be suffering
from some physical disability the services of a trained medical
man would be invoked. The psychologist does not psycho-
analyse the child; he does not adopt the clinical attitude; he
comes to an understanding of the child by the simple process
of being on the child’s side. It will be understood, therefore,
that only people who really love children can qualify as child-
psychologists; they must be people who are instinctively on the
child’s side, who approve of the child, and are capable of conveying
that approval to the child. In our present world there are plenty
of people who declare that they ‘love’ children, and many of
them practise as child-psychologists, and they are full of text-
book knowledge and theories, but the only ones who really
help children out of their maladjustments and into happiness are
the ones the children themselves recognise as being on their side —
there was the late Homer Lane and his Little Commonwealth;
there is David Wills and ‘the Hawkspur Experiment ’ of the
‘Q,. Camps’; there is A. S. Neill and his free school. There are,
perhaps, a few others, but they are very few, because in our
present society the idea of discipline for its own sake, and the
importance of adult authority, dies hard. In Utopia it died
during the transition period; the generation that grew up in the
ideal commonwealth, never having known anything but free-
dom, physical and spiritual, accepted from the beginning the
idea that the only discipline of any value is the natural discipline
that life itself imposes, and that the only authority to whom
allegiance is due is the authority of the community.
When the Utopians assert that they love children they do not
mean it in the selfish, possessive way in which people commonly
‘love’ children in our world, forcing their own moral codes on
them, exercising authority over them, demanding respect of
them, and obedience, and at the same time expecting love from
them. The Utopians make no such demands of children — above
all they make no emotional demands, thus leaving the children
free to give; loving children means, for them, leaving them alone,
giving them freedom, believing in their natural goodness, accept-
ing them on terms of equality, believing in ‘that of God’ in
every child as in every man — and really believing in it, not merely
saying that they do and then trying to mould the child to their
own conception of goodness, and in the process turning the God
in the child into a little devil. . . .
The Utopians are aware that the impressions formed in the
early years of childhood are deep and lasting, determining the
future development of various mental and emotional trends in the
child. They know that the man or woman of tomorrow is deter-
mined by the child of today; that ‘everything happens before the
age of five’. Reading the history of the bad old days before the
great change-over to Utopia they are horrified at the realisation
that during the second world war thousands of children spent the
first years of their lives in an atmosphere of death and destruction
and terror — wakened from their sleep, night after night, year
after year, by the sinister droning of ’planes, the thunder of guns,
the dreadful crash of bombs, and, along with these horrors, the
awareness of fear and anxiety in the adults about them, in their
talk and in their actions, children born into and growing up in a
world of fear and anxiety and terror. No children should have been
born, say the Utopians, during those years of hell let loose, just
as no children should be born into poverty and squalor, because
it is important that a child’s earliest memories should be happy
ones, should establish a foundation of happiness upon which to
build a happy life.
The Utopian child grows up without fear, in a safe, secure
world; trusting in this world, and believing in himself, with all
the confidence of his fearlessness, he gives the Yea to life, in
his work and in his play, through his healthy body and his fearless
spirit. From happy childhood he grows up into a self-confident
adult, worthy of his heritage of freedom, and possessed of the
imagination and idealism for reaching out to yet more radiant
horizons — that true progressiveness which is the realisation of
Utopias.
The consideration of what we mean by education leads on
naturally to a consideration of what we mean by art, since outside
of its utilitarian purpose of fitting human beings to take their
place in society the function of education is, as has been indicated,
the development of sensibility — what is generally called ‘ culture ’,
though it is a bad word. It is a bad word because it is a
thoroughly ambiguous word, a pretentious word, a charlatan
of a word. No wonder Herbert Read echoes Eric Gill a$d
cries ‘to hell with culture’. Read, in his little book under
that title, asks ‘What is culture?’ and points out that the
Greeks hadn’t a word for it. ‘They had good architects, good
sculptors, good poets, just as they had good craftsmen and good
statesmen. They knew that their way of life was a good way of
life. . . . But it would never have occurred to them that they
had a separate commodity, culture — something to be given a
trade-mark by their academicians, something to be acquired
by superior people with sufficient time and money, something
to be exported to foreign countries along with figs and olives. It
wasn’t even an invisible export; it was something natural if it
existed at all — something of which they were unconscious. . . .
It could not even be described as a by-product of their way of
life; it was that way of life itself.’
‘Culture’ suggests something special and apart, outside of
daily life; cultured tastes are carefully cultivated tastes, imposed
from without, diligently acquired ; ‘ art ’ is something in a museum
or gallery; we talk about Art with a capital A, and by a cultured
person we understand a person with an appreciation of Art
with a capital A. It is all false, artificial. Because art, as Eric
Gill was never tired of pointing out, was simply something well
made — from a fine painting to a piece of domestic pottery.
Herbert Read reminds us that in the Middle Ages, ‘Its architects
were foremen builders, its sculptors were masons, its illuminators
and painters were clerks. They had no word for art in the sense
of our “fine arts”; art was all that was pleasing to the sight;
a cathedral, a candlestick, a chessman, a cheese-press’.
With the development of capitalism and industrialisation
there arose an acquisitive class, people who, by their control of
labour and raw materials and the means of production, could
command beautiful things to be made exclusively for them, and
the machine finally separated art — as the common thing beautifully made — from daily life. Art became beautiful things made
specially for the privileged few who could afford them; the
machine dispensed with the necessity for handicrafts ; the common
things of daily life began to be mass-produced; the beautiful
things became ‘art’, not for the common people; there arose
the cult of art, the thing called ‘culture’. The peak of all this
unnaturalness and decadence was the eighteen-nineties, and ‘ art
for art’s sake’ exclusively — art utterly and finally divorced from
common life; art as something esoteric.
In Utopia, where every man is a special kind of artist, over
and above the utilitarian aspect, education brings out the artist
in every man, develops his natural tastes. No one considers
him uncultured — that is to say lacking in sensibility — if he fails
to appreciate Shakespeare and Beethoven; it may well be that his
sensibilities do not reach out to the past at all; he may be of
those who do not want their poetry written down, who find it
implicit in the rhythm of a bird’s wings, the movement of cloud-
shadows over hills; music, for him, may be something he makes
for himself from a hollow reed, or that comes idly into his head as
he ploughs a field or works a lathe. It does not indicate a greater
degree of sensibility to take music and poetry ready-made from
the past.
In Utopia, what in our world we call art — music, painting,
poetry, sculpture — is all part of life, not something apart in
museums, galleries, concert-halls. That is not to say that there
are no museums, galleries, concert-halls. Museums and galleries
are useful in the way that libraries are, for reference, but the idea
‘ of a piece of sculpture being made or a picture painted merely
in the hope of acquisition by a museum or gallery, the idea that
there is any ‘honour’ in such acceptance, is alien to the Utopian
conception. In Utopia good pictures and sculpture are put into
museums and galleries only if no better purpose can be found for
them; it is a matter for regret with the painter or sculptor.
It is considered very much more satisfactory if the sculpture
can be put to some good use in a garden or public park, or to
ornament a building, public or private; and the painter would
much rather have a wall to paint on than a canvas, because then
his work has purpose, a direct relationship with life; similarly
a composer of music would prefer to compose for an occasion —
a pageant, a procession, a harvest-home celebration, or a May
Day festivity, or some such merry-making. In Utopia it is re-
garded as a much greater honour for a composition to be played
or sung on some such occasion than rendered to an audience
in a concert-hall. Utopia, in fact, vastly prefers the applied arts
to the fine arts; the fine picture or sculpture or musical composi-
tion purely as aesthetic experience, purely for entertainment,
seems a little wasteful — but it is not doctrinaire or puritanical
about it, as Eric Gill was. Gill considered that concert audiences
were ‘like debauchees at a Roman feast,’ 1 and passionately
protested against the divorce of music from occasion, music
as an end in itself, purely for pleasure. It was all part of his
abhorrence of the divorce of work from beauty and of beauty
from usefulness, and in principle the Utopians are in agreement
with this attitude, but they have no objection to ‘pleasure
unalloyed’. Just as they might believe that rationally meat-eating
is gross and unhealthy, a devouring of corpses, but that neverthe-
less on occasion a roast chicken or a game pie is well worth
the sacrifice of rationality and principle, so though they entirely
agree that listening to music in a concert-hall is highly unnatural
and purely sensuous, and not the best use to which it could be
put, they go to concerts, or listen to them over the radio, with a
natural and untroubled enjoyment. As far as possible concerts
are given in the open air, which is considered pleasanter and
healthier than in the stuffy atmosphere of a concert-hall. Some-
times these concerts are given in clearings in woods, or on the
lawns of public parks, sometimes in open-air theatres designed
on the Roman plan. Ballets and plays are performed, similarly,
in the open air, in preference to indoors, whenever possible.
The difference between art in Utopia and in our present world
is to be found in the popular attitude to it. In our world it is taken
for granted that art is something special and apart, for the picture
gallery, the concert-hall, the theatre, the museum; our devotion
to it is like the devotion of the orthodox religious people —
a periodic visit to the temple must be made. Whereas in Utopia
you can hear as good music in the market-place as at the concert-
hall, see as good painting on a street wall as in a picture gallery; it
is part of daily life, all the time. And as everything is well
made, by master-craftsmen, people are used to beautiful things,
so that beauty, too, is not something apart, related to something
called ‘Art’, but it also is a part of daily life. The Utppians
find it difficult to believe that there was ever a time when beautiful
vases and statuettes and carvings, and such things, were locked
up in cabinets, in private houses, merely to be looked at, that
there were such things as objets (Tart, many of them not even
beautiful, and with no value except that of antiquity — which is a
value they do not understand except historically; obviously an
ancient Roman carving has value — the value of historic interest —
In Work and Property (Dent, 1937), the chapter on ‘The End of the Fine Arts’.
even if it does not happen to be beautiful, but then its place is
in museums, where it may be examined by students of Roman
civilisation.
In Utopia art is at every street corner — beautiful architecture
everywhere, decoratively designed fountains, statues (not, one
need hardly say, of statesmen in frock-coats) by the finest sculptors,
gay painted frescoes on houses. In the houses every table and
chair, every rug, every kitchen pot, is a work of art. For the
Utopians art is, quite simply, the thing well made. Its value
is something decorative, something utilitarian. Sometimes,
as in the case of a poem, a piece of music, a play, ballet, a story,
it is purely for delight. The education of the Utopians has given
them this understanding of ends and means. They know that,
as a modern critic has expressed it , . . . Art is itself neither
Use nor Beauty, any more than it is Goodness or Truth. It is the
ordering of doing and making for use, and the ordering of expres-
sion for delight. It arrives at Beauty incidentally, by pursuing
use in the arts of use, significance in the arts of emotion’.
Accepting art in these terms the Utopians are in favour of
introducing every manifestation of art as widely as possible,
without self-consciousness, into daily life. Wherever it is possible
to apply it to a utilitarian purpose — whether practical or decorative — they apply it; wherever it is possible to adapt it to occasion
they adapt it; where it is purely for delight that, too, being freely
available to all, becomes also a part of daily life. Good music,
being widely played in public parks and in cafes, is to a large
extent liberated from the concert-hall ; similarly, painting, being
as far as possible mural, as much in the home as in the public
building, is largely liberated from picture-galleries. On the
purely sensuous side, music, painting, and dancing combine
for delight in the ballet, and though music and singing are related
as far as possible to occasion there is still the unnaturalness of
opera for those who find pleasure in it. There is likewise poetry
and literature and the drama, sometimes purely for delight,
sometimes for the illumination of life — but never, and this is
important to the Utopians, never degraded to the purpose of
propaganda.
At this point it becomes important to make clear what is
meant by 'propaganda’. Earlier in this book reference was
made to the degradation of poetry, music, painting, in the
U.S.S.R., by making it the handmaid of communist propaganda,
and in Nazi Germany, painting, if not the other arts, was similarly
degraded. Nazis and Communists alike wage war on what they
decide is 'decadent’ art; by which they mean art which does not
conform to or fit in with their particular political dialectic.
When the present writer was in Moscow in 1936 Chekhov was
held in disrepute on the grounds that his plays offer no solution
to the social problems they present. The idol was Gorki, who
continually urged writers to use their art for the furtherance of the
socialist State and expressed contempt for literature which,
having no social significance, does not so serve the State. In the
same year the Soviet composer, Shostakovich, was attacked by
Pravda , and rebuked by the Society of Soviet Composers for ‘ non-
Soviet tendencies ’ and for ‘ writing above the heads of the Soviet
masses.’ 1 Of this Victor Seroff writes in his book on Shostakovich, 2 ‘Streams of letters were written to the Composers’ Unions,
filled with vitriolic criticisms of Shostakovich’s work, and resolu-
tions were published with the headlines, Down with Bourgeois
Aesthetes and Formalists, Long Live Music for the Millions,
and Down with Formalist Confusion in Art. The young composer was hurled down from the pedestal on which his opera, Lady
Macbeth , had at first placed him, the opera was banned, and he
was musically ostracised ’. Seroff comments, ‘It is interesting to
note that no one expressed publicly the fact that Pravda' s editorials
went far deeper than mere music criticism’. Shostakovich
changed his style, became ‘powerful’ and ‘intelligible’ in his
music, and made his come-back eighteen months later, eventually
winning the Stalin prize for a piano quintet which Pravda described as ‘lyrically lucid, human and simple’.
Seroff writes, ‘Just as futurism and cubism and even impressionism in painting are not greatly favoured in the Soviet Union,
so atonal music, or music full of mysticism, remains alien to the
Soviet idea’. He quotes Shostakovich as saying of Scriabin,
at one time a leading Russian composer, ‘Thus we regard
Scriabin as our bitterest musical enemy. Why? Because Scriabin’s
music tends to an unhealthy eroticism. Also to mysticism and
passivity and escape from the realities of life’.
In Utopia there is no question of any artist being required
to toe any line; the fact that there is no State to make any such
direction obviates this, of course, but the whole spirit of Utopian
society is opposed to any kind of dictatorship in principle, even
if it were possible. The artist is free to say, through the medium
of his art — whether it be painting, poetry, plays, music, literature,
sculpture — whatever he feels impelled to say; he may feel impelled to express some comment on society, satirical or critical
as he sees it; he may feel that he has some spiritual message to
convey, some illumination to offer; he may be solely concerned
with self-expression, the expression of something deep in himself,
or the expression solely of his creative impulse. Whatever he is
concerned with is entirely his affair. In our present society an
artist sometimes feels impelled to indict certain evils of society
through his art — and he writes a book or a play or paints a
picture to that end. If he is a good artist the ‘propaganda’ —
that is, the criticism he is making, the moral he is trying to point
— is implicit in the work itself ; if he is an inferior artist the whole
thing is clumsy and defeats its own ends, because people feel that
it would all have been better done straightforwardly as a tract
or a pamphlet. There is no reason at all why art should not be a
criticism of or a comment on life ; but there is also no reason why
it should be; the comment may or may not be a criticism, and
the criticism may or may not constitute an indictment, may or
may not point a moral. The important thing is that the artist
shall be free; that he shall be free to interpret life as he sees it,
as he feels it; to say what he has to say, express what he has to
express; art is a thing well made, and a well-made play or poem
or picture or story or piece of sculpture may or may not have
something of social significance to say. The emphasis is on the
social. The work of art is always significant in one way or another.
It has meaning, that is to say; is not negligible.
In Utopia it is obvious that there is much less scope for social
significance in art, since the social problems are disposed of;
there is no unemployment (except the happy unemployment
of desired leisure in which to enjoy life) , no poverty, no prostitution,
no war, none of the things that artists in our present society feel
called upon, on occasion, to indict. This does not mean, however,
that there are no problems. Human relationships, for one thing,
will always present problems — though the rational education
and moral code of Utopia naturally minimises them. And no
society is going to satisfy, completely, in all respects, every single
member of it, which means that there will always be room for
criticism. There are, in all probability, in the free stateless
society some who sigh for the ‘good old days’ of centralised
government — or for some other form of government, for anything
but what exists. Any healthy society is stimulated by its discon-
tents, and in Utopia the border-line between ‘discontent’ and
‘dreamer’ is very fine. As Wilde said, Utopia is a country in
which, when humanity lands, there is always the vision of something beyond — always the horizon, and ‘progress is the realisation
of Utopias’, the perpetual movement towards the horizon,
which fades, forever and forever as we move. The discontents
of Utopia are not malcontents but visionaries, the progressives
of the community, dreaming beyond the happy present to an
even more glorious future.
The work of the artist is necessarily coloured by the times in
which he lives; a decadent society will produce decadent art, and a
progressive, inspired society will produce inspired, progressive art.
In the freedom of Utopia the artist has room to spread his wings.
And he is freed from the economic problems which harass him,
and so largely influence his work in our present society. The
painter is not called upon to paint conventional portraits of
boring people for the sake of earning a living; the writer is not
required to prostitute his gifts to the vulgarity of cheap journalism
and an uneducated popular demand. The artist, in whatever
medium he works, has his integral place in society, along with the
carpenter, the shoemaker, the ploughman, all of whom, it is
recognised, are also artists in their different spheres. There is no
longer a halo round the Fine Arts. Art, in Utopia, is simply
the thing well made, whether it is a chair or a song, a painting
or a pot, a poem or a cathedral. And the artist is completely
free to express himself, according to his inspiration — to say,
‘without let or hindrance’, what he has to say, through his
imagination, as in music, poetry, literature, or through his
imagination plus the craftsmanship of his hands, as in painting,
sculpture, pottery, wood-carving.
As to the Fine Arts, they are so integrated with the decorative
and applied arts that to all intents and purposes they cease to
exist. Painting and sculpture exist primarily in relation to
architecture, and architecture, more than any of the arts, is the
expression of the human spirit. The architecture of Utopia,
therefore, is of noble proportions, because its spires are the
spires of dreams; its arches lofty with ideals. Utopia is com-
pletely free of the hideous architectural vulgarities which indus-
trialism, with its money values — produced in the nineteenth
century ; and of the shoddy mass-production monstrosities of the
twentieth, ranging from pseudo-Tudor to what Osbert Lancaster
has defined as ‘Twentieth- Century Functional’. All the smugness
and complacency of the Victorian era is expressed in its architec-
ture ; all the upsurge of the human spirit in the light of the New
Learning emerges in the grace and beauty of the architecture
of the Renaissance. All the falsity of the twentieth century is
expressed in its pretentious villas, its barracks of flats, its stream-
lined ‘modernity’. Morris, in 1900, declared that the world was
uglier than it was fifty years ago ; today it is still uglier than it was
fifty years ago. We pass from ugly to uglier, and the tendency
is all to uglier still. Kropotkin made a similar complaint of the
ugliness of his world, and pointed out, ‘When a Greek sculptor
chiselled his marble he endeavoured to express the spirit and heart
of the city. All its passions, all its traditions of glory, were to live
again in the work. But today the united city has ceased to exist;
there is no more communion of ideas. The town is a chance
agglomeration of people who do not know one another, who have
no common interest, save that of enriching themselves at the
expense of one another. The fatherland does not exist. . . .
What fatherland can the international banker and the rag-picker
have in common? Only when cities, territories, nations, or groups
of nations, will have renewed their harmonious life, will art
be able to draw its inspiration from ideals held in common. Then
will the architect conceive* the city’s monument which will no
longer be a temple, a prison, or a fortress; then will the painter,
the sculptor, the carver, the ornament-worker know where to
put their canvasses, their statues, and their decorations; deriving
their power of execution from the same vital source, and gloriously
marching all together towards the future. But till then art can
only vegetate.’
We cannot visualise the architecture of Utopia except in
very general terms. We can be sure that it is free of excrescences,
that it has grace and dignity, because the lives of the people have
grace and dignity, just as our present architecture is vulgar and
commercial because our lives are vulgar and commercial. We
can be sure that it makes full use of the decorative arts, that it is
harmonious in line, and in relation to its setting; that it is in all
respects an expression of the harmony of the community, because
its inspiration is drawn, as Kropotkin says, from ideals held in
common. Today, when we have no common ideals, our architecture is a mere conglomeration of buildings thrown up according to indiscriminate notions of utility, impressiveness, economy,
and completely without regard for any harmonious whole.
Nothing else could be expected of a society devoid of harmony,
a competitive society of each for himself and the devil take the
hindmost.
It is impossible to see clearly, in detail, what Utopia looks
like, physically, since it is impossible to predict how much will
survive of the modem world to be carried over into Utopia. In a
series of world-wars the glories of the Middle Ages and of the
Renaissance can and do disappear over-night. We can but hope
that some, at least, of the riches of the past will survive twentieth-
century barbarism — that there will still be Oxford, minus
its present slums; that there will be Chartres Cathedral, and St.
Tropheme at Arles, and Venice, intact with St. Mark’s, and the
Doges Palace, those visions in a dream, and some, at least, of
the superb baroque architecture of Munich, Vienna, Salzburg,
Wurzburg, and something left of the medieval enchantments
of Nuremberg, Ghent, Bruges. All these things have their place
in Utopia, along with the old houses of the savants along the
quays of the lie St. Louis in Paris — the tall, old, yellow houses
looking through the plane trees and the poplars that reach out
over the river — and the old gabled houses along the Amsterdam
canals. One can only hope that Rome will survive, the twin
towers of the old yellow Trinita dei Monti continue to lift their
beauty above the magnificent horse-shoe sweep of the steps that
are flanked at one side by Shelley’s house, that flowers will
continue to blow amongst the ruins of the palaces and temples
on the Palatine Hill; that nothing will happen to the Duomo
and Baptistery at Florence, or the little town of Fiesole, on the
hillside above. So many pages from the past in Europe are
worthy to be carried over into the Utopian world. The terraced
and be-fotintained gardens of such places as Versailles, Tivoli,
Frascati, would make happy playgrounds for the Utopians —
indeed they are hardly likely to make fountains or gardens more
beautiful.
Morris, in his Utopia, retained Oxford, as we have seen,
and made it the task of his Utopians to restore England to what it
was before it became industrialised. The ‘huge and foul work-
shops’ surrounded by the slum dwellings of the workers were
disposed of, ‘melted away into the general country’, and England
became once more a green and pleasant land, ‘a garden, where
nothing is wasted and nothing is spoilt, with the necessary
dwellings, sheds, and workshops scattered up and down the
country, all trim and neat and pretty’. When people have any
sense of architectural power, Morris declared, as they have in
freedom, they know that they can have what they want, and then,
like the medievals, they like ‘everything trim and clean, and
orderly and bright’. Beyond this Morris does not specify the
architecture of his ‘Nowhere’. It was trim and pretty and neat;
it K was enclosed by trees in a garden-like England; the reader
must fill in the details from imagination stirred by this bare
outline.
Sir Thomas More, on the other hand, seems to have seen his
Utopia as clearly as though he had himself been there. He all
but gives its latitude and longitude. His Utopia is an island,
and there are fifty-four cities, including the capital, which is set
upon a hill. The cities are all ‘large and well built’. The capital
is walled, with many towers and forts, and surrounded by a moat
on three sides and the river on the fourth. ‘The streets are very
convenient for carriages, and are well sheltered from the winds.
Their buildings are good, and are so uniform, that a whole side
of a street looks like one house. The streets are twenty feet broad;
there lie gardens behind all their houses; these are large but
enclosed with buildings, that on all hands face the streets, so
that every house has both a door to the street, and a back door
to the garden’. All is 'well-ordered and finely kept’. The houses
are three stories high, the fronts faced with stone, plastering or
brick; the roofs are flat, and the windows glazed. Over the
river there is a bridge of 'fair stone, consisting of many stately
arches’.
That bridge of fair stone, with its many stately arches, conveys,
perhaps, more than all the details of the architecture of the
houses; it conveys the 'tone’, the whole architectural standard.
You know that in the city where that bridge is to be found all will
be dignified and gracious and fair. That should you find such a
city outside of dreams you would have come to Walt Whitman’s
city 'invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the
earth . . . the new city of Friends’.
In Utopia sculpture is as nearly as possible related to archi-
tecture — what Gill calls a ‘natural flowering of the walls and
pillars of buildings ’. He reminds us that the word decoration
means that which is decorous, which is proper and seemly, just as
ornament is that which is required to furnish something — in the
way that candlesticks are the ornament, in this sense, of the altar.
When sculpture is removed from the art schools and studios
and museums and art galleries and becomes the natural flowering
of architecture — ‘the product of the exuberance of workmen’- —
the sculptor achieves his proper place in society, that of respon-
sible workman, as responsible as the bricklayers, the stone-
masons, the architects themselves, and his art, that is to say his
work, is given its proper place, not something esoteric and apart
but an integral part of a whole.
