to politico-social expedients that our imaginations fail. Sparta,
for all the evidence of history, is scarcely more credible to us
than a motor-car throbbing in the agora would have been to
Socrates.

By sheer inadvertence, therefore, Plato commenced the tradition of
Utopias without machinery, a tradition we find Morris still loyally
following, except for certain mechanical barges and such-like toys,
in his News from Nowhere. There are some foreshadowings of
mechanical possibilities in the New Atlantis, but it is only in the
nineteenth century that Utopias appeared in which the fact is
clearly recognised that the social fabric rests no longer upon human
labour. It was, I believe, Cabet [Footnote: Cabet, Voyage en Icarie,
1848.] who first in a Utopian work insisted upon the escape of man
from irksome labours through the use of machinery. He is the great
primitive of modern Utopias, and Bellamy is his American equivalent.
Hitherto, either slave labour (Phaleas), [Footnote: Aristotle's
Politics, Bk. II., Ch. VIII.] or at least class distinctions
involving unavoidable labour in the lower class, have been
assumed--as Plato does, and as Bacon in the New Atlantis probably
intended to do (More gave his Utopians bondsmen sans phrase for
their most disagreeable toil); or there is--as in Morris and the
outright Return-to-Nature Utopians--a bold make-believe that all
toil may be made a joy, and with that a levelling down of all
society to an equal participation in labour. But indeed this is
against all the observed behaviour of mankind. It needed the
Olympian unworldliness of an irresponsible rich man of the
shareholding type, a Ruskin or a Morris playing at life, to imagine
as much. Road-making under Mr. Ruskin's auspices was a joy at Oxford
no doubt, and a distinction, and it still remains a distinction; it