The Samurai - Page 2

childhood or at birth, or
who never learnt to read, or who lived and died amidst savage or
brutalising surroundings that gave their gifts no scope, did in
Utopia encounter happier chances, and take up the development and
application of social theory--from the time of the first Utopists in
a steady onward progress down to the present hour. [Footnote: One
might assume as an alternative to this that amidst the four-fifths
of the Greek literature now lost to the world, there perished,
neglected, some book of elementary significance, some earlier
Novum Organum, that in Utopia survived to achieve the profoundest
consequences.] The differences of condition, therefore, had widened
with each successive year. Jesus Christ had been born into a liberal
and progressive Roman Empire that spread from the Arctic Ocean
to the Bight of Benin, and was to know no Decline and Fall,
and Mahomet, instead of embodying the dense prejudices of Arab
ignorance, opened his eyes upon an intellectual horizon already
nearly as wide as the world.

And through this empire the flow of thought, the flow of intention,
poured always more abundantly. There were wars, but they were
conclusive wars that established new and more permanent relations,
that swept aside obstructions, and abolished centres of decay; there
were prejudices tempered to an ordered criticism, and hatreds that
merged at last in tolerant reactions. It was several hundred years
ago that the great organisation of the samurai came into its present
form. And it was this organisation's widely sustained activities
that had shaped and established the World State in Utopia.

This organisation of the samurai was a quite deliberate invention.
It arose in the course of social and political troubles and
complications, analogous to those of our own time on earth, and was,
indeed, the last of a number of political and religious experiments
dating back to the first dawn of philosophical state-craft in
Greece. That hasty despair of specialisation for government that
gave our poor world individualism, democratic liberalism, and
anarchism, and that curious disregard of the fund of enthusiasm and
self-sacrifice in men, which is the fundamental weakness of worldly
economics, do not appear in the history of Utopian thought. All
that history is pervaded with the recognition of the fact
that self-seeking is no more the whole of human life than the
satisfaction of hunger; that it is an essential of a man's existence
no doubt, and that under stress of evil circumstances it may as
entirely obsess him as would the food hunt during famine, but that
life may pass beyond to an illimitable world of emotions and effort.
Every sane person consists of possibilities beyond the unavoidable