Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/613

 REVIEWS 591 finds himself in the twenty-first century; there is also an account by a very old man of how the change came about. The new Utopia partly agrees with, partly differs from, Plato's and Sir Thomas More's. There is no private property in it, but complete and universal communism. But also there is no government. This is the capital and differential feature of the future society. By the establish- ment of communism we come naturally to equality in distribution, since human wants as respects material things are on the whole equal and will be more nearly so still in Utopia. By the abolition of property and especially of government liberty becomes first possible, and there is ample liberty in Utopia, indeed what to the reader at first seems a surprising amount until he gradually discovers that all authority has ceased, that the judges, magistrates, and even the policeman have disappeared, while by the abolition of the factory system workers are no longer the slaves of the large system of production. In Utopia in fact the Anarchist Vision of Backunin is fully realized. All government is abolished together with the State and all its chief institutions, in- are back in cluding property, religion and the legal family. We Rousseau's ' State of Nature' before the establishment of and on the whole its nicer than we thought. civil society; There is universal friendliness, neighbourliness, everywhere genuine kindly greetings, and good-natured acts done without reward, now that private property, which killed naturally good and kindly qualities, and produced most of the opposite bad qualities, is happily abolished. There can be no more offences against property; no more covetousness of goods. No doubt there might be jealousy as respects individuals of the opposite sex and Mr. Morris allows that even in Utopia such a passion might urge to homicide. Even so there is no need of a prison for the offender. His remorse will be a sufficient punishment, unless he is insane and then he is not responsible. There are other things absent in the new Arcadia besides the prisons and the workhouses. Factories and factory chimneys are not there, not only b.ecause they would necessitate a certain organization of labour, perhaps authority, incompatible with the full freedom of the time, but also because they are ugly; for .Mr. M. orris has an artistic quarrel with the Nineteenth Century which is quite as deep as his social quarrel. Railways are absent, at least all the'ugly iron bridges' across the Thames are gone as well as the ' Cockney Villas' along its banks, which. now form an especial eye-sore to Mr. Morris. London and most of rural England is rebuilt. A forest covers much of the present area of London. There are beautiful public buildings of the types approved of by Mr. Morris. The present public buildings museums, national galleries, churches, &c., have disappeared or been pulled down. St. Paul's indeed and the British Museum and some other buildings have been spared, not on account of their merits but at earnest antiquarian intercession; so also the Houses of Parliament have been spared, but they have become ' for a sign,' converted into ' The Dung Market' or