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The unproved, parrot-phrases of a cheap Utopianism will grow dumb those phrases which offer us entrance into the usual Garden of Eden with its square-cut, machine-made culture and gaudy, standardized enjoyments phrases which assure us that when we have introduced the six-hours' working day and abolished private property, the cinema horrors will be replaced by classical concerts, the gin-shops by popular reading-rooms, the gaming-hells by edifying lectures, highway robberies by gymnastic exercises, detective novels by Gottfried Keller, bazaar-trifles and comic vulgarities by works of refined handicraft; and that out of boxing contests, racecourse betting, bomb exercises, and profiteering in butter, we shall see the rise of an era of humility and philanthropy.
Around Couthon, Saint-Just, Billaud, Collot, and Robespierre, with the exception of certain men devoted, not to Utopianism but the country, and who, like Carnot, conform to the system in order to save France, there are but a few sectarians to carry out the Jacobin program.
Our fathers could not try more than one theory at a time; and the theory they were bent upon testing naturally preceded, in the series of the world's progressive experiments, the more generous, but, at the same time, more dangerous one which he advanced; and their theory had a right to an earlier and a full trial, as lying in the way of a safe advance towards his bolder Utopianism.
The principle of equality was not disputed, but the use of brute force through the power of the State was regarded with horror in the form in which the followers of Baboeuf, the enthusiasts for Utopianism, preached it.
The next day he printed the interviews a collection of curiosities in utopianism, cant, ignorant fanaticism, provincialism, hypocrisy. These appeared strictly as news; for the cardinal principle of Howard's theory of a newspaper was that it had no right to intrude its own views into its news-columns. On the editorial page he riddled the interviews.
It might seem to impartial observers rather Utopian to hope and expect some regeneration of the political world of Great Britain from the return of an intelligent country gentleman of independent and original principles, for a few obscure Scottish burghs, to be one of an assembly of six hundred and fifty-eight legislators, but it is from such Utopianism, felt, not in one instance, but in many, that the atmosphere of politics, both in Great Britain and in Australia, can be cleared and purified.
He thrust again and again at the tough intangibility of the priests' Utopianism like a man fighting a ghost; he answered transcendental defiances with baser material persecutions; and at last, on a dark and, I think, decisive day in English history, his word sent four feudal murderers into the cloisters of Canterbury, who went there to destroy a traitor and who created a saint.
Even Booth Tarkington, in his excellent "Turmoil," had to dodge the logical issue of his story; had to make his hero exchange a practical literary idealism for a very impractical, even though a commercial, utopianism, in order to emerge apparently successful at the end of the book.
To love but one woman through this life and into a next would be blissful ... if it were possible; there might be a great deal saved but by someone else in heroically supporting such an Elysian tenet; Lee Randon definitely hadn't the necessary utopianism. Love wasn't a sacred fluid held in a single vessel of alabaster; marriage didn't conveniently create shortsightedness.
So obvious is all this, that in defining the word "useful" I may be said to have decided the question in favour of Utopia; and what is now in dispute is not whether Utopianism is "useful," in any sense of the word, but whether my sense of the word is the right one. I cannot go much further into this question without exceeding the limits of the theme which I am handling in this chapter.
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