In placing your name at the head of an article of my own my motive is, naturally, to do myself credit while showing you honor. But I also seek an opportunity of conversing with you in that perfectly intimate manner so often prevented by our own shy or philistine persons, and possible only, perhaps, under the chaperonage of that most sympathizing and unreal of all phantoms, the Reader.

Our talk, of course, will be about the most wonderful of all your inventions: the planet, twin of our earth, where (as Sterne already remarked about the Continent) things are better done than over here.

I have just been re-reading your Utopia and your Anticipations; and my thoughts are still in a prodigious welter, curdling into currents by no means easy to follow, and eddying round certain reefs, with or without beacons. One of these recurrent rocks is that against which our theological forefathers were perpetually breaking their logic, and to a certain extent their hearts, the question, if I may give it a name formed by analogy, of the Inefficacy of Grace, the persistence of Sin and Punishment in the face of redemption; the question why, since there was a royal road to Heaven, should so many souls go nevertheless to Hell? To you and me, and all who think like us, this self-same query recurs for ever in a garb of evolutional philosophy: Why should progress be so little progressive? Why should Utopia be... well, only Utopia?

This is what your books make me ask myself; whereunto, also, your books furnish at least an implicit answer; and it is about this mainly that I want to have a talk, because I find that we do not entirely agree. It is

perhaps inevitable. You are and that is the usefulness and delightfulness of you-a builder of Utopias; and all Utopias, like all schemes of salvation, pivot upon an if. Every constructive reformer is ready to set all (or most) things right, providing only you will promise to obey him on one little point, or at least grant this point might have been otherwise. Thus: if only people would observe some particular law, or (as more recent prophets prefer) disobey every law without distinction; if only people would abolish private property, or disregard all selfish (or all unselfish and merciful) impulses; if only they would be strictly communistic, or monogamic, or hygienic; if only they would think less, or drink less, or have fewer children, or (saving your presence) have a few yards less of unnecessary intestine; if only they would follow the dictates of Lycurgus, Comte, Pope Pius X., Tolstoi, or Nietzschethen, &c., &c., &c.-as if by magic. But so long as mankind obstinately (brutishly or sentimentally or ignorantly, as the case may be) declines to accept the particular terms upon which the particular speaker has fixed his fancy, why, of course, all that mankind can possibly do will be mere vanity and vexation; for nothing equals the critical acumen with which every other scheme of redemption is destroyed by each successive preacher of the one thing needful. Has not Mr. Bernard Shaw achieved his comic masterpiece in the proposal, following on the demonstration of the futility of all reforms, whether Whig, Radical, Collectivist, or Anarchist, that the efficiency of the citizen should be entrusted to an office for the breeding of human beings?

But enough of such examples. Even

without them, it is obvious that all Kingdoms of Heaven depend on an If. The if of your particular Utopia, my dear Mr. Wells, is certainly the most easily admitted, if not the most easily granted, of all similar conditions, because it is the least narrow and precise, and indeed is not so much expressed by yourself as perpetually suggested to the reader's own thoughts. This if of yours, this little bit of perfection required by you, as by all other utopists, as a starting point for all improvement, can, however, be summed up in a few words, as follows: Progress might have been and might be far rapider and more secure, and the world a less wretched and hopeless place for many folk, if the achievements of mankind had not been perpetually checked, deviated, or rendered nugatory, and its power of mind, heart, and will allowed in a considerable degree to run to waste. I understand right, your planet beyond Sirius differs from its twin world Earth exactly in so far as its past has escaped certain historical accidents which have slackened our progress; as the seed of good has fallen less often on indifferent obduracy, or been gobbled up less certainly by selfinterest and perfunctoriness; as whatever germinating wisdom has not been choked by routine and prejudice. There has been less loss of time and effort and thought in Utopia; that, take it all round, has been the difference between it and our poor Earth.

Thus, if Utopian

Such an explanation fits into our modern conception of Nature (in so far as Nature can be opposed to Man) as being eminently wasteful: millions of germs for one living organism, myriads of variations for one improvement. But even better does this explanation tally with the evidence of everyday life, of ingenious thoughts become dead letter, fruitful rules grown to barren routines, preferences to prejudices,

convictions to superstitions; and individual talents, power, good intentions, becoming not merely the paving-stones, but the very brick and mortar, of hell.

