STANDARD CLOTHES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20520, 22 March 1930, Page 1 (Supplement)

STANDARD CLOTHES.

MORE'S UTOPIA.

BY KOTAHE.

The Russian attempt to standardise women's dress was bound to come, 'lhe rigorous logic of Lenin and his disciples must inevitably direct itself, sooner or later, in its extermination to produce a severely rational world, to the utterly irrational matter of feminine fashions. In a slate ruled wholly by reason there is no place for meaningless change; in a nation rigidly controlled in all its parts from a central authority there is room for only one all-embracing tyranny, and the autocrats of Moscow will not for long tolerate the rival tyranny of fashion. When you have decided what men and women must think and what they must do and how they must feci, you have no new field to control unless you bring the wheel full circle and decide also what they will eat and drink and what they will wear.

Old Thomas More saw that very clearly when lie devised his Utopia early jn the sixteenth century. I do not suppose that the Russians have borrowed the idea from More, though they may well have done so. All socialistic states are bound to work toward the same ends and will probably find it necessary to use the same means.

More's Utopia is amazingly modern. It was one of the first fruits of the Renaissance in Eqgland. That tremendous enlargement of the human mind meant the breaking down of the barriers hampering the spirit of man in every' department of human interest and activity. Man became once more the seeker. It was oyer the hills and far away for him at last. Safe anchorages meant nothing to him now; the wide spaces were calling him. I'm tired of sailing my little boat Safe inside tlio harbour bar; I want to be where tlie big ships float Out on the deep where thejjreat ones are. Thomas More. More was a loyal man to England and a loyal man to his Church ; but when the Renaissance impulse leapt the Channel he w r as one of the first'men in England to respond to it It seemed to him that the conventional acceptance of things as tliev are was a poor business for the new questing mail the Renaissance had revealed. He was a statesman and his interests were largely political and social. His first contact with the new ideas from the Continent opened his eyes to the miseries of the little world of his loved England.

He had recognised them before but they had seemed to him part of a divinely appointed scheme of things which it would be blasphemy to question or to seek fundamentally to remedy. Now he asks whether it 'is a necessary part of a ' true man's faith that the " structure of society is unalterable. Might not the organisation of humanity into the groups we call tribes or nations have proceeded altogether on the wrong lines? Did God really decree the poverty and misery that leaped to the eyes wherever one turned in England ? While the Renaissance sent Columbus to seek a new world across the Atlantic, while it sent Galileo's imagination careering through the uncharted spaces of the heavens, it sent More to the reconstruction of human society. . . In his Utopia lie tells how he visited the Low Countries as one of a diplomatic mission sent on behalf of the English king to negotiate with the Spanish representatives there. His friend takes him one day to Antwerp and there on the wharves he meets a Portuguese navigator who has been in America with the famous Italian Amerigo Vespucci. He is impressed by the sailor's air of experience and wisdom. Ho asks him his opinion of England. The Portuguese does not think much of what be has seen. Tlieie is far too great an inequality between the classes., Ihe rich are very rich and the poor very poor. England's Problems.

lie has been astonished to find that the farm lands upon whose cultivation so much depends are becoming mere grazing ground.for sheep. Where the crofter in his small holding maintained himself and his family in food and clothing, and had something over to exchange for other commodities, he has found the little cottages falling to rack and ruin, the fences down, the gardens and corn lands given over to grass, and the village church converted into a sheep shelter. This way lies disaster, says the Portuguese. The small farmer is the foundation stone of the modern nation—drive him out for easier and quicker returns and you are condemning the whole state to slow impoverishment and ultimate death. Besides, the agricultural workers drift into the towns and greatly complicate the unemployment problem there. Lack of work -has turned many an honest man into a criminal. A man cannot see his wife and children starve. Then there are soldiers from continental campaigns. A spell of peace has brought many an old campaigner home. He has no trade and the excitements of war service have not fitted him for a monotonous routine job even if work were available. He drifts with the crowd, steadily moving to criminality. All the authorities can do to meet this most menacing situation is to multiply gallows and apply the laws with merciless severity. The 'Remedy. More wants to know what he would do. It is easy to criticise; but, granted that the indictment is trtie, what would he suggest as a remedy ? The Portuguese asks why other countries cannot follow the' example of an island state he had discovered off the American coast, Here they had prosperity in which every citizen* of the state had his share as he had had his part in producing it. There was 110 private wealth and so no injustice and inequality. Every man performed some useful work and regarded his toil not as a means to personal aggrandisement but as his contribution to the well-being of the state. The Utopian stale is described in detail. Unequal distribution of wealth and rivalry between citizens are conceived to be the root cause of all the ills of human society. Abolish private properly, says Moie, and standardise all such" things as clothing and furniture and houses. If all have the same houses and furniture, if all clothing is of the same material ' and cut according to one ordained design, no one will be able to build a better house than his neighbour or fill it with more costly furniture or pictures, and no woman of expensive tastes will be able to outdrcss her friend or enemy. It was altogether a remarkable conception for the sixteenth century. I have always felt that, even if it were successfully inaugurated, the Utopian state would come to disaster on this apparently trivial matter of the standardisation" of dollies. I began to have some hopes of Russia when I saw last week that her ultra-logical rulers were going to force the nation into a standard outfit, Jlen and women can tolerate apparently for an indefinite period almost any sort* of tyranny that is clear-sighted enough to know exactly what it would be. at. They will thiiik to older, act to order, feel to order. But you arc courting utter failure if you are foolish enough to make them dress to order.