I had now been led to see that there was a council for the decision

of foreign questions, for it was this that rejected the new idea of

the idlumian mission. I soon came to recognise its domestic functions

as more important than its policy abroad. The latter occupied its

attention only once or twice in a generation. Monthly, almost weekly,

it met to agree on questions and schemes which had no connection with

the world outside of Limanora. Now that I was inspired to attend its

meetings, I felt that it safeguarded the march forward. It never passed

a law; and yet its decisions were as clear, as valid, and as universal

in their effects as if they had been written out, proclaimed, and

printed in a statute-book. All the parents, proparents, and guardians

were members of it, and along with them were associated as silent,

inactive members the young men and women who had matured and had shown

sufficient of the wisdom and virtues of the race to warrant such a

privilege. These latter were in training for full and active membership

many years before their spirit and influence were felt to have bearing

on any decision. On this basis I had been admitted to the meetings.

The scheme of every new book came before this assembly prior to its

publication in Loomiefa. Every new departure on the part of any family

was brought up by its heads to be tested by the feeling of the council.

But it rarely happened that any scheme was rejected; it was, as a

rule, only revised and modified. In fact, every parent or guardian

was so keenly in sympathy with the spirit and genius of the race that

it was almost impossible for any proposal or idea to come from a

family in antagonism to the general welfare and feeling. One feature

that struck me as marking their meetings was the absence of those

searching, flaw-finding criticisms we would have considered absolutely

necessary to progress in the West; every modification suggested was an

improvement or addition readily welcomed by the author and his family.

The council was there to help and develop, and not to be hypercritical

or censorious. Every thinker or inventor was eager to bring his work

before it; instead of fearing its criticism as an ordeal he knew that

his creation would have its true spirit appreciated, and if there was

genuine and original work in it, it would meet with its due; whatever

was likely to aid the race in its forward march would be welcomed and

aided.

Another branch of its duties was the preparation of practical problems

and difficulties which were likely to obstruct the national progress

till they were solved. The council thought over these as they came

up in their minds, and tried to get at their fundamental form or

principle. After having ruminated over them for months, or perhaps

years, it indicated the family in whose province they lay, and handed

them over to it as part of its duty thereafter. In fact, the debatable

borderland between family and family was evidently one of its most

important spheres. Not that any family ever desired to evade what

might be included in its functions or offices, but, on the contrary,

was eager to do all that in it lay for the benefit of the race.

Often, however, spheres overlapped, so that two different families or

individuals were doing the same thing; and it was necessary to define

and apportion the duty of each.

In all the meetings and discussions I came gradually to feel that there

was a dominating spirit that influenced from behind the scenes. I could

see no overt mastery or guidance of the proceedings, yet there was

manifest an organising power within its organism. Schemes and problems

came before it in lucid order and a definite shape leaving no room for

mere idle conjectures. As the treatment of any one proceeded, I could

feel the magnetism of strong, harmonious spirits moulding and bending

the thoughts. I knew that I was in tutelage, although there was no open

dictation or even guidance.

After a time I began to trace the vigorous currents of influence

that swept us on with such force, to the oldest men and women in

the council, those who in Europe would have been thrust aside as

incapable of good advice and as on the borders of second childhood.

I could see a tendency on the part of most members to look to them

for the cue, when thoughts had begun to wander and part company. They

did not claim superior authority, but the deference to their opinion

and instincts was spontaneous and palpable, and often grew into the

deepest reverence. This would never have awakened the notice of an

unsympathetic stranger, so little was the feeling expressed in open

word or act.

In this way I learned, before many years’ experience of the council,

that there was an inner council or cabinet, consisting of all the

elders who had proved themselves able and wise by centuries of

discovery, or invention, or penetrative and far-reaching advice. I

could discover no formal election to it, everything in the shape of

definite constitution or government being manifestly avoided. Age did

not form the qualification for this senate although all the senators

were men and women who could count their years by hundreds. Many who

were older than they still remained outside the charmed circle. It was

rather weight of experience, and the fulness of development resulting

from it, that admitted. Whosoever by living long had made the most of

life in the line of greatest progress was singled out by the reverence

paid to his lofty character and expansive wisdom, for the duty of

piloting the race. It took years of massive growth in personality and

influence to make the community or the man certain that he had been

selected by the national spirit. The responsibility was so onerous that

the wisest shrank for years from it, fearing they had not developed

sufficiently. It was only with reluctance that they at last listened to

the call of their fellows and entered the noblest of all senates. None

sought the honour, but once undertaken, none attempted to shift the

burdens of it onto other shoulders till the nausea of life, indicating

the approach of their mortal liberation, came upon them. No one was

jealous of their authority or influence; for all knew that these they

would have had by virtue of their nature and advance, even if they

had no seat in this inner assembly. And every type of family had its

representative there, the ablest, the wisest, the noblest, generally

the oldest of the group, whether man or woman. For there was great

need in its councils of someone minutely familiar with the practical

functions and duties of every science and art in the island. Sex made

no distinction in the choice; sex was a mere accident in the realm of

reason and wisdom; sometimes the greater brain-power and greater moral

and intellectual development belonged to the male head of the family,

sometimes to the female; and it never entered the minds of this strange

people to discount position or influence because of sex.

In all differences of opinion their decision was final. For everyone

felt that the race could not possibly at that particular stage of

its progress attain to any clearer light upon the subject than this

areopagus had attained. The upholders of the clashing views received

the decision as coming from a tribunal, the most impartial and the

farthest-seeing that could be found on earth. But it was seldom that

any division of view came as far as a controversy which needed the

influence of the elders. Where two individuals or families began to

feel their opinions on any common topic drawing apart, they each made

eager efforts to understand the other’s point of view; and their

neighbours, recognising a discord in the mental atmosphere, came in

with reconciling magnetism and reason. Everyone was too anxious to

have the light of others’ thoughts thrown on the matters he had to

investigate or consider, to reject in haste a view that differed from

his, or to let his own view become unreasoning prejudice. I never

perceived among them any of that bickering or heat which so commonly

attends a misunderstanding in Europe. Long after arriving in the island

I still wondered where their courts of law were; and thought there

must be some secret tribunal that dealt summarily with all disputes. I

came at last to see that there was no need of courts of justice, for

there was never any approach to jarring or litigation; and, most of

all, there was no written law to appeal to. It was one of the primary

principles of their life that any law that needed committal to writing

was either artificial, and so beyond the necessities of the community,

or implied a flaw in the nature of the race demanding instant

attention. Written law, like overt authority, was an evidence of

elements in a community which were alien and had better be eliminated.