In the U.S.S.R. artists — that is to say writers, painters,
musicians, sculptors, actors — are a privileged class, and it is as
much a criticism of the U.S.S.R. that this should be so as it is a
criticism of capitalist countries that whilst people called artists
are regarded as special and apart, nevertheless they can be
allowed to starve if they fail to* achieve a commercial success
for themselves. And, as we have seen, artists in the U.S.S.R.
are only a privileged and honoured class so long as they toe the
government propaganda line. The artist has a better time of it
in the capitalist countries, since at least he is free to express
his own ideas in his own way. He may even succeed by stubbornly
persisting in ideas commonly regarded as 'revolutionary’ —
witness Jacob Epstein, whose works continue to shock the con-
ventionally-minded, but whose celebrity increases with the
years.
The Mexican painter, Diego Rivera, is a strong advocate of the
integration of painting, sculpture, architecture. In his proposed
innovations for the art-school curriculum there is, writes his
biographer, Bertram D. Wolfe, ‘a steady insistence on the artist
as workman in both the physical and the social senses, and a
central role is assigned to the study of comparative styles and the
history of art in terms of the social role of the various arts.
Finally, there is a continuous integration of painting and sculpture
with each other, and both of them with architecture’. The
greater part of Diego’s own work is mural painting, and Wolfe
observes, in this connection, If only for its own sake, art must
enter once more the public arena. Too long has it abdicated
its power to speak to man of his destiny. And today, when that
destiny presents its riddle in “political” terms, art dare no
longer proclaim itself indifferent and incapable. A Rockefeller
buys a wall to smash it. A Hitler expels art from a land of culture because it cannot prove a Biedermeier grandparentage.
Even the proletarian land, struggling forward amidst backward-
ness and hostility, becomes contaminated with off-scourings of
totalitarianism \
In Utopia this integration of painting, sculpture, architecture
is continuously sought; the art of the studio is not despised,
but the aim of the painter and the sculptor is always towards this
integration, and failure to achieve it is a matter for regret. It
cannot be over-emphasised that in Utopia the conception of the
artist is that of the workman, the good craftsman ; the fine arts and
the decorative arts merge, and all work well done is art, something
made, the creative product of human skill.
In the previous chapter we discussed the use of the film in
Utopia for educational purposes, and made some reference to
its entertainment value, and we cannot close this discussion
of art in Utopia without some consideration of the film as art.
Let us make no mistake about it — the film’s potentiality as art
is as great as its educational potentialities. Art being simply
the thing well made, in Utopia the film is as much art as the
noble piece of architecture, the finely woven cloth, the beautiful
song or poem, the pleasing musical composition and its skilled
rendering. The same basic principle of fine craftsmanship
applies ; but the film is an integration of several arts — the craftsmanship of the story-writer, the producer, the photographer,
the actors, the designers of the sets, and of many more people
besides. And the Utopians apply the same criticism to a film
as to a stage play, or a story, or a novel, or a painting, that is to
say they demand that it shall have sincerity and truth, and that
it shall, in one way or another, illuminate some aspect of life;
whether it is realism or fantasy they demand these qualities
of the finished production. In Utopia there is nothing approaching a film convention, they would greet with derisive laughter
a. film heroine who went through a gale and emerged without
a hair out of place; any distortion of history they would regard
with contempt; and as to altering the climax of a book, a play,
a story, for the sake of a happy ending, anything so absurd could
not occur to them, so profound is their passion for truth — and
even in Utopia not every real life story has a happy ending by
any means, so complex is human nature, so irrational, in spite
of everything, human emotions. This passion for truth disposes
of the convention that film actresses must be beautiful and film
actors handsome; nor is a love-interest considered essential to a
film story.
The Utopians have a high regard for the artistic integrity
of a number of films that came out of France up to the time of
World War II — the satirical whimsies of the Rene Clairs before
his ghost went west especially delight them — and for several
German films of the pre-Hitler era. They are well aware that the
remarkable imaginative German film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari y
made film history in 1920 — that it was, as Paul Rotha wrote
of it in 1930, 1 ‘Once and for all the first attempt at the expression
of a creative mind in the new medium of cinematography’.
It amazes the Utopians that the film did not go on from there,
but as it developed technically, achieving sound and colour,
degenerated artistically until it touched bottom in the Hollywood vulgarities of the ’thirties and ’forties. The Utopians
have a great respect, also, for some of the early Russian films,
outstandingly The Battleship Potemkin 9 made in 1925; they consider that, as the Stalinist era developed, the films of the U.S.S.R.
became increasingly propagandist, and top-heavy with it.
Their admiration for the English actor, Charles Chaplin, makes
it a little difficult for them to remember that his films classify
as American, and apart from his contribution they have little
use for American films outside of a very few exceptions, notably
The Grapes of Wrath. Nor, with the exception of one or two
documentary films, Drifters (1924) and San Demetrio (1944),
have they little interest in English Pre-Utopian films,
There is no doubt in the minds of the Utopians that before
World War II the finest films, in fact the only films of authentic
artistic value, were coming from France. They do not claim in
Utopia to have produced anything finer than Gens du Voyage , La
Femme du Boulanger , La Grande Illusion , and the R6n 6 Clair satire,
Le Dernier Milliardaire . But whether grave or gay, realistic or fan-
tastic, their own films are all of this class. In Utopia it is all much
easier, of course, to maintain a high standard, since there is no
‘box-office’ to watch and no ‘stars’ commanding huge salaries
for the exploitation of their ‘sex-appeal’. The Utopians are not
interested in ‘stars’, on either stage or screen; they know from
experience that the brilliant amateur frequently outshines the
slick professional, brings to the part a feeling, a sincerity, the
professional shed years ago; they are aware that even in the
Pre-Utopian era some of the more intelligent film producers occa-
sionally had the inspiration to use ordinary people in place of
professionals — there was a beautiful film of the South Seas,
called Tabu , in which the cast were all natives, quite new to such
work, and there was the Irish film, Man of Aran , which, similarly,
used the natives of the place. There are, of course, professional
actors and actresses in Utopia, people with a special gift and
who make their acting a full-time job, but no special importance
attaches to them; they are not more highly paid than anyone
else, and no particular ‘glamour’ attaches to them, nor is there
any particular demand for them; the demand, all the time,
is for the right person for the part, and very often — such is the
artistic integrity of the Utopians — it is found that some quite
unknown and inexperienced person fits the role better than any of
the professionals. In Utopia names mean nothing; the play’s the
thing, and who can best interpret it.
Despite the high artistic level of the film in Utopia, however,
the theatre is, on the whole, more popular, the flesh-and-blood
actors being preferred to moving pictures of them. The Utopians
regard the film as chiefly valuable for educational purposes, and
for what, in our world, we call ‘documentaries’. The Utopians
make very beautiful documentary films, showing various aspects
of life in different countries, and the explanatory running com-
mentary is intelligently written — free of facetiousness and wise-
cracking and all such vulgarities — and delivered in a pleasant,
natural voice.
The Utopians make the utmost use of the open-air theatre;
they prefer to take their recreation as much as possible out-of-
doors, which is another reason for preferring the theatre to the
cinema. They regard the stuffy darkness of the cinema as one
of its drawbacks. Every town and village has its open-air theatre,
in the Roman style, as we have indicated, but with arrangements
made for giving the performance under shelter in bad weather,
and there are companies of ‘strolling players’ who travel from
place to place giving performances in barns, village halls, market-
places, public-squares — wherever is most convenient.
The Utopians, being well-educated in the real sense, are very
catholic in their tastes; they like all kinds of plays; they like
Greek tragedies, they like Shakespeare, they like the tragedies and
comedies of their own times. But whatever is given, by whomever
it is given, it is art; that is to say the thing well-made, well-
written, well-produced, well-acted. Any number of their plays,
both stage and screen, are light in texture, designed only to amuse,
but they are never false or shoddy; even the lightest trifle has
truth at its heart, a conception of spiritual values, and is touched
with beauty and an implicit poetry.
There is not much attendance at cinemas in the summer
months; the Utopians prefer to be in the open air. In some parts
of Utopia the cinemas close down during the summer, but if,
after a consensus of opinion has been taken, an agreed minimum
of people want them open, they must stay open for an agreed number of hours per week, because it is a basic principle of Utopia
that people must have what they want — so long as it is not anti-
social — not what other people consider good for them. The
Utopians, not prepared to have laws dictated to them, are certainly not going to have their pleasures dictated to them ; nor is it
any part of the Utopian scheme that everyone shall like the same
things;' they know that human nature is complex and varied,
highly individual; and there is no question of imposing ideas
from above, whether in the matter of education, art, or the
employment of leisure.
But leisure in Utopia is a subject In itself, and a highly important
one.
Just as the consideration of what we mean by education leads
on naturally to consideration of what we mean by art and culture,
so from that point we must go on to ask ourselves what we mean
by work, since we are agreed that art is simply craftsmanship, the
thing well made, and every good craftsman, every good workman,
is therefore an artist. We have seen, too, that some manifestations
of art — such as the film, the theatre, dancing, music, poetry,
literature — apart from being the contribution to society of the
artists concerned, from being, that is to say, part of the world’s
work, are also part of the world’s pleasure. Now, in Utopia,
clearly, pleasure falls into two distinct categories; there is what
Morris calls ‘work-pleasure’, the pleasure human beings derive
from creative activity; and there is the pleasure in which human
beings relax and enjoy the creative activity of others — such as
in watching a film or a stage-play, or listening to music, or reading
literature or poetry; or in non-creative activity such as dancing,
rowing, riding, swimming, walking, climbing, all the sports and
games pleasures. H. J. Massingham, in his Tree of Life , contends
that, rationally, work and leisure should be different phases of a
single activity, and leisure ‘never an escapist device for forgetting
work’; he believes that ‘a split between work and play means a
split personality and a neurotic or neuropathic tendency in the
people’. This idea is strongly supported by Eric Gill and other
Catholic writers. The Rerum Novarum itself warns against the
Leisure State. ‘The Leisure State’, writes Harold Robbins,
severely, in his book, The Sun of Justice , x ‘is un-Catholic and
unreasonable. Too much and too constant work brutalises a man.
Too much and too constant leisure dissipates and degrades him.’
He goes on to speak of time ‘frittered away in conventional
posturing or frivolous or degrading pleasures’.
If by ‘ degrading pleasures ’ he means blood-sports or whoring
he need have no fear of these things in the ideal commonwealth;
the Utopians are far too intelligent; their sense of values prohibits
them from the exploitation either of animals or of other human
beings for their pleasure. As there is no hate in them to be worked
out of their systems it is not their idea of fun to go out and kill
something, and their rational attitude to sex rules out prostitution.
Why do so many teachers and preachers and would-be reformers
invariably assume that the masses, given freedom, have no ideas
for the employment of their leisure except dissipations and brutalities? If much leisure does indeed dissipate and degrade, then
clearly the system of education is at fault. But in the ideal
commonwealth this is not so. People know how to put their
leisure to good use — the truly recreative use, that is to say, for the
re-creation of their energies, the refreshment of their minds and
spirits. Even when work is a pleasure, when it is creative, and can
be called, as Morris calls it, work-pleasure, human beings need
leisure in which to enjoy other pleasures.
The writer of an article on ‘A Leisured Civilisation’, in The
Times Literary Supplement of September 18th, 1943, puts it admir-
ably: ‘This is what we have to learn, that even though our work
be delightful there are other delights, and that it is necessary, in a
new and newly-leisured civilisation, to cultivate them. Leisure is,
or should be, a corrective to extreme specialisation, enabling men
to know themselves and enrich their individualities. ... A
leisured civilisation, knowing how to use its leisure, is, and always
has been, the true and natural product of a machine age. What
must come is a vast distribution of leisure at the expense of the
machines.’
There are, says this admirably liberal-minded writer, two
good uses of leisure — ‘ the first is to pursue an activity that pleases
you . . . the second is to be idle ’. Many essayists on the pretty
subject of idleness, he says, have confused it with the pursuit of a
pleasant activity, such as fishing, reading, or playing patience;
but idleness is another matter; it is not occupied with anything,
nor is it of its essence that it should be. He disputes the old adage
that Satan finds mischief for idle hands to do, ‘ the truth being ’,
says he, ‘that idleness is an opportunity of the spirit, an opening
of windows to its outgoing and incoming’. He speaks of it, also, as
‘ an awareness of the spirit ’ and ‘ one of the arts of life ’ ; he insists
that it is creative, ‘a liberating meditation, a humane means of
self-healing and self-knowledge’.
Bernard Shaw makes a similar distinction between leisure and
rest, between idleness, that is, and activity. ‘Labour’, he says, 1
‘is doing what we must; leisure is doing what we like; rest is
doing nothing whilst our bodies and minds recover from their
fatigue.’ He points out that doing what we like is often as
laborious as doing what we must. That kicking a ball up and
down a field for fun is harder work than many kinds of necessary
labour. This, of course, is true; but in Utopia people enjoy
doing what they must do. Every physically fit person makes some
contribution to society, and does it gladly because it As some-
thing in which he or she is interested; the dull and unpleasant
tasks are shared out, so that no section of the community does
them all the time, and such tasks are enormously minimised by
the simplification of wants, and by the strongly-developed social
sense of the people. Production is lower than in a competitive
society, and a great many goods at present machine-produced —
under the necessity of mass-production — are made by hand, thus
releasing people from the slavery of the machine. Machinery is
used as little as possible, and only in the service of man, not for his
exploitation for the piling up of profits, as in our society; it is not
allowed to robotise men and women.
In Morris’s ‘Nowhere’ when certain work was found by experi-
ence to be too disagreeable or troublesome it was given up, and
what it produced was done without. The rule was that ‘ all work
which it would be irksome to do by hand is done by immensely
improved machinery; and in all work which it is a pleasure to do
by hand machinery is done without... and as we are not driven
to make a vast quantity of useless things we have time and re-
sources enough to consider our pleasure in making them’.
Machine after machine was dropped in the course of years, be-
cause the machine could not produce works of art, and these,
things made by hand, were more and more called for.
Harold Robbins is of the opinion that all industrial machinery
should go. It is a far-reaching statement. For one thing we need
machinery that will get the coal out of the mines for us instead of
human labour. The need is for de-industrialisation as far as
possible; then we shall get the machine as Wilde visualised it, the
servant of society, saving people from the dull, mechanical,
unpleasant jobs.
Some of the unpleasant jobs of our present society are abolished
by the Utopian way of life. They have, for example, no sewage
system as we understand it, a wasteful system, which pours out
into the sea what should, by every natural law, be returned to the
soil. This highly important subject we will discuss fully later
when we come to consider Utopia in relation to the land; mention
here is relevant, however, as an example of how a rational way of
living can both remove certain unpleasant tasks and benefit
society at the same time.
Perhaps you will protest at this point, ‘But granted that the
Utopians have a scientific attitude regarding sewage and the soil,
an appreciation of the Cycle of Nature, and so on, there still have
to be latrines, and there is thus still the necessity to employ people
for the unpleasant task of keeping them clean’. The reply to
which is that the work of keeping latrines sanitary is only made
unpleasant by lack of common decency on the part of some who
use them. But the Utopians are not lacking in this sense; they do
not have to be requested to leave public conveniences in the
condition in which they would wish to find them. . . .
‘Lavatory attendant’ is not a full-time occupation in Utopia.
Not because it is unpleasant but because it is boring and un-
creative. It is one of the jobs, like machine-minding, which no
one person does often or for long.
The workshops of Utopia bear no resemblance to the huge
factories of our world. They are small and personal ; that monster
of mechanisation, the travelling belt, is unknown in them. There
is no question of workers making the same movement thousands
of times a day and never, for all their slavery, seeing the finished
job. Different tasks are allotted the workers in the Utopian work-
shop, but they see the thing they are working on grow before their
eyes; it is personal to them; their individual work is integrated
with the whole, like that of the men who work at separate tasks
in .the building of a ship, a bridge, a house. Where it is possible
for one person to complete a job this is considered the ideal
arrangement, but obviously it is not always practical ; the worker
who makes the wooden part of an easy chair or couch, for instance,
is not necessarily able to weave the cloth or make the springs for its
upholstering ; the man or woman with a gift for tailoring may be
no good at making the cloth, and so on. The person who can
produce the finished article, from the spinning of the wool to the
last button sewn on the completed garment, is obviously a greater
artist than the person who can only weave or only tailor or only
make the buttons, and most of the Utopians can, in fact, do more
than one thing — though, clearly, the fact that the good tailor or
weaver may also be a good carpenter or shoemaker does not help
him or her — for there are no sex distinctions in Utopia — to produce
the finished article. However, each gives according to his ability
and receives according to his needs, in accordance with the basic
principles, and everyone is satisfied.
Perhaps you will demand, at this point, ‘But what about the
irresponsible, the non-co-operative person — the person who
refuses to give according to his ability; is he still allowed to take
according to his needs, or is there some method of forcing him to
co-operate?’
It is an old question — a favourite question of those who assert
that the principle of mutual aid applied to human society is not
practicable. Alexander Berkman answered it years ago, and
his answer cannot be bettered. He considered that the Bolsheviks
in the early days of the revolution made a mistake in attempting to
establish the principle that whoso shall not work neither shall he
eat. He pointed out that it had proved impractical in application
and was both unjust and harmful. ‘It was impractical’, he explained, ‘because it required an army of officials to keep tab on
the people who worked or didn’t work. It led to incrimination
and recrimination, and endless disputes about official decisions.
So that within a short time the number of those who didn’t work
was doubled and even trebled by the effort to force people to work
and to guard against their dodging or doing bad work. It was the
system of compulsory labour which soon proved such a failure
that the Bolsheviki were compelled to give it up. Moreover, the
system caused even greater evils in other directions. Its injustice
lay in the fact that you cannot break into a person’s heart or mind
and decide what peculiar physical or mental condition makes it
temporarily impossible for him to work. Consider further the
precedent you establish by introducing a false principle and
thereby rousing the opposition of those who feel it wrong and
oppressive and therefore refuse co-operation. A rational community will find it more practical and beneficial to treat all alike,
whether one happens to work at the time or not rather than create
more non-workers to watch those already on hand, or to build
prisons for their punishment and support. For if you refuse to feed
a man for whatever cause, you drive him to theft and other
crimes — and thus you yourself create the necessity for courts,
lawyers, judges, jails and warders, the upkeep of whom is far more
burdensome than to feed the offenders. And, these you have to
feed anyhow, even if you put them in prison.’
‘The revolutionary community’, he concludes, ‘will depend
more on awakening the social consciousness and solidarity of its
delinquents than on punishment. It will rely on the example set
by its working members, and it will be right in doing so. For the
natural attitude of the industrious man to the shirker is such that
the latter will find the social atmosphere so unpleasant that he
will prefer to work and enjoy the respect and goodwill of his
fellows rather than to be despised in idleness .’
It is probable that in the transition from the old order to
the new order of the ideal commonwealth there will be people who
so lack social sense that they will take advantage of the situation
to evade their share of the common responsibility, just as children
who have hitherto known only orthodox schools when transferred
to the atmosphere of a free school, where there is no compulsion
and no punishment, take pleasure in throwing stones at the win-
dows and staying away from lessons. After a time, the novelty of
freedom wears off, and when they realise that there really is no
compulsion and there really are no punishments it ceases to be
exciting to throw stones and refuse lessons, and their natural
creativeness asserts itself; throwing stones and idling is non-
creative and a bore. No one can be completely idle for ever; it
becomes too insufferably boring. There is also, as Berkman points
out, the uncomfortable feeling of being despised by their fellow-
men — despised and resented. Sooner or later they must inevitably
discover something which it gives them pleasure to^do, and which
is at the same time useful to society — something which wins them
the respect of their fellows.
There are no hard and fast rules about hours of work in Utopia.
An arrangement is reached through common consent when it is a
matter of collective activity ; and when it is a matter of the individual craftsman he is best left to work as he feels inclined. Good
heavens, perhaps you will exclaim, that means he will do practically nothing! That is not true. There is such a thing as being
interested in the job. People only find any excuse not to work
when the work is tedious to them. In Utopia that question
doesn’t arise, since everyone works at the thing they are interested
in, except for those short spells, planned according to rota, at dull
or unpleasant but necessary jobs. Anyone refusing to take his or
her share in such work would not be compelled, but the anger
and contempt of their fellows would be much more unpleasant
to anyone of any sensibility than the tasks themselves. But if any
were so thick-skinned that he remained indifferent to this, or
preferred it to the uncongenial duty, the community would merely
shrug and accept him as a cross they have to bear... The
generation that grows up in Utopia is not likely to produce such
‘problem citizens’.
Bellamy, in his Utopia, makes it clear that work is not to be
considered the main business of existence. He makes one of his
Utopians explain... The labour we have to render as our part
in securing for the nation the means of a comfortable physical
existence, is by no means regarded as the most important, the
most interesting, or the most dignified of our powers. We look
upon it as a necessary duty to be discharged before we can fully
devote ourselves to the higher exercise of our faculties, the in-
tellectual and spiritual employment and pursuits which alone
mean life. Everything possible is, indeed, done by the just distri-
bution of burdens, and by all manner of special attractions and
incentives to relieve our labour of irksomeness, and, except in a
comparative sense, it is not usually irksome, and is often inspiring.
But it is not our labour, but the higher and larger activities which
the performance of our task will leave us free to enter upon, that
are considered the main business of existence’.
The main business of existence, as Bellamy saw it, was the
achievement of leisure whilst still young enough to put it to good
use. And by good use he understood scientific, literary, or
scholarly interests; travel, social relaxation with good friends,
‘the cultivation of all manner of personal idiosyncrasies and
special tastes, and the pursuit of every imaginable form of recrea-
tion’. His workers, retired from their national service at forty-five,
were to have, in fact, ‘time for the leisurely and unperturbed
appreciation of the good things of the world which they have
helped to create’. The reward of their years of labour, in fact, is
life-
The flaw in this scheme is that Bellamy has his Utopians
devote their youth to the service of the nation, instead of to what
he acknowledges to be the main business of existence. It would
seem a pity to have to wait till forty-five before acquiring ‘ elbow
room’ for full, rich living. Youth is the time when such things
as travel, friendships, and spiritual and intellectual adventures
are the most enriching. In the present writer’s view it would seem
better to so minimise work from the beginning that it interferes
hardly at all with the business — the busy-ness — of living. However
creative and pleasurable and interesting the task on hand, what
normally constituted person wants to work on a soft, warm, May
morning when the air is full of the scent of blossoms and the song
of birds, ‘and the river calls, and the sea calls, and oh, the call of
the sky!’ It is positively sacrilege to devote such a day to doing
anything but being alive, savouring the vast luxury of living. It is
a day to down tools, leave the bench, the typewriter, the easel, the
loom, whatever one is doing, and go out into the open and give
oneself up to the simple animal pleasures of the five senses. Shall
we not smell the lilacs with the dew upon them, hear the thrush
and blackbird and cuckoo, see the bluebells like heaven laid out
under the trees, feel the new-springing grass ‘soft as the breast of
doves, and shivering sweet to the touch ’, taste the sweetness of the
clover’s honey distilled in tiny drops upon the tongue, and the
sour-sweet of the red sorrel crushed between the teeth . . . who
would be so dead of soul as to wish to work, be it ever so pleasurably, on such a morning in the sweet month of May?
As to employing leisure ‘frivolously’, what is wrong with being
frivolous on occasion? And what more suitable occasion than our
leisure hours? Oh, these moralists, these improvers, with their
mania for regimenting men and women in work and play alike!
When will they realise that what the world wants — and badly — is
not more employment but bigger and better ww-employment?
That it is beneficial both to the soul and body of man to take
time off in which to lay activity aside and merely stand and stare?
There is no virtue in work for its own sake. Only our false conception of morality makes work a virtue and laziness a sin. What
more natural than to be ‘averse to labour’? To make the wheels
of society go round certain things must be done; food must be
produced, clothes made, houses built; all these are essential
tasks; in a rational society co-operative effort reduces each person’s
share of these essential tasks to the minimum, so that all may have
the maximum of time and energy for the enjoyment of the real
business of life — which is its enjoyment.
James Hilton makes a Tibetan in his novel, Lost Horizon , query
the word ‘slacker’ carelessly used by an Englishman; the English-
man explains that it is a slang word meaning a lazy fellow, a
good-for-nothing; to which the Tibetan replies, thoughtfully,
‘It is significant that the English regard slackness as a vice. We,
on the other hand, should vastly prefer it to tension. Is there not
too much tension in the world at present, and might it not be
better if more people were slackers?’
John Cowper Powys makes the same point: The
ordinary man . . . wants, in fact, not more work but more leisure;
not proletarian art but human art, not puritanical levelling down
but individualistic levelling-up.’ He asserts with commendable
vigour — ‘ . . . there is no aristocratic mania for solitude and
silence and for being “alone with Nature”, and for preferring
a horse or a dog rather than a human being as companion; no
mania for growing flowers, or tending a rock-garden, or a green-
house; no mania for fishing, or hunting, or botanizing, or
photographing, or boating, or sailing; no mania for just “loafing
and inviting our soul and observing a spear of grass”, that we
common men couldn’t cultivate and be absolutely absorbed in,
if only our money went a little further, if only our working-hours
were a good deal shorter!’
