association; and yet his work was not without its practical influence.
The Brook Farm experiment in America was a fumbling attempt to plant
a phalanstery without paying any attention to the conditions which
Fourier would have rigorously imposed; and the “familistere” of the
great steel works of Godin at Guise, in France, is another direct
result of Fourier’s inspiration. He remains, I believe, the first man
who had a plan for colonizing the wilderness of industrial barbarism
that existed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and redeeming
that wilderness to civilization.
5
The name of Robert Owen is usually associated with utopianism; but his
work belongs more to the “real” world than to the idola of utopia;
and I pass over him with the briefest mention, for his projects for a
model industrial town have more of the flavor of a poor colony than
that of a productive human society. Let us grant him good intentions,
organizing ability, and moral fervor: without doubt he is a noble
figure, even when his attitude is strained and his tone strident. The
series of essays he wrote on love and marriage are marked by fine
sympathy and common sense; and it is to be regretted that they are not
as widely known as his plans for a new moral world. If this little note
can repair the neglect, I have done Owen ample justice: as an active
figure in English and American public life he is properly a subject for
the social historian. With Owen I must also dismiss John Ruskin, who
began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to develop plans
for a “Guild of St. George.” This guild was to form a little island
of honest labor and sound education in the midst of the turbid sea of
industrialism; but it did not embrace the whole of society, and it was
utopian only in the sense that the Oneida Community, let us say, was
utopian. While they are full of pregnant suggestions, the plans for the
Guild are as fragmentary as the New Atlantis.
6
One of the neglected utopias of the mid-nineteenth century is that of
James Buckingham.
James Buckingham was one of those erratic men of affairs which the
fertile soil of British individualism produces, and which hard British
common sense persistently ignores. Like Owen, Buckingham was acquainted
with industrial and commercial affairs from the inside: he travelled
widely and wrote upon various matters with that copious, amateurish
dogmatism and spirit which marks him, perhaps, as the philistine
counterpart of John Ruskin. If the utopias of the past express the
ideals of the soldier, the farmer, and the artisan, the community
which Buckingham projected represents the ideal of the bourgeoisie.
Buckingham’s Victoria is the ideal aspect of that Coketown which in a
later chapter we shall attempt to describe.
We talk loosely of the individualism of the nineteenth century; but
in reality it was a period that was thriving with associations.
The scope of joint stock companies and philanthropic societies had
immeasurably widened. Along with the Mudfog Association, “for the
advancement of everything,” which Dickens satirized, there sprang up
a hundred different societies for performing some special function in
the industrial system or realizing some particular purpose in society.
Buckingham gives us a picture of his contemporaries which is also a
criticism:
“We have the government of the country itself, passing acts of
parliament for the better drainage of towns, and a more ample supply
of water and air for ventilation.... Hence, too, arise associations of
noblemen and others for building model lodging houses for the labouring
classes; associations for improving the dwellings of the poor;
societies for providing baths and bath houses for families unable to
procure such conveniences for themselves; associations for establishing
suburban villages for the working classes, and to get them at night at
least out of the crowded haunts and vicious atmosphere of the towns.
And hence we have Temperance Societies, Tract Societies, Home Missions,
Asylums for Repentant Magdalens, Homes for Seaman out of Employ, and
Houses of Refuge for the Destitute, with soup kitchens and other modes
of temporary relief....”
What does this all come to? Let Buckingham answer:
“They are, after all, mere palliatives, and do not reach the seat of
the disease.... This can only be done by uniting the disjointed efforts
of all these well-meaning but partially curative bodies into one, in
order to achieve, by their union of means, influence, and example, the
erection of a “Model Society,” with its model farms, model pastures,
model mines, model manufactures, model town, model schools, model
workshops, model kitchens, model libraries, and places of recreation,
enjoyment, and instruction; all of which could be united in one new
Association.”
Without inquiring too closely into what a model pasture may be, we may
admit that the notion behind Buckingham’s proposal was not unsound. The
industrial society of his day was in an inchoate, indeed in a chaotic
state. In order to sift out the necessary institutions and put them on
a firm basis, it was the better part of wisdom to start anew on a fresh
area of land and attempt to plan the development of the community as a
whole. It is true that in this proposal of Buckingham’s there is none
of Fourier’s brilliant intuitions of a true social order, and none of
Ruskin’s critical inquiry into what composed a good life: Buckingham
took contemporary values for granted. What he sought to do was to
realize these values completely, and in orderly fashion. Here are the
elements of his proposal.
