VI + 

The utopia that remains for consideration is the last important one in point of time; and it is, curiously enough, the quintessential utopia, for it is written with a free and critical gesture, and with a succinct familiarity towards the more important books that came before it. Mr. H. G. Wells, it is true, has made more than one excursion into an imaginary commonwealth: The Time Machine is his earliest and The World Set Free may possibly be considered as his latest. A Modern Utopia combines the vivid fantasy of the first picture with the more strict regard for present realities that marks the second; and it is, altogether, a fine and lucid product of the imagination. + 

The assumption upon which Mr. Wells gains entrance into his utopia differs from those shipwrecks and somnambulisms in which our modern utopias have been stereotyped. He conceives of a modern man, a little thickset and protuberant, seated at a desk and brooding over the possibilities of man’s future; and gradually this image comes to life and defines his views, and his voice rises into narrative in something like the fashion of a lecturer, throwing from time to time his illustrations of a New World upon the screen. He enters utopia by hypothesis; that is, without any other subterfuge than an act of the imagination; and in the thickening realities of a utopian community, first discovered in an Alpine pass, he finds himself in the company of a sentimental botanist, who is sick with a love affair and is maudlin about dogs, and who again and again wrecks this exploration of utopia by dragging into the midst of the scene some petty complication⁠—about his sweetheart or his doggie⁠—that he has acquired on earth! + 

Where and what is this modern utopia? By hypothesis, it is a globe identical with the one on which we live; it has the same oceans and continents, the same rivers and minor landmasses, the same animals and plants; yes, even the same people, so that each one of us has his utopian counterpart. Conveniently, this new earth is located beyond Sirius; and for the most part its history is parallel to ours; except that it had a critical turn for the better at a not too remote period; so that, while mechanical invention and science and all that sort of thing is exactly on the same level as ours, the scale and order is entirely different. + 

The scale and order of things is indeed different. Utopia is a world community; it is a single civilization whose net of monorails and posts, whose identification bureaus, whose rules of law and order are the same in England as in Switzerland; and presumably the same in Asia and Africa as in Europe. In every sense it is a modern utopia. Machinery plays an important part, and the absence of menial service is conspicuous from the very first contacts in which our travellers get the hospitality of an inn, and find that interior decoration has verged towards the style of the modern lunchroom and subway station, so that the whole room can be redded, after use, by the guest himself. There is no harking back to the past in industry, in architecture, or in the mode of living. All that machinery has to offer has been accepted and humanized: there is a cleanliness, an absence of squalor and confusion, in this world-community, which indicates that utopia has not been purchased by evasion. + 

The price of this order and spaciousness is not as heavy as that which Bellamy was willing to pay in Looking Backward. The land and its natural resources are owned by the community and are in the custody of regional authorities; and the means of communication and travel are in the hands of one common administrative body. There are great socialized enterprises such as the railways, with planetary ramifications; there are regional industries, and there are a good many minor affairs which are still undertaken by private individuals and companies. Farms are worked by a cooperative association of tenant farmers, upon lines suggested by Dr. Hertzka in Freeland. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of utopian organization is the registration of every individual, with his name, numeral, fingerprint, changes of residence and changes in life; all of which is filed in a huge central filing office, to become part of a permanent file upon the individual’s death. Utopian registration gets our travellers into hot water, for they are naturally mistaken for their utopian doubles; but outside of its use in the story this little device seems strangely beside the point, and it arose, I believe, out of Mr. Wells’ temperamental regard for tidiness⁠—tidiness on a planetary scale⁠—the tagging and labelling of a well-conducted shop.⁠ ⁠… + 

The people of our Modern Utopia are roughly divided into four classes: the kinetic, the poietic, the base, and the dull. The kinetic are the active and organizing elements in the community: as active kinetics they are the managers, the enterprisers, the great administrators, as passive kinetics they are the minor officials, the innkeepers, the shoptenders, farmers, and the like. The poietic are the creative elements in the community; the “intellectuals” we should perhaps call them. This follows in general the lines laid down by Comte⁠—chiefs, people, intellectuals, and emotionals, and perhaps something of the same classification was outlined by More in his Philarchs, people, priests, and scholars. This division of classes is a very ancient one. In that old Indian script, the Bhagavad Gita, we find that the population is divided into Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaisryas, and Sudras, and that their duties are “determined by the modes that prevail in their separate natures.” The residual classes of the base and the dull correspond to the Sudras; they are, of course, the slag of the community; and the active elements in this class, the criminals, the habitual drunkards, and the like are exported to various islands in the Atlantic where they have organized a community of their own in which they may practice fraud, chicane, and violence to their hearts’ content. + 

Like Plato, Mr. Wells is concerned to provide for the education, discipline, and maintenance of people who will be sufficiently disinterested and intelligent to keep this vast organization a going concern⁠—no ordinary politician or captain of industry will do. Hence there arises a class of Samurai. These Samurai are selected by rigorous mental and physical tests out of youth who are past twenty-five, up to which time they may be foolish and unsettled and may sow their wild oats. These Samurai have a high intellectual standard of achievement. They live a simple life. They are under strict moral discipline, and follow a minute regimentation of dress and minor details of conduct. They cannot marry out of their class. Once a year they are sent out into the forests, the mountains, or the waste places to shift for themselves; they go “bookless and weaponless, without pen or paper, or money”; and they come back again with a new hardness and fineness and fortification of spirit. It is such an organization as might have been evolved at the time of the Reformation had the Order of Jesuits been able to effect a dictatorship of Christendom. I say this without disparagement of either the Jesuits or the Samurai, in order to point out that these guardians of A Modern Utopia are plausible historic characters. All the important economic and political enterprises of the state, and important vocations like that of the physician, are in the hands of Samurai. They are as necessary to the social organization of A Modern Utopia as the research laboratories, which are provided by charter with each factory, are necessary to its industrial organization. + 