"We have now a double Canon, a very fine First Canon, and a Second
Canon of work by living men and work of inferior quality, and a
satisfactory knowledge of both of these is the fourth intellectual
qualification for the samurai."
"It must keep a sort of uniformity in your tone of thought."
"The Canon pervades our whole world. As a matter of fact, very much
of it is read and learnt in the schools.... Next to the intellectual
qualification comes the physical, the man must be in sound health,
free from certain foul, avoidable, and demoralising diseases, and in
good training. We reject men who are fat, or thin and flabby, or
whose nerves are shaky--we refer them back to training. And finally
the man or woman must be fully adult."
"Twenty-one? But you said twenty-five!"
"The age has varied. At first it was twenty-five or over; then the
minimum became twenty-five for men and twenty-one for women. Now
there is a feeling that it ought to be raised. We don't want to take
advantage of mere boy and girl emotions--men of my way of thinking,
at any rate, don't--we want to get our samurai with experiences,
with a settled mature conviction. Our hygiene and regimen are
rapidly pushing back old age and death, and keeping men hale and
hearty to eighty and more. There's no need to hurry the young. Let
them have a chance of wine, love, and song; let them feel the bite
of full-bodied desire, and know what devils they have to reckon
with."
"But there is a certain fine sort of youth that knows the
desirability of the better things at nineteen."
"They may keep the Rule at any time--without its privileges. But a
man who breaks the Rule after his adult adhesion at five-and-twenty
is no more in the samurai for ever. Before that age he is free to
break it and repent."
"And now, what is forbidden?"
"We forbid a good deal. Many small pleasures do no great harm, but
we think it well to forbid them, none the less, so that we can weed
out the self-indulgent. We think that a constant resistance to
little seductions is good for a man's quality. At any rate, it shows
that a man is prepared to pay something for his honour and
privileges. We prescribe a regimen of food, forbid tobacco, wine, or
any alcoholic drink, all narcotic drugs----"
"Meat?"
"In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to
be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughter-houses. And, in
a population that is all educated, and at about the same level of
physical refinement, it is practically impossible to find anyone who
will hew a dead ox or pig. We never settled the hygienic question of
meat-eating at all. This other aspect decided us. I can still
remember, as a boy, the rejoicings over the closing of the last
slaughter-house."
"You eat fish."
"It isn't a matter of logic. In our barbaric past horrible flayed
carcases of brutes dripping blood, were hung for sale in the public
streets." He shrugged his shoulders.
"They do that still in London--in _my_ world," I said.
He looked again at my laxer, coarser face, and did not say whatever
thought had passed across his mind.
"Originally the samurai were forbidden usury, that is to say the
lending of money at fixed rates of interest. They are still under
that interdiction, but since our commercial code practically
prevents usury altogether, and our law will not recognise contracts
for interest upon private accommodation loans to unprosperous
borrowers, it is now scarcely necessary. The idea of a man growing
richer by mere inaction and at the expense of an impoverishing
debtor, is profoundly distasteful to Utopian ideas, and our State
insists pretty effectually now upon the participation of the lender
in the borrower's risks. This, however, is only one part of a series
of limitations of the same character. It is felt that to buy simply
in order to sell again brings out many unsocial human qualities; it
makes a man seek to enhance profits and falsify values, and so the
samurai are forbidden to buy to sell on their own account or for any
employer save the State, unless some process of manufacture changes
the nature of the commodity (a mere change in bulk or packing does
not suffice), and they are forbidden salesmanship and all its arts.
Consequently they cannot be hotel-keepers, or hotel proprietors, or
hotel shareholders, and a doctor--all practising doctors must be
samurai--cannot sell drugs except as a public servant of the
municipality or the State."
"That, of course, runs counter to all our current terrestrial
ideas," I said. "We are obsessed by the power of money. These rules
will work out as a vow of moderate poverty, and if your samurai are
an order of poor men----"
"They need not be. Samurai who have invented, organised, and
developed new industries, have become rich men, and many men who
have grown rich by brilliant and original trading have subsequently
become samurai."
"But these are exceptional cases. The bulk of your money-making
business must be confined to men who are not samurai. You must have
a class of rich, powerful outsiders----"
"_Have_ we?"
"I don't see the evidences of them."
"As a matter of fact, we have such people! There are rich traders,
men who have made discoveries in the economy of distribution, or who
have called attention by intelligent, truthful advertisement to the
possibilities of neglected commodities, for example."
"But aren't they a power?"
"Why should they be?"
