The Samurai

Section 1.

Neither my Utopian double nor I love emotion sufficiently to
cultivate it, and my feelings are in a state of seemly subordination
when we meet again. He is now in possession of some clear, general
ideas about my own world, and I can broach almost at once the
thoughts that have been growing and accumulating since my arrival
in this planet of my dreams. We find our interest in a humanised
state-craft, makes us, in spite of our vast difference in training
and habits, curiously akin.

I put it to him that I came to Utopia with but very vague ideas of
the method of government, biassed, perhaps, a little in favour of
certain electoral devices, but for the rest indeterminate, and
that I have come to perceive more and more clearly that the large
intricacy of Utopian organisation demands more powerful and
efficient method of control than electoral methods can give. I have
come to distinguish among the varied costumes and the innumerable
types of personality Utopia presents, certain men and women of a
distinctive costume and bearing, and I know now that these people
constitute an order, the samurai, the "voluntary nobility," which
is essential in the scheme of the Utopian State. I know that this
order is open to every physically and mentally healthy adult in
the Utopian State who will observe its prescribed austere rule of
living, that much of the responsible work of the State is reserved
for it, and I am inclined now at the first onset of realisation to
regard it as far more significant than it really is in the Utopian
scheme, as being, indeed, in itself and completely the Utopian
scheme. My predominant curiosity concerns the organisation of this
order. As it has developed in my mind, it has reminded me more and
more closely of that strange class of guardians which constitutes
the essential substance of Plato's Republic, and it is with an
implicit reference to Plato's profound intuitions that I and my
double discuss this question.

To clarify our comparison he tells me something of the history of
Utopia, and incidentally it becomes necessary to make a correction
in the assumptions upon which I have based my enterprise. We are
assuming a world identical in every respect with the real planet
Earth, except for the profoundest differences in the mental
content of life. This implies a different literature, a different
philosophy, and a different history, and so soon as I come to
talk to him I find that though it remains unavoidable that we
should assume the correspondence of the two populations, man for
man--unless we would face unthinkable complications--we must assume
also that a great succession of persons of extraordinary character
and mental gifts, who on earth died in