There is to be formed a model town association, with a limited
liability, for the purpose of building a new town called Victoria. The
town is to contain every improvement in “position, plan, drainage,
ventilation, architecture, supply of water, light, and every other
elegance and convenience.” Its size is to be about a mile square and
the number of inhabitants is not to exceed 10,000. A suitable variety
of manufactures and handicraft trades is to be established near the
edge of the town; and the town itself is to be surrounded by farm land
10,000 acres broad. All of the lands, houses, factories, and materials
are to be the property of the company, and not of any individual; and
this property is to be held for the benefit of all in proportion as
their shares entitle them. No person is to be a member of the company
or an inhabitant of the town except one who is a bona fide shareholder
to the extent of at least twenty pounds, and who is ready to subscribe
to a drastic series of blue laws which, while permitting freedom in
religious worship and preventing child labor, do away with liquor,
drugs, and even tobacco.
In addition to these provisions there are to be common laundries,
kitchens, refectories, and nurseries; and medical advice is to be given
free, at home or in the hospital, as in the army and navy. Education is
to be undertaken by the community. Justice, it should be noted by those
who are acquainted with an experiment which has recently been started
in New York, is to be administered by competent arbitrators under a
written code of laws, without the expense, delay, and uncertainty
of ordinary legal proceedings. All members are to sign declarations
accepting arbitration and waiving other legal proceedings against
members of the company.
All these affairs, especially the manner in which the town is to
be built, are worked out in considerable detail; thus the size and
character of the houses are set forth on the plan, and it is provided
that each workingman is to occupy at least one entire and separate
room for himself; whilst each married couple without children gets
two rooms, and each family in which there are children is to occupy
at least three rooms for domestic purposes. I have set down all these
details baldly because the plan itself is a bald one; and no amount
of fine writing will embellish it. Buckingham’s society is not based
upon a thoroughgoing criticism of human institutions: the ends for
which this society exists are doubtless those which were held good
and proper by the Macaulays and the Martineaus. What is interesting
in Buckingham’s utopia is the definite plans and specifications,
accompanied by drawings; for this is surely one of the first attempts
to put a problem in social engineering on a basis from which an
engineer or an architect could work.
Buckingham thought that, given a successful model town, the rest of
England might in time be colonized by the surplus population, and
thus the old centers of black industry would be wiped out. Nor was
Buckingham altogether deceived. His utopia was a limited one, but out
of his limitations has come success. In 1848 this utopia was a chimera;
in 1898, Mr. Ebenezer Howard reconstructed it and set it forth in a
persuasive little book called Tomorrow, and as a direct result of
the plans advocated by Mr. Howard, a flourishing garden city called
Letchworth has come into existence; which in turn has propagated
another garden city, called Wellwyn; and at the same time has, by
example, paved the way for numerous garden villages and garden suburbs
in various parts of Europe and in America.
With this mid-Victorian theorist, we pass over from a pre-scientific
method of thinking to one which sacrifices the artistic imagination to
a realistic grasp of the facts; and in this passage something is gained
and something is lost. Buckingham gains by confining his proposals to
what is immediately practicable. He loses by not having the imaginative
energy to criticize the ways, means, and ends that are sanctioned by
current practise. If utopia begins with Plato’s glorious dream of an
organic community, the image of the just man made perfect, it cannot
end with Buckingham’s invention of a shell. Nevertheless, through the
nineteenth century the superficial utopians, the shell-builders, are
dominant; and we must continue to examine them.
CHAPTER SEVEN
How some Utopians have thought that a good community rested at
bottom on the right division and use of land; and what sort
of communities these land-animals projected.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1
Before the Industrial Revolution upset the balance of social power,
there were little villages in England where, on a limited scale and to
no very grand purpose, a quiet and placid and fairly jolly existence
must have been the rule of things. These villages were those in which
the land was either held in freehold by small proprietors, or where
there still remained for the use of each inhabitant certain common
pastures and wastes. Under this regime there was a fair degree of
prosperity with which only the wind and the weather and war could
interfere. Something of the savor of this life Mr. W. H. Hudson finely
conveys in his A Traveller in Little Things; and a century ago Cobbett
made a series of excellent snapshots in his Rural Rides.
When the mediæval order broke down the great proprietors began to
seize this common land; and during the eighteenth century, under the
incentive of big-scale scientific agriculture, the seizure went on at a
merry pace. The peasant without land was forced to migrate to the new
towns, as the Hammonds have pictured in their graphic work on the Town
Laborer; and the labor of the peasant and his family fed the machines
which the Watts and Arkwrights were developing in the eighteenth
century. Industrial progress and social poverty went hand in hand. The
period before the Industrial Revolution seemed in comparison a real
utopia; and the key to this utopia was the land.
The importance of land in the constitution of civil society was
emphasized by the Diggers of Cromwell’s time; one of them, Gerard
Winstanley, wrote a minor utopia to prove that the land should be held
in common; and this view was reinforced--without the communism--in a
purely political utopia called Oceana by James Harrington, who lived
during the same period. Harrington advocated such a distribution of
land that the landed gentry should be the leaders, and the commonalty
should have the preponderance of power.
