Modern Utopia — Chapter 10: Race in Utopia, Sections 3-5

Section 3

Suppose, now, there is such a thing as an all-round inferior race.

Is that any reason why we should propose to preserve it for ever in a condition of tutelage?

Whether there is a race so inferior I do not know, but certainly there is no race so superior as to be trusted with human charges.

The true answer to Aristotle's plea for slavery, that there are "natural slaves," lies in the fact that there are no "natural" masters.

Power is no more to be committed to men without discipline and restriction than alcohol.

The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior.

There is only one sane and logical thing to be done with a really inferior race, and that is to exterminate it.

Now there are various ways of exterminating a race, and most of them are cruel.

You may end it with fire and sword after the old Hebrew fashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniards did the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowly with deleterious commodities, as the Americans do with most of their Indians; you may incite it to wear clothing to which it is not accustomed and to live under new and strange conditions that will expose it to infectious diseases to which you yourselves are immune, as the missionaries do the Polynesians; you may resort to honest simple murder, as we English did with the Tasmanians; or you can maintain such conditions as conduce to "race suicide," as the British administration does in Fiji.

Suppose, then, for a moment, that there is an all-round inferior race; a Modern Utopia is under the hard logic of life, and it would have to exterminate such a race as quickly as it could.

On the whole, the Fijian device seems the least cruel.

But Utopia would do that without any clumsiness of race distinction, in exactly the same manner, and by the same machinery, as it exterminates all its own defective and inferior strains; that is to say, as we have already discussed in Chapter the Fifth, section 1, by its marriage laws, and by the laws of the minimum wage.

That extinction need never be discriminatory.

If any of the race did, after all, prove to be fit to survive, they would survive--they would be picked out with a sure and automatic justice from the over-ready condemnation of all their kind.

Is there, however, an all-round inferior race in the world?

Even the Australian black-fellow is, perhaps, not quite so entirely eligible for extinction as a good, wholesome, horse-racing, sheep-farming Australian white may think.

These queer little races, the black-fellows, the Pigmies, the Bushmen, may have their little gifts, a greater keenness, a greater fineness of this sense or that, a quaintness of the imagination or what not, that may serve as their little unique addition to the totality of our Utopian civilisation.

We are supposing that every individual alive on earth is alive in Utopia, and so all the surviving "black-fellows" are there.

Every one of them in Utopia has had what none have had on earth, a fair education and fair treatment, justice, and opportunity.

Suppose that the common idea is right about the general inferiority of these people, then it would follow that in Utopia most of them are childless, and working at or about the minimum wage, and some will have passed out of all possibility of offspring under the hand of the offended law; but still--cannot we imagine some few of these little people--whom you must suppose neither naked nor clothed in the European style, but robed in the Utopian fashion--may have found some delicate art to practise, some peculiar sort of carving, for example, that justifies God in creating them?

Utopia has sound sanitary laws, sound social laws, sound economic laws; what harm are these people going to do?

Some may be even prosperous and admired, may have married women of their own or some other race, and so may be transmitting that distinctive thin thread of excellence, to take its due place in the great synthesis of the future.

And, indeed, coming along that terrace in Utopia, I see a little figure, a little bright-eyed, bearded man, inky black, frizzy haired, and clad in a white tunic and black hose, and with a mantle of lemon yellow wrapped about his shoulders.

He walks, as most Utopians walk, as though he had reason to be proud of something, as though he had no reason to be afraid of anything in the world.

He carries a portfolio in his hand.

It is that, I suppose, as much as his hair, that recalls the Quartier Latin to my mind.

Section 4

I had already discussed the question of race with the botanist at Lucerne.

"But you would not like," he cried in horror, "your daughter to marry a Chinaman or a negro?"

"Of course," said I, "when you say Chinaman, you think of a creature with a pigtail, long nails, and insanitary habits, and when you say negro you think of a filthy-headed, black creature in an old hat.

You do this because your imagination is too feeble to disentangle the inherent qualities of a thing from its habitual associations."