In Utopia, where everybody works, nobody works long hours;
there is simply no need. The work gets done. Also, by eliminating
competition fewer things have to be produced. Think of the
wasted labour in our present society — the hundreds of different
brands of soap, cigarettes, toothpaste — and each claiming to be
the best, and little, if anything, to choose between any of them!
This does not mean that everything in Utopia is standardised;
there is plenty of variety, but no duplication; some people like
their toothbrushes to have white handles, others like them
coloured;' some like Turkish cigarettes, others prefer Virginian;
some women like their powders scented, others like them plain;
and all women want a variety of shades and textures in the silk
stockings in their wardrobes. If all commodities were standardised
life would become very grey and dreary indeed.
The stern moralists, no doubt, are shocked to find that the
women of Utopia are addicted to such frivolities as cosmetics and
fine silk stockings; some are probably equally shocked to find
that the Utopians smoke and drink; others have, no doubt, been
shocked by the suggestion that there are human problems in
Utopia. But Utopia is nothing if not an earthly Paradise of human
beings. It is true that their education and environment combine
to produce in them qualities of rationality and co-operativeness
unknown amongst the mass of people in our present society; their
whole way of life is based on this principle of mutual aid and
brotherly love; but they remain human — they fall in love, they
suffer, they know the pangs of jealousy; they do not always act
as wisely as they think , because intellect is one thing and emotion
another. And so they are not always wise, and not always happy,
and often they are frivolous, and Utopia is altogether a place
where there is
‘Wine and music still,
And statues, and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill.’
Whether the Utopians in their leisure call for madder music,
redder wine, or whether they loaf and invite the soul to observe a
spear of grass, is entirely their own affair — the affair of each
individual. Away with the moralists and their conformity —
beginning with that disciplinarian Plato! This is Utopia; we will
wear our hats on the sides of our heads, or, if we’ve a mind to, none
at all; we will drink wine under hedges and make love under hay-
stacks ; we will stride over the hills singing ribald songs ; or lie on
our backs in a meadow chewing a grass, merely looking up at the
sky and thinking nothing at all — for why should the mind be
always cluttered up with thought? And no one is going to per-
suade us that we should be happier, or even as happy, making a
pot or a chair or a sonnet or anything else, however beautifully,
when the sun shines and we have the mood and the leisure for
idling the long lovely day away — not ‘ wasting time ’ but using it
for the supreme purpose of life, which is to live .
Let us make no bones about it — there is very little work done in
Utopia in the good weather. The bread must be baked, the cows
milked, the hens fed, it is true, but when such essentials are
attended to the Utopians, being sensible people, give themselves
up to enjoyment; their worship of the sun is part of their zest for
living. Tomorrow it may rain or blow, but today the sun shines
and is therefore a natural holiday. There are no bank holidays in
Utopia, for the very good reason that there are no banks. There
are banks of violets and primroses and wild thyme, but no
unnatural banks of brick and stone and money. There are no
State holidays because there is no State. No religious holidays
because there is no orthodox Church. (There are churches, for
those who want them, but that is another matter.) No institution
known as the annual holiday because clearly the idea of one or two
weeks out of the year set aside for holiday is ridiculous. People
need all the holday they can get, and any sunny day is a high day
and a holiday, a festival of joyous idleness.
‘If everyone just downs tools when they think they will — just
because it happens to be a fine day — doesn’t that make for every
kind of confusion and disorder? Supposing because it is a fine
day you decide to knock off work yourself and go and visit a
friend or relative some distance away — if the engine-driver of the
train that would take you there also decides to take a holiday, it
means you can’t go.’
Precisely. What of it? What about it? Why should any man
stand in front of a fiery furnace driving an engine along a steel
track when the meadows invite him with soft grasses and cool
airs?
‘But you might have an important business appointment to
keep?’
‘In Utopia on a fine day? Nonsense.’
‘You would make life impossible!’
‘On the contrary, my friend, I would make it possible! I would
make it possible for everyone to enjoy life. To live in the real sense
— really to livel You would give them only bread, with your
orderliness, your regulations, your regimentation; I would give
them roses and a sweet disorder, roses and wine, roses and wine
and music ... for this, my friend, is Utopia. And Utopia is
this, or it is nothing ! ’
Having established the importance of leisure we can devote
some attention to the various ways in which the Utopians employ
it — since clearly they do not all spend all their time drinking
wine under hedges or making love under haystacks or lying on
their backs mindlessly contemplating the sky.
Plutarch tells us that in Sparta under Lycurgus the people had
a cheap and easy way of supplying their few wants, and that
‘when they were not engaged in war, their time was taken up
with dancing, feasting, hunting, or meeting to exercise, or con-
verse’. In our modern Utopia war is ruled out, so that when the
people are not making their contribution to society in the form
of some useful work, done for no other reason than that they want
to do it, they have ample leisure for the real business of living —
which is to live. What constitutes the real business of living, of
course, varies with the individual. Sir Thomas More’s Utopians
considered that the true happiness of life consisted in improve-
ment of their minds, and all unnecessary labour was eliminated
in order to afford plenty of time for this purpose. Similarly the
Utopians of the ‘City of the Sun* worked only about four hours a
day, and spent the remaining hours ‘in learning joyously, in
debating, in reading, ‘reciting, in writing, in walking, in exercising
the mind and body, and with play’.
In our Utopia, as has already been indicated, every town has its
open-air theatre, and there are cinemas and concert-halls, and
public parks. The gardens and parklands of the big houses and
palaces of the pre-Utopian era are now the pleasure-grounds of
the whole community. Nowhere in Utopia is there that abominable thing, a board announcing that ‘Trespassers will be Prose-
cuted’. The generation that has grown up in Utopia can
hardly believe that there was a time when private individuals
actually owned not merely acres of woods and moorlands, but
mountains, ranges of hills, great lakes, and whole towns and
villages.
The mansions and palaces of the old order are converted to
various purposes : some are museums, some are schools, some are
holiday homes, some are hostels where people on walking tours —
a very popular form of recreation in Utopia — may put up for the
night. Some of the big old houses have been adapted to house
several families, each with their own apartments; others, again,
house communities. Where swimming pools were found in the
gardens of the houses taken over these were adapted for public
use. The open-air swimming pool and the open-air dancing
place are as popular in Utopia as the open-air theatre and concert. These swimming and dancing places are in grounds laid out
with lawns and trees and flower-beds ; there are cafes and kiosks
and little shops, and facilities for sun-bathing; they are places at
which whole days may be pleasantly passed in a healthy activity
or a no less healthy idleness. At the swimming pools the Utopians
sun-bathe and swim with little on or nothing according to indi-
vidual preference. There is no self-conscious cult of nudism; the
Utopians are much too well educated — in the real sense — to be
upset by the sight of anyone of either sex naked and unashamed,
but some people have a natural reticence, and others have an
aesthetic dislike of nudity except, perhaps, in the young and
beautiful ; there is no segregation of those who wish to be naked
when swimming and sun-bathing. That would seem prudish to
the Utopians. And of course there is no segregation of the sexes,
naked or clothed. The standard of physical fitness in Utopia
being very high, owing to the healthiness of their lives and their
knowledge of dietetics, there is little objection to nudity on
aesthetic grounds.
At the dancing places there is dancing of all kinds. After
the transition period the decadent dancing of the old order
died out, the Utopians finding no pleasure in shuffling about
locked in intimate embrace with complete strangers. They
well understand why a character in one of the novels of a pre-
Utopian era writer called Aldous Huxley called the dancing of
his times ‘the imitative copulative article. The Utopians are
interested in the folk dances of the different nations; they are
also interested in dancing as an interpretation of music, or an
idea; and they are interested in it purely as eurhythmies. They
have revived from the ‘olden 5 days of pre-Utopian England
the pleasant village habit of dancing round the maypole; they
cannot understand why so pleasant a festivity was allowed to
die out. They like, too, to dance in barns and farm-kitchens
at their harvest-home celebrations — another festivity revived
from the old days, and they like to dance round bonfires on May
Eve and Midsummer’s Eve, in the old English way, and to
perform torch-dances round bonfires in the old French way.
They are aware of the religious and pagan origins of these
ancient customs which, they have revived, but have no preju-
dices against them on that score; St. John’s Eve, and the First
Sunday in Lent, have no significance for them, but they have
historical interest for those interested in the barbaric history of
the pre-Utopian world.
They like to dance as much as possible in the open air, in
a setting of trees and lawns and flowers, when they are not
dancing round maypoles, or in barns or farm-kitchens, in the
streets, or at some fair held in a public square or market-place.
Of the more modern dances of the old world they have retained
the waltz — as originally danced in Vienna — and the tango, also
in its original form. They enjoy, also, watching dancing, and
take great pleasure in the ballet, in which the arts of dancing,
painting, music, are integrated in a satisfying whole. They have
retained some of the classical ballets from the old world, and
are all the time creating new ones expressive of their own
world.
As a result of their education, which has brought out the
creativeness in each man and woman, the Utopians do not
depend upon ready-made amusements. They use the radio,
television, gramophones, but they do not depend on these things,
any more than they depend on the cinema, the theatre, the
concert, though they enjoy going occasionally to all three.
They like to make their own music — most people acquire proficiency in at least one musical instrument, if it is only a reed
pipe. Where the young people of our world take gramophones
with them when they go on river excursions, or run out into
the country in their cars, the Utopian young people take their
guitars, and then lie under trees, or drift idly down-stream, and
sing whilst the musician of the party plays. At home there is
always someone who can play the piano, and usually someone
who can play the violin or ’cello. The harpsichord has been intro-
duced into Utopia — that lovely instrument which our present
world neglects so strangely. In our world when anyone in a
gathering of people says, ‘Let’s have some music!’ it means
‘Let’s put on a gramophone record’, or turn on the radio; in
Utopia it means let us make some music.
In his discussion of the machine as a modem evil, in his book,
Do What Ton Will , Aldous Huxley points out that ‘the machine
is dangerous because it is not only a labour-saver, but also a
creation-saver’, and that ‘leisure has now been almost as completely mechanised as labour. Men’, he adds, ‘no longer amuse
themselves, creatively, but sit and are passively amused by
mechanical devices... Men find it easier to let themselves be
passively amused than go out and create... Passivity and
subservience to machinery blunt the desire and diminish the
power to create’. And with this subservience to the machine,
to the ready-made, this frustration and final atrophy of the
creative impulse, comes a lowering of tastes and values. It is
so easy to turn on the radio and take what comes; so easy to
‘go to the pictures’ and sit back and submit. The film and
radio devotees are indifferent to the rubbish to which they half-
listen and which they half-watch; it bores them, but they reach
a stage of ennui, of inertia, at which they ‘can’t be bothered’;
it’s all so easy, so fatally easy, so effortless, and this effortlessness
works in them insidiously, a slow poison, destroying that vital
inner core of creativeness which is the source of happiness — of
satisfaction . There is a great deal of pleasure in our present
world, but very little happiness, and our society is so corrupted
by the artificialities of mechanisation that it confuses pleasure —
good times, amusements — with happiness.
The Utopians are not given to such confusion. They are not
concerned with ‘good times’, but with satisfactions, and that
mechanisation, whilst it may usefully serve in various directions,
cannot provide those satisfactions in which human happiness
is rooted. Whilst, therefore, they do not altogether ignore the
mechanical pleasures their world has to offer, in general they
like better to dance and sing and make their own music, and
enjoy the natural pleasures of the open air, such as riding,
swimming, walking, climbing, sailing, or drifting lazily in punts.
They have never allowed the natural creative impulse to become
deadened in them.
From these few indications it will be seen that there is in
Utopia every facility for the use of leisure in a variety of ways,
some of them what in our world we should call ‘cultural',
some of them athletic, and when the mood is for neither the
strenuous nor the cultural it is not considered a waste of time
to indulge in a blessed idleness — which is, on the contrary,
deemed as re-creative as any of the active pleasures.
There are in the U.S.S.R. large public parks known as Parks
of Rest and Culture. In the Moscow park there is a tall tower
from which those so-minded may take a parachute drop ; whether
this constitutes rest or culture is not defined; it is hardly culture —
but on the other hand is it to be classified as rest? In Utopia
all the most beautiful parks and pleasure gardens of the world
are freely available to all, and a great many have been specially
planned, so that as many tastes as possible are catered for within
the same enclosure — sun-bathing, dancing, swimming, boating,
secluded walks for lovers, comfortable garden-chairs under trees
for those who wish to read or talk with a friend or merely dream;
and swings and roundabouts and sand-pits for the children —
at some distance from the secluded walks and the quiet trees.
And everywhere fountains and rose-gardens and flower-beds
and lily-pools and arbours and summer-houses and gay statues,
and all that makes a park or garden a pleasance in the real
sense. There are no keep-off-the-grass, pick-no-flowers, drop-
no-litter notices. No horrid little moral texts nailed to trees
in the hope of making people tidy. Their strongly developed
social sense prevents the majority of Utopians from being 'litter-
fiends’. But if anyone is careless or forgetful there is no penalty,
no rebuke; the keepers of the gardens remove anything un-
sightly as automatically as the gardeners pull the weeds; and
if a child picks a flower, or a whole bunch of flowers, there is
no one to scold; there are plenty more. Generally speaking
these lapses from good social conduct do not occur — most of
the problems of freedom occur only in the fears of those whose
conception of freedom is shadowed by a disciplinarian habit of
thought. An objectionable feature of the Parks of Rest and
Culture in the Russian 'Utopia’ which could not possibly
occur anywhere in the Utopia under review, is the erecting
of effigies of people who have in some way transgressed — com-
mitted the sin of getting drunk or of being late to work or failing
to maintain a certain standard of output at work — with their
name and address and particulars of their 'crimes’ on placards
attached to the effigies. The Utopians consider this moral
censure very offensive. They cannot understand why the people
of that pre-Utopian Russian ' demi-Paradise ’ did not tear down
such examples of ill-manners. In their ideal commonwealth it
is not a crime to get drunk or be late to work or do less work
than another. Their conception of crime and their handling
of it we will discuss later.
Here, in this consideration of work and leisure in Utopia, it
remains only to, add that the Utopians believe, firmly, in the
importance of balancing brain and manual work; they regard
it as important to the general balance of life. If a man has
spent a number of working hours at a desk, whether composing
poetry or adding up figures, he does well, they maintain, to
change the occupation of his working hours from time to time,
and devote himself to landwork — farming or gardening — or to
carpentry or some other manual labour. Similarly, they main-
tain that manual labour needs balancing with some form of
mental work, because manual work, when it is not directly
creative — and a great deal of it is not — done continuously has
a deadening effect on the mind. It might be argued that the
manual worker can stimulate his mind with mental activity
during his leisure hours, but the Utopians would consider such
an arrangement unjust; when a man has done several hours
of hard manual labour he wants, in his leisure hours, as often
as not, to do nothing at all; his physical fatigue leaves him
unfitted for mental effort — such as playing chess, reading poetry,
or working out a crossword puzzle. And similarly the brain-
worker, after several hours of mental effort, is too mentally
tired, in many instances, to do anything but sit quietly and relax
in his leisure hours. There is, obviously, manual work which
involves considerable mental attention, and mental work which
involves a certain amount of physical effort — in painting, for
example, hand and brain are equally involved, and in such
cases the need for changes of occupation is not so great; but
where there is not this natural co-ordination of mental and
physical it is highly important to devote some portion of the
week’s working time to the satisfaction of whatever aspect of
the creative impulse has been denied. No one, man or woman,
the Utopians consider, should be a purely manual or a purely
brain worker. The poet needs to balance his mental preoccupa-
tions with digging in the earth; the man who has spent hours
turning sods with a spade needs to balance his earthiness by
going indoors and sitting down and reading a poem. Lest the
poet become a sterile intellectual, and the manual worker turn
into a clod.
As the Utopians see it, the essence of the art of living lies
in the preservation of this delicate balance of hand and brain,
flesh and spirit, both in the things we do because we — morally —
must, the things we call our work, our contribution to society
in return for what we take from it, and the things we do for
no other reason than that we want to, the things to which we
devote our leisure hours, and in which we express ourselves no
less than in our dedicated moments of creativeness. Our moments
of idleness are not less sanctified. We waste time only as we
find no satisfaction in the thing we do. In Utopia no one wastes
time, not in spite of so much leisure, but because of it.
Plutarch tells us that ‘ One of the greatest privileges that
Lycurgus procured for his countrymen was the enjoyment of leisure,
the consequence of his forbidding them to exercise any mechanic
trade. ... To this purpose we have a story of a Lacedaemonian,
who, happening to be at Athens while the court sat, was informed of a man who was fined for idleness; and when the
poor fellow was returning home in great dejection, attended
by his condoling friends, he desired the company to show him
the person that was condemned for keeping up his dignity.
So much beneath them they reckoned all attention to mechanics,
arts, and all desire of riches!’
Any suggestion of the abolition of money always rouses such a
storm of ridicule that it would seem as well to remind the scornful
reader at the outset that there is nothing new in the idea.
Aristophanes had it in 414 b.c. when he wrote his The Birds.
In the Cloud-Cuckoo-Borough of that birds’ Utopia, Euelpides
explains to Hoopoe, ‘Money is out of the question; we don’t
use it.’ Plutarch tells us that in Sparta under Lycurgus money
was banished. Sir Thomas More had the no-money idea in
the sixteenth century, Gerrard Winstanley in the seventeenth,
and William Morris and Edward Bellamy in the nineteenth.
More wrote of his Utopians that ‘the use as well as the desire
of money being extinguished, much anxiety and great occasions
of mischief is cut off with it’. He refers to them ‘living in common, without the use of money’. He believed that the abolition
of money would abolish crime as well as poverty, and pointed
out, ‘Men’s fears, solicitudes, cares, labours, and watchings,
would all perish in the same moment with the value of money;
even poverty itself, for the relief of which money seems most
necessary, would fall ... so easy a thing would it be to
supply all the necessities of life, if that blessed thing called
money which is pretended to be invented for procuring them,
was not, really the only thing that obstructed their being
procured ! ’
In his Utopia More had every city divided into four, with
a market-place in the middle of each where the goods produced
were sorted and distributed to the appropriate store-houses,
‘and thither every father goes and takes whatsoever he or his
family stand in need of, without either paying for it, or leaving
anything in exchange’. There is no reason for giving a denial
to any person, since there is such plenty of everything among
them; and there is no danger of a man’s asking for more than
he needs; they have no inducements to do this, since they are
sure that they shall always be supplied. It is the fear of want
that makes any of the whole race of animals either greedy or
ravenous; but besides fear, there is in man a pride that makes
him fancy it a particular glory to excel others in pomp or excess.
But by the laws of the Utopians there is no room for this, and
as they all ‘content themselves with fewer things, there is great
abundance of all things amongst them \
Winstanley regarded trading, buying and selling, as the real
fall of the human race, not ‘the righteous law of creation’,
but ‘the law of the conqueror’. He wanted ‘this cheating
device of buying and selling cast out ‘among the rubbish of
kingly powers. In his Utopia people were to work according
to their ability and take — from the common storehouses —
according to their need. He lacked the good Sir Thomas’s
faith in human nature, however, for there was to be, as we
have seen earlier, first reprimand and then punishment for
those who gave too little and took too much. People were to
be free to produce in their own homes or in public workshops,
which were also training centres for boys who did not wish
to follow their father’s trade, ‘or that of any other master’.
There were to be two kinds of storehouses, those for raw products,
such as corn, wool, etc., and those for manufactured articles.
Anyone attempting to buy or sell was to be subjected to severe
punishment. To sell land, or the produce of it, was to be punishable with death. Merely calling the land one’s own was punishable with twelve months of forced labour, and the guilty was
to have his words branded on his forehead ! No one was to hire
labour, or let himself out for labour on hire: ‘Whoever requires
assistance may avail himself of the services of young people,
or such as are specified by the labour overseers as “servants”.
Anyone infringing this rule will have to undergo twelve months’
forced labour.’ Gold and silver were not to be coined, but
might be worked up for domestic utensils — dishes, cups, etc.
Money could be used in transactions with other countries which
insisted on payment in that form. Winstanley regarded money
as the ‘cause of ail wars and oppressions’.
The people of the City of the Sun had little use for money
or commerce ; they refused to take money for goods they exported,
preferring to take in exchange ‘those things of which they are
in need’. They sometimes bought with money, and the young
people were amused at the number of things received in exchange for small sums of money, but the old men were not
amused, being ‘unwilling that the State should be corrupted
by the vicious customs of slaves and foreigners’.
Two hundred years later Bellamy wrote in his Looking Backward, ‘Money was essential when production was in many
private hands, and buying and selling was necessary to secure
what one wanted. It was, however, open to the obvious objection of substituting for food, clothing, and other things, a merely
conventional representative of them. The confusion of mind
which this favoured, between goods and their representative,
led the way to the credit system and its prodigious illusions.
Already accustomed to accept money for commodities, the
people next accepted promises of money, and ceased to look
at all behind the representative for the thing represented. Money
was a sign of real commodities, but credit was but the sign of
a sign/ Under such a system, he pointed out, periodic crises
were inevitable. In his Utopia there were 'no national, State,
county or municipal debts, or payments on their account . . .
no revenue service, no swarm of tax assessors and collectors’,
and by this disuse of money 'the thousand occupations connected with financial operations of all sorts, whereby an army
of men was formerly taken away from useful employments’,
were saved.
William Morris, in his News from Nowhere , shows the free
distribution of goods in market-place and shop, makes one of
his Utopians observe that ‘as there is no buying or selling, it
would be mere insanity to make goods on the chance of their
being wanted. ... So that whatever is made is good, and
thoroughly fit for its purpose’, and left it at that, as though it
were something too simple, and from the Utopian point of
view too obvious, to merit discussion.
To the Utopians it is obvious that money is a sham; that
the only real wealth is the land and what it, directly or indirectly,
produces. It seems to the younger ones, who have grown up
in the ideal commonwealth, droll that there was ever a time
when wealth was thought of in terms of money, and that money
was not silver or gold but mere paper, and that in a world of
plenty people starved and went homeless and in rags because
they had not sufficient of these pieces of paper to procure the
necessities of life.
‘Were the people all mad?’ they demand, and it is difficult
for them to grasp that what seems to them a tremendous game
of make-believe was taken seriously as ‘the economic system’.
The older Utopians remember the passing of the money system
during the transitional period of change-over from the old
order to the new. First of all food was distributed free, and
when people got used to this innovation and ceased to think
it extraordinary, more and more things — both goods and services — were gradually made available without the exchange of
money. All travel was made free, and of course all education
and medical services, and then more and more goods, after
food, clothes, and so on, till the people got used to doing without
money, and there ceased to be any use for it at all.
1 A writer in The Times (January 18th, 1937) referred to Sir Robert Peel’s famous,
‘What is a pound?’ and observed that he ‘would have had great difficulty in defining
our pouhd at the present time, except as “a visionary abstraction” for it has no
material existence*.
R6n£ Clair, years ago, in his satiric film, Le Dernier Milliardaire, showed how
high finance consisted of buying something that didn’t exist with something you
hadn’t got ... In that film, it may be remembered, a patron at a cafe paid for
his drinks with a hen, and received a couple of eggs in exchange, the money system
of the country having ceased to operate.
But barter, it should be emphasised, was never at any time
the Utopian solution to the problem of consumption and exchange. Barter they regarded as absurd as money, for how
ire the values of things to be assessed? The matter cannot be
setter summed up than by Mr. Robert Mennell in an address
lelivered in 1933. He said, ‘“But,” people say, “money is
lecessary as a medium of exchange, a common denominator.
We cannot barter, so we must have a common equivalent.”
Think of any two things, the contents of a glass of water and
:he contents of the Bible, for instance. What is the common
denominator in cash? How many pieces of pastry equal a
piece of poetry? What is the common denominator between a
tiorse and a house, between clothes and clocks, between a bunch
Df narcissus and a Nazi uniform? It is absolute moonshine.
There is no sense in it at all, and yet we all accept the idea
without question. The truth is that at a certain moment, in a
:ertain place, to a certain person a certain thing has a certain
value. For example, to a naked, starving, penniless and homeless
man clothing, food, and shelter are of infinite value. But that
value can only be expressed in terms of the things themselves,
not in terms of another thing called money, which, so far as
the man is concerned, does not exist’.
