Sanity and health and good-will and tolerance--as one sculls along the Thames, above Richmond, on a Sunday morning, between boatloads of gay picnickers and sauntering people, it is not impossible to imagine a new social order developing on simple lines and bringing these things into existence. With five million people in England, and perhaps half a million in the Thames valley, the thing would not be impossible. Then the whole countryside would be dressed again in green; then buildings would arise in the landscape like flowers out of the ground; then the kindliness and spontaneous co-operation of a happy holiday would be prolonged into the workaday week. We should know how to spend our time and with what to occupy our heads and hands, if the great wen of London were removed from the Thames valley, and all the cheap cockney things that London has conjured into existence were to be blasted away. We should know all these things, because William Morris has told us about them; and we should do all these things, because in our heart of hearts we realize that they would satisfy. 6 The utopia that remains for consideration is the last important one in point of time; and it is, curiously enough, the quintessential utopia, for it is written with a free and critical gesture, and with a succinct familiarity towards the more important books that came before it. Mr. H. G. Wells, it is true, has made more than one excursion into an imaginary commonwealth: The Time Machine is his earliest and The World Set Free may possibly be considered as his latest. A Modern Utopia combines the vivid fantasy of the first picture with the more strict regard for present realities that marks the second; and it is, altogether, a fine and lucid product of the imagination. The assumption upon which Mr. Wells gains entrance into his utopia differs from those shipwrecks and somnambulisms in which our modern utopias have been stereotyped. He conceives of a modern man, a little thickset and protuberant, seated at a desk and brooding over the possibilities of man’s future; and gradually this image comes to life and defines his views, and his voice rises into narrative in something like the fashion of a lecturer, throwing from time to time his illustrations of a New World upon the screen. He enters utopia by hypothesis; that is, without any other subterfuge than an act of the imagination; and in the thickening realities of a utopian community, first discovered in an Alpine pass, he finds himself in the company of a sentimental botanist, who is sick with a love affair and is maudlin about dogs, and who again and again wrecks this exploration of utopia by dragging into the midst of the scene some petty complication--about his sweetheart or his doggie--that he has acquired on earth!