Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Upton Sinclair, ed. (1878–1968). rn The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest. 1915.

Liberty in Utopia
(From “A Modern Utopia”)

Wells, Herbert George

H. G. Wells

(English novelist, 1866–1946; author of many strange romances of modern science, and later, of penetrating studies of social injustice and hypocrisy. The present novel tells of the career of a financial potentate who begins life with a patent-medicine business)

THE IDEA of individual liberty is one that has grown in importance and grows with every development of modern thought. To the classical Utopists freedom was relatively trivial. Clearly they considered virtue and happiness as entirely separable from liberty, and as being altogether more important things. But the modern view, with its deepening insistence upon individuality and upon the significance of its uniqueness, steadily intensifies the value of freedom, until at last we begin to see liberty as the very substance of life, that indeed it is life, and that only the dead things, the choiceless things, live in absolute obedience to law. To have free play for one’s individuality is, in the modern view, the subjective triumph of existence, as survival in creative work and offspring is its objective triumph.…

A Utopia such as this present one, written on the opening of the Twentieth Century, and after the most exhaustive discussion—nearly a century long—between Communistic and Socialistic ideas on the one hand, and Individualism on the other, emerges upon a sort of effectual conclusion to these controversies.… In the very days when our political and economic order is becoming steadily more Socialistic, our ideals of intercourse turn more and more to a fuller recognition of the claims of individuality. The State is to be progressive, it is no longer to be static, and this alters the general condition of the Utopian problem profoundly; we have to provide not only for food and clothing, for order and health, but for initiative. The factor that leads the World State on from one phase of development to the next is the interplay of individualities; to speak teleologically, the world exists for the sake of and through initiative, and individuality is the method of initiative.… The State is for Individuals, the law is for freedoms, the world is for experiment, experience and change: these are the fundamental beliefs upon which a modern Utopia must go.