each side; and it faces the river Anider which takes its rise eighty
miles above the town, and gets lost in the ocean sixty miles below. The
town is compassed by a high, thick wall; the streets are convenient
for carriages and sheltered from the winds; and the houses are built
in rows so that a whole side of the street looks like a single unit.
(It was so that the great people built their houses in eighteenth
century London and Edinburgh, as Belgrave Square, Charlotte Square, and
the great Adelphi Mansion designed by the Brothers Adam show us.) The
streets are twenty feet broad; and in back of the houses are gardens,
which everyone has a hand in keeping up; and the people of the various
blocks vie with each other in ordering their gardens, so that there
is “nothing belonging to the whole town that is more useful and more
pleasant.”
In every street there are great halls, distinguished by particular
names, and lying at an equal distance from each other. In each hall
dwells the magistrate of a district, who rules over thirty families,
fifteen living on one side and fifteen on another; and since a family
consists of not more than sixteen and not less than ten people, this
magistrate--or Philarch as he is called--is the “community leader” of
some four hundred people.
In these halls everyone meets and takes his principal meal. The
stewards go to the market place at a particular hour, and, according
to the number of people in their halls, carry home provisions. The
people who are in hospitals--which are built outside the walls and are
so large they might pass for little towns--get the pick of the day’s
food. At the hours of dinner and supper the whole block is called
together by a trumpet, and everybody joins company, except such as are
sick or in hospital, just as the students and fellows to this day eat
their principal meal in an Oxford college. The dressing of meat and the
ordering of the tables belongs to the women; all those of every family
taking their place by turns. In the same building there is a common
nursery and chapel; and so the women who have children to care for
labor under no inconvenience.
The midday meal is dispatched unceremoniously; but at the end of the
day music always accompanies the meals, perfumes are burnt or sprinkled
around, and they “want nothing that may cheer up their spirits.” Bond
Street and Fifth Avenue may weep about the absence of conspicuous
waste in Utopia; but at supper time, at any rate, William Penn would
be uncomfortable. There is the odor of an uncommonly good club in the
description of the final meal of the day: the smell of the barracks
or the poorhouse, which we should find later in Robert Owen’s common
halls, does not intrude for an instant. More, when you examine him
closely, does not altogether forget the mean sensual man who dwells
occasionally in all of us!
8
Now that we have laid the foundations of the material life, we must
observe the limitations that are laid upon the daily activities of the
Utopians. This brings us to the government.
The basis of the Utopian political state, as in the economic province,
is the family. Every year thirty families choose a magistrate, known
as a Philarch; and over every ten Philarchs, with the families subject
to them, there is an Archphilarch. All the Philarchs, who are in
number 200, choose the Prince out of a list of four, who are named by
the people of the four divisions of the city. The Prince is elected
for life, unless he be removed on suspicion of attempting to enslave
the people. The Philarchs are chosen for a single year; but they are
frequently re-elected. In order to keep their rulers from conspiring to
upset the government, no matter of great importance can be set on foot
without being sent to the Philarchs, “who, after they have communicated
it to the families that belong to their divisions, and have considered
it among themselves, make report to the senate; and upon great
occasions the matter is referred to the council of the whole island.”
Recollect that each household is an industrial as well as a domestic
unit, as was usual in the Middle Age, and you will perceive that this
is an astute combination of industrial and political democracy on a
genuine basis of common interest.
The greater part of the business of the government relates to the
economic life of the people. There are certain other matters, however,
which remain over for them; and these affairs constitute a blot on
More’s conception of the ideal commonwealth. One of them is the
regulation of travel; another is the treatment of crime; and a third is
war.
It is interesting to note that on two subjects which More is mightily
concerned to rectify in his own country--crime and war--he establishes
conditions which are pretty far from being ideal or humane in his
Utopia. A. E. has well said that a man becomes the image of the thing
he hates. Everything that Raphael brings up against the government of
England in the Introduction to Utopia could be brought with almost
equal force, I believe, against the very country which is to serve as a
standard.
While any man may travel if there is no particular occasion for him
at home--whether he wishes to visit friends or see the rest of the
country--it is necessary for him to carry a passport from the Prince.
If he stay in any place longer than a night he must follow his proper
occupation; and if anyone goes out of the city without leave or
is found wandering around without a passport, he is punished as a
fugitive, and upon committing the offense a second time is condemned to
slavery. This is a plain example of unimaginative harshness; and it is
hard to explain away; indeed, I have no intention to.
Apparently More could not conceive of a perfectly happy commonwealth
for the majority of men if they still had to perform certain filthy
daily tasks, like the slaughtering of beef; and so he attempts to kill
two birds with one stone: he creates a class of slaves, and he fills
this class by condemning to it people who have committed venial crimes.
