no less than a planet will serve the purpose of a modern utopia. time was when a mountain valley or an island seemed to promise sufficient isolation for a polity to maintain itself intact from outward force; the republic of plato stood armed ready for defensive war, and the new atlantis and the utopia of more in theory, like china and japan through many centuries of effectual practice, held themselves isolated from intruders. such late instances as butler’s satirical “erewhon,” and mr. stead’s queendom of inverted sexual conditions in central africa, found the tibetan method of slaughtering the inquiring visitor a simple, sufficient rule. but the whole trend of modern thought is against the permanence of any such enclosures. we are acutely aware nowadays that, however subtly contrived a state may be, outside your boundary lines the epidemic, the breeding barbarian or the economic power, will gather its strength to overcome you. the swift march of invention is all for the invader. now, perhaps you might still guard a rocky coast or a narrow pass; but what of that near to-morrow when the flying machine soars overhead, free to descend at this point or that? a state powerful enough to keep isolated under modern conditions would be powerful enough to rule the world, would be, indeed, if not actively ruling, yet passively acquiescent in all other human organisations, and so responsible for them altogether. world-state, therefore, it must be.
that leaves no room for a modern utopia in central africa, or in south america, or round about the pole, those last refuges of ideality. the floating isle of la cite morellyste no longer avails. we need a planet. lord erskine, the author of a utopia (“armata”) that might have been inspired by mr. hewins, was the first of all utopists to perceive this — he joined his twin planets pole to pole by a sort of umbilical cord. but the modern imagination, obsessed by physics, must travel further than that.
out beyond sirius, far in the deeps of space, beyond the flight of a cannon-ball flying for a billion years, beyond the range of unaided vision, blazes the star that is our utopia’s sun. to those who know where to look, with a good opera-glass aiding good eyes, it and three fellows that seem in a cluster with it — though they are incredible billions of miles nearer — make just the faintest speck of light. about it go planets, even as our planets, but weaving a different fate, and in its place among them is utopia, with its sister mate, the moon. it is a planet like our planet, the same continents, the same islands, the same oceans and seas, another fuji-yama is beautiful there dominating another yokohama — and another matterhorn overlooks the icy disorder of another theodule. it is so like our planet that a terrestrial botanist might find his every species there, even to the meanest pondweed or the remotest alpine blossom. . . .
only when he had gathered that last and turned about to find his inn again, perhaps he would not find his inn!
suppose now that two of us were actually to turn about in just that fashion. two, i think, for to face a strange planet, even though it be a wholly civilised one, without some other familiar backing, dashes the courage overmuch. suppose that we were indeed so translated even as we stood. you figure us upon some high pass in the alps, and though i— being one easily made giddy by stooping — am no botanist myself, if my companion were to have a specimen tin under his arm — so long as it is not painted that abominable popular swiss apple green — i would make it no occasion for quarrel! we have tramped and botanised and come to a rest, and, sitting among rocks, we have eaten our lunch and finished our bottle of yvorne, and fallen into a talk of utopias, and said such things as i have been saying. i could figure it myself upon that little neck of the lucendro pass, upon the shoulder of the piz lucendro, for there once i lunched and talked very pleasantly, and we are looking down upon the val bedretto, and villa and fontana and airolo try to hide from us under the mountain side — three-quarters of a mile they are vertically below. (lantern.) with that absurd nearness of effect one gets in the alps, we see the little train a dozen miles away, running down the biaschina to italy, and the lukmanier pass beyond piora left of us, and the san giacomo right, mere footpaths under our feet. . . .
and behold! in the twinkling of an eye we are in that other world!
we should scarcely note the change. not a cloud would have gone from the sky. it might be the remote town below would take a different air, and my companion the botanist, with his educated observation, might almost see as much, and the train, perhaps, would be gone out of the picture, and the embanked straightness of the ticino in the ambri-piotta meadows — that might be altered, but that would be all the visible change. yet i have an idea that in some obscure manner we should come to feel at once a difference in things.
the botanist’s glance would, under a subtle attraction, float back to airolo. “it’s queer,” he would say quite idly, “but i never noticed that building there to the right before.”
“which building?”
“that to the right — with a queer sort of thing ——”
“i see now. yes. yes, it’s certainly an odd-looking affair. . . . and big, you know! handsome! i wonder ——”
that would interrupt our utopian speculations. we should both discover that the little towns below had changed — but how, we should not have marked them well enough to know. it would be indefinable, a change in the quality of their grouping, a change in the quality of their remote, small shapes.
i should flick a few crumbs from my knee, perhaps. “it’s odd,” i should say, for the tenth or eleventh time, with a motion to rise, and we should get up and stretch ourselves, and, still a little puzzled, turn our faces towards the path that clambers down over the tumbled rocks and runs round by the still clear lake and down towards the hospice of st. gotthard — if perchance we could still find that path.
long before we got to that, before even we got to the great high road, we should have hints from the stone cabin in the nape of the pass — it would be gone or wonderfully changed — from the very goats upon the rocks, from the little hut by the rough bridge of stone, that a mighty difference had come to the world of men.
and presently, amazed and amazing, we should happen on a man — no swiss — dressed in unfamiliar clothing and speaking an unfamiliar speech. . . .
