II
The early part of the nineteenth century is remarkable for the fact that men of common stock, usually self-educated, began to apply their wits to improving the conditions of the class to which they belonged; and in particular there was in London a peasant named William Cobbett, a tailor named Francis Place, and a stationer named Thomas Spence who devoted a good part of what remained over from their working days to plans for bettering man’s estate.
Thomas Spence had a shop in High Holborn from which he published little pamphlets of rough philosophy, called Pig’s Meat; in 1795 he issued A Description of Spensonia, which was followed in 1801 by The Constitution of Spensonia: A Country in Fairyland Situated Between Utopia and Oceana; Brought from Thence by Captain Swallow. Spence’s title to have written a complete utopia rests upon the fact that he proposes a return to an environment which had once been, in its fashion, complete.
Spensonia begins with a parable about a father who had a number of sons, who built them a ship for traffic, and who provided that the profits of the enterprise were to be shared in common. This ship is wrecked upon an island; and the sons quickly awake to the conclusion that if “they did not apply the Marine Constitution given them by their father to their landed property, they would soon experience inexpressible inconveniences. They therefore declared the property of the island to be the property of them all collectively, in the same manner as the ship had been, and that they ought to share the profits thereof in the same way. The island they named Spensonia, after the ship which their father had given them. They next chose officers to mark out such portions of the land, as every person or family desired to occupy, for which they were to receive for the use of the public a certain rent according to its value. This rent was applied to public uses or divided among themselves as they thought proper. But in order to keep up the remembrance of their rights, they decreed that they should never fail to share at rent-time, an equal dividend, though ever so small, and though the public demands should be ever so urgent. … As they had determined, when seeing that every ship they should build and man, should … be the property of the crew, so, in conformity therewith, they decreed that every district or parish which they should people, should be the property of the inhabitants, and the rent and police of the same at their disposal. … A National Assembly or Congress consisting of delegates from all the parishes takes care of the national concerns, and defrays the expenses of the state and matters of common utility, by a pound rate from each parish without any other tax.”
What is a parish and what is its work? Look around the English countryside and see.
A parish, to begin with, is a “compact portion of the country, designedly not too large that it may the more easily be managed by the inhabitants with respect to its revenues and the police.”
“The parishes build and repair houses, make roads, plant hedges and trees, and in a word do all the business of a landlord. … A parish has many heads to contrive what ought to be done. Instead of debating about mending the state, … (for ours needs no mending) we employ our ingenuity nearer home, and the result of the debates are in every parish, how we shall work such a mine, make such a river navigable, drain such a fen, or improve such a waste. These things we are all immediately interested in, and have each a vote in executing.”
There is a rough, homespun quality about this utopia, and it needs a visit to the English villages of the New Forest or the Chiltern Hills, where some of the common lands have been kept, to see what a rural utopia would be like if it could keep itself free from invaders who sought to live off the fat of the land without contributing their labor. Spence was not altogether blind to the necessity of keeping watch over this constitution of equality; and he places his utopia in the care of two guardian angels—Voting by Ballot and the Universal Use of Arms—two angels which look less formidable and potent in the twentieth century than they did in the first decade of the nineteenth, when the first had still to be tried, and when the second was not complicated by the invention of machine guns and poison gases.
At the bottom of Spence’s Utopia, however, lies the conviction which he shares with Plato and all the other genuine utopians; namely, that in Thoreau’s words less is accomplished by the thousands who are hacking at the branches of evil than by one who is striking at the root. Spence, it must be remembered, wrote in the thick of the agitation for parliamentary reform which was the keynote of so much nineteenth century activity—the chartist movement, parliamentary socialism, and the like, being so many rainbows in the bubble of political effort which burst with such a bang when the Great War broke out. Spence saw the futility of these superficial demands. He said:
“Thousands of abortive schemes are daily proposed for redressing grievances and mending the constitution, whereas, the shoes were so ill-made at first, and so worn, rotten, and patched already, that they are not worth the trouble or expense, but ought to be thrown to the dunghill; and a new pair should be made, neat, tight, and easy as for the foot of one that loves freedom and ease. Then would your controversies about this and the other way of cobbling, that continually agitate you, be done away; and you would walk along the rugged and dirty path of life easy and dry-shod.”