Hostile individuals or factions made a body of recorded laws, backed up

by force, a necessity throughout the nations of the world, and rendered

most of them practically unprogressive. Since the great series of

purgations the spirit of the Limanoran community, working through the

electric sense, had been the master of its unity and progress, and it

appeared idle to make or write laws. Every advance it achieved made

every individual at once debtor to it; all moved up to the new level.

The laws, if those principles which were continually being revised and

constantly progressing could be called so, were written in the hearts

and natures of the race; every new amendment of them was the natural

demand of the racial spirit and passed at once through the elders, the

parents, and the guardians into the conscience of all the families and

individuals. Every man was a law to himself, in that he knew and fully

recognised the aim of the community and the part he had to fulfil in

its advance. Those who were still in a state of pupillage had each two

elders as their guarantors and sponsors, who watched the instillation

of the common spirit into them, and any flaw or discord rapidly made

itself felt.

Reason was at the back of every word and act of the Limanorans; a

new feature or thought or discovery had to prove itself worthy and

real before it was accepted. There was no such thing as an appeal to

authority. Everyone knew that he would have to reason out and make

clear the nobleness of what he expected others to believe or agree to.

It was one of the main functions, the most urgent duty, of the two

councils, therefore, to revise the axioms and postulates in which the

national reason found its leverage and to see that they never became

mere prejudices. Every new advance antiquated some principle that had

been taken as axiomatic, or revealed the fallacy that lay in some

pivot-word. Any difference of opinion or of point of view generally set

the inner council on the alert. Not infrequently they found that one

investigator had been misled by a verbal fallacy or a mistaken axiom,

whilst the other had in searching laid his mind open to the light of

truth. They never rejected as trifling or insignificant any divergence

in the views of a common topic, but rather welcomed it as evidence of

some long-hidden flaw in the foundations of their reason.

Another striking feature of this inner council was that their meetings

were open to all but the young and immature. They would have nothing

to do with the secret conclave, which, they held, was the beginning

and principle of despotism. Away from the sunlight of truth and open

thought the most ghastly spiritual diseases of humanity sprang into

being and flourished; thoughts and feelings, otherwise healthy and

unashamed, became sickly, morbid, and often venomous. Resolutions

passed in secrecy need have no assigned reasons, and are soon passed

without discussion and without any reason but the lower private

feelings and prejudices of individual members. A mystery is attached

to the proceedings of such conclaves that gives well-nigh omnipotence

to the terror they instil. Hence until their doom is near they are

by nature and of necessity despotism. To every meeting of the inner

council all active councillors of the larger assembly were welcomed.

But, when present, they kept silence, and preferred to keep silence.

Nay, it was considered a special privilege for one of the senate

to withhold his thoughts from the discussions; silence for a year

or two was the hard-earned reward for years of painfully guarded

responsibility in debate. Not one of them but looked forward to such a

breathing-time for relaxation, so heavy was the care of the future of

the race. To speak was the burden; for speech must be weighty, and the

recording linasans automatically treasured it up for future years to

shed light and criticism on it.

In fact their senate-house was arranged so as to be a vast linasan

itself. Nothing was needed at the end of a meeting but to touch

a spring, and the moving irelium-strip, on which the proceedings

imprinted themselves, was securely fixed on its roll and transferred to

the valley of memories there to be laid past in the archives for future

reference, and a fresh strip took its place ready for the next debate.

Knowing this each senator weighed his every word with the utmost care.

Whatever building was used as a meeting-place for discussion by either

the whole of the people or any section of it had its dome constructed

in such a way as to serve as a collector and magnifier of sound, so

arranged that the sound should not echo back but pass instead into the

receiver of a great linasan and at once indelibly record itself, thus

making every member of the community set a watch upon his lips and

allow only the maturest wisdom to pass them.

The memories of the Limanorans were marvellous in their precision and

tenacity. They could ransack the records of any man’s brain in sleep

with the greatest minuteness, though they did not care to use this

process on anyone beyond the stage of probation and pupillage; it

implied something not unlike prying into the secrets of the nature.

They knew, too, how inexact the senses are in their reports of what

takes place in the world without. Refined and trained as they were,

there was always a liability to error. Whenever exactitude of record

was required they used machine-reporters which never made mistake

except when their gearing was out of order. At all important assemblies

and gatherings they had an instrument called an idrolinasan which

recorded in permanence not merely all that was said or done, but the

electric currents which passed from man to man. Whenever they needed

to verify a memory of the past, the irelium-strip of the particular

occurrence was brought out of the historical archives and placed

in the reversible idrolinasan, and the whole scene flashed vividly

before the senses. Doubtless this custom of machine-recording made

the Limanorans so watchful of all they said and did and thought; and

it was perhaps this as much as any of the wonderful features of their

civilisation that quickened the pace of their personal development in

more recent years. They made every effort their natures were capable

of to think and say and do what was worthy of themselves and their

people. Nothing retards the progress of Western civilisation so much

as the relaxed habit of life that even the best men and women fall

into, when others are not likely to see or hear them. Religion invented

the all-watchfulness of God in order to provide a substitute for the

consciousness of the eyes and ears of others. But it is too distant and

incorporeal to strike a highly materialised civilisation as real; and

the belief acts only for a brief period after it has been impressed

upon the mind. The economy of breath in churches and of evidence in law

courts would be so great if some of those instruments were introduced

into the West, that Europe would not know itself within a few years,

it would develop and progress intellectually and morally with such

rapidity. But the most striking result would appear in politics and

legislation. The machine would influence the speech and action of the

legislators as powerfully as if they believed every moment that the

omni-watchfulness of the deity were as real as the presence of the

Speaker in the chamber. There could be no revisal of its hansardisings;

every politician would be as true, as reverential, as weighed down

with the responsibility of his duties as if he were before the final

judgment-seat.

These machines had had a wonderful effect even upon the advanced

Limanoran polity. Not even a gesture was wasted in their assemblies.

Everything done and said was relevant and weighty. The result was

they acted as if they were one man and their meetings were brief and

effective; where a Western legislature would discuss a scheme or

proposal for years, a few minutes would suffice a Limanoran assembly

to get at the heart of it, and accept or reject it. They seldom

had to retrace their steps; if they did, the error was due to some

mistaken principle accepted in past ages as an axiom, or to some

undetected fallacy in a pivot-word. The proposer of the scheme had the

responsibility of making every feature and consequence of it clear; he

must not, and would not, conceal anything that might militate against

its acceptance; he had discussed it fully with his family, and seen

in their criticisms and suggestions everything that might be amended.

