This book is in all probability the last of a series of writings, of which — disregarding certain earlier disconnected essays — my Anticipations¹ was the beginning. Originally I intended Anticipations to be my sole digression from my art or trade (or what you will) of an imaginative writer. I wrote that book in order to clear up the muddle² in my own mind about innumerable social and political questions, questions I could not keep out of my work, which it distressed³ me to touch upon in a stupid haphazard⁴ way, and which no one, so far as I knew, had handled in a manner to satisfy my needs. But Anticipations did not achieve its end. I have a slow constructive⁵ hesitating sort of mind, and when I emerged from that undertaking⁶ I found I had still most of my questions to state and solve. In Mankind in the Making, therefore, I tried to review the social organisation⁷ in a different way, to consider it as an educational process instead of dealing⁸ with it as a thing with a future history, and if I made this second book even less satisfactory from a literary standpoint than the former (and this is my opinion), I blundered, I think, more edifyingly — at least from the point of view of my own instruction. I ventured upon several themes with a greater frankness than I had used in Anticipations, and came out of that second effort guilty of much rash writing, but with a considerable development of formed opinion. In many matters I had shaped out at last a certain personal certitude, upon which I feel I shall go for the rest of my days. In this present book I have tried to settle accounts with a number of issues left over or opened up by its two predecessors⁹, to correct them in some particulars, and to give the general picture of a Utopia that has grown up in my mind during the course of these

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