"Wealth _is_ power."
I had to explain that phrase.
He protested. "Wealth," he said, "is no sort of power at all unless
you make it one. If it is so in your world it is so by inadvertency.
Wealth is a State-made thing, a convention, the most artificial of
powers. You can, by subtle statesmanship, contrive what it shall buy
and what it shall not. In your world it would seem you have made
leisure, movement, any sort of freedom, life itself, _purchaseable_.
The more fools you! A poor working man with you is a man in
discomfort and fear. No wonder your rich have power. But here a
reasonable leisure, a decent life, is to be had by every man on
easier terms than by selling himself to the rich. And rich as men
are here, there is no private fortune in the whole world that is
more than a little thing beside the wealth of the State. The samurai
control the State and the wealth of the State, and by their vows
they may not avail themselves of any of the coarser pleasures wealth
can still buy. Where, then, is the power of your wealthy man?"
"But, then--where is the incentive----?"
"Oh! a man gets things for himself with wealth--no end of things.
But little or no power over his fellows--unless they are
exceptionally weak or self-indulgent persons."
I reflected. "What else may not the samurai do?"
"Acting, singing, or reciting are forbidden them, though they may
lecture authoritatively or debate. But professional mimicry is not
only held to be undignified in a man or woman, but to weaken and
corrupt the soul; the mind becomes foolishly dependent on applause,
over-skilful in producing tawdry and momentary illusions of
excellence; it is our experience that actors and actresses as a
class are loud, ignoble, and insincere. If they have not such
flamboyant qualities then they are tepid and ineffectual players.
Nor may the samurai do personal services, except in the matter of
medicine or surgery; they may not be barbers, for example, nor inn
waiters, nor boot cleaners. But, nowadays, we have scarcely any
barbers or boot cleaners; men do these things for themselves. Nor
may a man under the Rule be any man's servant, pledged to do
whatever he is told. He may neither be a servant nor keep one; he
must shave and dress and serve himself, carry his own food from the
helper's place to the table, redd his sleeping room, and leave it
clean...."
"That is all easy enough in a world as ordered as yours. I suppose
no samurai may bet?"
"Absolutely not. He may insure his life and his old age for the
better equipment of his children, or for certain other specified
ends, but that is all his dealings with chance. And he is also
forbidden to play games in public or to watch them being played.
Certain dangerous and hardy sports and exercises are prescribed for
him, but not competitive sports between man and man or side and
side. That lesson was learnt long ago before the coming of the
samurai. Gentlemen of honour, according to the old standards, rode
horses, raced chariots, fought, and played competitive games of
skill, and the dull, cowardly and base came in thousands to admire,
and howl, and bet. The gentlemen of honour degenerated fast enough
into a sort of athletic prostitute, with all the defects, all the
vanity, trickery, and self-assertion of the common actor, and with
even less intelligence. Our Founders made no peace with this
organisation of public sports. They did not spend their lives to
secure for all men and women on the earth freedom, health, and
leisure, in order that they might waste lives in such folly."
"We have those abuses," I said, "but some of our earthly games have
a fine side. There is a game called cricket. It is a fine, generous
game."
"Our boys play that, and men too. But it is thought rather puerile
to give very much time to it; men should have graver interests. It
was undignified and unpleasant for the samurai to play conspicuously
ill, and impossible for them to play so constantly as to keep hand
and eye in training against the man who was fool enough and cheap
enough to become an expert. Cricket, tennis, fives, billiards----.
You will find clubs and a class of men to play all these things in
Utopia, but not the samurai. And they must play their games as
games, not as displays; the price of a privacy for playing cricket,
so that they could charge for admission, would be overwhelmingly
high.... Negroes are often very clever at cricket. For a time, most
of the samurai had their sword-play, but few do those exercises now,
and until about fifty years ago they went out for military training,
a fortnight in every year, marching long distances, sleeping in the
open, carrying provisions, and sham fighting over unfamiliar ground
dotted with disappearing targets. There was a curious inability in
our world to realise that war was really over for good and all."
"And now," I said, "haven't we got very nearly to the end of your
prohibitions? You have forbidden alcohol, drugs, smoking, betting,
and usury, games, trade, servants. But isn't there a vow of
Chastity?"
"That is the Rule for your earthly orders?"
"Yes--except, if I remember rightly, for Plato's Guardians."