There was, therefore, not a minute lost on defective arrangement or

statement.

It was astonishing how rarely the councils had to meet, and how brief

their meetings were. And this was the reason why I had been so long

in discovering any trace of constitution or polity in their midst.

One of their favourite maxims was that an organism to be healthy must

work without calling attention to itself. And this is truest of all in

politics. The government that is never seen or heard or felt, and yet

has no secrecy or need of secrecy about its proceedings, is the most

efficacious and wholesome. Those loud democracies which occupy most

of their time in discussing themselves and their systems are corrupt

already or on the road to corruption. And monarchies that have to

parade abroad in threats or expeditions are diseased at home and afraid

to become too conscious of their disease. “The minimum of government

attains the maximum of development,” was another of their favourite

sayings. To keep this sentiment living, they led their youth back to

the study of certain periods of their past that they were ashamed of,

called the stagnant ages. Some of them had been republican, others

monarchic, some religious or superstitious, others rationalistic

or sceptical, some warlike, others peaceful. Their one common

characteristic was that the state did everything for the subjects; the

island was a nursery, the citizens were infants; no one ever thought of

taking the initiative in any scheme; whenever anything was needed, the

state had to look after it; the chief duty of a citizen was to talk and

hold meetings and criticise; to act was beyond his province; the state

had to feed and clothe him at last, and to drive him to his work with

the lash. It was the lash that disciplined the army, and urged it on to

battle. The state had within it or in its service the few who retained

activity or energy; and these few knew how to fill their own coffers

better than those of the country. Then came disgrace and disaster.

Prosperity and patriotism and courage vanished in decay before the

universal corruption on the one hand and the senile helplessness on the

other. And all that remained fell an easy prey to the first ambitious

marauder who invaded the island.

There grew up in the breasts of the Limanorans an instinctive fear

of all encroachments of the state on the duties and functions of the

family and the individual; and those who formed the inner council

were as deeply imbued with this feeling as the rest of the citizens.

One of their chief duties was to draw the line with care between

what could best be done by the separate units of the state, and what

by the state as a whole. They safeguarded the independence of the

individual, and encouraged his initiative in order that every tendency

to originality should flourish, and that the capability of meeting

emergencies should grow stronger and stronger. Every man on the island

knew that he must act for himself in innumerable circumstances without

waiting for help or counsel. And the women were trained to be similarly

self-reliant. Readiness of resource, confidence, and courage were

universal characteristics of the people, and they knew from their study

of history, as well as if they had mastered it by experience, that

dependence on the action of all and interference on the part of the

state would gradually destroy these.

It was, of course, the elders who were most keenly alive to this fact.

In their councils they defined with the most exceeding care what might

be done by them without injury to the habit of presence of mind and

spontaneity of action on the part of the individual citizens. What they

had chiefly to look after was the future of the race; and everything

done by the citizen or the family that endangered this had to be

reviewed and corrected by them. But so powerful a private influence had

each elder over every individual of his family that interference in

this respect was seldom needed. The ideals held before the race sank

into the nature of every citizen and guided him in all his actions, if

not now in all his thoughts. The matters that needed most deliberation

were the revisal or expansion of those ideals, and the selection of

pairs for marriage and parenthood; they knew that a mistake in either

of these would lead to incalculable evil, and would necessitate, in

retracing the step, long years of thought and labour besides the most

drastic remedies. The guidance of the great public institutions needed

little counsel or interference, but was almost automatic; everyone

concerned knew by instinct what he had to do and had its interests so

completely at heart that he required no reminder of the details of his

duty. The inspection and review of the various departments were rather

the task of the expert families, and chiefly of their elders, than of

the elders as a whole.

But there was one department for which the inner council or senate was

wholly responsible. This was Rimla, or the centre of force. Mechanical

power was the one thing, they had all along felt, that must belong

to the state and be controlled by the state. All other possessions

(wealth, property, reputation) were mere symbols of it. To let it drift

into the hands of individuals, who might grasp more than was good for

them or even monopolise it, was to endanger the future of the race.

Only the wisest and best and the most imbued with Limanoran ideals were

ever allowed to control the concentrated force of the island. In fact

no one but a member of the inner council could be the master of force,

and his term of control was limited to a few hours at a time, for which

period he was chosen from day to day from amongst the oldest and most

experienced of the nobler-natured. It was the greatest honour the race

could bestow. To be trusted by the whole people with the management

and distribution of that which was the fulcrum of all progress was to

be marked out as one worthy to be divine. When I came to understand

this, I saw the meaning of the reverence, almost awe, with which the

master of force was pointed out to me on my first visit to Rimla. I had

not measured the greatness of his power, or seen that it was far more

real and comprehensive than that of any monarch or despot that had ever

ruled.

Where would their civilisation or their ideals or great future be

without this marvellous concentration of naked energy? What would have

become of the race, had a base ambition or an insane caprice entered

into the thoughts of anyone of their masters of force while he held

the reins of dominion in his hands? It was the duty, therefore, of

everyone who was elected to the office, however often he had held it,

however noble he had proved himself, however trusted he might be by

all, to submit himself the hour before he entered Rimla to the tests of

the inner nature and thoughts that the race knew, and this in presence

of the oldest of the senate. The workings of his brain and heart were

stringently investigated, and after that he was sent to sleep, in

order to have his dreams read and interpreted. If any of the tests

gave dubious answer, he resigned his office and another was chosen in

his place. For almost a generation this had never occurred, yet the

precautions were as rigidly enforced as if the tests had often revealed

defects. For the master of force held in his hands the key of their

civilisation and progress. To the elders all private ends and honours

seemed trivial beside the aim of the race, the only divine thing,

they thought, that they held in their hearts. To have been able to

substitute anything on earth for it even for a moment was to them so

absurd and insane as to appear impossible for any Limanoran. All this

safeguarding of the probity and the sanity of the masters of force was

therefore counted rather as a tribute to the importance of the office

than a slur upon the individual.

