A Modern Utopia

A Modern Utopia

The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Modern Utopia, by H. G. Wells
#24 in our series by H. G. Wells
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.
Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how
the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since
1971**
*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of
Volunteers!*****
Title: A Modern Utopia
Author: H. G. Wells

Release Date: September, 2004 [EBook #6424] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on December 10,
2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MODERN
UTOPIA ***

Produced by Andrew Sly

A MODERN UTOPIA
BY H. G. WELLS

A NOTE TO THE READER
This book is in all probability the last of a series of writings, of
which--disregarding certain earlier disconnected essays--my
Anticipations was the beginning. Originally I intended Anticipations to
be my sole digression from my art or trade (or what you will) of an
imaginative writer. I wrote that book in order to clear up the muddle in
my own mind about innumerable social and political questions,
questions I could not keep out of my work, which it distressed me to
touch upon in a stupid haphazard way, and which no one, so far as I
knew, had handled in a manner to satisfy my needs. But Anticipations
did not achieve its end. I have a slow constructive hesitating sort of
mind, and when I emerged from that undertaking I found I had still
most of my questions to state and solve. In Mankind in the Making,
therefore, I tried to review the social organisation in a different way, to
consider it as an educational process instead of dealing with it as a
thing with a future history, and if I made this second book even less
satisfactory from a literary standpoint than the former (and this is my
opinion), I blundered, I think, more edifyingly--at least from the point

of view of my own instruction. I ventured upon several themes with a
greater frankness than I had used in Anticipations, and came out of that
second effort guilty of much rash writing, but with a considerable
development of formed opinion. In many matters I had shaped out at
last a certain personal certitude, upon which I feel I shall go for the rest
of my days. In this present book I have tried to settle accounts with a
number of issues left over or opened up by its two predecessors, to
correct them in some particulars, and to give the general picture of a
Utopia that has grown up in my mind during the course of these
speculations as a state of affairs at once possible and more desirable
than the world in which I live. But this book has brought me back to
imaginative writing again. In its two predecessors the treatment of
social organisation had been purely objective; here my intention has
been a little wider and deeper, in that I have tried to present not simply
an ideal, but an ideal in reaction with two personalities. Moreover,
since this may be the last book of the kind I shall ever publish, I have
written into it as well as I can the heretical metaphysical scepticism
upon which all my thinking rests, and I have inserted certain sections
reflecting upon the established methods of sociological and economic
science....
The last four words will not attract the butterfly reader, I know. I have
done my best to make the whole of this book as lucid and entertaining
as its matter permits, because I want it read by as many people as
possible, but I do not promise anything but rage and confusion to him
who proposes to glance through my pages just to see if I agree with him,
or to begin in the middle, or to read without a constantly alert attention.
If you are not already a little interested and open-minded with regard to
social and political questions, and a little exercised in self-examination,
you will find neither interest nor pleasure