"There is a Rule of Chastity here--but not of Celibacy. We know
quite clearly that civilisation is an artificial arrangement, and
that all the physical and emotional instincts of man are too strong,
and his natural instinct of restraint too weak, for him to live
easily in the civilised State. Civilisation has developed far more
rapidly than man has modified. Under the unnatural perfection of
security, liberty and abundance our civilisation has attained, the
normal untrained human being is disposed to excess in almost every
direction; he tends to eat too much and too elaborately, to drink
too much, to become lazy faster than his work can be reduced, to
waste his interest upon displays, and to make love too much and too
elaborately. He gets out of training, and concentrates upon egoistic
or erotic broodings. The past history of our race is very largely a
history of social collapses due to demoralisation by indulgences
following security and abundance. In the time of our Founders the
signs of a world-wide epoch of prosperity and relaxation were
plentiful. Both sexes drifted towards sexual excesses, the men
towards sentimental extravagances, imbecile devotions, and the
complication and refinement of physical indulgences; the women
towards those expansions and differentiations of feeling that find
expression in music and costly and distinguished dress. Both sexes
became unstable and promiscuous. The whole world seemed disposed to
do exactly the same thing with its sexual interest as it had done
with its appetite for food and drink--make the most of it."
He paused.
"Satiety came to help you," I said.
"Destruction may come before satiety. Our Founders organised motives
from all sorts of sources, but I think the chief force to give men
self-control is Pride. Pride may not be the noblest thing in the
soul, but it is the best King there, for all that. They looked to it
to keep a man clean and sound and sane. In this matter, as in all
matters of natural desire, they held no appetite must be glutted, no
appetite must have artificial whets, and also and equally that no
appetite should be starved. A man must come from the table
satisfied, but not replete. And, in the matter of love, a straight
and clean desire for a clean and straight fellow-creature was our
Founders' ideal. They enjoined marriage between equals as the
samurai's duty to the race, and they framed directions of the
precisest sort to prevent that uxorious inseparableness, that
connubiality which will reduce a couple of people to something
jointly less than either. That Canon is too long to tell you now. A
man under the Rule who loves a woman who does not follow it, must
either leave the samurai to marry her, or induce her to accept what
is called the Woman's Rule, which, while it excepts her from the
severer qualifications and disciplines, brings her regimen of life
into a working harmony with his."
"Suppose she breaks the Rule afterwards?"
"He must leave either her or the order."
"There is matter for a novel or so in that."
"There has been matter for hundreds."
"Is the Woman's Rule a sumptuary law as well as a regimen? I
mean--may she dress as she pleases?"
"Not a bit of it," said my double. "Every woman who could command
money used it, we found, to make underbred aggressions on other
women. As men emerged to civilisation, women seemed going back
to savagery--to paint and feathers. But the samurai, both men
and women, and the women under the Lesser Rule also, all have a
particular dress. No difference is made between women under either
the Great or the Lesser Rule. You have seen the men's dress--always
like this I wear. The women may wear the same, either with the hair
cut short or plaited behind them, or they may have a high-waisted
dress of very fine, soft woollen material, with their hair coiled up
behind."
"I have seen it," I said. Indeed, nearly all the women had seemed to
be wearing variants of that simple formula. "It seems to me a very
beautiful dress. The other--I'm not used to. But I like it on girls
and slender women."
I had a thought, and added, "Don't they sometimes, well--take a good
deal of care, dressing their hair?"
My double laughed in my eyes. "They do," he said.
"And the Rule?"
"The Rule is never fussy," said my double, still smiling.
"We don't want women to cease to be beautiful, and consciously
beautiful, if you like," he added. "The more real beauty of form and
face we have, the finer our world. But costly sexualised
trappings----"
"I should have thought," I said, "a class of women who traded on
their sex would have arisen, women, I mean, who found an interest
and an advantage in emphasising their individual womanly beauty.
There is no law to prevent it. Surely they would tend to counteract
the severity of costume the Rule dictates."
"There are such women. But for all that the Rule sets the key of
everyday dress. If a woman is possessed by the passion for gorgeous
raiment she usually satisfies it in her own private circle, or with
rare occasional onslaughts upon the public eye. Her everyday mood
and the disposition of most people is against being conspicuous
abroad. And I should say there are little liberties under the Lesser
Rule; a discreet use of fine needlework and embroidery, a wider
choice of materials."
"You have no changing fashions?"
"None. For all that, are not our dresses as beautiful as yours?"
"Our women's dresses are not beautiful at all," I said, forced for a
time towards the mysterious philosophy of dress. "Beauty? That isn't
their concern."
"Then what are they after?"
"My dear man! What is all my world after?"