Section 5

Let us come back to Utopia. We were speaking of travel.

Besides roadways and railways and tramways, for those who go to and
fro in the earth the Modern Utopians will have very many other ways
of travelling. There will be rivers, for example, with a vast
variety of boats; canals with diverse sorts of haulage; there will
be lakes and lagoons; and when one comes at last to the borders of
the land, the pleasure craft will be there, coming and going, and
the swift great passenger vessels, very big and steady, doing thirty
knots an hour or more, will trace long wakes as they go dwindling
out athwart the restless vastness of the sea.

They will be just beginning to fly in Utopia. We owe much to M.
Santos Dumont; the world is immeasurably more disposed to believe
this wonder is coming, and coming nearly, than it was five years
ago. But unless we are to suppose Utopian scientific knowledge far
in advance of ours--and though that supposition was not proscribed
in our initial undertaking, it would be inconvenient for us and not
quite in the vein of the rest of our premises--they, too, will only
be in the same experimental stage as ourselves. In Utopia, however,
they will conduct research by the army corps while we conduct it--we
don't conduct it! We let it happen. Fools make researches and wise
men exploit them--that is our earthly way of dealing with the
question, and we thank Heaven for an assumed abundance of
financially impotent and sufficiently ingenious fools.

In Utopia, a great multitude of selected men, chosen volunteers,