described the wiles of the hungry pseudo-author who did poor Mr. and Mrs. Lewisham out of their typewriter's deposit. You are, for instance, angry that our schools should not be better adapted to the education of the young. But our schools (the one which educated Kipps, for instance) are perfectly adapted to their real vital object, namely, furnishing a livelihood to sundry genteel, incompetent moralists and scholars, and, on the other side, ridding parents and guardians of the harassing responsibility and presence of unruly youngsters. English people, less hypocritical because more practical than Latins, will even admit that seeming perfunctoriness is no drawback: Eton is useful in furnishing a lad with presentable future friends; Alma Mater, with her Schola Logicæ, Schola Mathematica, Schola Musica, and other Faust-like inscriptions over Gothic doors, turns a boy into a man worthy of a latch-key. The simple truth was ingenuously put to this present writer by the youth who averred that Greek and Latin, doubtless Hellas and Imperial Rome, were useful "to pass exams." Half of our institutions, of our codes, morals, ideals, are, believe me, dear Mr. Wells, useful "to pass exams," and exams are useful-well, in order not to have to pass any more. Nor are the offences against progress always of this smug British type: in Southern countries (let us say) one is horrified by the suffering of galled and overladen horses, and one is forced to pick one's way and stop one's nose in the public street. But can we expect the miserable carter to be more careful (even if he had the money) of his harness than of his own ragged clothes, nay to unload half his freight and come back again, when his day's work and pay depends on doing that broiling journey a certain number of times? And where would you have the sluttish housewife

throw her filth when she has no place save the convenient thoroughfare?

This illustration is, I fear, rather humble and repulsive. But the lives and souls of most folk are (and still more, have been) humble and repulsive: ill-fed, unwashed, untaught, often tired and nearly always hurried; so that one wonders how, even like those poor Southern peasants, mankind has yet been able to put by, year by year, more savings in the bank, and swell the capital of good.

"Il faut vivre, Monseigneur," says the human race, like the jail-bird to the Minister. And you know, dear Mr. Wells, that you abhor the only answer possible to that, Schopenhauer's and the other pessimists; you refuse to say, "Je n'en vois point la nécessité." And meanwhile, living, because it has meant dying less soon and suffering less constantly, has slowly brought its remedy with it. The avoidance of pain and the snatching a scanty pleasure have been man's real and sole business, with the consequence, as I have repeated too often, of much destruction, of much clogging and littering, but with the consequence also of constantly increasing order and forethought and self-control. For the lessening of our own discomfort forces a certain restraint on our neighbor, the lessening of his discomfort a certain restraint on us; foresight grows into imagination, imagination into sympathy; appetite itself ends by teaching moderation, and self-defence, respect for others; thus, as Professor Baldwin has shown us, the child, by gradually increasing perception of the outer world and increasing experience of other folk, grows at length into the adult citizen. You, yourself, dear Mr. Wells, have written a more convincing book than this Modern Utopia, your book of Anticipations, of how the world is likely to progress by the mere shifting and pushing of its short-sighted and

selfish activities. We shall, even as we have, but with increasing speed, become more sound and sane, more leisurely and sensitive and thoughtful, as we become less poor and ignorant; and our added leisure and finer sensitiveness will enable us to do less mischief in seeking our good, and make us more dependent for our comfort on the comfort of others; our cleaner, more ventilated fancy will sicken at whiffs from even distant refuse-heaps left by less squeamish and more hurried ancestors -refuse-heaps into which they swept what they could not deal with, and let it fester and breed disease, such as industrial exploitation, criminal justice, marriage law, prostitution, and SO forth, which we still accept as part of public sanitation.

Quickly or slowly, man, asserting himself in the universe, will diminish the universe's wastefulness. Quickly, say you, with your incomparable romancing ingenuity and intolerant novelist's sympathy; slowly, says your brother-thinker, Gabriel Tarde, with his historian's and economist's belief in strata of civilization, in slow permeation or levelling up. But, quicker or slower, this automatic progress requires time; and it is time which you, in your Modern Utopia, have suddenly taken to grudge. In thinking over the betterment which must come, you have (at least it seems to me) lost patience with the evil, the folly, and wastefulness under your eyes; and you have set to planning a royal road, to framing some device by which (as in some Monte Carlo "system") there will be all, or very nearly all, gain, and no loss to speak of. And you have invented a Utopia where time and experience are replaced by foresight and self-control; where forces for good shall no longer run to waste, and forces for evil be snuffed out by deliberate effort. There is already in the world an amazing amount of knowledge, of disinterested

