I have tried to indicate the drift of these remarkable proposals,
but about them clustered an elaborate mass of keen and temperate
discussion. Into the details of that discussion I will not enter
now, nor am I sure I am qualified to render the multitudinous aspect
of this complicated question at all precisely. I read the whole
thing in the course of an hour or two of rest after lunch--it was
either the second or third day of my stay in Utopia--and we were
sitting in a little inn at the end of the Lake of Uri. We had
loitered there, and I had fallen reading because of a shower of
rain.... But certainly as I read it the proposition struck me as a
singularly simple and attractive one, and its exposition opened out
to me for the first time clearly, in a comprehensive outline, the
general conception of the economic nature of the Utopian State.
Section 3
The difference between the social and economic sciences as they
exist in our world [Footnote: But see Gidding's Principles of
Sociology, a modern and richly suggestive American work, imperfectly
appreciated by the British student. See also Walter Bagehot's
Economic Studies.] and in this Utopia deserves perhaps a word or
so more. I write with the utmost diffidence, because upon earth
economic science has been raised to a very high level of tortuous
abstraction by the industry of its professors, and I can claim
neither a patient student's intimacy with their productions
nor--what is more serious--anything but the most generalised
knowledge of what their Utopian equivalents have achieved. The vital
nature of economic issues to a Utopia necessitates, however, some
attempt at interpretation between the two.
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