And so one turns to his own illustration of this belief, _A Modern Utopia_. It is a beautiful Utopia, beautifully seen and beautifully thought; and it has in it some of that flavor of airy unrestraint one finds in _News from Nowhere_. Morris, of course, carries us into a world where right discipline has long since produced right will, so wholly and instinctively socialized that men can afford to be as free as anarchists would have the unsocialized men of our own time, a world such as Goethe had in mind when he said: "There is in man a force, a spring of goodness which counterbalances egoism; and if by a miracle it could for a moment suddenly be active in all men, the earth would at once be free from evil." Well, that is the miracle which has in some way just taken place before the curtain goes up on most Utopias; and I think that Wells has never been more skilful than in keeping this miracle quietly in his bag of tricks and devising meanwhile a plausible transition between us and that better world. It all happens in a moment and we are there. By an amazing legerdemain of logic he leaps the gap and presents us with a planet which at every point tallies with our own. It is a planet which does not contain a State but is a State, the flexible result of a free social gesture.
_Mankind in the Making_ should be taken as introductory to _A Modern Utopia_. It is the sketch of a method towards attaining such a world state. It is a kind of treatise on education based on the assumption that "our success or failure with the unending stream of babies is the measure of our civilization." It opens with a complete repudiation of "scientific" breeding, as a scheme which ignores the uniqueness of individual cases and the heterogeneous nature of human ideals. "We are," says Wells, "not a bit clear what points to breed for, and what points to breed out;" while the interplay of strong and varied personalities we desire is contradictory to any uniform notions of beauty, capacity, and sanity, which thus cannot be bred for, so to speak, in the abstract. But in _A Modern Utopia_ he outlines certain conditions limiting parentage, holding it necessary that in order to be a parent a man must be above a certain minimum of capacity and income, failing which he is indebted to the State for the keep of his children. Motherhood is endowed and becomes in this way a normal and remunerative career, which renders the mother capable of giving her time to the care and education of her children, as millions are not in a wage-earning civilization, and makes both her and her children independent of the ups and downs of her husband. His very detailed suggestions about the education of young children (illustrated also in _The Food of the Gods_) are at once a reminiscence of Rabelais and an anticipation of Madame Montessori. He insists upon uniform pronunciation (a very important matter in England, where diversity of language is one of the bulwarks of a rigid class-system), the universality and constant revision of text-books, the systematic reorganization of public library and bookselling methods, with a view to making the race think as a whole. He urges the necessity of rescuing literature from the accidents of the book-market by endowing critical reviews, chairs for the discussion of contemporary thought, and qualified thinkers and writers regardless of their special bias or principles. To strike a mean between the British abuse of government by hereditary privilege and the American abuse of government by electoral machines he ingeniously proposes the election of officials by the jury method, twenty or thirty men being set aside by lot to determine the proper holders of office. And he is convinced of the importance in a democracy of abundant honors, privileges, even titles, and abundant opportunities for fruitful leisure.