vermin, out of men and women with like passions, like uncertainties
of mood and desire to our own. And, moreover, we are going to accept
this world of conflict, to adopt no attitude of renunciation towards
it, to face it in no ascetic spirit, but in the mood of the Western
peoples, whose purpose is to survive and overcome. So much we adopt
in common with those who deal not in Utopias, but in the world of
Here and Now.

Certain liberties, however, following the best Utopian precedents,
we may take with existing fact. We assume that the tone of public
thought may be entirely different from what it is in the present
world. We permit ourselves a free hand with the mental conflict of
life, within the possibilities of the human mind as we know it. We
permit ourselves also a free hand with all the apparatus of
existence that man has, so to speak, made for himself, with houses,
roads, clothing, canals, machinery, with laws, boundaries,
conventions, and traditions, with schools, with literature and
religious organisation, with creeds and customs, with everything, in
fact, that it lies within man's power to alter. That, indeed, is the
cardinal assumption of all Utopian speculations old and new; the
Republic and Laws of Plato, and More's Utopia, Howells' implicit
Altruria, and Bellamy's future Boston, Comte's great Western
Republic, Hertzka's Freeland, Cabet's Icaria, and Campanella's City
of the Sun, are built, just as we shall build, upon that, upon the
hypothesis of the complete emancipation of a community of men from
tradition, from habits, from legal bonds, and that subtler servitude
possessions entail. And much of the essential value of all such
speculations lies in this assumption of emancipation, lies in that
regard towards human freedom, in the undying interest of the human
power of self-escape, the power to resist the causation of the past,