which lacks savour entirely. It is a beautiful, well-ordered, purposefully-striving universe contrasted with our world of chaos, selfishness, and trust in God or Competition or Evolution. Conflict exists in this Utopia—conflict with the still unsubdued forces of nature. But there is no struggle of man against his fellow. There is scope for the great ambition to acquire and to use knowledge. There is room even for martyrdom.
The civilization of this Utopia is based upon Five Principles of which the first is the principle of Privacy, the second that of Free Movement, the third, Unlimited Knowledge, the fourth, that Lying is the Blackest Crime. Here Mr Wells interrupts the list; if he had not long ago repudiated, in precise words, the title of artist, I should imagine that the interlude is "for effect." The effect comes, in spite of him: the fifth principle is Free Discussion and Criticism. It will be seen that three of these five are governmental, that only the first and the fourth involve the individual, and the best thing about the others is that two of them are negative, are inhibitions against excessive interference with the private life. In other words, an enlightened liberalism could do much for this Utopia. Even the first principle is meagrely taken:
"All individual personal facts are private between the citizen and the public organization to which he entrusts them, and can be used only for his convenience and with his sanction. Of course all such facts are available for statistical uses, but not as individual personal facts."
The principle of privacy hardly extends to what the individual does, certainly not to what he is. It is understood that no individual would want to be or to do what would hinder the common good. The "Crowd-mind" has gone for ever, Mr Barnstaple discovers; at its best you could say that it has been displaced by the Universal Mind. But I feel that the individual mind has gone also, and it is characteristic that the Utopians communicate with each other simply by thinking; they do not talk.
The truth about Utopias is that they are all 110-proof. For all of our arguments that they won't work, break on the rock of the Utopian character which can make them work; and all our arguments that they are silly or trivial or inhuman are shattered by the