It was not that private motive or stimulus had been annihilated. On

the contrary they considered that the chief spur to progress was the

struggle of the individual in competition with his fellows. He who

could attain most rapidly to the ideal set immediately before the race

was a marked and striking personality. To level all means of advance

so as to make them the same for all was to destroy this stimulus to

development. To be respected and at last reverenced by his neighbours

was longed for by every man in the community, and everyone had his own

special faculty and means for gaining such respect and reverence. At

the great purgation of the island’s socialists and thieves, private

property had not been abolished, but only disgraded. The socialists had

been willing to erase all other methods of civilisation and progress

for the sake of the impossible dream, the equalisation of property;

the thieves had been willing to do the same for the sake of the swift

acquisition of their share of it. They kept up an abnormal and morbid

appetite for property which raised it completely out of scale and

proportion, compared with the other symbols of power and means of

advance. It became a disease that perverted their whole view of life,

and nothing wholesome could be done till they were expelled. After

their expulsion it was found that property lost its importance, and the

word “fortune” ceased to be identified with its acquisition. It fell

to its natural and true position in the scale of means of development.

The motive that the socialists had most prominently put forward for

their schemes, the benefit of their poverty-stricken and starving

brethren, had long become too artificial to hoodwink the wiser

patriots. Not since the barbarous stage of their past had bare

subsistence been a struggle and aim in the race. They had become too

provident to allow population to outrun means or demand. There never

had been for centuries anyone who needed his neighbour or the state to

aid him with food or clothing or other of the vital necessaries. If

there had, he would have been too deeply ashamed of his mismanagement

of his life, or his improvidence, to allow anyone to know of it. The

arrangements of the state and the carefully proportioned size of the

population left no room for him to throw the blame on others. The body

of the people laughed at the socialists for the patent absurdity of

their pretext, and helped the wise leaders to drive them out. Even if

this motive had been the real one, to disorganise the whole political

and social system, and to throw overboard the aim of the race for the

sake of securing a beggarly pittance for feebler folk who ought not

to have been brought into the world, and ought not to be allowed to

perpetuate their kind, was a monstrous waste of vital power. There had

become deeply implanted in them a racial instinct that no step should

ever be taken which could in any way weaken or endanger the sense of

individual responsibility. They knew that no amount of self-sacrifice,

no kind of guaranty of certain subsistence on the part of the workers

in the state, would ever make true and good citizens of those who had

lost this.

Even when they had come to have a far more comprehensive and

scientific command of the problem of population, and when the

communising of property would have led to no evil results, they refused

to think of such a measure. Every man was allowed to accumulate as

much wealth as he desired. But none had now the ambition to accumulate

it. And as soon as communication with the neighbouring islands was cut

off, commerce ceased, and with it all opportunity for growing opulent.

Everyone had enough for his needs, and these were great in a country

so rich in resources and devices and so rapid in its development. The

family safeguarded the solvency of every member of it, as it guaranteed

his capacity to do competent work for the state and for himself. The

state demanded nothing that could be called taxation from the citizens;

part of their time, ability, and work was all that it required. But

it was one of the methods of showing patriotism to give freely to the

state.

It was indeed one of the chief reasons for the retention of private

property that it allowed of an easy and ever available means of

cultivating benevolence. Personal work was a limited thing, and could

be given in aid of others only at fixed places and times and in defined

quantities. But if it could be concentrated in private possessions,

then there was ready at all times and places and in any quantity the

power of helping others. Without it generosity and self-sacrifice would

have to mourn their petty limitations. With it benignity was ever in

exercise, and remained an active and vital habit in the community. If

the state possessed all and demanded all, then the citizens were little

better than slaves; their virtues had no freedom, no exercise, and

were bound to disappear. To get as much as they could, to sate their

appetites as fully as they could, was the only competition amongst

neighbours in such a condition of affairs. The blessedness of giving

help spontaneously would never be experienced and would vanish from the

community, and in its train sympathy, beneficence, humanity.

The competition in Limanora was in giving, not in getting, though

getting was one of the conditions and bases of giving. It is true

that the advance of the race had almost superseded this palpable

method of revealing the bounty of the spirit. In former ages, when

hypocrisy was still possible, and language and smiles were too cheap

and ready a treasury to be wholly trusted as evidence of kindly intent,

private property enabled a man to give a trustworthy guaranty of his

generosity; the only other things he could sacrifice, work, liberty,

life, were too personal and too limited in opportunity to be symbols

of a bounteous heart. Now men and women needed no outer symbol to

interpret and pledge their thoughts and feelings. Everyone knew the

soul of his neighbour as he knew his own, and hypocrisy was a lost art,

having been long ago stripped of its motive.

This singular people retained the institution of private property,

fearing the apathy and languor that fall upon the energies of a

socialistic people. They had far higher stimuli to competitive vigour

in the devotion to progress and to the aim of the race, but they were

not so foolish as to abandon the more material stimuli. Everything that

would contribute to progress they retained, everything that would tend

to quicken the pace. Nor were they yet so far away from the more animal

stage of their civilisation as to be wholly rid of the fear of its

return. Should it return, the other motives, even that of patriotism,

would be so shadowy as to be impotent against the deluge of appetite

and indolence if the material competitive principle, the system of

private property, had been abolished. To avoid the risk of such a doom

as had fallen on Tirralaria, they refused to communise possessions. And

a certain sweetness of imagination, of memory, and of harmless romance

had hallowed the system in their minds; without it they would have felt

a distinct depreciation of life that would not have found compensation

in any advantage its abolition might have brought.

The evils that seemed to attach to the system in other times and

nations attached to all other symbols of power as well: birth,

position, influence, reputation, character, talent, opportunity, luck.

All that tended to differentiate one man from another and raise him

in the scale of the use of power was open to the same charge as the

institution of private property. But early in their reforming career

the Limanorans had discovered that the evils that seemed to attach to

these features of human life were not inherent in them; they arose from

the passions of envy and jealousy. As long as these had possession of

men’s hearts, the levelling process could never be final.

Communities that made the attempt to plane down human society to a

common level, and to equalise all symbols and opportunities of power

had an infinite task before them. They really began at the wrong end

and struck at the accidental consequences of what they thought an evil,

instead of getting to the root and source. The Limanorans had wisely

set themselves to bleach their natures of envy and jealousy; and once

this was accomplished they found that inequalities amongst them were,

instead of being an evil, the greatest good, the keenest stimulus of

progress. They smiled at the farce that went on in Tirralaria, a

farce that at intervals culminated in tragedy. They saw the inherent

futility of all efforts to do away with the occasions of envy and

jealousy, instead of eradicating the passions themselves. They compared

socialistic and equalising schemes to bailing out the ocean with a

sieve.