In doing this, he overlooks the final objection to slavery in all its
forms; namely, that it tends to corrupt the master.
Since we are discussing the conditions that undermine More’s
commonwealth, we may remark that war, too, remains; the difference
being that the Utopians attempt to do by strategy, corruption, and
what we should now call propaganda what less intelligent people do by
sheer force of arms. If the Utopian incubator anticipates the modern
invention, their method of conducting war likewise anticipates our
modern technique of undermining the enemy’s morale: these Utopians, in
the good and the bad, are our contemporaries! Among the just causes
of war the Utopians count the seizure of territory, the oppression of
foreign merchants, and the denial of access to land to nations capable
of cultivating it. They take considerable pains to keep their “best
sort of men for their own use at home, so they make use of the worst
sort of men for the consumption of war.” In other words, they regard
war as a means, among other things, of weeding out undesirable elements
in the community.
It is a relief to turn away from these residual iniquities to marriage
and religion!
In marriage there is a curious mixture of the personal conception of
sexual relations, which is the modern note, with a belief in certain
formal specifications which was the distinctly mediæval quality.
Thus on one hand the Utopians take care that the bride and the
bridegroom are introduced to each other, in their nakedness, before the
ceremony; and the grounds for divorce are adultery and insufferable
perverseness. When two people cannot agree they are permitted to escape
the bond by mutual agreement under approval granted by the Senate after
strict inquiry. On the other hand, unchastity is sternly punished, and
those who commit adultery are condemned to slavery and not given the
privilege of a second marriage.
In religion there is complete toleration for all creeds, with this
exception: that those who dispute violently about religion or attempt
to use any other force than that of mild persuasion are punished for
breaking the public peace.
9
There is not the space to follow the life of the Utopians in all its
details. It is time to discuss the world of ideas by which these
Utopians chart their daily activities. This exposition of the basic
Utopian values has been so admirably put by Sir Thomas More himself
that the greater part of our conclusion will inevitably fall within
quotation marks.
The Utopians “define virtue thus: that it is a living according to
Nature, and think that we are made by God for that end; they believe
that a man then follows Nature when he pursues or avoids things
according to the direction of reason.... Reason directs us to keep
our minds as free from passion and as cheerful as we can, and that we
should consider ourselves bound by the ties of good-nature and humanity
to use our utmost endeavors to help forward the happiness of all other
persons; for there never was any man such a morose and severe pursuer
of virtue, such an enemy to pleasure, that though he set hard rules for
men to undergo much pain, many watchings and other rigors, yet did not
at the same time advise them to do all they could to relieve and ease
the miserable, and who did not represent gentleness and good nature as
amiable dispositions.... A life of pleasure is either a real evil, and
in that case we ought not to assist others in their pursuit of it, but,
on the contrary, to keep them from it all we can, as from that which is
most hurtful and deadly; or if it is a good thing, so that we not only
may but ought to help others to it, why then ought not a man to begin
with himself? Since no man can be more bound to look after the good of
another than after his own....
“Thus as they define Virtue to be living according to Nature, so they
imagine that Nature prompts all people to seek after pleasure, as the
end of all they do. They also observe that in order to further our
supporting the pleasures of life, Nature inclines us to enter into
society; for there is no man so much raised above the rest of mankind
as to be the only favorite of Nature, who, on the contrary, seems to
have placed on a level all those that belong to the same species.
Upon this they infer that no man ought to seek his own conveniences
so eagerly as to prejudice others; and therefore they think that all
agreements between private persons ought to be observed, but likewise
that all those laws ought to be kept, which either a good prince has
published in due form, to which a people that is neither oppressed with
tyranny nor circumvented by fraud, has consented, for distributing
these conveniences of life which afford us all our pleasures.
“They think it is an evidence of true wisdom for a man to pursue his
own advantages, as far as the laws allow it. They account it piety to
prefer public good to one’s private concerns; but they think it unjust
for a man to seek for pleasure by snatching another man’s pleasures
from him.
“Thus upon an inquiry into the whole matter, they reckon that all
our actions, and even all our virtues, terminate in pleasure, as in
our chief end and greatest happiness; and they call every motion or
state, either of body or mind, in which Nature teaches us to delight,
a pleasure. They cautiously limit pleasure only to those appetites to
which Nature leads us; for they say that Nature leads us only to those
delights to which reason as well as sense carries us, and by which we
neither injure any other person nor lose the possession of greater
pleasures, and of such as draw no troubles after them.”
Thus the Utopians discriminate between natural pleasures and those
which have some sting or bitterness concealed in them. The love of fine
clothes is considered by Utopians as a pleasure of the latter sort;
likewise is the desire of those who possess fine clothes to be kowtowed
to by other people. Men who heap up wealth without using it are in the
same class; and those who throw dice or hunt--for in Utopia hunting is
turned over to the butchers, and the butchers are slaves.