Money values cannot be other than false. If all the diamonds
mined were released on to the market they would be of no
more value than glass beads; their price is only kept up by
giving them a false scarcity value. Why should pearls be any
more costly than blackberries? They are both natural products,
and the native who dives for them in shark-infested waters
lives and dies in poverty in spite of the great sums secured for
them by the white man to whom he trades them; the native
himself thinks nothing of them; he knows that actually they
are nothing — grit in an oyster’s shell, surrounded by the oyster’s
protective mucous secretion. A mink coat costs anything from
two hundred pounds upwards; it can cost a thousand pounds
or more, and what is it? A number of animal skins sewn together — and who is it, and what is it, that determines that the
skin of this small, wild, evil-smelling animal is so much more
valuable than the skins of rabbits and squirrels? At the moment
of writing a small bunch of violets costs five shillings, and this
is also the price of a meal, but a restaurant proprietor, even if
he wished to have a bunch of violets to give his wife, would
not give you a meal if you took him the violets. And who is
it and what is it that determines that a meal and a bunch of
violets are each ‘worth’ five shillings? As Mr. Mennell observes,
it is all moonshine, a mere fiction, the most fantastic make-
believe.
And it is a make-believe to which the Utopians do not subscribe. They have no use in their sane society for mad-house
economics. The abundance of the earth is theirs, and the fulness
thereof. It amazes and bewilders them that people in the pre-
Utopian era did not see a fact so palpably clear as that money,
far from bringing producer and consumer together, keeps them
apart. In our present society it takes a world-war — with all
its horrors — to find employment for everyone. In peace-time
homeless human beings slept out in the open, in cities full of
fine buildings full of empty rooms; they starved whilst foods
for which there was no sale went bad in shops and stores; they
went in rags whilst clothes deteriorated in the shops, went
‘shop-rotten’. These people starved and were homeless and
went in rags not because there was not enough food or clothing
or shelter to go round, but simply because they had no tokens
to exchange for these things, and they lacked these tokens
because they lacked work.
At this point those who cannot visualise a society in which
there is no money system and no barter get very angry and
demand, ‘Are people to plunder when they lack money for
the necessities of life? Aren’t you confusing the issues? The
problem of unemployment has nothing to do with the money
system; it is a question of supply and demand, of production
and markets’. . . .
‘The question of markets.’ The world’s perpetual preoccupation — as though the business of living were not preoccupation
enough! Abolish money and you abolish this ‘question of
markets’, which is only another way of saying this question of
profits. When there is no money system there cannot be any
exploitation of labour and raw materials for private profit, and
instead of being ‘everywhere in chains’ Man is set free to take
his part in production for the common good. Then, as Morris
says, only the goods which are really needed are produced;
there ceases to be any need for mass-production and competitiveness, and Man is released from the domination of the machine
and is free to make it what it should be — his servant. When
nothing is for sale money obviously ceases to have any use.
And in Utopia nothing is for sale, neither goods nor labour.
Certainly at this point comes the demand, both horrified and
incredulous, ‘Do you mean that we are expected to believe
in a community in which people work for nothing?’
But what would be the point of working for money if money
will not buy anything?
And who is to assess the value of a man’s work? And how
is it to be assessed? In our present society the miner, engaged
in work which is dangerous, unpleasant, and of vital value to
the community, gets on an average £5 a week and less; an
exiled European boy-king gets £2,000 a month. The inequalities in payment for work are blatant and grotesque. In
war-time men go to sea, with the risk of being torpedoed or
bombed or meeting a mine, for £12 a month, whilst members
of parliament draw £600 a year — four times as much as the
men who risk their lives. Fifty shillings a week was until recently
considered an adequate wage for the agricultural worker — most
vital of all productive workers. A shorthand typist is paid £3
a week and upwards; a hospital nurse 25 s. It doesn’t make
sense. The truth being, as Kropotkin pointed out, ‘Services
to society cannot be valued in money. There can be no exact
measure of value (of what has been wrongly termed exchange
value) nor of use value, in terms of production.’ He takes the
case of mine workers, and asks who is to be considered the
most valuable worker — the colliers who hew the coal, or the
engineer without whom they would dig for it in the wrong
places. The one worker is as valuable as the other; there can
be no real assessment of respective values. No law can apply
save the rational one of ‘from each according to his ability;
to each according to his needs’, which we have already postulated as a basic principle of an Utopian society.
‘But if everybody can get what they want for nothing obviously
no one will do any work!’
If nobody did any work then there would be nothing for
anyone — no food or clothes or houses or furniture, and humanity
would die out. But humanity is not like that. It has the will
to live. The one great basic right is the right to live — and
that is a right which our present society, with its slumps and
depressions and unemployment problems, denies. We talk about
the right to work; Utopia insists on ths right to live. The
difference is fundamental.
We have already seen that in Utopia the stress is not on
bigger and better employment, but on bigger and better un-
employment — that is to say leisure. 2 The abolition of the money
system makes this possible. In our present society any folly
and waste will be excused on the grounds that ‘it all makes
work’. In Utopia they are not concerned to make work, but
to make leisure. And in their work everything they make or
produce is for use, not profit. But, as we have seen, there is
no question of applying the harsh principle of ‘whoso will not
work neither let him eat’. Jesus, it may be remembered, did
not so insist, but urged that we should consider the lilies of
the field, that toil not, neither do they spin, yet Solomon in
all his glory was not so arrayed. . . .
In our present society people work in order to live; in Utopia
they work because complete idleness is intolerably boring, and
because of the creative need in everyone, and because people
will do with pleasure voluntarily what is tedious to do under
compulsion, whether the compulsion be authoritarian or economic. In Utopia there is no compulsion of any kind; people
work because it is a natural human activity.
You do not believe this? You believe that if you could have
everything you wanted without lifting a finger you would not
work? That you would take everything from society and give
nothing in return? ‘No, no , 5 you probably protest, ‘of course
not; I personally wouldn’t — without a job of some sort I should
be bored to death, apart from the sense of moral responsibility,
not wanting to be a parasite. . . . But look at the parasites
in our present society ! Remove the economic necessity to work,
and instead of a privileged minority of idle rich you will have
the idle masses, and an exploited minority who have a social
conscience and feel themselves under a moral compulsion to work.
Let us take this very common argument point by point. In
the first place why should you assume — so conceitedly! — that
you are different — that whereas you would work without any
economic necessity to do so others wouldn’t? Why should you
assume that because you would be ‘bored to death without
work of some sort, other people wouldn’t be, but would enjoy
complete idleness indefinitely? We have discussed the recreative
value of idleness, but it obviously only has that recreative value
when it is a change from its antithesis — occupation. We are
agreed that in a leisured civilisation idleness is an ‘opportunity
of the spirit’, an enrichment, but the spirit devoted to idleness
exclusively would lose the capacity for enrichment, for lack
of creative outlet. Out of the deeps of an insufferable ennui
would come the cry:
‘What pleasure have we of our changeless bliss?'
The pleasure of idleness exists only by contrast with occupa-
tion. It is a great joy to down tools and abandon oneself to
the simple animal pleasures of the five senses on a fine May
morning — the joy of truancy and of change, such as the always
idle person cannot know. It is true that in our present society
there are completely idle people who pass their days eating,
sleeping, gossiping, and in idle amusement, but you have only
to look at their faces to realise the utter boredom and emptiness
of their days, filling in the time between one meal and the next;
most of them drink heavily — what else is there to do? How
else can the tedium of the empty idle hours be overcome? Their
lives are utterly lacking in satisfaction.
It is probable that in the transitional period from the old
order to the new there might be a good deal of idleness, from
the sheer novelty of the absence of necessity to work. But that
such a state of affairs would last is highly unlikely. The novelty
would wear off in time, and the creative impulse assert itself.
When people are free to work at what they like, at what they
enjoy, work ceases to be a drudgery, and becomes a source of
satisfaction; when people may have all the leisure they feel
inclined for, saturation point is soon reached.
The present writer is in entire agreement with Robert Mennell,
when he says, ‘I do not share the common fear of slackers. Let
them slack, loaf about, play games, loll by the fire till they are
sick of so doing. Let them go travelling until they are fit or
fcd-up and come back, as they will, begging to be allowed to
settle down and take a hand with the rest as respected and self-
respecting citizens’. He makes an interesting point when he
asserts, ‘As for an expected large increase in “drunks”, under
my system, “pubs” will cease to exist when no money can be
made out of them and when the drinker has to be his own
brewer. Cocktail-bars and night-clubs will soon lose their
charm when the revellers have to do the serving and cleaning-
up themselves. When cash has disappeared a whole new technique of revelling will be discovered’.
There is no reason, however, why there should not be pleasant
inns and cafes in Utopia where people can sociably enjoy good
ales and wines in company with their fellows. There are plenty
of people who would enjoy running such places — in our present
society how often does one hear people say, eagerly, ‘I’d love
to run a pub!’
But it is true, as Mr. Mennell says, that when money is abolished
there will be a whole new technique of ‘revelling’. People will
begin to discover what they really want, what they really enjoy,
and no one class of people will be exploited — to provide entertainment for the rest. If a girl chooses to dance in a midnight-
to-dawn cabaret it will be because she enjoys that kind of life,
not because with her particular abilities it is the only way she
knows to make a living.
Similarly, in Utopia there can be no question of ‘servants’
pandering to a parasite class, as at present. People live in big
houses today, when they are able to do so, because of their
social position. The big house represents power, wealth, superior
social status. In Utopia none of these things apply. Because
there is no money there is no such thing as power. If a man
takes a bigger house than he needs, and a couple of cars, and
his wife has several fur coats, all it indicates is that these people
have been greedy — and stupid. But when no social position
has to be established there is no point in possessing more than
is needed, and the Utopians, once out of the transitional period
in which everything is a novelty, and people are perhaps greedy
because they cannot grasp that everything they want is freely
theirs, so that there is no need to grab, realise this. When a
woman can have six fur coats if she wants them there seems
no point in having more than one at a time. And what is the
point in having two cars to keep clean when one fine, efficient
one adequately serves? When possessions cease to have any
cash value they cease to represent power and position, cease
to have significance, so that there is simply no point in acquiring
more of anything than is needful ; an excess of possessions merely
becomes an embarrassment and a nuisance, and makes the
owner look ridiculous, like a man wearing a thick overcoat in
midsummer. Parasites flourish in our present society, because
the social structure encourages their existence, its whole basis
being the exploitation of the many by the few, for private profit.
In Utopia the completely parasitic existence is impossible, since
no one contributes to it. Anyone lacking a social sense can
take freely from the common stores without doing a stroke of
work, and none will gainsay him, but he is regarded by his
fellows with a mixture of pity and contempt, and he receives
no co-operation from them in his parasitism; since there are
no servants to command — he must cook his own un-worked-for
meals, stoke up his own central heating, and if he wants a luxury
yacht he must be prepared to be his own cabin-boy and captain
too. There is no ‘kick’ — of power and position — to be had out
of a parasitic existence in Utopia, and no one in Utopia endures
it long; it is boring enough in our present society, but in a
society in which excessive possessions and complete idleness
are discreditable there is nothing to be gained in submitting to
the boredom involved. With the abolition of money new values
are evolved — a beautiful home, for example, reflects not the
owner’s financial and social status, but his taste; a thing is
assessed not for its cash-value but for its usefulness or beauty.
There is no question of not working at a certain trade or profession because ‘there’s no money in it’; people work at the
things which interest them, and for which they have ability.
The values of the stock-exchange, the box-office, the market-
place, cease to exist . . . those values which are so sordid and
degraded that the Utopians marvel that they could have been
tolerated for so many centuries. They agree with Winstanley
that ‘when mankind began to buy and sell, then he did fall
from his innocency’.
Let us, then, sum up the Utopian situation in this important
matter of production and consumption. Production is organised
in syndicates controlled by the workers in each industry. There
is no private ownership of the land, raw materials, or the means
of production. Thus, as Alexander Berkman puts it , ‘Your
watch is your own, but the watch factory belongs to the people’,
and ‘land, machinery, and all other public utilities will be
collective property, neither to be bought nor sold. . . . The
organisation of the coal miners, for example, will be in charge
of the coal mines, not as owners but as the operating agency.
Similarly will the railroad brotherhoods run the railroads, and
so on. Collective possession, co-operatively managed in the
interests of the community, will take the place of personal
ownership privately conducted for profit. . . . Exchange will
be free. The coal miners, for instance, will deliver the coal they
mined to the public coal yards, for the use of the community.
In their turn the miners will receive from the community’s
warehouses the machinery, tools, and the other commodities
they need. That means free exchange without the medium of
money and without profit, on the basis of requirement and the
supply on hand’. There is no question, it must be realised, of
bartering a sack of coal for a sack of flour. The coal miners
produce the coal and the farmers the flour for the common
good, and each takes from the common store what he wants
to enable him to produce, and what he wants to enable him
to live and to enjoy life.
‘But coal-mining is unpleasant and dangerous work,’ it may
be objected, ‘who is going to do it if there is no economic
necessity to do such work and no other form of compulsion?
In a society in which there is no necessity to do any work at
all, who, even amongst the people prepared to work, is going
to do such work as that?’
The answer to that may be taken from our own society — even
when other work is available there are still men who choose
to go down the mines. What work is more dangerous and unpleasant and, incidentally, worse paid, than going to fight in
a war? Yet men freely volunteer for such work, freely risk their
lives and face unspeakable horrors. Why? Because of a sense
of duty to their country; because of a conscience which insists
that this is something they ‘ought’ to do; because they believe
it is ‘right’ to do it — and some, perhaps, attracted by the mere
fact that it is dangerous.
In Utopia men are not called upon to risk their lives and
take other men’s lives in war; they are not asked to undertake
anything more dangerous or unpleasant than coal-mining, and
this they do for the same reasons that men go to war — as a
job that has to be done . . . until such time as the community
learns, by engineering enterprise, to manage without coal. And
this is one of the objectives of Utopian engineers and scientists.
Far less coal is needed in Utopia, of course, thanks to the general
de-industrialisation, plus the fact that there is no great com-
petitive export trade to sustain, and water-power, for the production of electricity, is highly developed. Utopian engineers
hope and believe that it is only a matter of time before they
devise a means of getting such coal as is needed by machine,
without having to send men underground for it.
In the meantime, whilst a certain amount of coal is needed,
there are always volunteers for the mines. These volunteers
work only a few hours at a time underground, and are the heroes
of the community. A man is proud to acknowledge that he has
worked in the mines, and his relatives regard him much in the
way that in our own society we regard men who have won the
V.C. It is an honour to have a miner in the family. The finest
poet, musician, painter, is not more highly regarded. It is, of
course, unthinkable in Utopia that a man should devote his
life, or even a great part of his life, to such work, and, if he
only puts in six months at it in a life-time the community is
grateful to him, and honours him. That both his working and
his living conditions are as good as they can possibly be made
goes without saying. If nobody was prepared to get the coal
the Utopians would go without; there is no economic coercion
of one exploited section of the community; the Utopian com-
munity is a whole, and it is entirely up to them as a whole
whether they have coal or not; they know this, and there is
no lack of volunteers, because in any community there is no
lack of unselfish and heroic human beings — since this is so in
our own society it could hardly fail to be so in Utopia, where
all work is for the common good.
The coal is got and the corn is raised, and often it happens
that one man in his time plays many parts in the stirring and
continuous drama of the world’s work. No work that people do
voluntarily can be soul-killing and lacking in interest. What is
soul-killing is work done purely for money — either out of economic
necessity, or from motives of greed — 'and from lack of opportunity
to do anything else — none of which conditions can apply in
Utopia.
If and when, for any reason, there is a shortage of any commodity, then the syndicate responsible organises a rationing system as our present society does in time of war and scarcity.
There is no buying and selling. Everything — food, houses,
clothes, entertainment, public services, transport, books, furniture, education — is completely free. There is no barter. No compulsion to work. No wages.
‘Won’t it make everything very complicated?’
On the contrary, it simplifies everything. Nothing could be
more complicated than finance — the stock exchange, the banking
system, the credit system, and the labyrinth of accountancy.
Robert Mennell, himself a business-man, declares, ‘More than
half the worry and effort of any business is connected with the
cash and price problems, buying and selling, costing, charging,
checking and collecting the money. The choice and assembling of
the most suitable materials and personnel, the calculating of
weights and measures, strains and stresses, these would be simplified out of recognition if price considerations could be eliminated.
... If cash considerations were eliminated, countless thousands
of men and women now engaged on money calculations would be
set free for useful work for the public good or for the cultivating
and beautifying of their own minds and bodies as well as their
own houses and gardens ’. He adds that ‘As a result of this release
of man-power, production under scientific planning, and with
mechanical devices being used to their full capacity, would so
vastly exceed our power of consumption that the time available
for living as distinct from earning a livelihood, would soon
transform the world’.
In Utopia there is no question of earning a living. Living is
not something which should have to be earned; the basic right
of all existence is the right to live . To this, in a truly civilised
society, should be added the right to live abundantly , l But only
in a moneyless society is man freed from the necessity — and
degradation — of having to earn his living.
The people who insist that a moneyless society is impractic-
able merely assert their lack of faith in humanity. They refuse
to believe in the perfectability of man — despite the anthropologists. It is precisely because the mass of people lack faith
and vision that the idea of Utopia is relegated to the realm of
impossible idealism. The mass of people everywhere are obsessed with the idea of money as with the idea of government,
and the fantastic make-believe of this obsession removes them
so far from reality that they forget that everything — every
single thing they eat and drink and wear — the materials of the
houses and furniture, every tool, every machine — has no other
source than the earth itself.
Money is not wealth. Money produces nothing. When there
is a famine money is useless; its falsity is then revealed; it ceases
to have reality as wealth. The only real wealth is the land.
We have established that there is no private ownership in Utopia
— other than in the matter of minor personal possessions; a man,
as we have seen, may own a watch, but not the factory in which
it was made — and no buying or selling. It therefore follows
that the land is communally owned and worked for the common
good.
This means, in practice, collective farming, as in the U.S.S.R.,
and as in Catalonia under the anarcho-syndicalist regime during
the Civil War, but it cannot be over-emphasised that whereas
the Russian Revolution coerced the peasants — with disastrous
results in the early years — in Utopia, as in Catalonia in 1936-8,
communal working and ownership is by free association, because
it is recognised that only free do men give of their best. This
means that anyone wishing to work a small-holding for himself
and his family is free to do so — but he is not allowed more land
than will support himself and his family and than he can work
himself — though such people are in a minority because it has
been shown that, generally speaking, better results are obtained
collectively, and with less labour.
The collectives are, in effect, village communes which adjust
their local affairs in their own way, but which are unified in
the national agricultural federation of syndicates. The function
of the national federation is research, the administration of
agricultural colleges, contact with the factories manufacturing
agricultural implements and turning the raw materials supplied
by the farms — cereals, fruit, sugar-beet, etc. — into foods for
distribution through the common store-houses. Everything is
simply and sensibly organised into regional and national federa-
tions, with delegates elected from the various groups. The
delegates and officials appointed hold office for short periods
only, and are not singled out for any special privileges, so that
there is no danger of a bureaucracy of a privileged class arising,
and power remains evenly, because collectively, in the hands
of the workers. There is, in short, no administration from the
top; everything works from the bottom up.
We have seen how in Utopia the tendency has been all towards
de-industrialisation, with all that that involves of making the
machine the servant of man, instead of, as at present, his master.
This de-industrialisation breaks up the industrial population and
redistributes it throughout the land, so that the congested industrial areas are disposed of, and the country becomes again,
in Morris’s words, ‘a garden, where nothing is wasted and
nothing is spoilt’. He has his Utopian spokesman describe the
change-over thus — ‘People flocked into the country villages, and,
so to say, flung themselves upon the freed land like a wild beast
upon his prey’. He admits, ‘Of course, this invasion of the
country was awkward to deal with, and would have created
much misery if the folk had still been under the bondage of
class monopoly. But as it was, things soon righted themselves.
People found out what they were fit for, and gave up attempting
to push themselves into occupations in which they needs must
Tail. The town invaded the country; but the invaders, like the
warlike invaders of early days, yielded to the influence of their
surroundings, and became country people; and in their turn, as
they became more numerous than the townsmen, influenced them
also; so that the difference between town and country grew less
and less’. Men made mistakes and recovered from them. Re-
adjustment to the new economic order and way of living was slow
and difficult, ‘but slowly as the recovery came, it did come’,
because the people had freedom, and faith, and a common ideal.
Since the Utopians, as we have seen, produce for use, not
profit, industrially they do not have to produce anything like the
vast quantity and variety of goods of a capitalist society, and they
are thus left free to develop the production of the land to the
extent of making every country self-supporting. They have discovered that associated labour yields the maximum of production
with the minimum of effort — that, for example, two hundred
families communally working a thousand acres is better, economically and agriculturally, than the same two hundred families
each struggling to subsist on a five-acre plot. The land is drained,
irrigated, fertilised, by this communal effort, to an extent quite
impossible by dividing it up into small-holdings. Scientifically
and collectively farmed, it produces the wheat for bread, the
green crops and fodder for the cattle which supply milk, butter,
meat, all the fruit and vegetables needed, and still has room to
spare for poultry, and for the cultivation of flowers. Whilst the
time and labour saved by the communal efForUcontribute to that-
leisure for recreation and cultural pursuits so highly valued by
the Utopians.
The rational cultivation of the land, as the Utopians under-
stand it, is not merely the communal working of it for the common
good, and an appreciation of the machine in the service of the
maximum of production — consistent with avoidance of over-
working the soil — with the minimum expenditure of time and
labour, but a rational attitude of the Cycle of Nature — the natural
law by which man and beast take from the earth and give back
to it. In our present society it is more common than not to find
refuse and sewage shot into the sea as waste, whilst the land is
made sterile by chemical fertilisers which increase production
through artificial stimulus and ultimately destroy the soil bacteria
and the good earthworms who contribute to the sub-soil. In
transporting them, and for keeping armies of middlemen, we see at once how few
days and hours need be given, under proper culture, for growing man’s food’. Commenting on this, Berkman says, ‘By using modern agricultural machinery and
intensive cultivation London and New York could subsist upon the products raised
in their own immediate vicinity’. See, also, Dr. D. W. Wilcox’s book, Nations Can
Live at Home (Allen & Unwin, 1935).
Reginald Reynolds, in his Cleanliness and Godliness (Allen & Unwin, 1943), refers
to the producers of chemical fertilisers as ‘the druggists of the soil, offering quick
results, dearly bought in the final reckoning*. He points to The heritage of the
chemical fertiliser, the once-fertile fields of Europe, where for thirty years now,
since the first stimulus of these drugs ceased to be effective, the production of crops
has declined, while the fields of China continue, even aYter a decade of war, to nourish
her vast population*. He refers to this artificial stimulus as ‘the morphia of science
for a dying agriculture’, and reminds us that the Chinese, who are the oldest
agriculturists in the world, having husbanded the soil for 4,000 years, have always
composted garbage and animal and human excreta and returned it to the soil.
It is interesting to find in Bacon’s New Atlantis , a reference to a ‘great variety of
composts and soils, for the making of the earth fruitful*. The inhabitants of the
City of the Sun, on the other hand, were opposed to the use of ‘dung and filth'
Utopia all sewage and refuse is composted and returned to^the
soil, so that the natural rhythm of production, consumption,
fertilisation, is maintained. It puzzles the Utopians that in
our own era, although this scientific use of waste matter was
successfully adopted in a few towns, and there were the begin-
nings of interest amongst sanitary engineers, chemists, agricul-
turists, gardeners, and others, it was generally regarded as
‘cranky’, too difficult of achievement, or too costly. Being
Utopians, of course, they cannot understand the immense
amount of popular prejudice to be overcome, or realise — in their
blessedly moneyless condition — the vast amount of capital invested in companies producing chemical fertilisers. . . .
But what they do fully and appreciatively understand and
realise, is that the cultivation of the soil is the most fundamental
of all human activities, the true Doctrine of Creation in practice.
This is something they can no more doubt than the cycle of the
seasons, or any other natural phenomenon; it is an integral
part of their whole attitude to life. They are, therefore, completely free of that romanticism which characterises much of
the agricultural theorisings of our era. The life of the land is
so real and vital to them that there is no room for mysticism in
their attitude to it. Non-farming theorists may write lyrically
of ‘communion with the soil, and emotionally of the ‘blasphemy
of the machine in relation to it, but those who actually work
the land know that the longer the time men must spend trudging
Up and down fields the less they have for other things that
interest them and give them satisfaction and pleasure. Scything
the hay and the corn by hand, for example, presents a pleasant
spectacle for the onlooker, but for those employed upon it it
means long days of monotonous labour. Utopia being a non-
competitive society no harm is done by replacing twenty men
with a horse-drawn reaper-and-binder driven by one man, or
a hundred men when a machine takes the place of the horse,
and the Utopians see no virtue in spending days scything a hayfield by hand when a mechanical mower will accomplish the
task in a single day. They consider that there are other ways
of presenting pleasing spectacles than by breaking their backs
and expending their sweat in unnecessary labours. The traditional farming methods which afford such pleasant material for
the pens of the romanticists simply mean that those who work on
the land must toil from sunrise to sunset during the busy seasons
for manuring the fields, ‘thinking that the fruit contracts something of their rottenness, and when eaten gives a short and poor subsistence. Wherefore they do not,
as it were, paint the earth, but dig it up well and use secret remedies, so that fruit
is borne quickly, and multiplies, and is not destroyed’. Campanella’s views on
agriculture would seem to be altogether a little unreliable, for in his Utopia ‘the
men who are weak in intellect are sent to farm. . . .'
