A Modern Utopia | Page 9

outset that
the modern Utopia must have people inherently the same as those in the
world.
There is more, perhaps, in that than appears at the first suggestion.
That proposition gives one characteristic difference between a modern
Utopia and almost all its predecessors. It is to be a world Utopia, we
have agreed, no less; and so we must needs face the fact that we are to
have differences of race. Even the lower class of Plato's Republic was
not specifically of different race. But this is a Utopia as wide as
Christian charity, and white and black, brown, red and yellow, all tints
of skin, all types of body and character, will be there. How we are to
adjust their differences is a master question, and the matter is not even
to be opened in this chapter. It will need a whole chapter even to glance
at its issues. But here we underline that stipulation; every race of this
planet earth is to be found in the strictest parallelism there, in numbers
the same--only, as I say, with an entirely different set of traditions,
ideals, ideas, and purposes, and so moving under those different skies
to an altogether different destiny.
There follows a curious development of this to anyone clearly
impressed by the uniqueness and the unique significance of
individualities. Races are no hard and fast things, no crowd of
identically similar persons, but massed sub-races, and tribes and
families, each after its kind unique, and these again are clusterings of
still smaller uniques and so down to each several person. So that our
first convention works out to this, that not only is every earthly
mountain, river, plant, and beast in that parallel planet beyond Sirius
also, but every man, woman, and child alive has a Utopian parallel.
From now onward, of course, the fates of these two planets will diverge,
men will die here whom wisdom will save there, and perhaps
conversely here we shall save men; children will be born to them and
not to us, to us and not to them, but this, this moment of reading, is the
starting moment, and for the first and last occasion the populations of
our planets are abreast.
We must in these days make some such supposition. The alternative is

a Utopia of dolls in the likeness of angels--imaginary laws to fit
incredible people, an unattractive undertaking.
For example, we must assume there is a man such as I might have been,
better informed, better disciplined, better employed, thinner and more
active--and I wonder what he is doing!--and you, Sir or Madam, are in
duplicate also, and all the men and women that you know and I. I doubt
if we shall meet our doubles, or if it would be pleasant for us to do so;
but as we come down from these lonely mountains to the roads and
houses and living places of the Utopian world-state, we shall certainly
find, here and there, faces that will remind us singularly of those who
have lived under our eyes.
There are some you never wish to meet again, you say, and some, I
gather, you do. "And One----!"
It is strange, but this figure of the botanist will not keep in place. It
sprang up between us, dear reader, as a passing illustrative invention. I
do not know what put him into my head, and for the moment, it fell in
with my humour for a space to foist the man's personality upon you as
yours and call you scientific--that most abusive word. But here he is,
indisputably, with me in Utopia, and lapsing from our high speculative
theme into halting but intimate confidences. He declares he has not
come to Utopia to meet again with his sorrows.
What sorrows?
I protest, even warmly, that neither he nor his sorrows were in my
intention.
He is a man, I should think, of thirty-nine, a man whose life has been
neither tragedy nor a joyous adventure, a man with one of those faces
that have gained interest rather than force or nobility from their
commerce with life. He is something refined, with some knowledge,
perhaps, of the minor pains and all the civil self-controls; he has read
more than he has suffered, and suffered rather than done. He regards
me with his blue-grey eye, from which all interest in this Utopia has
faded.
"It is a trouble," he says, "that has come into my life only for a month
or so--at least acutely again. I thought it was all over. There was
someone----"
It is an amazing story to hear upon a mountain crest in Utopia, this
Hampstead affair, this story of a Frognal heart. "Frognal," he says, is

the place where they met, and it summons to my memory the word