from the conception of mechanical force as coming in from nature to the service of man, a conception the utopian proposal of a coinage based on energy units would emphasise, arise profound contrasts between the modern and the classical utopias. except for a meagre use of water power for milling, and the wind for sailing — so meagre in the latter case that the classical world never contrived to do without the galley slave — and a certain restricted help from oxen in ploughing, and from horses in locomotion, all the energy that sustained the old-fashioned state was derived from the muscular exertion of toiling men. they ran their world by hand. continual bodily labour was a condition of social existence. it is only with the coming of coal burning, of abundant iron and steel, and of scientific knowledge that this condition has been changed. to-day, i suppose, if it were possible to indicate, in units of energy, the grand total of work upon which the social fabric of the united states or england rests, it would be found that a vastly preponderating moiety is derived from non-human sources, from coal and liquid fuel, and explosives and wind and water. there is every indication of a steady increase in this proportion of mechanical energy, in this emancipation of men from the necessity of physical labour. there appears no limit to the invasion of life by the machine.
now it is only in the last three hundred years that any human being seems to have anticipated this. it stimulates the imagination to remark how entirely it was overlooked as a modifying cause in human development. [footnote: it is interesting to note how little even bacon seems to see of this, in his new atlantis.] plato clearly had no ideas about machines at all as a force affecting social organisation. there was nothing in his world to suggest them to him. i suppose there arose no invention, no new mechanical appliance or method of the slightest social importance through all his length of years. he never thought of a state that did not rely for its force upon human muscle, just as he never thought of a state that was not primarily organised for warfare hand to hand. political and moral inventions he saw enough of and to spare, and in that direction he still stimulates the imagination. but in regard to all material possibilities he deadens rather than stimulates. [footnote: the lost utopia of hippodamus provided rewards for inventors, but unless aristotle misunderstood him, and it is certainly the fate of all utopias to be more or less misread, the inventions contemplated were political devices.] an infinitude of nonsense about the greek mind would never have been written if the distinctive intellectual and artistic quality of plato’s time, its extraordinarily clear definition of certain material conditions as absolutely permanent, coupled with its politico-social instability, had been borne in mind. the food of the greek imagination was the very antithesis of our own nourishment. we are educated by our circumstances to think no revolution in appliances and economic organisation incredible, our minds play freely about possibilities that would have struck the men of the academy as outrageous extravagance, and it is in regard to politico-social expedients that our imaginations fail. sparta, for all the evidence of history, is scarcely more credible to us than a motor-car throbbing in the agora would have been to socrates.
by sheer inadvertence, therefore, plato commenced the tradition of utopias without machinery, a tradition we find morris still loyally following, except for certain mechanical barges and such-like toys, in his news from nowhere. there are some foreshadowings of mechanical possibilities in the new atlantis, but it is only in the nineteenth century that utopias appeared in which the fact is clearly recognised that the social fabric rests no longer upon human labour. it was, i believe, cabet [footnote: cabet, voyage en icarie, 1848.] who first in a utopian work insisted upon the escape of man from irksome labours through the use of machinery. he is the great primitive of modern utopias, and bellamy is his american equivalent. hitherto, either slave labour (phaleas), [footnote: aristotle’s politics, bk. ii., ch. viii.] or at least class distinctions involving unavoidable labour in the lower class, have been assumed — as plato does, and as bacon in the new atlantis probably intended to do (more gave his utopians bondsmen sans phrase for their most disagreeable toil); or there is — as in morris and the outright return-to-nature utopians — a bold make-believe that all toil may be made a joy, and with that a levelling down of all society to an equal participation in labour. but indeed this is against all the observed behaviour of mankind. it needed the olympian unworldliness of an irresponsible rich man of the shareholding type, a ruskin or a morris playing at life, to imagine as much. road-making under mr. ruskin’s auspices was a joy at oxford no doubt, and a distinction, and it still remains a distinction; it proved the least contagious of practices. and hawthorne did not find bodily toil anything more than the curse the bible says it is, at brook farm. [footnote: the blythedale experiment, and see also his notebook.]
if toil is a blessing, never was blessing so effectually disguised, and the very people who tell us that, hesitate to suggest more than a beautiful ease in the endless day of heaven. a certain amount of bodily or mental exercise, a considerable amount of doing things under the direction of one’s free imagination is quite another matter. artistic production, for example, when it is at its best, when a man is freely obeying himself, and not troubling to please others, is really not toil at all. it is quite a different thing digging potatoes, as boys say, “for a lark,” and digging them because otherwise you will starve, digging them day after day as a dull, unavoidable imperative. the essence of toil is that imperative, and the fact that the attention must cramp itself to the work in hand — that it excludes freedom, and not that it involves fatigue. so long as anything but a quasi-savage life depended upon toil, so long was it hopeless to expect mankind to do anything but struggle to confer just as much of this blessing as possible upon one another. but now that the new conditions physical science is bringing about, not only dispense with man as a source of energy but supply the hope that all routine work may be made automatic, it is becoming conceivable that presently there may be no need for anyone to toil habitually at all; that a labouring class — that is to say, a class of workers without personal initiative — will become unnecessary to the world of men.
the plain message physical science has for the world at large is this, that were our political and social and moral devices only as well contrived to their ends as a linotype machine, an antiseptic operating plant, or an electric tram-car, there need now at the present moment be no appreciable toil in the world, and only the smallest fraction of the pain, the fear, and the anxiety that now makes human life so doubtful in its value. there is more than enough for everyone alive. science stands, a too competent servant, behind her wrangling underbred masters, holding out resources, devices, and remedies they are too stupid to use. [footnote: see that most suggestive little book, twentieth century inventions, by mr. george sutherland.] and on its material side a modern utopia must needs present these gifts as taken, and show a world that is really abolishing the need of labour, abolishing the last base reason for anyone’s servitude or inferiority.