Out of all the modern utopias with which we have to reckon there are
two, in particular, in which the common possession of land is the
foundation of every other institution. These are Spensonia and A Visit
to Freeland.
2
The early part of the nineteenth century is remarkable for the fact
that men of common stock, usually self-educated, began to apply their
wits to improving the conditions of the class to which they belonged;
and in particular there was in London a peasant named William Cobbett,
a tailor named Francis Place, and a stationer named Thomas Spence who
devoted a good part of what remained over from their working days to
plans for bettering man’s estate.
Thomas Spence had a shop in High Holborn from which he published
little pamphlets of rough philosophy, called Pig’s Meat; in 1795 he
issued A Description of Spensonia, which was followed in 1801 by The
Constitution of Spensonia: A Country in Fairyland situated between
Utopia and Oceana; brought from thence by Captain Swallow. Spence’s
title to have written a complete utopia rests upon the fact that
he proposes a return to an environment which had once been, in its
fashion, complete.
Spensonia begins with a parable about a father who had a number of
sons, who built them a ship for traffic, and who provided that the
profits of the enterprise were to be shared in common. This ship is
wrecked upon an island; and the sons quickly awake to the conclusion
that if “they did not apply the Marine Constitution given them by
their father to their landed property, they would soon experience
inexpressible inconveniences. They therefore declared the property of
the island to be the property of them all collectively, in the same
manner as the ship had been, and that they ought to share the profits
thereof in the same way. The island they named Spensonia, after the
ship which their father had given them. They next chose officers to
mark out such portions of the land, as every person or family desired
to occupy, for which they were to receive for the use of the public a
certain rent according to its value. This rent was applied to public
uses or divided among themselves as they thought proper. But in order
to keep up the remembrance of their rights, they decreed that they
should never fail to share at rent-time, an equal dividend, though ever
so small, and though the public demands should be ever so urgent....
As they had determined, when seeing that every ship they should build
and man, should ... be the property of the crew, so, in conformity
therewith, they decreed that every district or parish which they
should people, should be the property of the inhabitants, and the
rent and police of the same at their disposal.... A National Assembly
or Congress consisting of delegates from all the parishes takes care
of the national concerns, and defrays the expenses of the state and
matters of common utility, by a pound rate from each parish without any
other tax.”
What is a parish and what is its work? Look around the English
countryside and see.
A parish, to begin with, is a “compact portion of the country,
designedly not too large that it may the more easily be managed by the
inhabitants with respect to its revenues and the police.”
“The parishes build and repair houses, make roads, plant hedges and
trees, and in a word do all the business of a landlord.... A parish
has many heads to contrive what ought to be done. Instead of debating
about mending the state, ... (for ours needs no mending) we employ
our ingenuity nearer home, and the result of the debates are in every
parish, how we shall work such a mine, make such a river navigable,
drain such a fen, or improve such a waste. These things we are all
immediately interested in, and have each a vote in executing.”
There is a rough, homespun quality about this utopia, and it needs
a visit to the English villages of the New Forest or the Chiltern
Hills, where some of the common lands have been kept, to see what a
rural utopia would be like if it could keep itself free from invaders
who sought to live off the fat of the land without contributing their
labor. Spence was not altogether blind to the necessity of keeping
watch over this constitution of equality; and he places his utopia in
the care of two guardian angels--Voting by Ballot and the Universal
Use of Arms--two angels which look less formidable and potent in the
twentieth century than they did in the first decade of the nineteenth,
when the first had still to be tried, and when the second was not
complicated by the invention of machine guns and poison gases.
At the bottom of Spence’s Utopia, however, lies the conviction which he
shares with Plato and all the other genuine utopians; namely, that in
Thoreau’s words less is accomplished by the thousands who are hacking
at the branches of evil than by one who is striking at the root.
Spence, it must be remembered, wrote in the thick of the agitation
for parliamentary reform which was the keynote of so much nineteenth
century activity--the chartist movement, parliamentary socialism, and
the like, being so many rainbows in the bubble of political effort
which burst with such a bang when the Great War broke out. Spence saw
the futility of these superficial demands. He said:
“Thousands of abortive schemes are daily proposed for redressing
grievances and mending the constitution, whereas, the shoes were so
ill-made at first, and so worn, rotten, and patched already, that
they are not worth the trouble or expense, but ought to be thrown
to the dunghill; and a new pair should be made, neat, tight, and
easy as for the foot of one that loves freedom and ease. Then would
your controversies about this and the other way of cobbling, that
continually agitate you, be done away; and you would walk along the
rugged and dirty path of life easy and dry-shod.”
