VII + 

The glimpses that one gets of this utopia are full of color and light and movement; there are finely contained cities, surrounded by wide suburban territories, cities that are not built of paper and alabaster. Lovers pass arm in arm through the streets in the twilight; and there is a soft dignity in the women, with their gay, sexually unemphatic dresses, that charms. There are electric trains weaving silently on rails over the landscape of Europe, crossing under the English Channel by tube, and emerging in London with none of the bustle, the grinding, or the dirt of a modern railway ride. There are well-cultivated fields and adequate inns. There are no obstreperous patriotisms, as one suspects in Looking Backward; there is none of the shirking one might fear in News from Nowhere. (While our travellers are waiting to be identified they stay for a while in a residential quadrangle at Lucerne, and are given employment in a toy workshop.) There is less dogmatism about creeds than in Christianopolis, and an entire absence of menialism which contrasts with More’s Utopia. + 

This modern utopia brings together, compares, and criticizes important points that all the other utopias have raised; and it does all this with a deftness and a turn of humor that speaks for Mr. Wells at his best. Above all, A Modern Utopia strikes a new note, the note of reality, the note of the daily world from which we endeavor in vain to escape. More or less, all the other utopias assume that a change has come over the population; that it has been diminished; that the blind, the lame, and the deaf have been cured; that the mean sensual man has been converted and is ready to flap his wings and sing Hallelujah! There is a minimum of these assumptions in A Modern Utopia. It is above all other things an accounting and a criticism; and so it forms a fitting prelude to the remainder of this book. + 