ness (at least as far as money and comfort goes), and of volition: let this be consciously applied to future improvement, no longer left to casual work. There are already a good number (perhaps there have always been) of superior men and women: let this élite direct the rest, showing its fitness to govern others by its fitness to govern itself-and behold! we have your Samurai, your voluntary oligarchy, your noble caste, recruited by the elimination of all baser motives. The idea is so good that it is not new: the Pythagoreans, I am told, were people of this kind; the Jesuits, who did such wonders in Paraguay, were men whose individual passions had been deviated and canalized ad majorem Dei Gloriam, although the God and the glory were sometimes queer; and to me, who am, after all, but a poor æsthete in moralist's garb, there is about the whole thing a pleasant reminiscence of Mozartian choruses in the Zauberflöte, of a venerable, deep-voiced Sarastro, clad in white and singing eighteenth-century humanitarianism. The attractiveness of the notion, and its perpetual recurrence in some shape or other, suggests that there may be some truth in it; at all events, that, by constant reverting to some such arrangement, mankind may eventually make it possible.

Eventually, but only eventually. For (here one of my vague dissentient currents of thought finds a channel of expression) it seems to me that such a system of government by the wise and good is rather the result of the world's greater wisdom and goodness than its probable cause. Apart from certain oligarchies of persons specially fit for military or statesmanly functions (but otherwise indifferent poor enough), like Sparta, or Venice, or the House of Lords at an unknown historical period, I can imagine such government by the wise and virtuous only in moments of

emergency and crisis. In the very suggestive little Utopian novel, Histoire de Quatre Ans, by my friend Daniel Halévy, for instance, the austere élite of men of science take the entire management of the human cattle remaining on earth, and even break and breed them, so to speak, for the plough. But this is after the collapse of society through the over-sudden introduction of virtually gratuitous chemical food and consequent license, and a fine bout of mysterious pestilences which has purged the earth more effectually than Robespierre even could have done with purifying guillotines. And my friend Daniel Halévy does not say how the human cattle and their high-minded farmers got on in the long run; nay, he even ends his tantalizing story with an incursion of Tartars and a return of that "Great Corrector of Monstrous Times, Shaker of o'er-rank States, and Grand Decider of Dusty and Old Titles," the "Mars Armipotent" of splendid Fletcher's verse. And M. Renan, while (in his pessimist moment of the Dialogues Philosophiques) giving us a singularly terrible scheme of a world handed over to the tender mercies of a scientific élite, has (like the charming, inconsistent, human, sly moralist he was) warned us in several other places against such oligarchies-indeed, made it quite clear that, brute though Caliban often is, it is safer to leave the world to him than to the austere and philanthropic Prospero.

It might be possible perhaps, with time (of which, however, you are very chary!) to guard against the unpleasantness of your Samurai régime, particularly by encouraging your other class of erratic (and I fear rather rowdy) creative geniuses. It might even (and to this I should propose devoting a little of our energy) become possible to diminish the trickiness and one-sidedness of superior people's individual constitution, and their tendency to

Why, we have not yet got the better of what is tricky and trashy in the individual saint or genius; and, as to disciples, every reformer has seen (or rather been too purblind to see) his teachings misunderstood or misapplied or turned into dead letter by those he trusted most. Did not the Apostles, under the eye of the Master, begin quarrelling for precedence?

The Samurai, therefore, may organize statistics and laboratories, but I doubt whether they will do much effective organization of mankind at large. I venture, indeed, to think that their real use will be to organize themselves, I might almost say, each to organize himself and herself. Good, wise, and responsible people are never good, wise, or responsible enough or in the right directions and moments; and it will be a great gain to all progress if they be, personally and collectively, up to the mark, a thoroughly efficient moral and intellectual vanguard; it will be a gain if virtue and wisdom cease to be a positive nuisance. Let the Samurai educate and organize themselves and not others; if their systems of morals and education, their new scruples and new duties, their new ideals and dignities and pleasures, are really good for anything, why, then, this better born and better bred class will gradually be imitated by their inferiors; the world will rot a little less for their presence. They are the salt of the earth; let them see to not losing their savor!

To do this will give them work enough, to breed and educate their own

children; nay, one might almost say, to breed and educate their own individual thoughts and desires.

I am gradually working my way through that confusion of enthusiastic assent and ill-defined suspicion with which your Modern Utopia has filled me. And now I find that while wishing with all my heart for your wellorganized republic, while longing to become a knightly priest of progress, while hankering even for a little sound persecution of literary fops like your Bare-legged

Nature-worshipper and

your Sentimental-Philistine with his Lady and his Dear Doggie, while at all events accepting your religion of responsibility and foresight as the one my soul has ever yearned for; while ... well, while all this has been going on, something has murmured in my innermost ear, "Beware of a new perfunctory ritual, a new hypocrisy, a new intolerance; beware of a new superstition”

For this perpetual reaching out to the Future is a violation of Reality. Mankind has not bothered much about the Future because it has had its hands full with the Present. And mankindsuch, at least, is my crass instinctive philosophy-mankind has been right. And what is more, you, dear Mr. Wells, know this far better than I, and have shown it with passionate pathos and humor in Mr. Lewisham and Kipps; and it is only when you sit down to systematize and specialize the Future that you forget this living knowledge, as specialists and system-makers always forget all save the specialty and the system. The metaphysics of your worship of the Future are, I venture to say, wrong, as wrong as those of any other priest preaching of any other Kingdom of Heaven.

