Failure in a Modern Utopia

Section 1.

The old Utopias--save for the breeding schemes of Plato and
Campanella--ignored that reproductive competition among
individualities which is the substance of life, and dealt
essentially with its incidentals. The endless variety of men, their
endless gradation of quality, over which the hand of selection
plays, and to which we owe the unmanageable complication of real
life, is tacitly set aside. The real world is a vast disorder of
accidents and incalculable forces in which men survive or fail. A
Modern Utopia, unlike its predecessors, dare not pretend to change
the last condition; it may order and humanise the conflict, but men
must still survive or fail.

Most Utopias present themselves as going concerns, as happiness in
being; they make it an essential condition that a happy land can
have no history, and all the citizens one is permitted to see are
well looking and upright and mentally and morally in tune. But we
are under the dominion of a logic that obliges us to take over the
actual population of the world with only such moral and mental and
physical improvements as lie within their inherent possibilities,
and it is our business to ask what Utopia will do with its
congenital invalids, its idiots and madmen, its drunkards and men of
vicious mind, its cruel and furtive souls, its stupid people, too
stupid to be of use to the community, its lumpish, unteachable and
unimaginative people? And what will it do with the man who is "poor"
all round, the rather spiritless, rather incompetent low-grade man
who on earth sits in the den of the sweater, tramps the streets
under the banner of the unemployed, or trembles--in another man's
cast-off clothing, and with an infinity of hat-touching--on the
verge of rural employment?

These people will have to be in the descendant phase, the species
must be engaged in eliminating them; there is no escape from that,
and conversely the people of exceptional quality must be ascendant.
The better sort of people, so far as they can be distinguished,
must have the fullest freedom of public service, and the fullest
opportunity of parentage. And it must be open to every man to
approve himself worthy of ascendency.

The way of Nature in this process is to kill the weaker and the
sillier, to crush them, to starve them, to overwhelm them, using the
stronger and more cunning as her weapon. But man is the unnatural
animal, the rebel child of Nature, and more and more does he turn
himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him. He sees
with a growing resentment the multitude of suffering ineffectual
lives over which his species tramples in its ascent. In the Modern
Utopia he will have set himself to change the ancient law. No