In your first chapter of Anticipations you have analyzed how the coming together of the two inventions of the steam pump and the tram-rail, both applied to the old arrangements of the stage coach, has bound us over to the intolerable stereotyped cumbersomeness of a railroad system. The chapter is a profoundly suggestive analysis of the deviation of what might be by what is; such spoiling of new wine by old bottles was recognized long ago in the domain of conduct and character; and half the novels written are unconscious essays on the ruin of powers for happiness and good by the institutions and arrangements made to secure good and happiness in other times or for other persons: marriage, inheritance, education, profession, all inventions which, when and where they do not help, inevitably impede. And you yourself, in your very remarkable little essay called "Scepticism of the Instrument," have drawn attention to the intellectual loss due to the very forms of our speech and the categories of our thinking impoverishing and distorting all detail and reality to suit lopsided formula. In short, nearly everything which serves a purpose is apt to become a nuisance; and economy on one side implies, at least nine times in ten, a waste of one thing or another. Wastefulness; everything under the sun (and probably inside the sun) is wastefulness; such will have to be the burden of the latter-day Ecclesiastes; and in so far our latter-day pessimism is an improvement upon that of the Preacher of even more pessimistic and more wasteful times. For the lesson of history as well as of natural science is that wastefulness tends to diminish and eliminate itself; and that, conversely, the obedience to purpose in

creases in all things just in proportion as a purpose forms itself and emerges out of the random lurchings and fumblings of the universe. But as yet purpose has but little to say, and Wastefulness, which we call Chance, has the best of it. I have just alluded to the Parable of the Sower and the Seed; it has an application wider than the one which British infants are to be taught, denominationally or not denominationally, in or out of school hours: The seed falls on the highway and is trodden to mud by the passersby, whom it might have fed; the fowls of the air pick it out of the furrow and devour it; there are thousands of square miles of rock upon which it is parched, and millions of acres of thorns in which it is choked; the only exaggeration in the whole allegory being the hundred-fold multiplication of the one little grain which chances upon good soil. "He that hath ears to hear let him hear," concludes the Master when he has set that forth. And we latter-day believers have heard the parable as a fair account of the ways of the Universe and of Man's poor efforts in their midst. Only, my dear Mr. Wells, there is a point which we are apt to overlook in this whole depressing story: the rocks and the thorns, the greedy pigeons, described as if they had come into being only to frustrate that well-meaning agriculturist, had been in that place long before the Sower himself; nay, the grain existed long before he took it into his head to use it for bread and sow it in his furrows; what he called barren soil was such only in the eyes of his hungry and hopeful effort; what he called thorns or weeds were inferior to other plants merely because they did not afford him sustenance; and the seed was wasted when it got into the crops of the birds only because he had intended that it should become bread for his belly. In other words, wasteful

All

ness is, as the Jesuit moralists would have said, a matter of direction of the intention; and the things Man happens to require for sustenance of his body and soul are not necessarily the same which the universe intends producing; nay, it may be man's self-engrossed imagination which attributes to the universe intentions of any sort. I have made this little digression in order to forestall from the first any accusation of pessimism, particularly of that Schopenhauer type which holds that the universe (including its expression the Wille) is always interfering with Man's real interests, to wit, complete or partial self-annihilation. that I mean is, that given that Man, with his sensitiveness to pain and consequent arrangements for trying to escape it, is merely one part, and a recently superadded part, of what we patronizingly designate as the Great Whole, there is no wonder in much of man's ingenuity and effort, like the seed of the parable, and from the Sower's point of view, being wasted. The matter for astonishment to me is rather how, despite the stones and brambles and thievish birds, there should already have come to be so many bushels of wheat and barley and oats, so many well-baked loaves, and even the most refined and least nourishing cakes; metaphorical brioche, for instance, of art, sentiment, and ideal, such as that French princess proposed to offer to people in years of famine. It is this view of things in general which, among other reasons, prevents my being much surprised, or even much discouraged, at our planet differing from its twin star Utopia.

But the indifference, construed by pessimists into hostility, of the Universe to man's rather tardy arrival and claims, is by no means the only reason for the slowness of his progress. As I have already hinted with reference to

marriage, education, and similar useful encumbrances, it is man's own presence and his own requirements which are really most to blame in this unsatisfactory business.

He is, on the whole, paying the price of his own refuse-heaps. "Refuseheaps!" exclaims the sanitary reformer and patentee for wholesale-Rubbishinto-Fuel-Conversion (half in Latin, of course, and half in Greek); "and pray, why should there be any refuse-heaps at all?" Because the refuse-heap is the chief instrument by which all progress has been achieved: the refuseheap called turn about unfitness, failure, vice, sin, dishonor, or merely illegality, on to which Natural Selection and Human Selection have for ever been throwing whatever, at any particular moment, happened to be in the way of their sweeping and garnishing; whatever, like the fossil which Thoreau flung out of his hermitage window, was more bother than it was worth. This rough and ready method has been, to say the least, expensive. Think of that destruction of possibilities! The variations suppressed for ever merely that one type should gain the preponderance needful for a few years! Why, early civilization (and perhaps not so very early either) must have been a perepetual killing off of individuals too sensitive, too imaginative, too independent, too good, in fact, for patriarchal and military civilizations; even as, nowadays, individuals too good for strenuous commercialism find themselves discouraged in a quieter though equally cruel way. And not only individuals have been exterminated, but in each survivor many a possibility sacrificed to a standard of necessary righteousness. Nay, every advance in morality has meant the sacrifice of all decent people who still clung to the practice, whatever it might be, which began to be branded as immoral; even as manslaughter and vendetta will be

come the exclusive privilege of "Born Criminals" with odd-shaped ears and a taste for tattooing (see Lombroso) only by the vigorous destruction of all possible Othellos and Orestes, with whatever chivalry and heroism there may be in them.