The disadvantages and abuses of private property and of all inequality

in the symbols of power vanish with the opportunity and the desire

to flaunt them in the faces of neighbours and rivals, to use them as

appeals to envy and jealousy. As a rule it is in small communities and

circles and narrow localities, where every man in almost every movement

kicks up against some neighbour, that envy and jealousy reach their

most virulent development and acquire the greatest refinement in the

use of their weapons. But that is in small communities that form parts

of wider arenas of ambition, and so learn arrogance and scorn of their

surroundings. Where a limited society lives, isolated from alien and

ambitious neighbours, a simple and unambitious life, it is generally

found to be almost free from the meaner emotions, envy, jealousy, and

their counterparts, disdain, pride, and insolence. Amongst them there

is little need of coercion or law or government; the more primitive

virtues of honesty, truth, loyalty, courage, come to them by nature;

the family eradicates or conceals all symptoms of lapse from them, all

rebellion against the interests of all. The great drawback to such

commonweals is that they are not progressive; they remain centuries

in one stage of civilisation, and seem to travellers from larger and

advancing nations mere savages buried in filth, and enslaved to the

despotism of the seasons. But this people considered such superficially

embruted communities nearer to ultimate salvation than the highly

refined nations that exhibit a medley of wealth and starvation,

militarism and religion. The maximum of government, they held, implied

the minimum of progress; for the essentials of spiritual advance are

ignored by external administration.

A long experience of all types of body politic, and a minute

knowledge and study of the history of the world, had made this people

antagonistic to every form of great empire. In their own far past

they had known the ambition to incorporate other peoples, and extend

the bounds of their dominion over the world. But that was in periods

that were stagnant or retrogressive in the essentials of a noble

civilisation. Great empires are able to concentrate vast resources;

but they spend them all on pomp, administration, and war. Wherever the

world is parcelled out into huge nations, there is no chance of freeing

them from the slavery of omnivorous armaments. Each is a threat to

the freedom of the others, and none dares disarm, or spend her wealth

on the arts of peace, lest the others should take advantage of her

unwarlike attitude. The only progress continues to be in the size and

the equipment of the armies, and in the ingenuity of the instruments of

destruction. And, should two or three absorb the others, the military

vigilance has to be all the greater. Even if the impossible should

occur, and one great empire should absorb the world, the internal

militarism would be none the less; half of mankind would have to be

employed in keeping the other half from rebellion against the central

power. Huge empires, instead of being guaranties of peace, are direct

incentives to war, or at least to a permanent warlike attitude.

What has most obstructed human progress on its civilised levels is an

inevitable tendency at a certain stage to mass into large aggregates;

that is, when there has been considerable accumulation of wealth or an

exceptional development of commerce, and protection is needed by the

wealthy or the merchants. Then the military element gains the mastery

of all natural power, and whilst there occurs a rapid evolution of all

forms of aggression and defence and of all the virtues connected with

them, there is real retrogression; the spirit dwindles as the outer

integuments bloom. Militarism only perpetuates itself and protects

nothing but its own ambitions. It is in its last analysis a subtle

fusion of histrionicism and savagery; it attracts the same tastes

as the prize-ring and the theatre. Everything that encourages it or

develops it stands in the way of the true advance of the human race.

There is, they held, no hope for mankind in general, unless this

stage of imperial ambitions and aggregations can be overleaped. Back

must the world recede from vast empires if it would attain to any

nobleness of aim, or any development of the higher elements in man.

Its sole salvation lies in small communities covering its surface and

remaining free from the taint of imperial effort and militarism. Only

when the nation has complete command of the numbers within it through

the family, that is, when the nation is small, will patriotism become

commensurate with humanity, and the true goal of the human race be the

aim of the individual.

The family is the natural unit of administration in a community; and,

as long as the heads form the common council that watches the interests

and aim of all, it can never come into conflict with national unity

and progress. The house and its goods belonged to the household in

Limanora; and, although the members of it had equal rights to the

livelihood that was counted fullest and best by the community, the

individual, if mature, had freedom of action that would surprise a

Western freeman; he was the equal of all members of the state; within

the aim of the race and the path of its progress he had complete

personal initiative; his destiny, it is true, had been shaped for him

during his pupillage, but the fulfilment of it was his own; his aims

and desires had been implanted and developed and pruned whilst he was

passing through childhood and youth, so that he would not in full

manhood spontaneously change them, but when he became an independent

citizen his methods of fulfilling these were all his own. He had to

contribute to the family treasury what was needed to keep it level

with Limanoran affluence, and he was generally eager to give more; but

all the rest was at his own disposal. The family had many buildings

in common; but each full-grown member, whether male or female, had a

separate house to retire to. Originality in the family, one of the

chief methods in the race for encouraging progress, could never be

attained without cultivating originality in the individual. It had a

track laid out for it through the future, carefully related to the

march of the nation; but it might adopt what means it liked to make

that track sure, and it might explore on all sides of it for new ideas

and methods and resources. It was the same with the individual within

it; he was encouraged to find his own means, and to use his imagination

and his other faculties fully and independently, provided he kept his

eye on the goal of the family, which was involved in the goal of the

race.

All the families were equal in their relations to the state, whatever

their occupation or wealth or origin might be. This prevented the

family from passing into the rigidity of the caste. All work was alike

honoured, and personal worth was the test of the man and of the respect

paid him, irrespective of external symbols and representatives of

power. And to prevent the supersession of this by any other principle,

all the physical forms of toil that might at one time or other be

considered offensive, were gathered into the hands of the state, and

all men and women had to take their share of them. They were the duties

connected with the various public institutions, and especially with

the centre of force. It was recognised as a good thing that every man

and woman should have physical exercise every day in order to keep the

basis of the spirit in the best possible condition, by working off the

débris of the various organs and functions of the system. This fitted

in with the principle that all force should concentrate in the hands of

the government. The most severe physical toil was certain to be that

which collected, divided, and adapted the vast accumulation of energy

in Rimla. The duties in the centre of force were therefore portioned

out day by day and week by week; and every man and woman of the

community had to spend a certain portion of time each day in this vast

forge of energy. But the lighter work was given to the less muscular,

and the youthful had to bear the chief burden; whilst the older, as

their share, were occupied chiefly in superintending it. Besides this,

every citizen had to take daily part in the work of some one of the

public institutions that were not assigned to special families, or in

the mechanical and unskilled toil of one of those that were under the

care of special families. Thus two or three hours of every citizen’s

twenty-four were impounded by the state, much to his bodily and

spiritual advantage.

