UTICA (56), a city in New York State, U.S., 232 m.  NW. of New York City; is on the Erie Canal, in the heart of a dairy-farming district; has a noted market for cheese, and has various manufactures.

UTILITARIANISM, the theory which makes happiness the end of life and the test of virtue, and maintains that “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, and wrong as they tend to produce the reverse,” a theory characterised by Carlyle, who is never weary of denouncing it, as “reducing the infinite celestial soul of man to a kind of hay-balance for weighing hay and thistles on, pleasures and pains on.”  The great apostle of this theory was John Stuart Mill, and the great father of it Jeremy Bentham.

UTOPIA (Nowhere), an imaginary island described by Sir Thomas More, and represented as possessing a perfect political organisation, and which has given name to all schemes which aim at the like impossible perfection, though often applied to such as are not so much impossible in themselves as impracticable for want of the due individual virtue and courage to realise them.

UTRAQUISTS (i. e. both kinders), followers of Huss who maintained that the Eucharist should be administered to the people in both kinds, both bread and wine.

UTRECHT (60), an old town, the capital of a province of the name (224), in Holland, on the Old Rhine, 23 m.  SE. of Amsterdam; it is fortified by strong forts, and the old walls have been levelled into beautiful promenades; has a number of fine buildings, a Gothic cathedral, St. Martin’s, a famous university with 700 students, and a library of 160,000 volumes, besides a town-hall and the “Pope’s house” (Pope Adrian VI., who was born here), &c.; manufactures iron goods, textiles, machinery, &c., and trades in butter and cheese; here in 1713 the treaty was signed which closed the Spanish Succession War.  Is the name also of a S. province of the Transvaal.

UTTOXETER, market-town of Staffordshire, 14 m.  NE. of Stafford; has sundry manufactures and brewing; here Dr. Johnson did public penance, with head uncovered, as a man, for want of filial duty when, as a boy, he refused to keep his father’s bookstall in the market-place when he was ill.

UXBRIDGE, town of Middlesex, 16 m.  W. of London; has two fine churches, and a large corn-market.

UZBEGS, a race of Tartar descent and Mohammedan creed, dominant in Turkestan, the governing class in Khiva, Bokhara, and Khokand especially; territory now annexed to Russia.

V

VAAL, a river of South Africa, which rises in the Drakenberg Mountains, separates the Free State from the Transvaal, and after a course of 500 m. in a SW. direction joins the Nu Gariep to form the Orange River.

VACCINATION.  Inoculation with the matter of cowpox as a protection against smallpox, was introduced 1796-98 by EDWARD JENNER (q. v.), and at length adopted by the faculty after much opposition on the part of both medical men and the public.