Life is not a single-aimed effort towards continuance and development, towards becoming somebody or something different. Seen through the

scheme of the historian or biologist, its facts grouped and accentuated into his special intellectual pattern, life is a ceaseless becoming. But looked at, or rather felt, in a different way, life takes the signification of a ceaseless being; and as a being, not a becoming, does life affect the real creature and

constitute real experience. Life (even the life of those Patriarchs who did nothing but be begotten and beget) is not merely procreation, but endurance; and if each individual were not busy making his own few years, nay, his own hour and minute, tolerable, the Race, for all its metaphorical powers of survival, would have died out a good while ago; nor would there be much talk of a future (on earth or off it) if there were not a most imperious present, full of ease and distress.

Even as theologians inventoried life according to the requirements of a day of judgment, so, particularly since Schopenhauer and Darwin, philosophers have taken in account only the qualities which, because they are useful, are perpetuated, and have denied utility to those which are not perpetual; they have fixed their eyes on the Will-to-continue, belonging to that abstraction, the Race; and have neglected the Will-not-to-suffer, belonging to the individual-a will quite as important and a good deal more ascertainable.

For would there have been any human or animal action at all, any thought, any volition, any effort, any food, or any love, but for the fact of individual pain, discomfort, distress, and its poor younger sister, individual satisfaction? Would you, dear Mr. Wells, and your Samurai and New-Republicans, and your humble admirer myself-nay, a great many remarkable persons, saints, sages, John-a-Dreamses and Torquemadas of various ages and conditions-have all been busy with Utopias and Paradises and Hells, but

for the pressure of that same Will-notto-suffer, but for the preferences, intellectual and sentimental, but organic, vicarious but personal and present, of our own rather odd individuality, and sometimes rather to the inconvenience of our neighbors! Our neighbors, meanwhile, not saints nor sages, nor poets nor heroes, but just the normal philistines beloved of Dr. Nordau, have (as before remarked) furthered and hampered progress by their less peculiar attempts at making the present tolerable. All mankind, superior or inferior, has been busy keeping itself alive by material and metaphorical food and rest, and also by narcotics and stimulants. This latter fact has been a little blinked by utilitarians and moralists, so I wish to insist on it: yes, the human race might have come to an end but for satisfactions and alleviations which have sometimes cost degradation and disease and an increase of misery to themselves and their progeny. The excitement and the dreams of cruelty and superstition have helped to keep the race (because the individual) going, even like the excitement and dreams of alcohol and opium. And the world would be depopulate but for the fact that human creatures have not merely begotten others, but kept their own vital hopes alive, thanks to the Gods' wholesale intoxicant called love. You, dear Mr. Wells, with your Lewishams and Kippses, have brought home to your readers that those lovers, sheepishly ecstatic among the music-filled moonlit bowers of, say, Folkestone Leas, are re-tempering their own soul, quite as much as replenishing the earth, in the one sort of poetry open to shopmen and housemaids, even as to the cave and lake dwellers, their ancestors. Indeed, you novelists may bring home to psychologists and sociologists and other rather dreary persons this great neglected cosmic fact: that

or

human development depends not only on the warning power of pain, but on the restorative power of pleasure.

Now, thinking about Utopias and arranging for them is the born Samurai's pleasure, as similar thinking of God and Heaven and living for them has been the pleasure of the Saint.

Perhaps the most useful function of all religions (as distinguished from mere codes of conduct which have used religious sanctions) has been thus to keep alive a certain number of religious people, who, but for the exhilaration of communion with a divinity and the corroborating peacefulness of a communion with fellow-worshippers, would have died out for sheer misery and forlornness. Now, religious people have been, and are, a necessary factor in all progress, and the more necessary for their scarcity.

Saintlessness and heroism have perhaps done little direct good, perhaps done harm, practically and in the way they meant it: they have not been, most likely, half as fruitful of useful action as the selfish and thoughtless self-seekingness of grosser folk. But they have corrected, pruned, and lopped the instincts of life which otherwise ran to seed of death. There is more than an allegoric significance in chastity being the saintly quality above all others; since chastity, in itself sterile, keeps the young brood, the quickening germ, from neglect, from devastation and death. A certain number must preach and live for altruism, not because altruism is a principle of life, but because the egoistic life-principles are too riotous and self-destructive. And as with thought of one's neighbor, so also with thought of that neighborin-time, the Future. The Future can exist only in the thought and feeling of the Present, as the Neighbor (in so far as Neighbor, as Alter) exists only in the thought and feeling of the Ego. Both are necessary mitigations of the