Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 9.pdf/41

 trived a State may be, outside your boundary lines the epidemic, the breeding barbarian or the economic power will gather its strength to overcome you. The swift march of invention is all for the invader. Now perhaps you might still guard a rocky coast or a narrow pass; but what of that near to-morrow when the flying-machine soars overhead, free to descend at this point or that? A State powerful enough to keep isolated under modern conditions would be powerful enough to rule the world, would be, indeed, if not actively ruling yet passively acquiescent in all other human organisations, and so responsible for them altogether. World State, therefore, it must be.

That leaves no room for a modern Utopia in Central Africa or in South America or round about the pole, those last refuges of ideality. The floating isle of La Cité Morellyste no longer avails. We need a planet. Lord Erskine, the author of a Utopia ("Armata") that might have been inspired by Mr. Hewins, was the first of all Utopists to perceive this—he joined his twin planets pole to pole by a sort of umbilical cord. But the modern imagination, obsessed by physics, must travel further than that.

Out beyond Sirius, far in the deeps of space, beyond the flight of a cannon-ball flying for a billion years, beyond the range of unaided vision, blazes the star that is our Utopia's sun. To those who know where to look, with a good opera-glass aiding good eyes, it and three fellows that seem in a cluster with it—though they are incredible billions of miles nearer—make just the faintest speck of light. About it go planets, even as our planets, but weaving a different