sake of and through initiative, and individuality is the method
of initiative. Each man and woman, to the extent that his or her
individuality is marked, breaks the law of precedent, transgresses
the general formula, and makes a new experiment for the direction of
the life force. It is impossible, therefore, for the State, which
represents all and is preoccupied by the average, to make effectual
experiments and intelligent innovations, and so supply the essential
substance of life. As against the individual the state represents
the species, in the case of the Utopian World State it absolutely
represents the species. The individual emerges from the species,
makes his experiment, and either fails, dies, and comes to an end,
or succeeds and impresses himself in offspring, in consequences and
results, intellectual, material and moral, upon the world.
Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of
all its successful individuals since the beginning, and the World
State of the Modern Utopist will, in its economic aspect, be a
compendium of established economic experience, about which
individual enterprise will be continually experimenting, either to
fail and pass, or to succeed and at last become incorporated with
the undying organism of the World State. This organism is the
universal rule, the common restriction, the rising level platform
on which individualities stand.
The World State in this ideal presents itself as the sole landowner
of the earth, with the great local governments I have adumbrated,
the local municipalities, holding, as it were, feudally under it as
landlords. The State or these subordinates holds all the sources of
energy, and either directly or through its tenants, farmers and
agents, develops these sources, and renders the energy available for
the work of life. It or its tenants will produce food, and so human
energy, and the exploitation of coal and electric power, and the
powers of wind and wave and water will be within its right. It will
pour out this energy by assignment and lease and acquiescence and
what not upon its individual citizens. It will maintain order,
maintain roads, maintain a cheap and efficient administration of
justice, maintain cheap and rapid locomotion and be the common
carrier of the planet, convey and distribute labour, control, let,
or administer all natural productions, pay for and secure healthy
births and a healthy and vigorous new generation, maintain the
public health, coin money and sustain standards of measurement,
subsidise research, and reward such commercially unprofitable
undertakings as benefit the community as a whole; subsidise when
needful chairs of criticism and authors and publications, and
collect and distribute information. The energy developed and the
employment afforded by the State will descend like water that the
sun has sucked out of the sea to fall upon a mountain range, and
back to the sea again it will come at last, debouching in ground
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