The only contribution in money or kind that the state made compulsory

was that which each family exchequer gave for the support of the

medical, architectural, and other public professional families. No

valid system could have estimated the value of their services either to

the state or to the individual; and it was considered impracticable to

valuate the benefits received by each family from their work. An amount

was fixed, which each had to contribute to every family that had the

care of a public institution, or the performance of a public duty. But

over and above this amount the voluntary gifts to them were very large.

The result was that the treasuries of public and professional families

were oftenest the fullest; and they were as ready and as able to give

as any. If there was any rivalry amongst the families and individuals

in Limanora, it was in the delight of giving.

CHAPTER X

THE MANORA AND THE IMANORA

WHAT would have been considered taxes in another state were looked on

by the people of this land as voluntary contributions. There had been

no formal resolution or written law fixing necessary imposts, but they

came rather from the heart of the people, and expressed themselves

in what would have been called in other nations public opinion. It

was opinion which needed no verbal communication and might be called

rather the public magnetism of the race, that unified its customs and

feelings, and made a body of written law superfluous.

One feature of their civilisation that puzzled me for many years was

the seeming immobility of their public relationships. When a man or

woman got into a certain family with its professional duties and

prospects, there was no means, it seemed to me, of changing. Once in

a certain groove, a Limanoran was in it for ever. His destiny was

irrevocable. It is true that the elders took every precaution to choose

his parents and ancestry for such a goal, and to mould his tissues and

educate his faculties to it. Yet some inspiration might reveal to him

a vista into a future better suited to his powers than that which had

been fixed for him. It is true that this feature gave great stability

and strength to the state. But a people that believed so firmly in

liberty, originality, and progress should surely have adopted some more

plastic system for their permanent relationships, some status less

rigid and immutable for the individual members. It seemed to me more

like the iron system of caste than the flexibility of an advancing

civilisation.

As usual I was mistaken in my criticism. I had not looked deeply

enough, or observed long enough to know the marvellous fabric of their

polity, a full knowledge of which meant an experience of several

centuries. The immutability was only in appearance and not in reality.

A few years after I had been admitted to some of the privileges of

mature citizenship, I began to feel that we were approaching an

exceptional time. There was evident a bustle of preparation, a rare

quickening of the pace of all work, and an expectancy that pointed

to some unusual event. The flight-exercises and the leisure-time

were somewhat curtailed, and as much work was put into four weeks as

was commonly put into five. Before the year was half over, I began

to understand what it meant. The word Manora occurred too often on

the lips and in the minds of my neighbours and friends to escape my

observation and on inquiry I found it meant the decennial review. Every

ten years, one quarter of the year was devoted to a census of the

civilisation of the period.

With all the other newly matured citizens, I had to be instructed

in the part I was to take in this census. Each day for months I had

to devote some hours to tracing out the progress I had made both in

character and in works, and in putting it into graphic and easily

observed form. I was taught to draw up comparative statistics of the

stages I had passed through from year to year for the decennial period,

though they considered this a poor and misleading mode of reviewing the

past. It was the mere skeleton of the census.

I was supplied from the valley of memory with irelium-strips, whereon

had been recorded automatically without my knowledge my thoughts and

feelings and words in the various important scenes in which I had taken

part. How surprised was I often to observe the mistakes my memory had

fallen into! As a witness of some act I had seen, or some discussion

I had heard, I would have sworn confidently to the opposite of the

truth. As to my own deeds and words and even thoughts and feelings,

I was ashamed to see how completely my subsequent life had distorted

the record of them; the likeness was often unrecognisable. And I knew

well which was wrong; for the machine-reporters were infallible as far

as their report went. After my perusal of these automatic records of

my life I came to the conclusion that common history must be a tissue

of fiction and error wherever it has had to depend on the senses and

memory of men for its details. I grew less and less inclined to add

anything from memory to my decennial biography, which I drew from these

machine-reports. It was as refreshing to study them as if I had been

examining pictures and memorials of another’s life. By the time I had

done with them, I seemed to know something real of my past; and side

by side I was able to place my review of what I had become, and the

account of my various stages of growth during this period, with the

definiteness and accuracy of one who was analysing scientifically half

a dozen different evolutionary specimens of a species. My personality

stood out at each different point of its growth as clearly as if it

had been that of another man laid under the microscope and in these

records I lived my life over again.

But I was still further aided in these researches into my development

by the accounts of the weekly inspection of my tissues and faculties

kept by the medical families. These were not merely statistical and

verbal, but pictorial. The appearance and electric state of every

part of my system had been made to impress themselves indelibly in

picture-records; and these were now submitted to me for comparison.

From the different records set side by side with the electrographs and

radiographs of all my animal economy, I was taught how to produce an

evolutionary picture of my faculties and organs and tissues.

This was one of the most striking advances in their art. They could

combine the pictorial representations of various stages in the life

of a growing being in such a way that, when placed in one of their

lightning-swift representers, the growth would flash before one’s

senses as a continuity. A child would grow as by magic into a matured

man or woman as we gazed. A seed would grow into a great tree in the

space of a few minutes. The brain or heart or lungs of a Limanoran

would pass like a flash through the stages of development that had

taken generations to achieve. For spectacular study of the history of

any living thing nothing could surpass the imataran, or focusser of

history, as the new instrument was called.

From the archives of the medical family I was able to make such a

series of pictures of my whole constitution and system as revealed

the growth of every faculty and organ and tissue. The rapidity of

my development astounded me as I looked over these graphic records

of my past. It was like a full-grown man inspecting the photographs

and annals of his infancy and childhood. I could not have believed

the story of it, had it not been engraved so indubitably on these

irelium-strips by the machine-reporters. My own memory had become

so foreshortened by the consciousness of my present, and by the

disproportionate importance of recent events and conditions that I

could have no more implicit trust in its representations of the past.

But, when I placed the various series of evolutionary pictures in the

imataran, the effect was so magical that I was half-inclined to believe

in preference my backward-looking faculty again. In the twinkling of

an eye the transparent reflection of myself had grown its ten years’

growth, and I had developed out of an alien into something not unlike a

Limanoran.

All that I had done in the period, or rather all that I had done

productively, I had similarly to picturise in series, so that every

feature that had been in any way developed might reveal itself, and

everything that showed stagnation or retrogression might be observed

without trouble.

My proparents and the elders of the family superintended and tested

my review of my past, and taught me to be unbending in criticism of

myself. No feature that seemed to count against my advance was I to

shrink from representing in all its nakedness, nor was I through

false modesty to depreciate whatsoever stood to my credit. I scarcely

needed the precautions; for I had learned during my sojourn amongst

this rigidly sincere and ingenuous people to respect the naked truth

above all things. Indeed I had come to feel that it was useless to

act otherwise than as if my whole system were open to the gaze of my

neighbours.