Now Utopians “reckon up several sorts of pleasures which they call true
ones; some belong to the body and others to the mind. The pleasures of
the mind lie in knowledge, and in that delight which the contemplation
of truth carries with it; to which they add the joyful reflections on
a well-spent life; and the assured hopes of a future happiness. They
divide the pleasures of the body into two sorts; the one is that
which gives our senses some real delight, and is performed, either by
recruiting nature, and supplying those parts which feed the internal
heat of life by eating and drinking; or when nature is eased of any
surcharge that oppresses it; when we are relieved from sudden pain,
or that which arises from satisfying the appetite which Nature has
wisely given for the propagation of the species. There is another
kind of pleasure that arises neither from our receiving what the body
requires, nor its being relieved when overcharged, and yet by a secret,
unseen virtue affects the senses, raises the passions, and strikes the
mind with generous impressions; this is the pleasure that arises from
music. Another kind of bodily pleasure is that which arises from an
undisturbed and vigorous constitution of body, when life and active
spirits seem to actuate every part. This lively health, when entirely
free from all mixture of pain, of itself gives an inward pleasure ...
and Utopians reckon it the foundation and basis of all the other joys
of life, since this alone makes the state of life easy and desirable;
and when this is wanting a man is really capable of no other pleasure.”
The crowning pleasure of the Utopian is the cultivation of the mind;
and the leisure hours of the people, as well as the professional
scholars, are spent in the lecture hall and the study.
10
Such are the goals for which the Utopians direct their social order.
These values are, I need scarcely point out, rooted in the nature of
man, and not in any set of external institutions. The aim of every
Utopian institution is to help every man to help himself. When we put
the matter in these bald phrases, what More brings forward seems weak
and platitudinous. Behind it all, however, is a vital idea: namely,
that our attempts to live the good life are constantly perverted by our
efforts to gain a living; and that by juggling gains and advantages,
by striving after power and riches and distinction, we miss the
opportunity to live as whole men. People become the nursemaids of their
furniture, their property, their titles, their position; and so they
lose the direct satisfaction that furniture or property would give.
To cultivate the soil rather than simply to get away with a job; to
take food and drink rather than to earn money; to think and dream and
invent, rather than to increase one’s reputation; in short, to grasp
the living reality and spurn the shadow--this is the substance of
the Utopian way of life. Power and wealth and dignity and fame are
abstractions; and men cannot live by abstractions alone. In this Utopia
of the New World every man has the opportunity to be a man because no
one else has the opportunity to be a monster. Here, too, the chief end
of man is that he should grow to the fullest stature of his species.
CHAPTER FOUR
How the new Humanism of the Renascence brings us within sight of
Christianopolis; and how we have for the first time a glimpse
of a modern utopia.
CHAPTER FOUR
1
A hundred years pass, and the man who next conducts us into Utopia is
a Humanist scholar. After the manner of his time, he answers to the
latinized name, Johann Valentin Andreæ. He is a traveller, a social
reformer, and above all things a preacher; and so the vision he imparts
to us of Christianopolis seems occasionally to flicker into blackness
whilst he moralizes for us and tells us to the point of tedium what
his views are concerning the life of man, and in particular the
conceptions of Christianity which his countrymen, the Germans, are
debating about. Sometimes, when we are on the point of coming to grips
with his utopia, he will annoy us by going off on a long tirade about
the wickedness of the world and the necessity for fastening one’s gaze
upon the life hereafter--for Protestantism seems just as other-worldly
as Catholicism. It is the Humanist Andreæ rather than the Lutheran
Andreæ who paints the picture of a Christian city. While Andreæ sticks
to Christianopolis his insight is deep, his views are sound, and his
proposals are rational; and more than once he will amaze us by putting
forward ideas which seem to leap three hundred years ahead of his time
and environment.
It is impossible to get rid of the personal flavor of Andreæ: his fine
intelligence and his candor make our contacts with Christianopolis
quite different from the dreary guidebook sketches which some of the
later utopians will inflict upon us. The two other utopians who
wrote in the same half century as Andreæ--Francis Bacon and Tommaso
Campanella--are quite second-rate in comparison; Bacon with his
positively nauseating foppishness about details in dress and his
superstitious regard for forms and ceremonials, and Campanella, the
lonely monk whose City of the Sun seems a marriage of Plato’s Republic
and the Court of Montezuma. When Bacon talks about science, he talks
like a court costumer who is in the habit of describing the stage
properties for a masque; and it is hard to tell whether he is more
interested in the experiments performed by the scientists of the New
Atlantis or the sort of clothes they wear while engaged in them. There
is nothing of the snob or the dilettante about Andreæ: His eye fastens
itself upon essentials, and he never leaves them except when--for he is
necessarily a man of his age--he turns his gaze piously to heaven.
