UTOPIAN ECONOMICS
world that is really abolishing the need of labour, abolishing the last base reason for anyone's servitude or inferiority.
§ 7
The effectual abolition of a labouring and servile class will make itself felt in every detail of the inn that will shelter us, of the bedrooms we shall occupy. You conceive my awakening to all these things on the morning after our arrival. I shall lie for a minute or so with my nose peeping over the coverlet, agreeably and gently coming awake, and with some vague nightmare of sitting at a common table with an unavoidable dustman in green and gold called Boffin,[1] fading out of my mind. Then I should start up. You figure my apprehensive, startled inspection of my chamber. "Where am I?" that classic phrase, recurs. Then I perceive quite clearly that I am in bed in Utopia.
Utopia! The word is enough to bring anyone out of bed to the nearest window; but thence I see no more than the great mountain mass behind the inn, a very terrestrial-looking mountain mass. I return to the contrivances about me, and make my examination as I dress, pausing garment in hand to hover over first this thing of interest and then that.
The room is, of course, very clear and clean and simple; not by any means cheaply equipped, but designed to economise the labour of redding and repair just as much as is possible. It is beautifully proportioned, and rather lower than most rooms I know on earth. There is no fireplace, and I am perplexed by
- ↑ Vide William Morris's "News from Nowhere."
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