Every mature member of the community had this drastic valuation of his

work and strict criticism of himself to make and all were occupied

for three months in reducing the annals of their past ten years to

focus. For the young and those still under tutelage the proparents and

guardians were responsible, and they picturised for the imataran the

decennial life of their pupils as well as of themselves.

But over and above this personal work, the elders had to review the

growth of the families, institutions, sciences, and arts of which they

had the guidance. This they knew well how to do from long practice,

and had carefully prepared the records of each separate year of the

decennium, and the pictures of the new features and new growths in the

departments they superintended. During these three months all they had

to do was to focus the growth of the years and arrange the various

records in series in such a way as to reveal the development.

When all was ready, each family gathered in its public spectacular

hall and viewed the growth of every member of it in the shadows

thrown by the imataran. I thought at first that the effect would be

too monotonous to be interesting. But, as the spectacle of the Leomo

proceeded, it proved to be a marvellous revelation of the vast variety

of types in one family, and of the amount of growth that had gone on in

the tissues and faculties of every member in different directions.

The growth of the family as a whole was taken first,--its power of

coping with new problems and of suggesting difficulties to come, its

additions to the treasury of force and to the civilisation of the race,

its attitude toward the aim of the nation, its pace on the forward

march, its comprehension of the Limanoran ethics and of the general

problems of the race, its command over its individual members, and its

relationships to the other families and to the state as a whole. The

decennial development of the Leomo was graphically focussed in pictures

that told their story in a flash even to the least mature.

Massed thus, the advance was felt by all to be surprising, for each had

been watching throughout the decennium his own special work or set of

faculties, and had been unable to abstract himself sufficiently from

his own sphere to gain a just view of the whole family progress. As

we saw the science and the art develop before our eyes, the moment’s

glance intensified the ten years’ work into a marvel. From a hundred

different points of view we watched the advance of the Leomo, and we

felt proud that we belonged to such a family; we knew that taken as

a whole it had not been wanting in its duty to the race and the aim

of the race. A magnetic thrill went through us, especially when there

unrolled before us the living picture of the preceding decennium; the

contrast between the two in pace of development was striking. Here and

there of course we recognised flaws in the work accomplished during

our recent period, when seen against the design of the whole. But we

gathered from the spectacle fresh hope and energy for the future, and

renewed determination to increase the pace still more during the next

period.

We shrank a little perhaps from the next stage of the spectacle, for it

meant the decennial confession of every one of us all. The family as

a whole acted the priest, and before it we each laid the story of our

failures and successes, our deeds of virtue and our sins. The ordeal

was less trying than I had anticipated, for the critic was lenient and

sympathetic. If the lapse was slight, the source of it was tenderly

pointed out by the elders and the remedy indicated; and the stronger

members formed resolves to lend their strength to the lapser to master

his weakness; everything that was possible, he felt sure, would be

done to help the laggard faculty or tissue to recoup its powers and

bring itself even with the march of the family. If the lapse was great,

the case was sympathetically placed before the council of elders,

which investigated the question whether it was due to their mistaken

choice of a career for the youth (it was generally a youth that failed

strikingly), or whether it had come from some changed faculty or tissue

in him; if it were the former, he was aided in deciding what change in

his career would be best for him; if the latter, he was dealt with as

an invalid, and in the hospital for spiritual diseases the curative

powers of the nation were applied to his case. Sometimes his disease

originated in atavism, and then the most drastic remedies, both

physical and spiritual, were brought to bear; sometimes it was found

to come from a new microscopic parasite that had floated from some

far atmosphere into the Limanoran arena; and then all the wisdom and

science of the race had to be brought into requisition to investigate

the conditions of the new foe and the possible means of driving it out.

This indeed was the time for anyone who had made a mistake to retrace

his steps. Here it was that the seeming rigidity of the system was

tempered and rendered flexible and plastic as nature herself. Ten

years was but a point in the continuity of the force in a man, in the

great expansion of Limanoran life. But it was enough to make sure that

a mistake in the choice of a career was real, not merely apparent,

and that the longing for another was not a mere caprice. A shorter

period would not have been test enough; and the review of all careers

prevented undue proportion being given to any individual failure

or mistake. It was not infrequent for youths who thought that they

had mistaken their career, to change their minds at the Manora, and

acknowledge that, all things considered, the wisest course had been

chosen for them; they came to see that their work was not so defective

as they had imagined, and that they had contributed their due quota

to the advance of the family and the race; against the background of

the whole science or art in which they toiled, they recovered tone

and hope, and the pride they felt in the progress of all stirred them

to new exertions in their own special work. It was as much the aim of

the elders in these Manoras to give new enthusiasm in the careers that

had been chosen as to revise the scheme of careers. The primary aim

was to remove the sense of bondage that might grow up in the breasts

of any from the feeling of inevitableness and unchangeableness in the

development of their lives. It was rare indeed that a real failure

ever occurred. But none the less a sense of failure might seize

upon a timid or self-depreciative mind, and then the knowledge that

there could be no turning back would send it rankling home into the

soul. Circumscription to a course, if irrevocable, is none the less

incarceration that it is a course selected by ourselves. A Limanoran

never felt enslaved to his career. He knew he had made his choice,

and that he might make it again if he showed sufficient reason. The

result of this atmosphere of complete freedom was that not once in a

generation was any career, once deliberately selected, changed. The

elders were fully justified in the elaborate choice of ancestry and

parents, and in the still more elaborate pains taken in the choice

of surroundings and in training. Misgivings and hesitations all

disappeared in the full light of the decennial review.

It was marvellous how the magnetic sympathy of the family, as the

spectacular confessional spread life after life before the gaze of all,

eradicated timidities, and strengthened each member in the path he had

chosen. Instead of having his little defects emphasised or exaggerated,

all the merits of his work were brought out. I took new courage and

hope, as I felt the air of impartial esteem over the excellencies of

each member’s development and of sympathetic sorrow and condolence

over any evidence of failure or retrogression. Not a sign was there of

censorious or captious criticism. Nor was there anything of that barter

of laudation and panegyric which makes mutual-admiration societies so

unwholesome in their effects. All was subdued, gentle, reasonable,

wise, and sympathetic, and the most healthful and invigorating of all

tonics to everyone. From what I had looked forward to as an ordeal I

came away refreshed and strong, determined to amend everything that

could be deemed faulty in my life, and to quicken my pace in marching

towards the goal of the race.

