III
When we look back upon the Republic, with its external organization so plainly modeled upon military Sparta, we see the camp and the soldier giving the pattern to the life of the whole community. In Utopia, the fundamental unit was the farmstead and the family; and family discipline, which arises naturally enough in rural conditions, was transferred to the city. In Christianopolis, the workshop and the worker set the lines upon which the community is developed; and whatever else this society may be, it is a “republic of workers, living in equality, desiring peace, and renouncing riches.” If Utopia exhibits the communism of the family, Christianopolis presents the communism of the guild.
Industrially speaking, there are three sections in Christianopolis. One of them is devoted to agriculture and animal husbandry. Each of these departments has appropriate buildings, and directly opposite them is a rather large tower which connects them with the city buildings; under the tower a broad vaulted entrance leads into the city, and a smaller one to the individual houses. The dome of this tower roofs what we should call a guildhall, and here the citizens of the quarter come together as often as required to “act on sacred as well as civil matters.” It is plain that these workers are not sheep led by wise shepherds, as in the Republic, but the members of autonomous, self-regulating groups.
The next quarter contains the mills, bakeshops, meat-shops, and factories for making whatever is done with machinery apart from fire. As Christianopolis welcomes originality in invention, there are a variety of enterprises within this domain; among them, paper manufacturing plants, saw mills, and establishments for grinding and polishing arms and tools. There are common kitchens and wash houses, too; for, as we shall see presently, life in this ideal city corresponds to what we experience today in New York, London, and many another modern industrial city.
The third quarter is given over to the metallurgical industries, as well as to those like the glass, brick, and earthenware industries which require constant fire. It is necessary to point out that in planning the industrial quarters of Christianopolis, these seventeenth century Utopians have anticipated the best practice that has been worked out today, after a century of disorderly building. The separation of the city into zones, the distinction between “heavy” industries and “light” industries, the grouping of similar industrial establishments, the provision of an agricultural zone adjacent to the city—in all this our garden cities are but belated reproductions of Christianopolis.
Moreover, in Christianopolis, there is a conscious application of science to industrial processes; one might almost say that these artisans believed in efficiency engineering; for “here in truth you see a testing of nature herself. The men are not driven to a work with which they are unfamiliar, like pack-animals to their task, but they have been trained before in an accurate knowledge of scientific matters,” on the theory that “unless you analyze matter by experiment, unless you improve the deficiencies of knowledge by more capable instruments, you are worthless.” The dependence of industrial improvement upon deliberate scientific research may be a new discovery for the practical man, but it is an old story in Utopia.