— which form the greater part of the year — by which time they
are too tired for any intellectual pursuits and interests; all they
are fit for is to take off their boots, stick out their feet, eat a
hearty meal, and drowse in a blessed physical relaxation, purely
animal, till an early bedtime. Anyone who has ever done long
days of hard manual work knows how the day’s end finds one
little more than a clod — an aching body and a dulled brain;
and the Utopians consider this not good enough for their land-
workers, They believe in the rational use of the machine for lessening
the drudgery of agricultural labour on the one hand and increasing efficiency on the other . . . and to suggest that a
great deal of agricultural work is not drudgery is the sheerest
romanticism. Anyone who doubts this should try picking-up
potatoes, pulling sugar-beet, ditching. In rejecting — for the most
part — tractor-ploughing, for example, the Utopians do so for
purely practical agricultural reasons. Steinbeck’s contention
that it ‘takes the wonder out of work, and out of the land, and
the working of it’, and ‘the deep understanding and the relation’,
leaves them cold. What is important to them is that, taking the
long view , tractor-ploughing is as bad for the land as chemical
fertilisers, since by its speed it opens the way to the over-working
of the soil, whilst robbing it of the dung and urine from the
horses, thus encouraging the use of chemicals.
But they cannot accept that a man has less feeling for the soil
because he mows and reaps, threshes and milks, by machine,
and employs machinery in his dairy and in his barn. Such an
attitude they regard as merely sentimental. It seems to them
reasonable to make the same intelligent use of the machine in
relation to agriculture as in relation to industry. Having no
commercial interests to consider they have no mania for in-
creasing production with the reckless disregard for overworking
the soil which characterises the ‘progressive’ farming of our
present society. The mechanisation of agriculture only becomes
a danger to the natural fertility of the earth when it is allied
with commercialisation. The Utopian design is to get the best
results from the soil — which are not necessarily increased results.
Apart from the value they attach to leisure the Utopians are
concerned to save time to overcome the weather factor — since
even Utopians cannot control the weather! — and in haymaking
and harvesting the machine usefully serves them to this end.
And to those who protest that the saving of time for the securing
of leisure ought not to be a consideration with the agricultural
worker, they reply that the land-worker is mind and spirit as
well as flesh and muscle no less than the industrial worker, and
if he is to toil from sunrise to sundown for the greater part of
the year in personal ‘communion’ with the soil he might as
well be an ox plodding under the yoke — and to all intents and
purposes is. They are impatient of the pre-Utopian romanticising of the peasant — particularly coming from the English
who have done their best to exterminate their peasantry by
turning them into farm-labourers, hired for a pittance.
‘no tweed-bright poet drunk in pastoral
or morris-dances in the Legion Hall,
I know my farmer and my farmer’s wife,
the squalid focus of their huxter life,
the grime-veined fists, the thick rheumatic legs,
the cracked voice gloating on the price of eggs,
the miser’s Bible, and the tedious aim
to add another boggy acre to the name .’
They demand to know whether those people who clamour for
the work on the land to be done in the ‘traditional’ manner
themselves live without mechanical amenities — such as electric
light and heating, telephones, typewriters, sewing-machines,
modern methods of transport.
The Utopians are neither tractor-minded nor oxen-minded.
The fact that farming is de-commercialised — freed from the huxter
attitude, the gloating on the price of eggs — and, like industry,
is for use and not profit, gives it its proper place in the com-
munal life as the very source of existence.
In Utopia there is no difficulty in getting people to work on
the land, since there, has been a natural turning away from
industry and back to the land as a result of the abolition of the
money system, with all that that entails of competition and
profit. The drift of labour from the land in England in the
nineteen-thirties had several causes — the work was badly paid,
the housing was inferior, the life was dull and lacking in amenities
of all kinds. The towns offered higher pay, and a variety of
diversions in the leisure hours — a point which counted very
strongly with the younger people. The result was a depression
in agriculture and the depopulation of the countryside. Parallel
with this there was — inevitably — the encroachment of the town
on the country. As agriculture declined so the towns stretched
out their tentacles of suburbs, and the fields one after another
became builders’ plots . 1 Farms were taken over by townspeople
who did not farm the land but who liked old country-houses
with plenty of land — the barn converting nicely into a garage —
and farm-cottages became the week-end cottages of people who
‘loved’ the country so long as they hadn’t got to live there —
who, in the words of Peter Howard 2 describing his own attitude
before he himself became a farmer, were ‘enthusiastic about
short week-ends in old cottages, so long as these had been
equipped with central-heating, hot water, first-rate cooking and
every other modern comfort’. Whole villages were inhabited
almost entirely by retired professional people from the towns
fancying country life — with electric light installed and the
plumbing brought up to date, and as often as not two or three
cottages converted into one country house with a couple of
bathrooms, and nothing more agricultural than a kennels or a
riding-stable for miles. . . .
Industry also moved out into the betrayed countryside; factories of brave-new-world design sprang up along the new
roads, and a grim ribbon-development of cheap, jerry-built little
houses followed. It only needed the road-houses, the snack-bars,
the ‘wayside cafes’, the tea-gardens, the pseudo-Tudor pubs, the
filling-stations, the advertisement hoardings, to complete the
degradation of the once green and pleasant land. Then came the
ugly little new places, rather more than village, rather less than
town, with the inevitable Woolworth’s, and an Odeon cinema,
and the art-and-crafty, olde-worlde, home-made cake-shop, and
the chromium-plated cheap ‘perm’ hair-dresser’s, and the petrol-
pumps, and a milk-bar, and what was once a winding country
road widened and straightened out into a by-pass for an endless
stream of cars. . . .
The Utopians are well aware of all this, and that it took a
second world-war to get England back to the development of her
agricultural resources . 1 Such a state of affairs seems to them
appalling, and in itself an indictment of the money system of
society, since such a state of affairs, they argue, could only obtain
in a society in which production, both industrial and agricultural,
is for profit, not use; in such a society it is inevitable that indus-
trialism should increase and agriculture decline.
In Utopia, by the very nature of things, none of the pre-Utopian
objections to rural life apply. The question of urban life offering
better wages and opportunities does not arise, obviously, in a
moneyless society, and as to housing, it could not occur to any
Utopian that agricultural workers should not be as well housed
as industrial workers, and with as much variety. They see no
reason why the farm-worker should be confined to a cottage, any
more than there is any reason why a town worker should be expected to live in a block of flats. There are, in Utopia, there-
fore, blocks of flats in the country just as there are cottages in
the towns. Utopia recognises that country workers are as diverse
in their tastes as town workers. This we will discuss more fully
later. It is here sufficient to indicate that in Utopia the country-
dweller has all the amenities of the town-dweller, not merely
in the matter of housing, but as regards schools, health services,
amusements. This means that those who work on the collective
farms, both men and women, or who work the small-holdings,
do so because the life appeals to them, because the land really
means something to them, not because it is just a way of earning
a living. As we have seen, there is no necessity, economic or any
other, to earn a living in Utopia.
Considerable care and attention is devoted by the Utopians
to forestry — they view with incredulity and horror the rate at
which the world was being denuded of its woodlands in the
pre-Utopian era. It seems to them fantastic that at the time
of the second world-war only 5 per cent of the surface of England
and Wales should have been forest and woodland, these countries being so highly suited to the growing of trees, and with so
much land unsuitable for growing anything else. They are
puzzled, also, by the unimaginative form of such afforestation
as was carried out by the Forestry Commission — the curious
devotion to solid blocks of conifers, as though, outside of supplying timber, trees served no purpose. In Utopia afforestation is
carried out with an eye to landscape as well as utility. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the Utopian conception of
utility reaches beyond the supplying of timber, as, apart from their
landscape value, forests and wooded parks have their uses as
pleasure-grounds for human beings —
‘Trees where you sit
Shall crowd into a shade’ —
and it seems to them important that the trees shall crowd, not the
people, and given sufficient woodland this can be so arranged.
Of course a great deal of wild, wooded land, hitherto privately
owned and only opened occasionally to the public, if at all, since
much of it was preserved for pheasants, became available to the
people when the great new Utopian order became established.
The Utopians attach great importance to the preservation and
development of land for beauty and pleasure. They have discovered that by the intelligent utilisation of good agricultural and
pasture-land there is no need to cultivate at the expense of the
great open spaces. They put the land to the best use, whether it
is for the production of timber, crops, grass, or its protection and
development for purposes of pleasure. Kropotkin worked out
that 1,000 acres of good agricultural land — land in ‘good heart'
as the agriculturists say — was sufficient, properly cultivated, to
feed 1,000 people and their livestock, and allow some over for
public gardens and other uses. He estimated that on an area of
340 acres they could easily grow all the cereals — wheat, oats, etc.
required for both the thousand inhabitants and their livestock,
without resorting for that purpose to replanted or planted cereals.
They could grow on 400 acres, properly cultivated, and irrigated,
if necessary and possible, all the green crops and fodder required
to keep the thirty or forty milch cows which would supply them
with milk and butter, and, let us say, the 300 head of cattle
required to supply them with meat. On twenty acres, two of
which would be under glass, they would grow more vegetables,
fruit and luxuries than they could consume. And supposing that
half an acre of land is attached to each house for hobbies and
amusements (poultry keeping, or any fancy culture, flowers,
and the like) — they would still have some 140 acres for all sorts
of purposes; public gardens, squares, manufactures, and so On’.
Kropotkin was estimating his 1,000 persons as divided into 200
families averaging five members per household. He pointed
out that the labour required for such intensive culture would be,
through co-operative effort, considerably less than 1,000 persons
have to expend in getting their food — 4 much smaller in quantity
and of worse quality’ — under the competitive system. He
insisted that from the technical point of view there is no obstacle
whatever to such an organisation being started tomorrow with
full success. ‘The obstacles against it are not in the imperfection
of the agricultural art, or in the infertility of the soil, or in climate.
They are entirely in our institutions, in our inheritances, and
survivals from the past — in the ghosts which oppress us.'
The Utopians achieved their ‘ideal commonwealth’ by over-
throwing those institutions, inheritances and survivals from the
past, by their refusal to be oppressed by ghosts; by their complete
change-over to the co-operative way of living, their return to the
land, not romantically and sentimentally but in the realist sense of
recognition of it as ‘the substratum of all that is living’. In their
economy there is no waste-land, and they cannot but be appalled
at how the good earth is wasted and spoiled in our own, along
with human labour and creative potentialities.
It is not merely that, in Reginald Reynolds’s words, ‘we allow
the fertility of the land to run out through open sluices ’, whilst
we slowly turn the earth into a desert, but that, agriculture apart,
we waste and spoil in all directions, felling trees to make room
for houses, instead of fitting the trees into a housing scheme, taking
forests for timber without replanting, or replanting with no eye
to the beauty of the landscape, ploughing up stony land that is
better left as moorland for people to roam over and picnic on,
allowing fields that should be rich and productive to lie fallow and
go sour, of use to neither man nor beast, and even where the land
is available for pleasure and recreation despoiling it with shoddy
little bungalows and hideous holiday encampments of ramshackle
huts — the seekers after the rural amenities themselves destroying
them.
In Utopia it could not occur to anyone that an orchard should
be demolished to provide a factory site, though it might well occur
to them that the orchard, left intact, would make the factory
built nearby a pleasant place in which to work, and with the
orchard on one hand and perhaps a wood on the other there is
no despoiling of the country by the building of the factory, for
it is of pleasing design, and it settles down amongst the fields
and' trees, as integral a part of the landscape as a group of farm-
buildings, and the workers can leave their benches and machines
and step out into the fresh air amongst the green growing things.
In this way the sharp line between town and country is softened;
the town invades the country, but the country also invades the
town, so set amongst trees and gardens are the houses, so that it is
difficult to say where one begins and the other ends, and everyone
has breathing-space and ‘elbow-room’. The towns are all small,
because in a moneyless society there is no need for commercial
centres; the industrial areas are dissolved and spread out;
everything is planned, nothing is haphazard . . . but this brings
us to the detailed consideration of homes and housing in his
happy, productive world of bread-and-roses. . . .
In Utopia people have the homes they want, not what any
government or borough council or planning board considers
to be good for them. The result is no symmetrical brave-new-
world, a cross between Manhattan and Welwyn Garden City,
nothing at all like the quite terrifyingly well-planned cities-of-
tomorrow illustrated in architectural magazines and government
publications, in which any Utopian would feel like a fly caught
in a gigantic spider web. The Utopians have never had any desire
to straighten out the crooked roads, dispose of the little narrow
alleyways, the old houses piled up behind each other, one street
above another; they have no mania for modernity, for that
spurious ‘ progressiveness ’ which characterises our own society.
In the same way that they are not tractor-minded in agriculture,
so they are not modern-at-all-costs in their architecture. Their
towns and cities, therefore, are not ‘ model ’ towns and cities as we
understand the term. They believe that a town should take
shape from the life lived in it, as a home does; if it is a little untidy,
a little sprawling, a little higgledy-piggledy, well, they say, so is
human nature; the important thing is that it shall be livable-in.
That it shall be, that is to say, human. And this the Utopians con-
tend, most of the towns and cities of this era are not, but mon-
strous, inhuman places, full of ugliness and squalor, on the one
hand, and streamlined and chromium-plated out of all humanity
on the other. They have no more use for the slums and tenements, and grim grey industrial streets, or red brick suburban
streets, of our world, than for the barracks of flats, the art-and-
crafty little garden-suburb villas, the jerry-built by-pass houses,
the box-like cement ‘ ultra-modern ’ houses (Osbert Lancaster's
‘Twentieth Century Functional') and the flats like chests-of-
drawers with the drawers pulled out. They see no reason why a
house in order to be efficient and light and sunny must resemble a
box, or a block of flats a barracks, or a gigantic chest-of-drawers.
They have not torn down the old market-towns, the cathedral
cities, nor remodelled the villages; but fairly quickly they demolished the slums, and gradually they did away with the more
jerry-built suburbs. The last world war, of course, had already
done a good deal of demolition for them — though unfortunately
it also demolished a good many buildings the Utopians would
have preserved.
There is no particular Utopian style of architecture. They
try to build, as far as possible, in keeping with the background,
and always using the local materials where such are available.
They maintain that man’s buildings should not be excrescences
on the face of the earth, but have an air of natural ‘belonging’.
They regard the old Cots wold houses, built of the Cotswold
stone, as very good examples of houses being part of the landscape.
They observe that in the country districts in Ireland and in the
wilder parts of Scotland the crofters’ cottages and the cabins
have an appearance of springing as naturally from the earth
as the heather and the boulders. They are impressed by the
harmony of many old English villages of timbered houses, and
by such medieval towns as Ghent, Bruges, Nuremberg, and the
good Dutch architecture, both ancient and modern. They
recognise, also, the harmony which it is possible to achieve
without actual architectural harmony — the harmoniousness of the
whole inherent in the jumbled detail. They have, for example,
seen pictures of the quayside of Marseilles before the Germans
— during the second world war — tore down the old buildings and
rebuilt in modern style, and they much prefer the old, shabby
confusion which yet made an harmonious whole; it had, they
contend, a rhythm of life about it; it was shapeless and raggle-
taggle, but it had a feeling of vitality, of passionate, vibrant life ;
the Germans rebuilt efficiently, modernly — soullessly. And if
anyone declares that to be sentimental the Utopians merely
smile and murmur, What of that? Theirs is no streamlined,
chromium-plated, pre-fabricated brave new world in which
people swallow capsules instead of enjoying wine and meat,
and in which life itself is begotten in test-tubes.
Where the Utopians have demolished pre-Utopian buildings,
either because they were ugly and stupid in themselves — like
most of the commercial buildings and many of the churches — or
because they were drab, or vulgar, or nondescript, they have not
always built again on the same spot; in many places in Utopia
where once were buildings are now public gardens, or tree-
flanked squares with gracious fountains. Many a block of
offices has been replaced by an orchard — which the Utopians
consider at once more beautiful and a great deal more useful.
Most of the pre-Utopian statues which ‘ornamented’ public
squares and street-corners have gone, the Utopians considering
them too ugly to keep; in their place they have planted trees.
They have a great affection for chestnut trees, because of their
pink and white candle-like flowers in the spring, and for lime-
trees for the heavy sweetness of their golden blossom in the summer.
They cannot understand why in the pre-Utopian era city trees
were so invariably planes — at least in England. They find it
almost incredible that the Germans should have cut down the
lime trees of their famous Unter den Linden, and admire the
French for their good sense in lining their boulevards with trees.
The majority consider Paris easily the most beautiful of all pre-
Utopian era cities, though some, with a passion for baroque,
prefer Vienna; London they regard as the essence of all that
a city ought not to be, such beauty as it possesses hidden away in a
welter of commercial buildings, and its riverside accessible only in
patches, and made hideous by dilapidated warehouses. The
Utopian London is a good deal smaller, and, except for such fine
buildings as decorated Westminster and St. James’s in the old ’
days, almost unrecognisable. Stepney and Hackney are in the
fields again. The Thames is flanked by fine tree-lined boulevards
with river-side cafes and gardens. St. Paul’s looks out over the
great open spaces that once were the cluttered buildings of the
Strand and Fleet Street, but which are now orchards. The old
names remain, and in May the scent of the apple-blossom in the
lovely sweep up from the fountains and flower-beds of Trafalgar
Square, along the Strand and Fleet Street to St. Paul’s, is a thing
to remember. Covent Garden Market serves very well as one of
the numerous common store-houses and distributive centres for
fruit and vegetables from the collective farms of the London area
out at Chelsea, Wimbledon, Earl’s Court, Ealing, Hampstead,
Islington; Piccadilly is a flower-market; the Eros statue survives
as one of the very few London statues worth preserving; in spring
the steps of the always playing fountain are massed with violets
and primroses grown in the violet fields and primrose woods of
Kensington and Knightsbridge. Vauxhall has its gardens again,
and Holborn is once more a village. It is not so long ago in the
pre-Utopian era that it was possible to walk across fields at
Earl’s Court to a farm, and Wimbledon was in the heart of the
country, and in Utopia all this is restored, the wilderness of
shops, offices, and pretentious houses and drab streets cleared
away. Several reasons have made this possible. De-industrialisation and the great movement back to the land thinned out the
towns and cities and distributed their populations throughout the
countryside, whilst the abolition of money meant de-commer-
cialisation, and there was no longer need for ‘the City’, or for
great blocks of offices, or banks, and as there was no buying or
selling, and no competitive production, there was no need for all
the shopping thoroughfares that make towns and cities so ugly,
and take up such valuable space. The abolition of the Press
disposed of Fleet Street — and that the Utopians consider a very
good clearance indeed. They did not turn the Houses of Parliament into a dung-market, as William Morris’s Utopians did, but
put them to good use as a technical institute. Places such as
Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Glasgow, still exist as cities,
but de-industrialisation and de-commercialisation have stripped
them of all the ugliness and clutter that industry and commerce
brought to them, and they have become small and quiet and
gracious.
Round all the towns and cities of Utopia there is a protective
wall of green fields to prevent them straggling out and swallowing
up the countryside. When a factory or workshop is built out
in the country it is there for a good, practical reason — such as that
the fruit from adjacent orchards may be made into jam or bottled
on the spot, and it is always designed to merge into the landscape
as a farm merges into its background of fields. Villages grow up
round the collective farms, so that farm and village are one unit.
There is this diffusion of industry and living-space, as opposed to
the concentration of our own era, so that town and country meet,
the ‘towns laved by the fields, yet never encroaching, and the
fields everywhere in touch with the towns, not cut off from
them, as now, by wildernesses of bricks and mortar, as the suburbs
straggle out to fields already doomed as builders’ plots.
In Utopia there are no suburbs, but only small towns, complete
in themselves, and villages. There is a choice of houses or flats,
but there are no great barracks of flats cutting people off from the
earth, piling them up on top of each other in a kind of ‘human
filing system’; the flats are of two or three storeys, and standing,
always, amidst trees and gardens. Most people prefer houses, but
young people, seeking independence through a place of their own,
prefer flats as a rule, and so do many unattached, non-family
people, though few remain unattached and non-family in Utopia.
A house may mean a house in a row, or in a terrace, or a cottage,
village, or bungalow detached in its own small garden, but
whatever form the house takes there are always trees and gardens
back and front.
There is no communal living, the Utopians agreeing with
Winstanley that ‘though the Earth and Storehouses be common
to every Family, yet every Family shall live apart as they do; and
every man’s house, wife, children, and furniture for ornament of
his house, or anything which he has fetched from the Storehouses,
or provided for the necessary use of his Family, is all a property
of that Family, for the Peace thereof’.
There are village-greens, on which the children play, and where
the old people sit on benches under trees and look on; there
are town-squares with trees and flowers and fountains, where
people promenade and meet; there are special playgrounds set
apart for children, with stretches of grass, and swings, sand-pits,
chutes to slide down, and shallow pools for paddling in and sailing
boats on.
In all the newly-built houses there is a living-room opening out
into a little garden, and in both houses and flats a compact
kitchen, opening, conveniently, out of the living-room; there is
also what in our world we refer to as a parlour, but which the
Utopians — using a word of ours that has fallen out of usage — call
more explicitly a ‘withdrawing room’, since it serves any member
of the family who for one reason or another wishes to withdraw
from the communal living-room, in order to study, or entertain
or talk with a friend in private, or merely in order to be alone.
The Utopians regard the withdrawing room as a very important
feature of the home, socially and psychologically.
Every house and flat has a good bathroom, a warm, pleasant,
properly-equipped place, heated airing-cupboards, cool cupboards for storing food, deep closets for clothes — so vastly superior
to the wardrobes popular in our own era and designed more for
show than for real use. Every kitchen has a refrigerator, good
deep sink, plate-rack, two draining-boards, good dresser, an
electric cooker, and every kind of electrical labour-saving device
for keeping the home clean and bright with the minimum of
labour. The modern houses and flats in Utopia have deep windows and sun-balconies, and a great many of them have been not
merely designed but built by the people who live in them, since
the Utopians consider that there are few activities in life more
satisfying than building one’s own house — few things, the cultivation of the soil apart, more truly creative. It appals them to
reflect that in the pre-Utopian era probably not one person in a
thousand had the slightest idea how to lay a brick or any concep-
tion of the workings of the house — how the plumbing, heating,
and lighting arrangements, the internal organs of the living body
of the house, worked, so that if anything went wrong they had
to send out for assistance instead of being able to right matters
themselves. They were a strange people, purely, the Utopians
think, who knew neither the inner workings of their own houses
or of their own bodies.
In the housing of Utopia all the things regarded in our world as
luxuries are taken for granted — such things as refrigerators,
central heating, bathroom showers, swimming pools, tennis-
courts, Vita-glass windows, everything designed for health, com-
fort, convenience. All this is possible when building is for use and
not for profit, and when the people have, as Morris said, a sense of
architectural power and know that they can have what they
want.
In Utopia, as we have seen, there is no communal living — other
than the natural communal life inseparable from living in a society
— because it is as unnatural as cooping human beings up all day
in shops, offices, factories. The Utopians observed that in the
U.S.S.R. — which some people at one time believed to be Utopia,
or Utopia in the making, despite evidence to the contrary-
people showed a tendency to cling to small houses and gardens in
preference to the great, barrack-like blocks of Workers’ Dwellings,
to which the devout Communists waved foreign visitors with such
pride, and in which home-life was ‘simplified’ almost out of
existence. The Utopians do not make a fetish of ‘The Home’ as
something almost holy; neither do they adopt the cynical attitude,
‘there’s no place like home — thank God!’ They recognise,
simply, that human beings are individualistic, and that a place
of one’s own has a psychological and a sentimental value for the
majority of people. They are aware of the numerous experiments
m^de in community living in the pre-Utopian era, particularly
in the mid-twentieth century, when the intellectuals and revolu-
tionaries (and those who fancied themselves as such) everywhere
were looking for a new way of living and seeking it in ‘community’
in the name of brotherly love — but the reports seem to indicate
singularly little success in the various ventures, which appear to
have lasted, for the most part, only until the original capital
which subsidised them gave out. Then the brotherly-lovers, full
of their private grudges, resentments, jealousies, went back to
normal life in the real world. Sex and individualism seem to
have been the chief disruptive factors, from which the Utopians
conclude that human beings were not designed by nature for that
kind of grouping. The natural grouping for human beings is the
Family. Outside of this there are the solitaries who like to live
alone, and unattached people who like to live with a friend of the
same sex until such time as one of them falls in love and marries
and a new Family is started.