3
The next utopia, Freeland, marks a transition between the utopia in
which the land alone is held by the community and that in which land
and capital and all the machinery of production belong to a national
state.
The writer of this utopia was an Austrian economist, Theodor Hertzka;
and he first published his view in considerable detail, with reference
to current economic doctrines, in a book called Freeland: A Social
Anticipation. He condensed these doctrines in another book called A
Visit to Freeland, or the new Paradise Regained, an attempt to picture
his freeman’s commonwealth in action.
These books formed the center of a whirlwind of agitation; a magazine
sprang up; societies were organized in various cities in Europe and
America; and a definite attempt was made to colonize a certain section
of Africa, selected by Hertzka; an attempt which, alas! met with speedy
failure as a result of the obtuseness and international jealousy of
various colonial officials. The first book was published in 1889; and
all this happened in the early nineties. Perhaps the only practical
effect of it was--and this is mere conjecture--to turn the thoughts
of certain Zionists, like Israel Zangwill, from establishing Zion in
Jerusalem to building it up again in some more suitable region in the
heart of Africa.
Freeland may be described as an individualist Utopia on a social
foundation. Hertzka was filled with sympathy and admiration for the
doctrines that Adam Smith set forth in The Wealth of Nations; and he
desired to realize a society in which the maximum amount of individual
freedom and initiative would prevail, especially in industrial
enterprises. This leads to a paradox; namely, that in order to ensure
freedom it is impossible to practise laissez faire; for the effect of
laissez faire is to permit accidental aggregations of wealth and power
to threaten the freedom that less fortunate individuals seek to enjoy.
So far from being an anarchist utopia, Freeland is a co-operative
commonwealth in which the State acts as an interested party in the
production and distribution of goods. This differs from socialism in
name; and it differed from the practical socialist agitation of the
time in that it relied, not upon turning over established institutions
in Europe, but in turning over a new leaf in the Kenia Highlands of
Africa; but Hertzka’s “individualism” comes to almost the same thing.
4
A visit to Freeland teaches us little about the arts of social life or
the constitution of a good society. What we can learn is one of the
methods by which--on hypothesis anyway--the industrial mechanism might
be controlled.
In Freeland there are five fundamental laws; and of these the first is
the most important; namely, that:
Every inhabitant has an equal right to the common land and to the means
of production which are furnished by the state.
The other fundamental laws have to do with the support of women and
children, old men, and those otherwise unfit to work, all of whom
have the right of maintenance, corresponding to the amount of credit
belonging to the state; with the provision of universal suffrage for
all above twenty-five years of age; and with the establishment of
independent legislative and executive branches of the government.
Let us follow the visitor to Freeland as he makes his first
explorations in Edendale, its principal city, and learns how affairs
are conducted. If this is an individualist utopia it is not by any
means free from the services of a bureaucracy; for first of all the
visitor turns to the Central Statistical Office, where records are kept
of the occupations that are open and the amount of pay offered by each.
“Every inhabitant of Freeland,” our visitor finds, “has the right to
become a member of any business he pleases. One has only to present
oneself for this purpose; for the managers only decide upon the manner
in which the members are to be employed, and not on the membership
itself.” In practice, the number of individuals with private businesses
and partnerships seems to be limited, for big companies not merely
operate factories but provide restaurant service, build houses, and
even supply domestic service to private individuals and households.
(The visitor has his boots blacked by one of these associated menials,
and his hostess explains how the services of a caterer and a valet may
be obtained by calling up a central distributing agency.)
The sole condition upon which a person or company is allowed to engage
in business is that the public be kept informed of all business
transactions. “The companies are therefore obliged to conduct their
book-keeping openly. The prices at which goods are bought and sold,
the net profits and the number of workmen, must be communicated at
intervals which are fixed according to the judgment of the central
office.”
Observe that Hertzka reckons with the fact that in an industrial
society, access to machinery is just as important as access to the
land, since, in a manner of speaking, all our modern activities,
even agriculture, are parasitic upon machinery. Hence the collection
and distribution of capital is managed in the interests of the whole
community; the first being taken care of by a yearly tax, which
obviates the need--and perhaps the possibility--of individual savings,
whilst the capital is distributed without interest to the companies
that make application for it. The community pays for the plant through
the added charge which is laid on consumers; the credit advanced is
cancelled out through production. This arrangement does away with the
standing charge for capital which is maintained under present day
production for profit even after the original capital has been paid
off in dividends; and above all, it does away with the practice of
capitalizing increased returns in such a way as to enlarge the amount
of the standing charge for capital. The social use of capital to
advance production, rather than to provide fixed incomes for a rentier
class, is recognized in Freeland.
Since our visitor is an engineer, he turns to a plant devoted to the
manufacture of railway equipment; and notes that it is run under the
following statutes.