"Insult isn't argument," said the botanist.

"Neither is unsound implication.

You make a question of race into a question of unequal cultures.

You would not like your daughter to marry the sort of negro who steals hens, but then you would also not like your daughter to marry a pure English hunchback with a squint, or a drunken cab tout of Norman blood.

As a matter of fact, very few well-bred English girls do commit that sort of indiscretion.

But you don't think it necessary to generalise against men of your own race because there are drunken cab touts, and why should you generalise against negroes?

Because the proportion of undesirables is higher among negroes, that does not justify a sweeping condemnation.

You may have to condemn most, but why _all_?

There may be--neither of us knows enough to deny--negroes who are handsome, capable, courageous."

"Ugh!"

said the botanist.

"How detestable you must find Othello!"

It is my Utopia, and for a moment I could almost find it in my heart to spite the botanist by creating a modern Desdemona and her lover sooty black to the lips, there before our eyes.

But I am not so sure of my case as that, and for the moment there shall come nothing more than a swart-faced, dusky Burmese woman in the dress of the Greater Rule, with her tall Englishman (as he might be on earth) at her side.

That, however, is a digression from my conversation with the botanist.

"And the Chinaman?"

said the botanist.

"I think we shall have all the buff and yellow peoples intermingling pretty freely."

"Chinamen and white women, for example."

"Yes," I said, "you've got to swallow that, anyhow; you _shall_ swallow that."

He finds the idea too revolting for comment.

I try and make the thing seem easier for him.

"Do try," I said, "to grasp a Modern Utopian's conditions.

The Chinaman will speak the same language as his wife--whatever her race may be--he will wear costume of the common civilised fashion, he will have much the same education as his European rival, read the same literature, bow to the same traditions.

And you must remember a wife in Utopia is singularly not subject to her husband...."

The botanist proclaims his invincible conclusion: "Everyone would cut her!"

"This is Utopia," I said, and then sought once more to tranquillise his mind.

"No doubt among the vulgar, coarse-minded people outside the Rule there may be something of the sort.

Every earthly moral blockhead, a little educated, perhaps, is to be found in Utopia.

You will, no doubt, find the 'cut' and the 'boycott,' and all those nice little devices by which dull people get a keen edge on life, in their place here, and their place here is somewhere----" I turned a thumb earthward.

"There!"

The botanist did not answer for a little while.

Then he said, with some temper and great emphasis: "Well, I'm jolly glad anyhow that I'm not to be a permanent resident in this Utopia, if our daughters are to be married to Hottentots by regulation.

I'm jolly glad."

He turned his back on me.

Now did I say anything of the sort?

...

I had to bring him, I suppose; there's no getting away from him in this life.

But, as I have already observed, the happy ancients went to their Utopias without this sort of company.

Section 5

What gives the botanist so great an advantage in all his Anti-Utopian utterances is his unconsciousness of his own limitations.

He thinks in little pieces that lie about loose, and nothing has any necessary link with anything else in his mind.

So that I cannot retort upon him by asking him, if he objects to this synthesis of all nations, tongues and peoples in a World State, what alternative ideal he proposes.

People of this sort do not even feel the need of alternatives.

Beyond the scope of a few personal projects, meeting Her again, and things like that, they do not feel that there is a future.

They are unencumbered by any baggage of convictions whatever, in relation to that.

That, at least, is the only way in which I can explain our friend's high intellectual mobility.

Attempts to correlate statesmanship, which they regard with interest as a dramatic interplay of personalities, with any secular movement of humanity, they class with the differential calculus and Darwinism, as things far too difficult to be anything but finally and subtly wrong.

So the argument must pass into a direct address to the reader.

If you are not prepared to regard a world-wide synthesis of all cultures and polities and races into one World State as the desirable end upon which all civilising efforts converge, what do you regard as the desirable end?

Synthesis, one may remark in passing, does not necessarily mean fusion, nor does it mean uniformity.

The alternatives fall roughly under three headings.

