For Anatole France, the colonial mania is purely economic, and he considers that Japan has done a great service to the union of races by compelling the white man to respect the yellow; he does not despair even of the black, who, he points out, are evolving in South America, growing educated and much superior to the Europeans of 2000 B.C. Of course this means “no more colonies,” which he looks upon as swindles, for “France has expended men and money so that the Congo, Cochin-China, Annam, Tonkin ... may buy cotton-goods in Manchester, weapons in Birmingham and Liège, spirits in Dantzig, and claret in Hamburg.” He is right, though humanity will not realise that until the day comes for it to haul down its buntings. But he is not hopeless. He believes that even military men are growing more peaceful, that they want “a pompous, magnificent, shining peace, proud as war.” Evidently he must hold such a belief, for in the same book is his idea of Utopia. It is a queer, intellectual Utopia, very different from Mr Wells’, and probably rather distasteful to most of us. He figures men and women in the international State, dressed alike (and I wonder whether the other Anatole France has not in his mind the wicked thought of encouraging delightful surprises), work done by machines, a six-hours’ day, aeroplanes, small private dwellings, no towns, few crimes (property having gone); he suppresses the legal class, alcohol ... he even suppresses the colon by operation and then eugenics. It is the ordinary Socialist Utopia with the labour bond system, the right to live for art and science, and the wages of ability; the family, of course, goes, and the sexless increase. That is not unattractive, for I gather that Anatole France wishes to make procreation less accidental and to confine it to those who feel intimately impelled to it. He sees the cinema and the phonograph ousting the book, which is too individualistic; drama as dead, owing to a lack of comedy and tragedy in life. That is what most of us will dislike in his Utopia (that is to say, tragedy in the lives of other people and comedy in ours). Religion persists, but in a great schismatic mess, and there is even a Pope who fulfils his mission after hours, for he is a dyer in Rome. All this is fairly commonplace, but it carries a number of fine criticisms, some of them generous, such as that of capitalism, which “was a great social progress, created the proletariat, made a state inside the State, prepared the emancipation of the workers and supplied them with means to power.” That shows a true sense of the evolution of man: the need for educating him out of his nomadic state by showing him how to combine in factories, armies, republics. And Anatole France is not too ambitious, for he does not think that equality can be established “as we do not know what it is.” All he wants is to assure a living to all and to make work honourable. Likewise he does not imagine perfect