In Utopia the Home is not the prison it so often is in our own
society, and the Family is not something to shudder away from
and escape at all costs — for the good reason that the Utopians are
morally emancipated, and parents do not seek to maintain a hold
upon their children, nor do they live together unhappily for ‘the
sake of the children’. This means that the home is an harmonious
place, free of conflict between husband and wife, betweeh parents
and children. There is no question of the father being the Head
of the Family. The Utopian home is a microcosm of Utopia
itself, since in it no one is set in authority over another, but all are
equal, and, freed of petty tyrannies and the grudges they set up,
the co-operative spirit of society at large prevails in the home.
Home, in Utopia, is a happy place, because it is a place of
freedom. The Father is not the symbol of authority — God and the
policeman and the schoolmaster rolled into one, as all too often in
our present society — nor the child of Original Sin. The Mother
does not seek to bind the children to her by a kind of spiritual
umbilical cord; the Children have no fear of the parents, and
therefore no hatred of the home, nor that morbid attachment to
the home which is bound up with anxiety and is a sign not of a
good home but of a bad one . 1 There is no neurotic bondage
because there is no sense of moral obligation binding the family
together, imparting unnaturalness to a natural association. The
Utopians know that Tove beginning as a bond becomes a bon-
dage’. They know, too, that unhappy people, frustrated emo-
tionally, sexually, creatively, cannot live harmoniously together,
either in the association of the home or in society at large. The
Utopians, in their free, classless, co-operative society, know no
such frustration, but are fulfilled in their whole natures, physical
and spiritual; they have, therefore, nothing to ‘work off’ on their
children; the father does not bully, the mother does not nag, or,
at the other extreme, seek compensation by over-loving her children, so that mother-love becomes smother-love. Instead of being
a breeding-ground for neurosis the Utopian home is a good
training-school for the wider world outside — is, in the best sense,
an introduction to life. Free of discipline from the top — the
authoritarian discipline of the parents — the child of the Utopian
home discovers for itself the natural discipline of life itself; in freedom he discovers that as a member of the small society of the
home he cannot live as a law unto himself — for one thing the other
members of the community will not stand for it, and for another he
discovers that it does not work; and because he discovers this for
himself— instead of being ‘ taught ’ it — it really makes an impression on him. At school this impression is reinforced, because in
the free schools of Utopia there is again, as we have seen, no
discipline from the top, but the natural discipline of the commu-
nity, which alone has value, because out of it alone can grow the
co-operative spirit.
‘The influence of the home’ really counts for something in
Utopia; for something generous and fine. We say in our world
that ‘charity begins at home’, narrowing down the word ‘charity’
to something mean, to the penny in the orphanage collecting box.
But in Utopia charity means something deep and rich; it means
understanding and tolerance and forgiveness; warmth and kindness and love. It means all that is contained in a phrase meaningless in a competitive society — ‘the brotherhood of man’.
No social or moral law coerces family life in Utopia — any more
than nesting birds and their fledglings. Everything which makes
Utopia the ideal commonwealth has its nucleus in the home —
freedom, equality, love. The child’s first world is the home; in our
society it is a world of frustration, tyranny, fear, conflict. In
Utopia — Utopia begins at home.
This does not mean that the Utopian child has no desire to
stretch his wings outside of the home. Even in Utopia the home is
too narrow to confine adolescents and their natural, excited
curiosity about life. The young person may feel perfectly free and
happy in the home yet still have a need for independence, and this
need is no criticism of the home or the parents, but entirely
natural, since the home belongs to the parents, the furniture and
decoration is of their choosing, expressive of their personality
and their generation, and youth has other ideas, other tastes, and
its own personality seeks its own expression. And the child, no less
than the adolescent, needs its own world, its own outlets. A child
is not a small adult, but something quite different; children and
adults are no more suited to live together than are human beings
and animals. The Utopians know this, and consider it wise that
children and young people should live away from home a good
deal, and schools — boarding-schools for the children from five to
fifteen, and day nursery-schools for the children under five — make
this possible. The adolescents are able to board at their technical
schools and training colleges, and when they feel like going off
and living on their own, before marriage, there is no family
complication of anyone being hurt or disapproving. It seems to
Utopian parents perfectly natural that the young should want to
live their own lives in their own way, and as the parents never
frustrate, or attempt to 'frustrate, their children, there is real
friendship and respect and understanding between them.
In short, there is the same free association in the Utopian home
as there is in its society at large, and a fine symbolism in the sun-
light and air invited through its deep windows.
It is not assumed in Utopia that ‘woman’s place is in the home’,
but that that is determined by her temperament and her abilities.
In Utopia, as in our world, there are women whose greatest
satisfaction lies in wifehood and motherhood, whose lives are
centred in the home, and women who need a wider sphere of
activity even when they are devoted wives and mothers. When a
woman has interests outside of the home there are creches and
nursery-schools, as we have seen, at which her children, if she has
any, may be well cared for whilst she is away from home, or so
occupied in the home that she cannot attend to them adequately.
Her house is so intelligently designed on labour-saving lines that
her housework presents no problems, and if she does not wish to
cook, or has no time to do so, there are plenty of what we should
call ‘communal kitchens’ in which she may eat, or from which
she may collect good, ready-cooked meals to take home.
Even in Utopia domestic service is not a profession which makes
much appeal. When every woman has a home of her own, is free
of any economic pressure, and has a choice of all trades and professions open to her, she has, in fact, even less inclination to work
in another woman’s home than in our society. Most of the
domestic help in Utopia consists of a neighbourly mutual aid.
Sometimes there are women who do not marry — legally or otherwise — and prefer to live with a family rather than alone, and such
women become housekeepers, doing the housework and cooking
whilst the woman of the house is engaged in some other profession,
their status being that of part of the family. But when no such
domestic help is forthcoming it is no hardship to the Utopian
woman to run her own home, since she does not work long hours
at her outside job, and running a house in Utopia is a very
different matter from the laborious business it is in our society,
and the Utopian woman has none of the prejudices against the
efficient and scientific way of doing things which commonly
characterise our own housewives.
No trade or profession is closed to any woman in Utopia; she
is in all things co-equal with man. Nothing is considered unsuitable work for a woman; every woman does what she wants to do,
which in practice means what she is most fitted for. (There are,
of course, a minority who think they can sing, write, act, paint,
but these pretensions are quite easily disposed of in Utopia, since,
for example, before anyone can cover a wall with mural decora-
tion the consent of the community must be obtained — as to
whether they want that particular wall painted, and, if so, in what
manner, and the would-be painter of it must satisfy the community
that he or she is capable of painting it to the general satisfaction.
Similarly the people who think they can act have to satisfy the
community of this, or they will soon find that they lack audiences.
In Utopia, where money does not enter into consideration, all
these things resolve themselves quite simply.)
The question of woman in relation to man, sexually, we will
discuss in the next chapter, when considering the Utopian conception of morality; it is here only necessary to indicate that woman is
as free as man; she is not dependent on him in any way; she cannot
exploit him economically, through marriage, as so often happens
in our own world, justifying Strindberg’s indictment of marriage
as 'legalised prostitution 5 ; nor can he exploit her, sexually,
through prostitution, or economically in any labour-market. So
many of the problems of our own society are rooted in the system
itself — which in turn is rooted in the evil of money. It is a cliche,
and it is considered trite, in our world, to assert that money is the
root of all evil, but the Utopians know, quite simply, that it is so;
their commonwealth is ideal because it is free of wars, poverty,
social inequality, prostitution, exploitation of the many by the
few, the exploitation of woman by man, and of man by woman,
and all this is so because they have abolished money.
In Utopia it is impossible to degrade marriage to the level of
prostitution because it is free of any economic element. In Utopia
nothing but mutual love and friendship hold a man and woman
together. All sex inequality disappeared with the abolition of
money, and a real comradeship became possible between the
sexes. Nobody in Utopia thinks any less of a woman because she
prefers to make her home and children her ‘career’. It is recognised that the good mother renders a very valuable service to the
community; that to raise healthy, happy children is as creative
a work as writing a book or a play or painting a picture, and as
vital as good agriculture.
The Utopian conception of a good education for women in-
cludes a knowledge of mother-craft (and pre-natal care), of physiology
— general and sexual — contraception, sexual hygiene, and the
rudiments of the sexual relation, of food-values , the balancing of
meals, so that they are not over-starchy or over-proteinous, or
lacking in the right amount of proteins and vitamins and vegetable
salts, housewifery , that is to say, cooking, laundry-work, needle-
work, the proper use of labour-saving devices, and the general
scientific, efficient management of the home. When a woman is
completely undomestic, not interested in home-management and
cooking, she naturally does not set out to learn these things, but no
Utopian woman would consider herself properly equipped for
adult life without a good knowledge of mother-craft, and everything which comes under the heading of physiology. In addition
to these purely feminine things she, of course, includes some
technical training in her education — she may prefer to learn
dressmaking rather than engineering, or to study nursing rather
than law, but she would consider herself — and be generally
considered — hopelessly uneducated if she did not acquire some
specific training to enable her to take her place, usefully, in society.
It seems strange to the Utopians that in our world the feminists
should clamour for equal educational facilities with men when
such facilities as are available for the men are so futile. They see
it as a clamour for a share in something bad. The Utopian
woman shares fully in the rational education available to all,
and which we have discussed earlier, and in addition has
opportunity for acquiring knowledge of particular value to
her as a woman.
The Utopian woman is not concerned with asserting intellectual
equality with men. She knows that psychologically as well as
physiologically men and women are different; she acknowledges,
without any sense of inferiority, that in general women are not
mechanically minded or scientifically minded — though there are
women engineers and women scientists, but they are exceptional —
that in general men do better creative work — that they always
have done and always will do, even in Utopia, because Nature
has so arranged it that woman's primary creative work is the pro-
duction of children; she accepts the significance of the fact that
the word ‘hysteric’ is from the Greek, husterikos, of the womb.
The women of Utopia, therefore, do not attempt to ape men, but
cultivate their own intellectual and creative gardens; where a
woman has more of the masculine than the feminine in her
mental make-up, has little or no interest in wifehood or motherhood, she is perfectly free to develop along the lines her nature
indicates. 'But there is none of that tiresome — and dreary — sex
rivalry encountered in our own world, with women cropping
their hair like men, wearing trousers, cultivating ‘boyish’ figures
and persistently asserting that they can do everything that a man
can do, except beget children — with supreme disregard for the
fact that men in general have greater muscular strength and stay-
ing power, and are not subject to the periodic instability —
nervous and emotional — involved in the possession of a womb. . . .
The Utopian woman does not consider herself inferior to man
because there are certain things which, if she does them at all,
she does not do as well; she simply accepts the fact that men and
women are different, and is glad of it, because in that difference
lies that attraction of the sexes for each other which is ‘ the stroke of
genius on the part of God’.
For the Utopian woman ‘emancipation’ is simply being free
to do what they want to do without obstruction or criticism; and
just as children in freedom, free of adult authority, have no desire
to throw stones through windows, which so many people assume
they will want to do, given freedom, so the Utopian woman,
because she is completely free to do what she pleases, devotes
herself to those things she does best, which only in exceptional
cases are the things that men generally like to do, such as driving
trains, stoking ships, building bridges, and so forth. Because there
is no assumption that her place is in the home she does not, like the
‘progressive’ women of our world, feel that she must escape the
home at all costs. Her home is beautiful and efficient, and a source
of pride to her. And she has the good sense to know that cooking
a good dinner is an intelligent job, and every bit as creative as
painting a good picture, and, generally speaking, more useful . 1
Her sound sense of values tells her that successful home-making is
an art and a craft, and an art and a craft in which women excel.
And she knows that as a mother of happy, healthy children she
has a place of honour in society; that everything which science
and medicine can devise to make motherhood safe and lessen its
pain and its burdens will be done, and she is completely free
of any economic anxiety concerning the future of her children.
Because they are all healthy and happy, and with ample
leisure (nothing is more destructive of a woman’s looks than
drudgery, and lack of time in which to care for herself) there
are no ugly women in Utopia. Some are more attractive than
others, obviously, but they have all a natural grace, and the
attractiveness of eyes that smile as well as lips. They make the
most of themselves, too, by dressing not according to something
called ‘fashion’ but according to what best suits them. Fashion is
nothing in Utopia; beauty everything. The women enhance
nature with the aid of cosmetics, but nowhere in Utopia do you
see a woman with her face plastered with rouge and her lips a
greasy scarlet daub. Their use of cosmetics is delicate and artistic,
and so subtle that it is impossible to say with any certainty where
nature ends and artifice begins. Needless to say, the ‘synthetic
blonde’ is a monstrosity completely unknown in Utopia, or a
woman with fingernails that look like talons dipped in blood. . . .
Clothes are beautiful because they are not mass-produced; a
great deal of the cloth is home-spun and hand-woven, and the
colours are the clear, bright colours of vegetable dyes; mostly
the women design and make their own clothes — they have
leisure for such ‘work-pleasure’ in their rationally organised
society, and they take delight in being individual in their dress.
The administration of Utopia, as we have seen, is through the
workers’ syndicates, and as there is no debarring of women from
any trade, industry, or farm-collective, the women have as much
say in common affairs as the men. In purely local affairs, such
as whether a new bridge or public building shall be built or an old
one scrapped, committees are elected from both men and women
to discuss and arrange matters. Everywhere the status of women is
co-equal with that of men, whether they work in the home or out
of it.
When any planning of new houses or creches or nursery-schools
or communal feeding centres is under discussion great deference is
paid to the views of the women on the committee, since in Utopia
woman is still predominant in the home, and in everything
touching children and the arrangement of meals, and it is therefore felt that in all such matters women know best what is wanted.
In the schools women teachers are preferred for the mixed
classes of young children, but for the older children the teacher
is not selected according to sex, but ability. In the case of
‘infants’, however, women teachers are considered to have more
patience and understanding, and the preference is for women with
children of their own.
There are a great many more women doctors in Utopia than in
our society, as it is felt that this is a profession for which women
are singularly suited, and there is, of course, no prejudice, as in
our world, against women doctors or surgeons.
There are no * Nannies * in Utopia. If a mother cannot look after
her children herself she has a choice of creches and nursery-
schools where trained nurses care for them. Thus no woman is in
authority over another. If any woman takes her child to a creche
or nursery-school to be cared for for no reason except that she
‘cannot be bothered’ to look after it herself, from nothing more
than laziness, or lack of maternal instinct, the child is not refused,
because it is held that such a woman is not fit to care for the child,
and it is therefore much better that she should hand it over to the
community. But the unwanted child is so rare in Utopia, as we
have seen, that this sort of unnatural mother rarely occurs, any
more than the bad mother who keeps the child at home but
neglects it; the neglectful mother, in any case, is only too glad
to hand the child over to someone else to look after. Such
‘problem mothers’, however, cease to exist in Utopia once the
difficult transitional period is past; the generation that grows
up in the ideal commonwealth has a strongly developed social
sense — a sense of responsibility, and of balanced values.
The women of Utopia are loved and desired as women,
respected as comrades and companions, honoured as mothers.
They are beautiful, as they are good, because they are happy;
and they are happy because they are free . . . free, not merely
in physical fact, to do as they please, but in their hearts and minds;
free of social and moral fears and taboos, free of inferiority.
Freedom, both social and moral, is all too often confused with
licence. Sexual freedom is too readily construed as promiscuity.
The Utopians are appreciative of Voltaire’s counsel, ‘Use; do not
abuse; neither abstinence nor excess maketh a man happy’. Or,
as Havelock Ellis has it in his noble essay on St. Francis , ‘All the
art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding in.
The man who makes the one or the other his exclusive aim in
life will die before he has ever begun to live. ... To live
rightly we must imitate both the luxury of Nature and her
austerity
A barnyard promiscuity is not the Utopian conception of sexual
freedom. By freedom they do not understand licence to degrade
‘the stroke of genius on the part of God ’, but freedom to live and
love fearlessly and honestly, and when love dies, if it does, to face
the fact no less courageously and honestly, without self-deception
or cant. The Utopians have no false romantic notions about
passion and physical fidelity. They know that passionate love
between two people dies in time a natural death, but that that is
not necessarily the end of love ; if when passion dies there is no
love it means there never was, that only lust drew the two people
together. They are not censorious of lust; indeed they agree
that it is ‘the bounty of God’, but they know that it is no basis
for a lasting partnership, and maintain that when there is no more
than that between lovers, when it is over — passion having run its
course — they do best to part, with no pain or bitterness, since
they have had mutual delight of each other. Similarly they hold
that physical infidelity is not necessarily a betrayal of love — that
people are not necessarily ‘unfaithful’ to each other, in the true
sense, because they sometimes enter into a temporary physical
relationship with someone else. They dislike the word ‘faith-
fulness’ reduced, like the word ‘morality’, to a purely sexual
issue.
They do not postulate any oughts or ought-nots in human
relationships. They agree with Nietzsche that every man must
be his own moralist. They believe that people must arrange
their private affairs as suits them best. They recognise that some
people can only be happy in a strictly monogamous partnership,
whilst others do not attach the same importance to sexual fidelity.
Morality, the Utopians insist, is what makes for the greatest
happiness for the greatest number; they regard as immorality
deliberate hurt to another person, or any conduct which is anti-
social — that is to say, hurtful to the community.
There is no punishment for the offender against society —
indeed, there are no punishments of any kind in Utopia, no police,
and no law-courts, and no prisons of any kind. The Utopians
consider our own methods of dealing with these maladjusted
people — for so they see them— as barbarous, for they reason with
Sir Thomas More, Tf you suffer your people to be ill-educated,
and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then
punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you
first make thieves and then punish them?’ More, in his Utopia ,
cites the example of the ‘ Polylerits ’, a Persian people who allowed
their thieves to ‘go about loose and free, working for the public’,
shut up only at night after a roll-call, and suffering ‘no other
uneasiness but this of constant labour’, eventually through hard
work and good conduct regaining their liberty, and in this way,
‘vice is not only destroyed, and men preserved, but they treated
in such a manner as to make them see the necessity of being honest,
and of employing the rest of their lives in repairing the injuries
they have formerly done to society. Nor is there any hazard
of them falling back to their old customs. . . . ’
In the ‘ City of the Sun although there were ‘no prisons, except
one tower for shutting up rebellious enemies ’, there were, nevertheless, judges and punishments. ‘Everyone is judged by the
first master of his trade, and thus all the head artificers are judges.
They punish with exile, with flogging, with blame, with depriva-
tion of the common table, with exclusion from the church and
from the company of women. When there is a case in which
great injury has been done, it is punished with death, and they
repay an eye with an eye, a nose for a nose, a tooth for a tooth,
and so on, according to the law of retaliation. If the offence is
wilful the council decides. When there is strife, and it takes place
undesignedly, the sentence is mitigated; nevertheless, not by the
judge but by the triumvirate, from whom it may be referred to
Hoh, not on account of justice, but of mercy, for Hoh is able to
pardon. . . . The accusation and witnesses are produced in the
presence of the judge and Power; the accused person makes his
defence, and he is immediately acquitted or condemned by the
judge; and if he appeals to the triumvirate, on the following day
he is acquitted or condemned. On the third day he is dismissed
through the mercy and clemency of Hoh, or receives the inviolable
rigour of his sentence. . . . No one is killed or stoned unless by
the hands of the people, the accuser and the witnesses beginning
first. For they have no executioners or lictors, lest the State
should sink into ruin.’ The only crimes punishable with death
were crimes committed against the liberty of the republic, or
against God or against the supreme magistrates. In such cases
no mercy was shown.
In our modern Utopia an attempt is made to re-educate people
who persistently refuse to co-operate with society under the
natural law of mutual aid, and anyone actively dangerous to
society, or to individuals, is restrained, taken into what we should
call ‘protective custody*, so that doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, may attempt to find out the cause of the anti-social conduct
and effect a cure. Where no cure is found to be possible after
everything possible has been done, and the anti-social person
cannot safely be allowed to go free, he or she is held as in our
present society we hold insane people, but in far superior condi-
tions, with very careful avoidance of the mixing of border-line
cases with the completely mad, but everything arranged as
intelligently and humanely as possible.
Anti-social conduct is frequently found to be purely neurotic,
and the Utopians are full of compassion for these maladjusted
people. They regard them not as wicked people, but as unhappy
and mentally sick people, for whom everything possible must be
done. They hold that in an ideal commonwealth, where poverty
and want are unknown, if anyone steals it can only be psychological stealing, since all material motive for theft is removed; and
that if anyone is violent, and wound or kills another, there must
be something seriously wrong with his psyche, and he is held not
as a criminal, but as a sick person until his sickness is cured. It is
believed that as Utopia develops such ‘problem people* will
cease to occur, for criminality and neurosis can no more flourish
in a rational society than can disease germs in a healthy body.
The Utopians know that the causes of crime are to be found mainly
in social conditions; that poverty, injustice, exploitation, frustration — social and sexual — the money system, are the chief evils in
which crime is rooted and which corrupt man’s natural goodness,
warping his psychology, and distilling the spirit of hate and vio-
lence and intolerance, and the lust for power, into the heart of
man. In Utopia the causes of crime do not exist, since there is no
poverty, but every one has all he wants, no injustice or exploitation, since there are no class-distinctions and no production for
profit, and no social or sexual frustration, because there is social
equality and sexual freedom ; but until all the people of the
Utopian world have been born and grown up there, there must
continue to be a certain amount of maladjustment carried over
from the old bad systems by which men lived — or, rather, existed,
since under the non-Utopian systems human beings spend so much
time earning their livings that they have little time in which to live.
To a certain extent, of course, sexual jealousy still exists in
Utopia as a cause of crime, and it is probable that this will never
be completely eradicated, though a rational sex education and
attitude to sex does very much to minimise it. Lycurgus strove
to eliminate in marriage ‘the vain and womanish passion of
jealousy’. He did this ‘by making it quite as reputable to have
children in common with persons of merit, as to avoid all offensive
freedom in their own behaviour to their wives. He laughed at
those who revenged with wars and bloodshed the communication
of a married woman’s favours’. A young wife with an elderly
husband might have a young and handsome lover — with her
husband’s consent — and get a child by him, which the husband
would bring up as his own; and similarly ‘a man of character’
might have as mistress some young and beautiful wife — with her
husband’s consent — and have children by her. According to
Plutarch, ‘ these regulations tending to secure a healthy offspring,
and consequently beneficial to the State, were so far from encouraging that licentiousness of the women which prevailed
afterwards, that adultery was not known amongst them’ — what
they did with their husband’s consent not counting as adultery .
In Utopia the word ‘adultery’ has fallen into disuse. It belongs
to a discarded moral code. Marriage, as we understand it, does
not exist, except with the minority who adhere to the orthodox
Christian Church. Outside of this a man and woman are con-
sidered married to each other if they set up house together; 'he is
her man; she is his woman. * * If and when the arrangement
ceases to be a source of happiness to them both they part company;
when there are children they usually stay with the mother, though
it is entirely a matter for mutual arrangement — the Utopians are
nothing if not reasonable people. The abolition of money simplifies these domestic arrangements, since the question as to who shall
‘support’ the children in the event of parents separating does not
arise; whoever has the care of them will take from the common
storehouses whatever is needed for them. Sometimes a man and
woman may love and desire each other without wishing to live
together, and no one thinks their ‘semi-detached arrangements
in the least odd; the woman may even wish to have children under
this arrangement, the father visiting them periodically, though in
general the Utopians favour family life as a complete unit under
one roof, considering this fairer to the children, who, they argue,
have as much right to the regular company of their father as of
their mother. The Utopians, too, with contraceptive facilities
freely available, and the knowledge that if there should be an
unwanted pregnancy it can be surgically interrupted under
proper hygienic conditions, do not have children lightly; when
they have them they do so in the full realisation of the responsibility involved, and the parents make every effort to secure the
success of their relationship. To this end they live together for
some time, experimentally, before starting a family. If they find
that they are still good comrades and friends and lovers after the
first sexual and romantic excitement has somewhat subsided they
consider that they stand a reasonable chance of making a success
of it as permanent partners and parents. Utopian lovers either
part company after a few months, when they have exhausted the
sexual novelty of each other, or they become ‘ married to each
other in a very real sense — in a far more real sense than the vast
majority of marriages in our world in which marriage is a legal
contract only to be dissolved through the machinery of a court of
law. The Utopians consider it completely fantastic that there
should be laws controlling human relationships. They echo the
exclamation of William Morris’s Utopian, ‘Fancy a court for
enforcing a contract of passion or sentiment ! If such a thing were
needed as a reductio ad absurdum of the enforcement of contract, such
a folly would do that for us!’ The only possible ‘contract’
between two people who love each other is their faith in each
other. They do not promise to love each other for ever, because
they know that there cannot be any such reckless guarantees in
human emotions, and because they cannot promise this they can-
not promise to remain together always; they do not require
promises of each other; it follows quite naturally that so long as
they love each other and find happiness in cohabitation so long
will they stay together, and as naturally it follows that if and when
they are no longer happy together they will part. That, neither
more nor less, is the essence of their unwritten and unspoken
contract.
