Freedom of movement in a Utopia planned under modern conditions must
involve something more than unrestricted pedestrian wanderings, and
the very proposition of a world-state speaking one common tongue
carries with it the idea of a world population travelled and
travelling to an extent quite beyond anything our native earth has
seen. It is now our terrestrial experience that whenever economic
and political developments set a class free to travel, that class at
once begins to travel; in England, for example, above the five or
six hundred pounds a year level, it is hard to find anyone who is
not habitually migratory, who has not been frequently, as people
say, "abroad." In the Modern Utopia travel must be in the common
texture of life. To go into fresh climates and fresh scenery, to
meet a different complexion of humanity and a different type of home
and food and apparatus, to mark unfamiliar trees and plants and
flowers and beasts, to climb mountains, to see the snowy night of
the North and the blaze of the tropical midday, to follow great
rivers, to taste loneliness in desert places, to traverse the gloom
of tropical forests and to cross the high seas, will be an essential
part of the reward and adventure of life, even for the commonest
people.... This is a bright and pleasant particular in which a
modern Utopia must differ again, and differ diametrically, from its
predecessors.
We may conclude from what has been done in places upon our earth
that the whole Utopian world will be open and accessible and as safe
for the wayfarer as France or England is to-day. The peace of the
world will be established for ever, and everywhere, except in remote
and desolate places, there will be convenient inns, at least as
convenient and trustworthy as those of Switzerland to-day; the
touring clubs and hotel associations that have tariffed that country
and France so effectually will have had their fine Utopian
equivalents, and the whole world will be habituated to the coming
and going of strangers. The greater part of the world will be as
secure and cheaply and easily accessible to everyone as is Zermatt
or Lucerne to a Western European of the middle-class at the present
time.
On this account alone no places will be so congested as these two
are now on earth. With freedom to go everywhere, with easy access
everywhere, with no dread of difficulties about language, coinage,
custom, or law, why should everyone continue to go to just a few
special places? Such congestions are merely the measure of the
general inaccessibility and insecurity and costliness of
contemporary life, an awkward transitory phase in the first
beginnings of the travel age of mankind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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