This teeming, struggling European world that Andreæ turns his back upon
he knows quite well; for he has lived in Herrenburg, Koenigsbrunn,
Tuebingen, Strassburg, Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Geneva, Vaihingen,
and Calw; and he is in correspondence with learned men abroad, in
particular with Samuel Hartlib, who lives in England, and with John
Amos Comenius. Like the Chancellor in Christianopolis, he longs for an
“abode situated below the sky, but at the same time above the dregs
of this known world.” Quite simply, he finds himself wrecked on the
shore of an island dominated by the city of Christianopolis. After
being examined as to his ideas of life and morals, his person, and his
culture, he is admitted to the community.
2
This island is a whole world in miniature. As in the Republic, the unit
once more is the valley section, for the “island is rich in grain and
pasture fields, watered with rivers and brooks, adorned with woods and
vineyards, full of animals.”
In outward appearance, Christianopolis does not differ very much from
the pictures of the cities one finds in seventeenth century travel
books, except for a unity and orderliness that these cities sometimes
lack. “Its shape is a square whose side is 700 feet, well fortified
with four towers and a wall.... It looks therefore towards the four
quarters of the earth. Of buildings there are two rows, or if you count
the seat of the government and the storehouses, four; there is only one
public street, and only one marketplace, but this one is of a very high
order.” In the middle of the city there is a circular temple, a hundred
feet in diameter; all the buildings are three stories; and public
balconies lead to them. Provision against fire is made by building
the houses of burnt stone and separating them by fire-proof walls. In
general, “things look much the same all around, not extravagant nor yet
unclean; fresh air and ventilation are provided throughout. About four
hundred citizens live here in religious faith and peace of the highest
order.” The whole city is divided into three parts, one to supply food,
one for drill and exercise, and one for looks. The remainder of the
island serves the purposes of agriculture, and for workshops.
3
When we look back upon the Republic, with its external organization
so plainly modeled upon military Sparta, we see the camp and the
soldier giving the pattern to the life of the whole community. In
Utopia, the fundamental unit was the farmstead and the family; and
family discipline, which arises naturally enough in rural conditions,
was transferred to the city. In Christianopolis, the workshop and
the worker set the lines upon which the community is developed; and
whatever else this society may be, it is a “republic of workers, living
in equality, desiring peace, and renouncing riches.” If Utopia exhibits
the communism of the family, Christianopolis presents the communism of
the guild.
Industrially speaking, there are three sections in Christianopolis.
One of them is devoted to agriculture and animal husbandry. Each of
these departments has appropriate buildings, and directly opposite them
is a rather large tower which connects them with the city buildings;
under the tower a broad vaulted entrance leads into the city, and a
smaller one to the individual houses. The dome of this tower roofs
what we should call a guildhall, and here the citizens of the quarter
come together as often as required to “act on sacred as well as
civil matters.” It is plain that these workers are not sheep led by
wise shepherds, as in the Republic, but the members of autonomous,
self-regulating groups.
The next quarter contains the mills, bake-shops, meat-shops, and
factories for making whatever is done with machinery apart from
fire. As Christianopolis welcomes originality in invention, there
are a variety of enterprises within this domain; among them, paper
manufacturing plants, saw mills, and establishments for grinding
and polishing arms and tools. There are common kitchens and wash
houses, too; for, as we shall see presently, life in this ideal city
corresponds to what we experience today in New York, London, and many
another modern industrial city.
The third quarter is given over to the metallurgical industries, as
well as to those like the glass, brick, and earthenware industries
which require constant fire. It is necessary to point out that in
planning the industrial quarters of Christianopolis, these seventeenth
century Utopians have anticipated the best practice that has been
worked out today, after a century of disorderly building. The
separation of the city into zones, the distinction between “heavy”
industries and “light” industries, the grouping of similar industrial
establishments, the provision of an agricultural zone adjacent to the
city--in all this our garden cities are but belated reproductions of
Christianopolis.
Moreover, in Christianopolis, there is a conscious application of
science to industrial processes; one might almost say that these
artisans believed in efficiency engineering; for “here in truth
you see a testing of nature herself. The men are not driven to a
work with which they are unfamiliar, like pack-animals to their
task, but they have been trained before in an accurate knowledge of
scientific matters,” on the theory that “unless you analyze matter by
experiment, unless you improve the deficiencies of knowledge by more
capable instruments, you are worthless.” The dependence of industrial
improvement upon deliberate scientific research may be a new discovery
for the practical man, but it is an old story in Utopia.
4
What is the character of this artisan democracy? The answer to this
is summed up in one of those sayings that Andreæ, in the midst of his
energetic exposition, drops by the way.
“To be wise and to work are not incompatible, if there is moderation.”