This does not mean that in Utopia there is no unhappiness
in human relations. Since there can be no guarantees in human
emotions so, even in Utopia, there can be no guarantee that
A and B will fall out of love at the same time; it may be that one
copies to the sad conclusion that the relationship would be better
ended, whilst the other longs for it to continue, and believes that
the other person may be won back. Partings in such circumstances
are as painful in Utopia as in any other form of society. But at
least the memory of love is not degraded by sordid financial
squabbles and bickerings over the custody of the children. As
freely as they came together the couple who can no longer live
happily together part.
But where there are children they do not lightly break up the
home. They do not necessarily consider the death of romantic
love the end of happiness. Long after a man and woman have
ceased to feel passion for each other they can feel friendship
and a deep and tender love — a kind of sunset- afterglow of passionate love. That they are no longer in love with each other
does not seem to them good reason for ending their 'marriage’,
particularly where there are children to whom they are both
devoted. Each may fall romantically and passionately in love
with someone else, yet still they can feel married to each other
and remain happily together. Their friendship, their love and
liking, the fact that in the past they have been lovers, and that
in the present they have children as souvenirs of that past, may
well bind them together, to love and to cherish, until death do
them part. . . . The Utopians consider that that is marriage
in the true sense — that sense of passions may come and passions
may go, but love and friendship endure. Such is their attitude
to life and love, that when 'passion’s trance is over-past’ tenderness and truth do indeed last.
Jealousy does occasionally occur, but it is considered a weak-
ness, never in any circumstance justified. No one, the Utopians
insist, has any ' rights ’ in anyone else, and if one partner deviates
from 'the faithful nuptial union between man and wife’ however
much the other partner may regret this, and however human
it may be to feel grieved about it, no one has the right to feel
aggrieved , because such a feeling implies a possessiveness alien to
the whole Utopian conception of sexual relations. Men and
women do not ‘ belong ’ to each other but to themselves. Sadness
that one’s partner no longer desires oneself is natural enough, they
say, and morally legitimate, but not anger or resentment; and
anyone who feels such an anger or resentment, to the point of a
crime passionnel , must be regarded as a sick person, unfit to mingle
freely with other human beings, at least until there has been
considerable sexual re-education.
If anything can be said to shock the Utopians it is jealousy.
They regard it and fear as the two most degrading of human
emotions. Though they have no use for authoritarian discipline
they believe, profoundly, in discipline — even if they do not
go so far as Nietzsche who contended that a day in which one has
not at least once denied oneself, in the interests of mastery of self,
is a day badly spent. But they believe with Epicurus — whom
Nietzsche admired — that an unending self-discipline was essential
to good-living, to the deepest organic satisfaction.
Because of that Epicurean attitude they abhor prostitution.
It seems to them bad living, because it lacks that deep organic
satisfaction. They regard it as one of the evils inseparable from
the old bad way of living, with its irrational and anti-life moral
code. It cannot exist in Utopia, since in a society in which there
is no money, and no one lacks anything, for what can a woman, or
a male homosexual, sell her or himself? Perhaps it will be
objected that the abolition of money does not necessarily dispose
of harlotry, since even in our own society it is by no means always
economic necessity — as the sentimentalists would have us believe —
which sends women and young male homosexuals — or those who
are willing to lend themselves to such practices — on to the streets.
But the simple fact is that the conditions productive of harlotry,
and necessary to its success, simply do not exist in the ideal
commonwealth. When men and women are free there are no
unhappy marriages and bad homes, and no frustrations to drive
people into loveless unions. The ‘Don Juan’, the ‘Casanova’, the
nymphomaniac, are all people restlessly seeking emotional satisfaction, and seeking it where it can never be found, through the
flesh, because all that the flesh can give them, when lust is divorced
from love, is sensual sensation, something completely ephemeral.
There is a strong vein of Hedonism running through Utopian
ethics, but it is the rational Hedonism of Epicurus, not of Aristippus, for whom the present was all-important, a ‘sharp apex
between two hypothetical eternities’; it is a Hedonism disciplined
by reason. The Utopians are an educated people in the true
sense, and they believe with Epicurus that ‘ while every pleasure
is in itself good, not all pleasures are to be chosen, since certain
pleasures are produced by means which entail annoyances many
times greater than the pleasures. Moreover, a right conception of
pleasure itself conduces to right living, since it is not possible to
live pleasantly without living wisely and well and righteously’.
The Utopians, like Epicurus, count serenity of mind and absence
of bodily pain amongst the pleasures of the ‘blessed life’.
In our society the moral code, with its repressions and general
unnaturalness, and the economic system, in which the hardest and
the most useful work is invariably the worst paid, are both
strongly conducive to prostitution; the one encourages the
demand, the other the supply. In the big drive against prostitution in the U.S.S.R. in 1922, the Commissary of Public Health
had the good sense to emphasise the importance of not permitting
the war against prostitution to degenerate into a war against
prostitutes; they were not to be hounded and harried and persecuted, but cured of disease, re-educated to a sense of social
responsibility, taught a trade. Where necessary psychological
treatment was given. By 1932 the few remaining prostitutes were
to be found almost exclusively in the big hotels catering for foreign
tourists. The Soviet Union, very sensibly, recognised that it was
not merely the prostitutes themselves who needed re-education,
but their users, and that without that it would be impossible to
abolish prostitution. The user of prostitutes was regarded as
guilty of anti-social conduct as much as the prostitute herself; it
was insisted that ‘prostitution degrades women; the demand for it
degrades men’. In Utopia, where there is no money, and no
compulsion to work, nothing is to be gained by harlotry; there
ceases to be any purpose in it ; a woman does not have to resort to
harlotry to secure an easy life and the satisfaction of her material
needs, and a man does not have to resort to prostitutes for the
gratification of sexual needs in a society in which there is complete
sexual freedom.
In Bacon’s ‘Bensalem’ there were ‘no stews, no dissolute houses,
no courtesans, nor anything of that kind’. Such things were
regarded as an affront to marriage. Bacon makes his Utopian
mouthpiece refer to ‘the depraved custom of change, and the
delight in meretricious embracements (where sin is turned into
art).’ Our Utopians detest such ‘meretricious embracements ’
not from the standpoint of ‘unlawful lust’, since they recognise
no laws in such matters, but because of their Epicurean philosophy
of a discriminating Hedonism.
They cannot claim with Bacon’s Utopians that ‘as for masculine
love, they have no touch of it’, but they do not regard homo-
sexuality as a social problem or anything calling for treatment
except at the wish of homosexuals themselves, and then it is
rather a matter of disposing of any conflict and inducing accept-
ance of the deviation rather than attempting a ‘cure’, since,
in the words of Dr. Kenneth Walker, ‘the true homosexual is
unable, with the best will in the world, to change the direction of
his desires, and treatment is generally useless. The invert is
born with the disposition to homosexuality. He has no more
control over his sexual make-up than he has over the colour of his
hair’.
Dr. Walker goes on to point out, however, ‘ But the congenital
predisposition is not the only cause of homosexuality, although it
is probably the most potent one. External factors also exert their
influence, such as seduction and example. . . . Undoubtedly
some of our famous public schools have in the past acted as incu-
bating establishments for homosexuals. Whereas a normally
constituted child will turn with disgust from the practices he may
have witnessed, one with a predisposition to homosexuality may
be permanently deviated in that direction’. He adds, ‘It must
be noted, however, that some psychologists deny that example
and seduction can ever affect permanently a normal adolescent \
It is generally accepted in Utopia that there are two kinds of
homosexuals — the pathological and the psychological; the first
group are a product of Nature; the second of civilisation. There
is the male homosexual with feminine attributes — feminine hips
and buttocks, high-pitched voice, delicate feminine skin; and
there is the masculine female homosexual, lacking in the soft
feminine attributes, and dressing, in accordance with the dictates
of her nature, in as masculine a fashion as possible. The hermaphrodite is the extreme of these types. Obviously for this ‘intermediate sex’ psychological treatment is useless; these people are as nature made them, and their sexual natures are in accordance
with the balance of male and female elements in their mental
and physical make-up. They cannot be said to be unnatural,
since nature itself is responsible for their intersexual condition. The
psychological homosexuals show no physiological abnormality;
many male homosexuals are completely masculine in appearance
and manner, and many women homosexuals are completely
feminine, both physically and mentally. Whereas the congenital
homosexual does not usually attract the opposite sex, the men
being too feminine, the women too masculine, the psychological
homosexuals deceive the opposite sex by their outward normality,
but are themselves quite unable to respond to any heterosexual
interest they may arouse. Various factors may have contributed
to their inversion — sex fears in childhood due to a bad sex education — the association of the idea of normal sex relations with pain,
or with something unclean — an over-emotional relationship with
the mother or the father, so that the son grows up unable to think
of women except as mothers, whilst for the daughter men are
impossible except as fathers. Over and over again in the history
of male homosexuals there emerges an exaggerated devotion to
the mother, an almost incestuous love, coupled, usually, with
jealousy or fear of the father. In the history of Lesbians there
commonly recurs a jealousy of the mother’s second marriage, fear
or hatred of the mother’s husband, whether as father or step-
father, or the man who has replaced the father in the home-life.
The girl with an over-emotional attitude to the father does not
appear to develop along homosexual lines, but tends to marry a
father-substitute, a man old enough to be her father; it is less
common for a man to marry a mother-substitute, the mother-
fixation usually developing into homosexuality.
The sexual impulse can be deviated into homosexual channels
early in childhood; the unnatural segregation of the sexes at
school confirms this tendency, which, in better circumstances,
might have been redirected. A first love-affair which fails sexually
can also confirm a homosexual tendency, as surely as a successful
first heterosexual experience can re-direct it. A man with a
homosexual tendency incurred in childhood has only to fail in
his first attempt at sex relations with a woman to be convinced
that his true sexual nature lies with his own sex, with whom,
it seems to him, everything is much simpler and easier, and there
is no risk of humiliation. Similarly with a woman with a latent
homosexual tendency; she has only to be disappointed in or disgusted by her first sexual experiences with the opposite sex to
jump to the conclusion that heterosexual relations are not for her.
In both such cases probably more effective than any psycho-
analytical treatment is the patient understanding of someone in
love with the homosexual, and who has tact and sympathy and
love enough to restore the confidence lost in the early disastrous
affair; it is a delicate and difficult business, but by love and
patience very much may be accomplished.
Dr. Walker cites Adler as emphasising ‘the part played by fear
in the development of latent homosexuality, and especially by
feat of the opposite sex. This may take many disguises, and be
manifested not only as fear of women in general, but also a fear of
venereal disease, fear of scandal, and fear of feminine entangle-
ments. Intimacies with the same sex, being free of these terrors,
exercise over a youth with an intersexual makeup a certain
attraction’.
As influences which have the power to correct a homosexual
leaning and direct the Libido into normal channels, Dr. Walker
gives, in order of importance, protection during childhood and
adolescence from seduction and example, a virile upbringing, good
feminine friendships, and a happy love-affair. ‘To these may be
added the influence of religion and the acquirement of a social
sense that disparages a homosexual and exalts a heterosexual
love’.
It is probable that as Utopia progresses psychological homo-
sexuality will finally disappear, because the conditions productive
of it will have ceased to exist, as one rationally educated genera-
tion succeeds another. In Utopia there is no unnatural segregation
of the sexes in the schools and colleges, no bad sex education — or
mis-education — to overcome, no ‘moral training’ to corrupt the
natural goodness of the child and pervert the impulses of its
adolescence. And nothing of that decadence which prevails in our
own society and which regards homosexuality with a kind of
admiration, almost awe, as a special attribute of the intellectual,
something so much more interesting than normality . . . whereas
what would really be interesting in intellectual and artistic
circles in our world would be if someone were to say, with that
air of having said something witty, ‘ Of course, you know, my dear,
he’s hetero!’
The Utopians neither persecute homosexuals on the one hand,
nor adulate them on the other, as we do; they accept them, and
do their best to help them resolve their conflicts and accept
what cannot be changed, whilst seeking always to establish that
background and education which will reduce the chances of
forming homosexual tendencies in the young.
They have pulled down all the prisons in Utopia. You might
say, ‘ Could they not have been used as places in which to attempt
to cure maladjusted people, and in which to restrain those who
cannot be cured?’ The answer to this is No, because of the bad
associations of prisons. Even if they were no longer called by
that name the old taint of prison would remain, and could not
fail to have a bad psychological effect on people whom it was
hoped to help and cure there. In Utopia, therefore, no vestige
of the prison is allowed to remain, even as an historic ruin. The
Utopians do not want to be reminded of the old, unhappy days
and man’s inhumanity to man that seems to them so strange, so
barbarous. Had no one any conscience, they wonder, that
people could be happy knowing that in their midst fellow human
beings were shut up for months and years, and under the most
inhuman conditions, being punished — tortured is how they see it —
for that for which they should have been pitied .
Since there are no police, no courts of law, no judges, no law-
yers, the anti-social person who must be restrained for the com-
mon good is dealt with by a committee made up — by election —
from the people amongst whom he lives, the people of the town,
or the village commune. They form not a court in which an
offender is judged, but a court of inquiry, a tribunal, and it is
arranged in as friendly and informal a manner as possible. Such
tribunals are only assembled when something extremely serious
has been done or attempted, such as a murder, an assault, setting
fire to a rick or a public building, a sexual offence against a child.
A court of inquiry is only called when it is necessary to hold the
offender in restraint; then some sort of tribunal becomes necessary
to determine whether he did actually commit the offence complained of; if a mistake has been made those who have suspected
him of the offence publicly apologise; if the general feeling,
as a result of careful inquiry, is that there is no doubt that
he is a menace to the common good he is held in pleasant and
comfortable conditions and treated psychologically, or psycho-
therapeutically, as the case may be; if he is found to be incur-
ably insane he is sympathetically cared for in a home for such
cases.
‘What?’ perhaps you exclaim. ‘Do you mean to say that in
Utopia incurable lunatics are kept alive — useless to themselves
and a drag on healthy people?’
The answer to which is that the Utopians consider that
euthanasia, despite the intellectual arguments for it, would introduce too much suspicion and fear into human life. No one
would ever feel quite safe. A person who had had a mental
breakdown and been cured would live in dread of another similar
illness for fear that this time he might be found incurable and, like
an incurably sick animal, be ‘put to sleep’; such an anxiety
might well give him another such breakdown. The responsibility
of taking another person’s life for humane reasons the Utopians
consider too great. In no circumstances, they hold, can it be
justifiable to take life — though what one does with one’s own is
one’s own affair, and not to be moralised over by society.
Suicide is, however, very rare in Utopia. All the material
reasons for it are removed. The two chief motives for suicide are
money and love. In Utopia worry over money matters is impossible, but even in the ideal commonwealth people are capable of so
over-valuing each other that it is possible for them to feel that
without the love of a certain person life is insufferable, and to
reach the point at which all desire to live ceases.
Whilst the Utopians deeply deplore suicide, regarding it 'as
the supreme sin, because it is the crime against life itself, they
nevertheless maintain that everyone has the right to do as he
chooses with his own life, and if he wishes to destroy it, is no one’s
concern but his own. When a person is found dead there is a
medical inquiry into the causes of death, because if he should
not have died of natural causes, or at his own hand, it would not
do to leave at large a person who might be a homicidal maniac.
If the person is found to have killed himself, the fact is recorded
without comment. A verdict of suicide ‘whilst of unsound mind’,
or ‘whilst the balance of the mind was deranged’, seems to the
Utopians unreasonable, for, they argue, who can possibly judge
of the state of the person’s mind at the time — and even if it were
possible to judge, what does it matter?
The Utopians have no fear of death, and no superstitions
concerning it. They know neither dread of dying, nor horror of
the dead. Those of the older generation who still adhere to the
teachings of the orthodox Church — but they are few — have the
comfort of their belief in an after-life. The great unbelieving
mass preserve a rational attitude to death. That is to say they
accept it philosophically, and though they feel a natural grief
for the loss that the death of those they love brings they are averse
to all funereal trappings. They believe that with that cessation
of physical being we call death, everything that they loved in the
living person has gone, and that what is left has no meaning, and
the sooner it is returned to the dust from whence it sprang the
better, and that this should be done with as little ostentation as
possible. The majority favour cremation rather than earth
burial, as being the most expeditious way of disposing of the husks
of humanity, and there is a general feeling against tombstones,
since, say the Utopians, the heart, inscribed with memories, is
memorial enough. They do not wear mourning or lay wreaths.
They use no euphemisms concerning death; they do not say
‘passed away’ or ‘passed on’ or ‘taken’. But though they have
no superstitions concerning death, and no wish for funereal
trappings, they regard Lycurgus as having been altogether too
arbitrary in that ‘he suffered nothing to be buried with the
corpse, except the red cloth and the olive leaves in which it was
wrapped’, and in that ‘he would not suffer the relations to
inscribe any names upon the tombs’, except of those men that fell
in battle, or those women who died in some sacred office, ‘and
fixed eleven days for mourning’. They maintain that people who
want the outward show, as a means of paying tribute to the dead,
and derive any kind of comfort from it, should be allowed to have
it. Our conduct towards our dead, they say, is as personal as our
conduct towards those we love. But they themselves have progressed beyond the superstitions and the trappings and funereal
pomps. Since they regard life as a boon —
‘Then death when e’er it comes
Must come too soon’.
There is nothing they can do about it but accept it as they accept
the cycle of night and day and of the seasons, regretful that ‘the
glory of life’, the ‘vast luxury of living’, has ultimately to come
to an end, both for themselves and those they love, but resigned
to it, and not seeking to delude themselves that there is anything
beyond. Their philosophy is to ‘learn to gather sloes in their
season, to shear sheep, to draw water from the spring with grateful
happiness, and no longer vex our hearts with impossible longings.
They know that all is impermanent, and life only a leasehold,
and with this philosophic materialism they ‘approach life with
firm, unfaltering mind, with chivalrous minds well disciplined to
ask and to expect no more than what has been clearly given to us.
For enough and more has already been allowed us’. They
believe that the spirits of those we love do survive after death,
not in any spiritualist sense , but as music continues to vibrate on the
air when the instruments that created it have ceased, and they
take comfort from this, for they know that their own spirits will
similarly survive, and that in that sense they will continue an
after-death life, in the memories those who loved them hold of
them, and in the things they created with hand and brain, so that
physical cessation, and the body become dust returned to the good
earth, is but ‘a sea-change into something rich and strange’, and
the anticipation of this is no shadow upon the sunlight of their
Utopian happiness.
The Utopian conception of happiness is something basically
different from our own. Whereas we pursue happiness they
wait quietly for it to enter into them. They believe, profoundly,
that it is a state of being , not of having . It is an attitude of mind ; an
acceptance of life. They do not experience, therefore, the rest-
lessness common to our way of living; they do not have to be
constantly seeking sensation — the sensations of love, the sensations
of pleasure. They are at peace within themselves, and this peace
they call happiness. It is not a bovine content, but rich in satis-
faction; they are happy because they are fulfilled in their creative
impulses, because each does what he likes to do, and it is a satisfaction to him; he is aware of his integral place in society; he has
this sense of integration with the whole fabric of society. In their
relations with each other there is this same serenity of mind;
marriage for them is not a frenzied perpetuation of passion’s
trance; it is not romanticism, ‘flowery and false’; they know
passionate, romantic love and delight in it, but they know that
passion and romance do not ‘marry’ people to each other, that
‘ marriage ’ is the love and friendship, the tenderness and devotion,
left when the first wild feelings have subsided, and though it is
true that unhappiness sometimes enters into their relations with
each other, there is far less unhappiness than between the men
and women of our world, and because of their education and their
attitude to life, the essential rationality of their whole conception
of happiness, they are far better equipped to face it — and in due
course recover from it.
Defining morality as what makes for the greatest good for the
greatest number, the Utopians are a strictly moral people. Though
they believe that the wilful infliction of pain is immoral they also
believe that there are occasions in human relations when unsel-
fishness and self-sacrifice are immoral. For example, it may be
extremely unselfish and self-sacrificing of A to stay with B, who
makes her unhappy, when she could be happy with C; but
it means that she is sparing B unhappiness at the expense
of her own and G’s — that, in fact, two people are being made
unhappy, their lives spoiled, for the sake of one. They consider
that if there is no third person involved and A decides to devote
her life to the attempt at making B happy, there is no great
virtue in this, because of the moral satisfaction A is likely to
derive from the consciousness of her self-sacrifice — that in
this she has her reward, which minimises the selflessness of her
conduct.
The Utopians consider it immoral to ill-treat a child, physically
or mentally, and to attempt to impose adult standards on it, or
‘mould’ it in any way. But in Utopia, where, as we have
seen, all children are wanted children and therefore loved, and
education is morally and intellectually free, there is little danger of
this.
•They consider it immoral to take from society — that is to say,
from the common storehouses, which contain the products of the
earth and of man’s labours — without contributing to it. But they
would consider it even more immoral to punish the transgressor;
not merely, they say, would it not cure him of his anti-social con-
duct, but harden him and turn him into a positive enemy of
society; it seems to them, also, that to cause another human being
to suffer in the name of punishment is to impose wrong upon
wrong, and no good can come of it. The individual forcibly res-
trained because he is a menace to society may suffer through this
restraint, but in such cases the law of the greatest good for the
greatest number operates.
Ugliness seems to the Utopians immoral — ugly cities, ugly
houses, the creation of ugly things. For them
‘The wrong of uncomely things
Is a wrong too great to be told ’
Most of our ‘modern art’ is, from the Utopian viewpoint, quite
immoral, its ugliness an expression of an inner chaos and con-
fusion, and of false values and lies. Indeed, our whole way of
living, with its buying and selling, its values of the stock exchange
and the market-place, its private ownership of the land and the
means of production, the exploitation of the many by the privi-
leged few, all the inequality and injustice that prevails, the hum-
bug and hypocrisy of our moral code, the degradation of sex
through prostitution, the parasitic element in marriage, the woman
bartering her body for the security a home and husband is made
to represent — the perversion of Christian teaching through the
Church, so that what should give man abundant life is anti-life,
the barbarousness of our wars, the lies of our Press, the vanity and
self-interest of our politicians — all this the Utopians consider so
unspeakably immoral, such incredibly bad living, that they hardly
know whether to despise or pity us most. If we are not a race of
rogues and criminals, they say, then certainly we must be a race
of perverts and lunatics. . . .
If they are to be accused of immorality because of their free
sexual relations, which have abolished prostitution and the un-
happy marriage and all the miseries of frustration that twist and
warp human nature and rob life of its joy, of what are we to be
accused, with our furtive adulteries and guilty fornications, our
street-walkers, and brothels, and sex degraded to the level of
pornography?
The Utopians have no poverty, no want, no disease. The earth
is theirs, and the fulness thereof. They have security, peace —
material, and spiritual, — satisfaction, joy. Like Aristophanes’
birds, their time is passed 'like a perpetual wedding-day’. . If
that is 'immoral’ they accept the accusation, proudly.
Nietzsche saw the cardinal virtues as sincerity, courage, gener-
osity, courtesy. Havelock Ellis, in his essay on St. Francis,
declares, 'Not energy, even when it shows itself in the blind fury
of righteousness, suffices to make civilisation, but sincerity, intelligence, sympathy, grace, and all those subtle amenities which go
to what we call, perhaps imperfectly enough, humanity — therein
more truly lie the virtues of fine living’. Our Utopians also attach
the utmost importance to all these virtues, but greater importance
to moral courage than to physical courage, and as to generosity,
they say that material giving is of little value if there is not
generosity of spirit behind, that a capacity for giving things proves
nothing, since many outwardly generous people are fundamentally
selfish, giving only when their own interests are not touched. In
our 'system of society, they say, it is easy to give money if you
have plenty, and no virtue in it, and very little in making presents
to people out of money or possessions in excess of our needs.
Generosity, as they see it, is the man who has only half a loaf
between himself and starvation giving half of it to someone who
has none; it is Sir Philip Sidney’s gesture with the cup of water on
the battlefield ; it is denying oneself something in order to give it
to someone else whose need is greater, or purely to give pleasure;
it is contriving another person’s happiness regardless of trouble
and inconvenience to oneself ; it is also forgiveness and tolerance,
and the emotional giving of self. It is the charitable spirit, the
free outflow of loving-kindness, not merely for those one loves,
but to the strangers that cross one’s path.
‘Compassion under the discipline of scientific knowledge may
well inaugurate the long looked-for Utopia,’ Llewelyn Powys
wrote in his Glory of Life , and pointed out, ‘When we act with
generosity we do it as a spreading oak, innocent of virtue, shelters
sheep from the sun, carelessly, naturally,* out of the abundance of
our pagan vigour. This largesse outpouring of a strong soul cannot be curtailed. It is the natural property of a temperament
richly fulfilled. It has certainly nothing whatever to do with
religion, logic, or philosophy. ’
Utopian generosity springs from that' rich fulfilment irradiating
life. Which brings us back to our original contention that people
are not happy because they are good, but good because they are
happy. The Utopians are rich in virtue because they are rich in
happiness.
