physician, but indecent in a philosopher or a man of science. In
this state of impotent expertness, however, or in some equally
unsound state, economics must struggle on--a science that is no
science, a floundering lore wallowing in a mud of statistics--until
either the study of the material organisation of production on the
one hand as a development of physics and geography, or the study
of social aggregation on the other, renders enduring foundations
possible.


Section 4

The older Utopias were all relatively small states; Plato's
Republic, for example, was to be smaller than the average English
borough, and no distinction was made between the Family, the Local
Government, and the State. Plato and Campanella--for all that the
latter was a Christian priest--carried communism to its final point
and prescribed even a community of husbands and wives, an idea that
was brought at last to the test of effectual experiment in the
Oneida Community of New York State (1848-1879). This latter body did
not long survive its founder, at least as a veritable communism, by
reason of the insurgent individualism of its vigorous sons. More,
too, denied privacy and ruled an absolute community of goods, at
any rate, and so, coming to the Victorian Utopias, did Cabet. But
Cabet's communism was one of the "free store" type, and the goods
were yours only after you had requisitioned them. That seems the
case in the "Nowhere" of Morris also. Compared with the older
writers Bellamy and Morris have a vivid sense of individual
separation, and their departure from the old homogeneity is
sufficiently marked to justify a doubt whether there will be any