The first is to assume there is a best race, to define as well as one can that best race, and to regard all other races as material for extermination.

This has a fine, modern, biological air ("Survival of the Fittest").

If you are one of those queer German professors who write insanity about Welt-Politik, you assume the best race is the "Teutonic";

Cecil Rhodes affected that triumph of creative imagination, the "Anglo-Saxon race"; my friend, Moses Cohen, thinks there is much to be said for the Jew.

On its premises, this is a perfectly sound and reasonable policy, and it opens out a brilliant prospect for the scientific inventor for what one might call Welt-Apparat in the future, for national harrowing and reaping machines, and race-destroying fumigations.

The great plain of China ("Yellow Peril") lends itself particularly to some striking wholesale undertaking; it might, for example, be flooded for a few days, and then disinfected with volcanic chlorine.

Whether, when all the inferior races have been stamped out, the superior race would not proceed at once, or after a brief millennial period of social harmony, to divide itself into sub-classes, and begin the business over again at a higher level, is an interesting residual question into which we need not now penetrate.

That complete development of a scientific Welt-Politik is not, however, very widely advocated at present, no doubt from a want of confidence in the public imagination.

We have, however, a very audible and influential school, the Modern Imperialist school, which distinguishes its own race--there is a German, a British, and an Anglo-Saxon section in the school, and a wider teaching which embraces the whole "white race" in one remarkable tolerance--as the superior race, as one, indeed, superior enough to own slaves, collectively, if not individually; and the exponents of this doctrine look with a resolute, truculent, but slightly indistinct eye to a future in which all the rest of the world will be in subjection to these elect.

The ideals of this type are set forth pretty clearly in Mr. Kidd's Control of the Tropics.

The whole world is to be administered by the "white" Powers--Mr. Kidd did not anticipate Japan--who will see to it that their subjects do not "prevent the utilisation of the immense natural resources which they have in charge."

Those other races are to be regarded as children, recalcitrant children at times, and without any of the tender emotions of paternity.

It is a little doubtful whether the races lacking "in the elementary qualities of social efficiency" are expected to acquire them under the chastening hands of those races which, through "strength and energy of character, humanity, probity, and integrity, and a single-minded devotion to conceptions of duty," are developing "the resources of the richest regions of the earth" over their heads, or whether this is the ultimate ideal.

Next comes the rather incoherent alternative that one associates in England with official Liberalism.

Liberalism in England is not quite the same thing as Liberalism in the rest of the world; it is woven of two strands.

There is Whiggism, the powerful tradition of seventeenth-century Protestant and republican England, with its great debt to republican Rome, its strong constructive and disciplinary bias, its broad and originally very living and intelligent outlook; and interwoven with this there is the sentimental and logical Liberalism that sprang from the stresses of the eighteenth century, that finds its early scarce differentiated expression in Harrington's Oceana, and after fresh draughts of the tradition of Brutus and Cato and some elegant trifling with noble savages, budded in La Cite Morellyste, flowered in the emotional democratic naturalism of Rousseau, and bore abundant fruit in the French Revolution.

These are two very distinct strands.

Directly they were freed in America from the grip of conflict with British Toryism, they came apart as the Republican and Democratic parties respectively.

Their continued union in Great Britain is a political accident.

Because of this mixture, the whole career of English-speaking Liberalism, though it has gone to one unbroken strain of eloquence, has never produced a clear statement of policy in relation to other peoples politically less fortunate.

It has developed no definite ideas at all about the future of mankind.

The Whig disposition, which once had some play in India, was certainly to attempt to anglicise the "native," to assimilate his culture, and then to assimilate his political status with that of his temporary ruler.

But interwoven with this anglicising tendency, which was also, by the bye, a Christianising tendency, was a strong disposition, derived from the Rousseau strand, to leave other peoples alone, to facilitate even the separation and autonomy of detached portions of our own peoples, to disintegrate finally into perfect, because lawless, individuals.