Mr. Lester Ward and Mrs. Stetson have told us of an irreparable loss of time and opportunity accompanying the necessary subordination of the female to the male, the passage from the matriarchal to the patriarchal state of society. And what is a great deal more certain (though we blush to mention it) is the fearful waste of excellent qualities (of which we may judge by Aspasia, Mary Magdalene, poor Gretchen, and sundry humble or eminent ladies of our own acquaintance) which must have attended, and still attend, the needful segregation of the woman destined for motherhood from the woman whose sterile and dishonorable vocation has, after all, considerably helped the establishment of the lofty monogamic household. In fact, it is doubtful whether progress has lost more by incursions of barbarians and bouts of fanaticism than by the ruthlessness of its own slow and unintelligent methods. We do not like to teach this to our children, or even to admit it to ourselves; we should be glad-yes, even you and I, dear Mr. Wells, let alone the followers of Comte-if we could lay all such mischief at the door of wicked tyrants, and capitalists, and cunning priests (those "Bonzes," "Fakirs," and "Old Men of the Mountain," who were such a comfort to eighteenth century optimism), and blink the suspicion that morality has employed immoral methods, and progress cost some stagnation and regression. We are not yet spiritually strong and elastic enough to admit of moral instability and adaptation. We still require the safety of sanctions, the corroboration of prejudices, the exhilaration of mu

tual anathema; in our fatiguing and puzzling journey towards recognition of realities we want to be comforted with what Ibsen's doctor calls "Vital Lies." And "Vital Lies," however indispensable for an individual, a class, or a period, are lies nevertheless, involving failure, catastrophe, or mere perfunctoriness; and as such they also are another instance of the wasteful system on which human progress is carried on. Wastefulness! Wasteful

ness everywhere, says the Preacher. The refuse-heap becomes indeed ever smaller and smaller, fewer useless things remaining to be thrown away, fewer useful things being thrown away with them; but the very process by which all this happens is wasteful itself. Nor is it surprising if the conscious spirit of man is thus wasteful, in however steadily decreasing a ratio, since it has arisen, after all, out of the unconscious automatism of the universe. And even as Pascal's Divinity could afford injustice because he had eternity to right it in, so the forces of Nature can be dignified and patient because they are not flustered by pleasure and pain; why should they mind how long it takes to attain anything when very likely they do not want to attain anything at all?

Such considerations, I imagine you answering, may afford a metaphysical Lenten diet for the lay priests of progress, the responsible and busy Samurai of Utopia, during their yearly retreat among the polar ice-fields. But, practically speaking, Mankind is separate from all these cosmic forces. And seeing that Mankind is conscious of pleasure and pain, and consequently gifted with foresight and volition, why the deuce should it not apply this foresight and volition to arranging a more tolerable earth? And here we are back, my dear builder of Utopias, at the original if of your whole system. For what has made the difference be

tween your decent and decently happy planet and this Earth as seen from the top of a Strand omnibus, has not been the accident of a war less or a discovery more, nor even the presence of a greater number of persons of virtue or talent, but simply that, in Utopia, people have been less inexplicably stupid and lazy and heartless and self-indulgent than here.

Less inexplicably. For I feel in all your anger and all your humorous sadness, even as in all the anathemas of all the prophets, the sting of the inexplicable: the human race is stiff-necked, obstinately blind to its own good. Now here it seems to me that you, like all the floaters of Kingdoms of Heaven, are distinctly unjust. The human race, I venture to say, has not shown, and does not show, itself one bit more stupid, heartless, lazy, or self-indulgent than you or I would in its place. There has been wastefulness on the part of the Forces of Nature, the great abstractions who are indifferent.

But

as to human beings, they have been applying their poor wits and will, under extremely trying circumstances, to their daily and hourly needs; needs comprising rest and enjoyment (what we moralists call "sloth" and "selfindulgence") quite as much as the more obvious renovation of their tissues and replenishing of the race.

In so doing, like the famous savages of rhetoricians, mankind frequently cuts down the tree for the fruit, and eats its corn as spinach; it damages to-morrow, but it satisfies to-day; and to-day is imperious. Mankind also damages its neighbor and posterity, but it satisfies (I must repeat it) the ego's immediate and cruel wants. Hence vice, crime, and (more detrimental still in the long run) all the various perfunctorinesses and frauds which raise your indignation legitimately, but ought not (for you are a great novelist) to excite your astonishment-you who