RACE IN UTOPIA
lips, there before our eyes. But I am not so sure of my case as that, and for the moment there shall come nothing more than a swart-faced, dusky Burmese woman in the dress of the Greater Rule, with her tall Englishman (as he might be on earth) at her side. That, however, is a digression from my conversation with the botanist.
"And the Chinaman?" said the botanist.
"I think we shall have all the buff and yellow peoples intermingling pretty freely."
"Chinamen and white women, for example."
"Yes," I said, "you've got to swallow that, anyhow; you shall swallow that."
He finds the idea too revolting for comment.
I try and make the thing seem easier for him. "Do try," I said, "to grasp a modern Utopian's conditions. The Chinaman will speak the same language as his wife—whatever her race may be—he will wear costume of the common civilised fashion, he will have much the same education as his European rival, read the same literature, bow to the same traditions. And you must remember a wife in Utopia is singularly not subject to her husband. . . ."
The botanist proclaims his invincible conclusion: "Everyone would cut her!"
"This is Utopia," I said, and then sought once more to tranquillise his mind. "No doubt among the vulgar, coarse-minded people outside the Rule there may be something of the sort. Every earthly moral blockhead, a little educated perhaps, is to be found in Utopia. You will no doubt find the 'cut' and the 'boycott,' and all those nice little devices by which
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