The official exposition of British "Liberalism" to-day still wriggles unstably because of these conflicting constituents, but on the whole the Whig strand now seems the weaker.

The contemporary Liberal politician offers cogent criticism upon the brutality and conceit of modern imperialisms, but that seems to be the limit of his service.

Taking what they do not say and do not propose as an indication of Liberal intentions, it would seem that the ideal of the British Liberals and of the American Democrats is to favour the existence of just as many petty, loosely allied, or quite independent nationalities as possible, just as many languages as possible, to deprecate armies and all controls, and to trust to the innate goodness of disorder and the powers of an ardent sentimentality to keep the world clean and sweet.

The Liberals will not face the plain consequence that such a state of affairs is hopelessly unstable, that it involves the maximum risk of war with the minimum of permanent benefit and public order.

They will not reflect that the stars in their courses rule inexorably against it.

It is a vague, impossible ideal, with a rude sort of unworldly moral beauty, like the gospel of the Doukhobors.

Besides that charm it has this most seductive quality to an official British Liberal, that it does not exact intellectual activity nor indeed activity of any sort whatever.

It is, by virtue of that alone, a far less mischievous doctrine than the crude and violent Imperialism of the popular Press.

Neither of these two schools of policy, neither the international laisser faire of the Liberals, nor "hustle to the top" Imperialism, promise any reality of permanent progress for the world of men.

They are the resort, the moral reference, of those who will not think frankly and exhaustively over the whole field of this question.

Do that, insist upon solutions of more than accidental applicability, and you emerge with one or other of two contrasted solutions, as the consciousness of kind or the consciousness of individuality prevails in your mind.

In the former case you will adopt aggressive Imperialism, but you will carry it out to its "thorough" degree of extermination.

You will seek to develop the culture and power of your kind of men and women to the utmost in order to shoulder all other kinds from the earth.

If on the other hand you appreciate the unique, you will aim at such a synthesis as this Utopia displays, a synthesis far more credible and possible than any other Welt-Politik.

In spite of all the pageant of modern war, synthesis is in the trend of the world.

To aid and develop it, could be made the open and secure policy of any great modern empire now.

Modern war, modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the conceit and intellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind.

Were the will of the mass of men lit and conscious, I am firmly convinced it would now burn steadily for synthesis and peace.

It would be so easy to bring about a world peace within a few decades, was there but the will for it among men!

The great empires that exist need but a little speech and frankness one with another.

Within, the riddles of social order are already half solved in books and thought, there are the common people and the subject peoples to be educated and drilled, to be led to a common speech and a common literature, to be assimilated and made citizens; without, there is the possibility of treaties.

Why, for example, should Britain and France, or either and the United States, or Sweden and Norway, or Holland, or Denmark, or Italy, fight any more for ever?

And if there is no reason, how foolish and dangerous it is still to sustain linguistic differences and custom houses, and all sorts of foolish and irritating distinctions between their various citizens!

Why should not all these peoples agree to teach some common language, French, for example, in their common schools, or to teach each other's languages reciprocally?

Why should they not aim at a common literature, and bring their various common laws, their marriage laws, and so on, into uniformity?

Why should they not work for a uniform minimum of labour conditions through all their communities?

Why, then, should they not--except in the interests of a few rascal plutocrats--trade freely and exchange their citizenship freely throughout their common boundaries?

No doubt there are difficulties to be found, but they are quite finite difficulties.

What is there to prevent a parallel movement of all the civilised Powers in the world towards a common ideal and assimilation?

Stupidity--nothing but stupidity, a stupid brute jealousy, aimless and unjustifiable.

The coarser conceptions of aggregation are at hand, the hostile, jealous patriotisms, the blare of trumpets and the pride of fools;

they serve the daily need though they lead towards disaster.

The real and the immediate has us in its grip, the accidental personal thing.

The little effort of thought, the brief sustained effort of will, is too much for the contemporary mind.

Such treaties, such sympathetic international movements, are but dream stuff yet on earth, though Utopia has realised them long since and already passed them by.

CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH