our own. That is our present enterprise. We are going to lay down
certain necessary starting propositions, and then we shall proceed
to explore the sort of world these propositions give us....

It is no doubt an optimistic enterprise. But it is good for awhile
to be free from the carping note that must needs be audible when
we discuss our present imperfections, to release ourselves from
practical difficulties and the tangle of ways and means. It is good
to stop by the track for a space, put aside the knapsack, wipe the
brows, and talk a little of the upper slopes of the mountain we
think we are climbing, would but the trees let us see it.

There is to be no inquiry here of policy and method. This is to be a
holiday from politics and movements and methods. But for all that,
we must needs define certain limitations. Were we free to have our
untrammelled desire, I suppose we should follow Morris to his
Nowhere, we should change the nature of man and the nature of things
together; we should make the whole race wise, tolerant, noble,
perfect--wave our hands to a splendid anarchy, every man doing as
it pleases him, and none pleased to do evil, in a world as good in
its essential nature, as ripe and sunny, as the world before the
Fall. But that golden age, that perfect world, comes out into the
possibilities of space and time. In space and time the pervading
Will to Live sustains for evermore a perpetuity of aggressions. Our
proposal here is upon a more practical plane at least than that.
We are to restrict ourselves first to the limitations of human
possibility as we know them in the men and women of this world
to-day, and then to all the inhumanity, all the insubordination of
nature. We are to shape our state in a world of uncertain seasons,
sudden catastrophes, antagonistic diseases, and inimical beasts and