o can even manage for a moment to take aristocracy seriously.
It may be a mere patriotic bias, though I do not think so, but it
seems to me that the English aristocracy is not only the type,
but is the crown and flower of all actual aristocracies; it has all
the oligarchical virtues as well as all the defects. It is casual,
it is kind, it is courageous in obvious matters; but it has one
great merit that overlaps even these. The great and very obvious
merit of the English aristocracy is that nobody could possibly take
it seriously.

In short, I had spelled out slowly, as usual, the need for
an equal law in Utopia; and, as usual, I found that Christianity
had been there before me. The whole history of my Utopia has the
same amusing sadness. I was always rushing out of my architectural
study with plans for a new turret only to find it sitting up there
in the sunlight, shining, and a thousand years old. For me, in the
ancient and partly in the modern sense, God answered the prayer,
"Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings." Without vanity, I really
think there was a moment when I could have invented the marriage
vow (as an institution) out of my own head; but I discovered,
with a sigh, that it had been invented already. But, since it would
be too long a business to show how, fact by fact and inch by inch,
my own conception of Utopia was only answered in the New Jerusalem,
I will take this one case of the matter of marriage as indicating
the converging drift, I may say the converging crash of all the rest.

When the ordinary opponents of Socialism talk about
impossibilities and alterations in human nature they always miss
an important distinction. In modern ideal conceptions of society
there are some desires that are possibly not attainable: but there
are some desires that are not desirable. That all men should live
in equally beautiful houses is a dream that may or may not be attained.
But that all men should live in the same beautiful house is not
a dream at all; it is a nightmare. That a man should love all old
women is an ideal that may not be attainable. But that a man should
regard all old women exactly as he regards his mother is not only
an unattainable ideal, but an ideal which ought not to be attained.
I do not know if the reader agrees with me in these examples;
but I will add the example which has always affected me most.
I could never conceive or tolerate any Utopia which did not leave to m