Morris’s News from Nowhere ends with a feast in a church — not
a religious feast, but simply a dinner to which the men and women
working at the haymaking sit down as to a harvest-time feast
in a barn. They choose a church because it is a hot summer’s
evening and the church is cool, and because a number of people
sit down to dine, and the church has space. In this there is
nothing blasphemous. A church is a place of worship, and men
worship God in various ways. Religion for Morris’s Utopians
meant the religion of humanity — the worship of life itself, of the
good earth, and of happy men and women. So at the feasts of the
good-earth, haysel, and harvest-home, they decorated their
churches with flowers, and those who had worked in any way to
bring in the produce of the earth, sat down to dine in a communal
thanksgiving in a fashion not unlike the Church-ales of the
Middle- Ages.
Is it too much to suggest that there is more of the true spirit of
religion in this than in a fashionable crowd listening to platitudes
from .the pulpit, their minds remote equally from heaven and
earth? Love of the good earth is ultimately love of God, creator
of heaven and earth. Massingham, in his Tree of Life , points out
that when the parson blesses the fields at Rogation-tide the
church is in the fields, and at the Harvest Festival the fields are
in the church, and that ‘it is this synthesis — religion, nature,
craft, husbandry, all in one — we have to rediscover’. He reminds
us that the first church was the manger, and urges that the
church must come back to the earth, the earth to the church.
When Man is integrated with the earth he is integrated with
God. God is the Supreme Good; the Creative Force of all life.
Serving the earth men serve God; worshipping life they worship
God. The Utopians do not seek to make religion a matter of
creeds; there is but one God because there is but one life. What
is religion, they ask, but human recognition of the superhuman
controlling power of all life? What need to tie this controlling
power down to a personal God? The wind that blows is all that
anybody knows. Call it the First Cause, Nature, the Law of
Cause and Effect, call it God —
‘This is its touch upon the blossomed rose,
The fashion of its hand shaped lotus leaves ! ’
Thus spake Prince Gautama, the Buddha. The orthodox Chris-
tian declares in the Apostolic Creed, T believe in God the Father
Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth’. It is the same human
recognition of the superhuman control — the essence of the religious spirit.
There are, in Utopia, those who believe in the personal deity;
those who believe in ‘God the Father Almighty’, and in Jesus as
his Son; those who believe that ‘there is but one God, Allah, and
Mahomet is his Prophet’; those who follow Buddha, Confucius,
and others; those who worship the ancient Hindu gods. Among
the Christians are those for whom Christianity is inseparable from
worship in church, with priests, and candles, and vestments; and
those who favour a Quaker simplicity, and whose belief is in the
Inner Light, that has no need of ritual. And there are those
who feel no need for any personal God, or any gods, but whose
religious spirit finds expression through ‘the religion of humanity
love of humanity, love of the earth, and an unconscious worship
through service, the Doctrine of Creation expressed through the
loving cultivation of the soil.
Man is naturally religious. However materialist he may be
intellectually science can never satisfy an innate spiritual need,
tie is stirred by tremendous thunders and lightnings, by splen-
dours of sunsets and dawns, by all manner of natural phenomenon,
in spite of his scientific knowledge. And for all his scientific
knowledge and inventiveness the movements of winds and
waters, of suns, moons, and stars, remain forever and forever
beyond his reach. In the presence of avalanches and great storms
and volcanic eruptions he is filled with a quite unscientific and
irrational awe; the ‘fear of God’ becomes real to him; the fear
of something utterly beyond his control, and with that fear, in
that moment, he acknowledges his littleness — and the existence
of ‘God’. He may deny God as a personal deity who listens to
prayers and answers them, who sits in judgment, administering
rewards and punishments; but God in terms of creator and
ruler of the universe he cannot deny — unless he is prepared to
deny the cycle of night and day and of the seasons, and that
the earth moves round the sun.
The Utopians who believe in a personal deity and who adhere
to religious teaching, whether Christian or Mohammedan or
anything else, are in a minority, as we have indicated ; the great
mass of Utopians have broadened the whole conception of religion
as they have of morality. This means that they are not less
religious than the peoples of our world, but, in the deepest
sense, more so. Religion, for them, is not a matter of ritual
and mumbled prayers and routine devotions. Without neces-
sarily acknowledging Jesus as Christ they nevertheless live in the
imitation of Christ to an extent seldom found amongst orthodox
Christians — who interpret Jesus's command to ‘Love one another'
by dropping bombs on each other — a course of conduct which
John Cowper Powys, in his The Art of Growing Old , justifies,
astonishingly, by interpreting the simple command, ‘Love your
enemies' as ‘Be kind to your enemies'. He assures us that
‘ Knock your enemy down and be kind to him afterwards ’ is the
common-sense version of this comprehensive command, for, he
goes on to explain — what Jesus in his simplicity never thought of —
‘Once down and the man is again your “neighbour"; and the
moment for “pouring in oil and wine" and paying his bill at the
Inn has arrived'. Thus do our modern ‘Christians' edit and ‘improve' upon the Sermon on the Mount.
The Utopian way of living, its stateless and moneyless society,
demands a high ethical standard; to live according to the anarchist principle of ‘mutual aid' the Utopians must indeed love
their neighbours as themselves. The whole positive creed of
Christian social teaching is involved; the personal ethic must
always be related to the good of the community. Love one an-
other, serve one another, forgive one another; give to one another.
They have abolished ‘the deceitfulness of riches' and, like the
early Christians, have* all things in common ; they have abolished
the law-courts and the prisons, and judge not that they be not
judged; they have abolished wars. They know well that the life
is more than meat, and the body than raiment, that man does
not live by bread alone, but has need of the roses of the Good
Life.
There are still churches in Utopia which are used as such, and
there are still priests to administer the sacraments and preach the
gospel, but the church has no temporal power. It does not, as
in our society, collect ground-rents for premises used as brothels;
it does not own property of any kind. Nor has it political power,
since, as we have seen, there is^ neither State nor politics. The
churches are there — with the exception of the hideous ones,
which have been pulled down — and where there is a demand for
it they are used for the old orthodox purposes; where there is
no demand for them to be so used they remain as historic monu-
ments, for their beauty of architecture and stained glass; and very
often people who are not religious in any orthodox sense never-
theless like to go and sit in them, to be quiet and contemplative,
or merely to rest for a little from the heat of the day; or in towns
to get out of the tide of people and traffic for a while. They
are used also for music recitals, many of them having fine
organs. It is not necessary, the Utopians say, to be an orthodox
Christian to enjoy the splendour and passion and tenderness of
Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and its effect is heightened when it is
rendered in a large and beautiful church. This feeling for noble
religious music, such as Bach’s St. Matthew Passion or Handel’s
Messiah, is an excellent example of the Utopian capacity for
religiousness outside of orthodox religion ; they have this feeling,
this spiritual sensibility, this sense of values beyond materialist
conceptions. They are not mystics, yet they have this feeling
for the mystery of life — the mystery of its beauty, its suffering,
its passion.
They use the churches, too, as we have seen, for the earth
feasts of haymaking and harvest, and they keep such feasts out
of their feeling for the earth as the source of all things living.
Reference was made earlier to the 'loving’ cultivation of the soil;
the choice of the word is deliberate ; it is something to which the
Utopians attach great importance. They are opposed to the com-
plete mechanisation of agriculture because it does not permit of
this careful loving cultivation. The man who roars over his land
on the seat of a tractor cannot get to know his land intimately as
does the man who follows the horse-plough. This is not that
romanticising of the land which we deplored earlier, but common
sense. That distinguished agriculturist, Lord Portsmouth, writes
on this subject , 1 'The man with his feet upon the ground knows
from stride to stride the nature of his soil, and can sense its alteration from season to season’. He regards a training in horse-
ploughing as 'essential for a proper instinctive feeling towards the
soil and its general health and structure’. The Utopians have this
instinctive feeling towards the soil; good husbandry is for them
the true Doctrine of Creation. Their God is manifested through
the laws and works of Nature, and this God they worship in their
love of the earth, and serve through their husbandry. Nor does
adherence to the orthodox conceptions of religious worship preclude them from a part in this most ancient of all forms of worship.
Where the church exists its spire rises up from the fields, in Mr.
Massingham’s beautiful imagery, and the shadow of the church
lies like a blessing upon the com. The Utopians have rediscovered
worship, which is the essence of the religious spirit, and in doing
so have rediscovered Man's immemorial relationship with God
and the earth.
In More’s Utopia there were ‘several sorts of religions . . .
some worshipping the sun, others the moon, or one of the planets;
some worship such men as have been eminent in former times for
virtue, or glory, not only as ordinary deities, but as the supreme
God ; yet the greater and wiser sort of them worship none of these,
but adore one eternal, invisible, infinite, and incomprehensible
Deity. . . . Him they call the Father of All. . . . By degrees, they
fall off from the various superstitions that are among them, and
grow up to that one religion that is the best and most in request’.
When they heard of ‘the doctrine, the course of life, and the
miracles of Christ ’, they were well inclined to receive this teach-
ing, since it seemed in accordance with their communal rule of
life. But there was complete freedom to join the Christian Church,
or remain outside of it; none that joined It were ill-used, and those
who. refused to be baptised did nothing to prevent other people
from following in this faith. When one man, newly baptised,
began to ‘ dispute publicly concerning the Christian religion with
more zeal than discretion’, condemning all other religions as
profane, and those who followed them to everlasting burnings, he
was seized and brought to trial, and condemned to banishment,
‘for this is one of their most ancient laws, that no man ought to
be punished for his religion ’. Every man might have what religion
he pleased, and attempt to convert others to it, by persuasion and
the force of argument, but he was to use no other force than per-
suasion; there was to be no railing against the convictions of
others, no reproaches or bitterness or violence. ‘This law was
made by Utopus, not only for preserving the public peace . . .
but because he thought the interest of religion itself required it.’
It seemed to him that different forms of religion might all come
from the same God, inspiring men in a different manner. ‘And
supposing that only one religion was really true, and the rest false,
he imagined that the native force of truth would at last break
forth and shine bright ... he therefore left men wholly to their
liberty, that they might be free to believe as they should see cause’.
In spite of this, however, he made a severe law against disbelief in
survival of the soul after death, which he considered an offence to
human dignity, and against the idea that the world was governed
by chance, without a wise, over-ruling Providence. Those who
did not hold these basic views as part of their religion were considered not fit to be citizens of a well-ordered commonwealth, ‘for
there is no doubt to be made, that a man who is afraid of nothing
but the law, and apprehends nothing after death, will not scruple
to break through all the laws of his country, either by fraud or by
force, when by this means he may satisfy his appetites’. None
holding these profane views might be raised to any high office
or honour or position of public trust, but were despised as men of
base and sordid minds, ‘yet they do not punish them, because they
lay down this as a maxim that a man cannot make himself believe
anything he pleases; nor do they drive any to dissemble their
thoughts by threatenings, so that men are not tempted to lie or
disguise their opinions; which being a sort of fraud, is abhorred
by the Utopians’. It might be reasonable to suggest that if one
were to be considered of base and sordid mind for being an un-
believer one might, nevertheless, be driven to lie and dissemble
rather than be so despised. . . .
Bacon, in his New Atlantis , takes it for granted that his Utopians
are ‘a Christian people full of piety and humanity’. The people
of the City of the Sun, however, were ‘ partly followers of Bramah
and Pythagoras’. They believed in the immortality of the soul,
but not in the transmigration of souls, ‘ except in some cases, by
a distinct decree of God’. They had an admiration for some
aspects of Christian teaching, strongly recommending it on the
question of possessions; they were rich because they wanted
nothing, poor because they possessed nothing, like the Apostles.
But they carried the Christian teaching of all things in common
a step farther than the Early Christians, who had ‘everything in
common except wives’. The inhabitants of the City of the Sun
did not make this exception. The sun for them was the image of
God, since it is the source of light and heat and life, and from it
‘the making of all things good and bad proceeds’. The sun was
the supreme father, the earth the mother. They believed that the
true oracle of Jesus Christ is by the signs in the sun, in the moon,
and in the stars.
Morris devotes little attention to the question of religion; he
seems to have assumed that people would have emancipated
themselves from the Church to the ‘religion of humanity’, a
general love of their fellow-man. The Utopian way of looking
at life is described as akin ‘to the spirit of the Middle Ages, to
whom heaven and the life of the next world was such a reality,
that it became to them a part of the life upon the earth; which
accordingly they loved and adorned, in spite of the ascetic doc-
trines of their formal creed, which bade them condemn it. But
that also, with its assured belief in heaven and hell as two countries in which to live, has gone, and now we do, both in word and
in deed, believe in the continuous life of the world of men, and,
as it were, add every day of that common life to the little stock of
days which our own mere individual experience wins for us ; and
consequently we are happy’.
Bellamy’s Utopians still had ‘Sundays and sermons’, but the
majority of people preferred to hear the sermons in their own
homes rather than in a church, and this they did by some tele-
phonic arrangement which was a prophecy of our modern wire-
less. There were voluntary churches, and an unofficial clerical
profession whose services, like those of editors, could be had on
request. ...
Our modern Utopians seem likely to free Christianity from the
stranglehold of the Church and restore it to its original simplicity
as a way of life, a guide to conduct which enables people to live
together in love and peace and harmony, seeking the kingdom of
heaven within them, creating it, co-operatively, here on earth.
And what is Utopia if it is not that — heaven on earth?
If we are agreed that progress is the realisation of our Utopias the
problem remains — how to set about this realisation. It is not to be
achieved through any political party, or any leadership. The
world has had a surfeit of political parties and leaders. The need
is not for politicians and leaders, but for a change in the heart of
man. Given the will to it the Utopian dream could be realised;
there could be that world in which men, whatever language they
sppke, whatever colour their skins, whatever their religions, were
brothers in the true sense, racially united in their common humanity, acknowledging one race only — the human race; a world in
which all things were in common, each giving to society according
to his ability and taking according to his need ; a world in which
there was no buying or selling, no useless toil, no exploitation of
the many by the privileged few; a world in which human beings
lived according to the natural law of mutual aid, in a stateless,
moneyless, and co-operative society; a world of true liberty,
equality and fraternity. . . . There could be such a world if
humanity wanted it enough. If this present civilisation, rapidly
destroying itself through mechanical force, the machine, accel-
erated beyond all control, finally collapsed amid its smoking
ruins, it might be that those who survived, purged beyond all
imagining by their sufferings, would be given the vision of a new
world, a new way of life — new as the first dawn when God looked
upon the world and saw that it was good. Nothing less will serve.
The need, as this book has attempted to indicate, is for the com-
plete transvaluation of values in all spheres, social, moral, econo-
mic, industrial, agricultural. That our present economics are the
economics of the mad-house is clear, and that we are draining the
good earth of its fertility, creating deserts, by taking from it with-
out returning, denying the natural cycle of life.
Nothing in the foregoing chapters is impossible— given the will
to the dream. Nor need mankind wait upon universal perfection.
The realisation of Utopia does not call for a world of perfect
people. It is probable that there will always be Ananias and
Sapphira in our midst. These defaulters did not disrupt the com-
munism of the Early Christians ; of them, we are told, the multi-
tude were ‘of one heart and of one soul; neither said any of them
that aught of the things which he possessed was his own ; but they
had all things common. . . . Neither was there any among them
that lacked; for as many as were possessors of lands or houses
sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold . . .
and distribution was made unto every man according as he had
need ’.
People say, But the heart of the multitude is not to be changed
overnight; there can be no mass conversion; therefore we must
take the world as it is and move forward step by step.
Then it is that they come forward with their Plans and their
Programmes, party labels attached — Communist, Fascist, Labour
Party, Common Wealth, and the rest. Some see the nationalisation of industry as the road to salvation ; others, seeing money as
the root of all evil urge monetary reform — not, strangely enough,
the abolition of the root of all evil; some see Utopia along the
Marxist road; some want State socialism, others socialism with-
out the State. In all these parties and systems there is revolt
against the existing system and its social inequalities and in-
justices, but some offer one thing at the expense of another —
and the thing most readily sacrificed is the liberty of the indi-
vidual, so that ‘the step in the right direction’ is continually
cancelled out. There is even a crypto-Fascist school of thought —
beginning with Plato — which considers freedom unimportant.
It is true that not every step in the right direction is cancelled
out by a negation of liberty; reforms we must have; there must be
amelioration of the human lot; but let us be under no illusion
that the road to Utopia is paved with reforms. To achieve
Utopia ‘we must first expiate our past, we must break with it;
and we can only expiate it by suffering, by extraordinary, unceasing labour. Utopia has nothing to do with reform; Utopia
is the new heaven and the new earth; it does not spring from any
political party or system, but from the dream in the heart of
man; a revolution in the human mind. By all means let us
sanction this and that reform — provided it is not one step forward
and two back. Whether or not we can sanction political revolution depends on whether or not we are prepared to sanction
violence as a means to an end. But it is clear that Utopia cannot
proceed from violence. The history of bloody revolution everywhere is the history of failure. Revolution there must be, the
‘complete change, turning upside down, great reversal of conditions, fundamental reconstruction, of the dictionary definition
of the word, but people are not to be bludgeoned into it; only
what is achieved through the great upsurge of the human spirit,
out of the impassioned desire of the multitude, endures; what is
imposed by force has no roots, and cannot last. There is no
realisation of Utopia without the change of values, and no change
of values without change of heart — spiritual revolution. Utopia
can be founded only on man’s love for man; on love and co-
operation; not on hate and the seizing of material power. When
one section of the community triumphs over another it is only a
matter of time before the section from whom power has been
wrested reasserts itself — in the same way that it is only a matter
of time before a conquered nation rises once more to power, and
to say that history repeats itself is only another way of saying that
wars beget wars.
This is not to deny the importance of the day to day struggles —
the struggle of oppressed peoples against imperialism, of workers
against capitalist exploitation. To suggest that subject peoples
should wait, passively, for imperialist governments to experience a
change of heart, repent of their sins, and hand over the keys of
the kingdom, is manifestly absurd. Ceaselessly the demand for
freedom must go up, the doctrine of justice be preached. The
masses, the world over, do not have to seize power, since it is by
their toil that the wheels go round and the earth brings forth;
this is their power; their strength lies in their realisation of it. With
the withdrawal of their co-operation the whole machinery of the
social system ceases to function, and the power of politicians
breaks, eventually, under the pressure of the moral force of public
opinion. No general strike, no rioting, was necessary on the part
of the British working classes in 1920 to break the government’s
intention of intervention against the revolutionaries in Soviet
Russia; the government was defeated by the great weight of
opinion of the common people who poured out into the public
squares and into meeting-places in mass protest. The shameful
Hoare-Laval pact during the Abyssinian war was similarly
defeated by the great weight of popular opinion against it. The
power of moral force has not yet been fully tried out, though in
India one old, frail man has demonstrated its potentialities — as
the Early Christians demonstrated the potentialities of co-opera-
tive living according to the law of love.
The change of heart requisite for the realisation of millennium
is not, ultimately, a matter of conversion from one idea to an-
other, but of the collapse — from exhaustion — of existing systems.
Civilisations rise and fall; the machine accelerates to the point at
which it blows itself up. Out of the ensuing chaos emerges the
morning-star; there breaks upon the world a new day, with new
ideas, new values — new vision. So long as there exists the system
of society based on private profit so long will there be injustice
and exploitation — the hard heart, that is to say the commercial
heart, the imperialist heart, with its lust for power, and all that
that connotes of the domination of man by man. Within such
a system the heart is not to be changed. But systems become
outworn and new conceptions develop. Eventually we do not
have to convert the imperialist and the capitalist and the mili-
tarist because they cease to be. There are tides in the affairs of
men that wash away systems and civilisations.
And the tide is rising in the world today, though few realise it,
and Nature herself is taking a hand in the process. The earth, the
source of all life, is losing its fertility; Nature is being revenged for
the profligacy of Man, ‘the most extravagant accelerator of waste
the world has ever endured ’, as the eminent American professor,
F. H. King, wrote in his great work, Farmers of Forty Centuries in
China , Korea and Japan . He adds that Man’s ‘withering blight has
fallen upon every living thing within his reach, himself not
excepted ’. In his Cleanliness and Godliness , Mr. Reginald Reynolds,
indicts ‘an evil and adulterating generation, declaring, with
bitter truth, that ‘of all the things that posterity will remember
about us, for nothing will it so justly condemn our age as for
our profligacy. They will say of us in time to come that we
wasted human labour in unemployment, and human life in war;
that we willingly destroyed food on the preposterous excuse that
it was necessary to maintain its price; that is to say, to make it
more dear to our own pockets ; that we killed time because we did
not know how to live; that we debilitated our constitutions by
destroying vitamins, inventing elaborate methods of ruining every
decent thing that was eatable; and that we destroyed the soil
itself by this same mania for waste ’. Mr. H. J. Massingham, in his
The Tree of Life , points out that ‘In England we waste every year
219,000 tons of nitrogen, 55,000 tons of phosphate and 55,000
tons of potash as sewage sludge and house refuse that pollute
the rivers and are lost in the sea. Every year the peoples of
Europe and the United States pour down into the sea and rivers
nearly twenty million tons of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus
for every million of their populations, and every cargo of beef or
milk products, every shipload of bones left the exporting country
the poorer in the fruitfulness of the soil.
What it all amounts to is that Man must find a new way of living
or perish. The dominating forces of our world today are Money
and the Machine; they are responsible for our over-industrialisa-
tion and our wars, and between the non-productiveness of the
one, and the destructiveness of the other, what chance has civilisation? Our only chance of survival lies in recognition of the danger
— of the rising tide — and restoration of those basic values which
acknowledge the earth as the only real wealth, and its fertility as
‘the substratum of all that is living.
The fertility of the earth is being destroyed through the com-
mercialisation of agriculture, which demands intensive production, quick returns on outlay. It means that the whole source of
Man’s existence is slowly returning to dust, through the ascend-
ancy of money — because the values of our civilisation are the
urban values of the stock exchange and the marketplace, and
therefore none of the steps in the right direction advocated by the
Planners, and the reformers in general, can be anything but con-
tinual readjustments in a losing struggle for survival — the make-
shifts by which a system fundamentally anti-life is kept going.
Dr. G. T. Wrench, in his book, The Restoration of the Peasantries ,
has reminded us that 4 By no act of man can any reform succeed,
if it does not begin with the organic foundation of man’s individual and social being. Man is a metamorphosis of the re-creating
power of the soil. His welfare is based upon its welfare. That is
the imperishable fact upon which his associations, cultures, and
civilisations will continue to be based, while human life endures \
That is in essence the Doctrine of Creation, the return to the
fundamental values. So long as Man continues to exploit the soil
for profit he sows the seeds of his own destruction, not merely
because Nature becomes his enemy, responding to his machines
and his chemicals by the withdrawal of fertility, the dusty answer
of an ultimate desert barrenness, but because his whole attitude to
life is debased ; his gods become Money and Power, and wars and
unemployment and useless toil become his inevitable portion.
That twentieth-century human beings, with all their imper-
fections, can live an ordered, co-operative life, free of centralised
government, has been demonstrated by the Catalonian experiment during the Spanish Civil War; a beginning was even made
with the abolition of money. Groups of people in all countries,
throughout the ages, from the Early Christians down to present-
day communities, have shown by example what can be achieved
through co-operative living. Utopias cannot exist islanded in a
non-Utopian world, but these experiments indicate what is
possible given the will to the dream.
It is no part of the business of the planner of an ideal common-
wealth to set forth instructions as to how it may be achieved ; his
function finishes when he has shown what could be done — given
the will of the mass of people. Towards that end he can urge a
new conception of education; he can warn against the rising tide,
the impending doom ; he can, by the preaching of fundamental
values, stimulate thought, the realisation of the urgent need for a
new way of living as an alternative to destruction. Which brings
us back to our original contention that Utopia is concerned with
the soul of Man, and, through the recognition of that, with the
brotherhood of Man. Humanity has to be doubly re-educated,
first to the conception of a new Golden Age, and then to the
necessity for it, and that is the task of the teachers and the
preachers, the writers and the poets and the dreamers. Only the
dreamer can give us the necessary inspiration, the authentic vision.
His function is that of teacher and preacher, not of director. He
cannot give you the earthly paradise within the terms of reference
of the existing order. He can but say to his fellow-men, ‘ If you
do this and this, and cease to do that and that, you will achieve
this heaven on earth I have outlined for you ’, and if they are so
infatuated with money and machines that they prefer hell upon
earth, with its wars and famines and squalors, its privations in the
midst of plenty, its mad-house economics, and its ultimate des-
truction of the earth’s productivity, which is the destruction of
life itself — it is their own calamitous affair.
Ideally, then, God should send another Flood, but of his mercy
receive into the Ark those prepared to begin again in the Garden
of Eden in the morning of a new world.
London, December, 1943 -May, 1944.