Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 9.pdf/332

 dull people get a keen edge on life, in their place here, and their place here is somewhere"

I turned a thumb earthward. "There!"

The botanist did not answer for a while. Then he said, with some temper and great emphasis: "Well, I'm jolly glad anyhow that I'm not to be a permanent resident in this Utopia, if our daughters are to be married to Hottentots by regulation. I'm jolly glad."

He turned his back on me.

Now did I say anything of the sort?

I had to bring him, I suppose; there's no getting away from him in this life. But as I have already observed, the happy ancients went to their Utopias without this sort of company.

What gives the botanist so great an advantage in all his Anti-Utopian utterances is his unconsciousness of his own limitations. He thinks in little pieces that lie about loose, and nothing has any necessary link with anything else in his mind. So that I cannot retort upon him by asking him, if he objects to this synthesis of all nations, tongues and peoples in a World State, what alternative ideal he proposes.

People of this sort do not even feel the need of alternatives. Beyond the scope of a few personal projects, meeting Her again, and things like that, they do not feel that there is a future. They are unencumbered by any baggage of convictions whatever, in relation to that. That, at least, is the only way in which I can explain our friend's high intellectual mobility.