The national review of every family’s progress was somewhat similar,

except that the larger arena and the greater volume of magnetism in

the audience stirred a deeper thrill in the natures of the individual

members. It was held in Loomiefa, and it took many days to view the

whole spectacle of the nation’s decennial work. Nothing have I ever

seen so varied, disciplinal, and impressive. It was as if ten thousand

years of the whole world’s progress had been focussed in this valley.

Science after science, art after art, graphically displayed all

that it had achieved during the period. To me it seemed a universal

education; and it strained all my faculties to follow the marvellous

array of inventions and discoveries, whilst my neighbours and comrades

drank the whole spectacle in with an ease that in other circumstances

would have made me envious. It was not the fault of the masters and

makers of the display that I followed it with difficulty, for they

had made every feature clear even to the least mature. What puzzled

me was the logical sequence or interdependence of the various parts

of the spectacle. Everything had been worked out so as to reveal its

relationship to the whole system and to the aim of the race, and to

comprehend it tested all my powers. I felt as if I had to study a great

encyclopædia in a few days, or rather its pictorial representation of

every feature of the most advanced and intricate civilisation. But even

this analogy is inadequate, for the phases of the many-sided progress

were not mechanically arranged, but grew out of the central system

by a natural and rational magic. The work of every family revealed

its central principles and their connection with the advance of the

race. It looked as if some master-mind had sat through the years, and

watching the nation’s work as it was being accomplished, kept it all in

system. We felt that there was one design in the progress of the whole

period, and that any feature that stood out in independence marred the

symmetry, and needed correction.

I remembered the waste of energy that took place in all intellectual

spheres in Europe, and felt ashamed of the contrast. I could have told

this people of the futile skirmishings and endless controversies of the

men of science and learning, of their duplications of each other’s work

with the consequent clutchings after fame, of their assumptions and

merely verbal distinctions, of their thickets of abstruse definitions

and ambiguities, of their everlasting substitutions of theory for fact.

I never felt so conscious of the shortcomings of the civilisation which

had nurtured me as during the array of Limanoran decennial progress in

sciences and arts.

After the spectacle was over, we returned to our usual employments. But

I observed that there were now more frequent meetings of the elders for

several months, and at last we had as the result of their discussion of

the review and its aspects a considerable rearrangement of our work,

and of our positions in the family and in the state. Most proceeded

on the path they had been taking during the previous period. But many

found themselves now at work more congenial to their temperaments and

destinies, and were able to put into it their whole energy rid of the

friction that the artificial application of will had meant. The changes

occurred almost naturally and spontaneously; each elder returned to his

family from the final meeting of the senate over the Manora, and it was

known without effort or command or waste of time who had to modify his

position and work, and how the modification was to be accomplished.

The impetus given to the civilisation by this loosening of any bonds

which had been begun to be felt sent it on with exhilaration and

vigour for years. There was an air of buoyant freedom and alacrity,

even of mirth amongst the younger, as they spent their best skill

and capacity upon the work they had in hand. The pace perceptibly

quickened, and at times the nation seemed to advance with the volume

and swiftness of a torrent. Discovery and invention became fuller as

well as more minute, and the outlook began to take in regions of which

they had not thought before.

I soon came to know that there was a more comprehensive and

far-reaching evaluation of the resources, the faculty, and the

personnel of the race ahead of us. Every tenth decennium there occurred

the event of the century, the Imanora or prospicient review. Ten years

made too short a period to give a bird’s-eye view of the future as

contrasted with the past. Even a century was short enough for the

perspective of past and future progress; but it was considered wise to

make the period fixed and of regular recurrence, and ten decenniums

formed a space symmetrical with the shorter Manora. The Imanora was

thus a centennial review. Tendencies that might be ambiguous in their

character under a decennial criticism would proclaim themselves evil

or good in so long a stretch as a hundred years. Faculties that would

still be but in embryo after a course of ten years would be in full

maturity when a century had passed. Young men and women, who might

still hesitate within a decade as to whether they had chosen their best

career, would have found by the Imanora what was their true bent beyond

the possibility of mistake.

But it was not meant merely as a review of the past and a rearrangement

of positions, as the Manora was above all things. It was rather a

revision of aims and destinies, a futuritive evaluation of the powers

of the race. Not merely the elders but the whole people were led up

to a mount of vision whence they could see their future for hundreds

of years spread out before them, bounded by the lines their past had

drawn. There they could view in picture the solutions of the problems

they had been working at and the final outcome of the lines of

development they had been following. They had to decide there and then

how far these agreed with the ultimate aim and destiny of the race,

and how far they had better modify them, or modify the general aim.

Then they had to choose whether their path should turn to the right or

left, or should continue onwards as it had continued for a century. The

spectacle of their future spread out in living picture and symbol must

have been a deeply impressive sight. Every family had prepared a series

of tableaux of their possible destinies and the possible developments

of their sciences and arts, of the problems they would have to solve,

and of their possible solutions, and these were passed in detail

before the whole people for criticism and appreciation. It was as if

a nation were led to the cave of some great and true prophet, and

were shown all that lay before it, whatsoever path it should choose.

The Limanorans had before them the choice of a destiny for a hundred

years. It was the care of the elders that no ambiguity or disproportion

should be admitted into the map of the possible routes that they might

take through the future, and that there should be no obscurity in the

relationships of these to the ultimate goal.

During the last decade of the century the Loomiamo and the Fraloomiamo

were the busiest of all the families in the island. Their exceptional

development of imagination made them essential to the preparation of

every map of the future. They seemed to be able to see where others

found only night and darkness. Each science and art often awoke to

perceive its way barred by some hill of difficulty, round or over

which they could discover no way; then the members of the Loomiamo who

had made special study of its path were called in to point out the

possible tracks that might lead past the obstacle. Or again a family

would find the way of its science or art untraceable; they would

grope blindly about for it and yet see no farther than the facts and

methods immediately before them. Here the help of the Fraloomiamo was

indispensable; a thousand different way-marks would soon be apparent,

and the route of future development would grow plain.

The pioneering families were the heroes of the Imanora, although most

of the hard work belonged to those who watched over the individual

sciences and arts. Nothing could be done without them, and the

exhilaration of trust in them and need of their services gave

extraordinary vigour to their special faculty. The close of a century

was one of the great autumns of their literature; their harvests at

that era were marked by fulness and wealth, and the pace of their work

gave it exceptional fervour and glow. In the West we should have called

the passionate ardour with which they threw off scheme after scheme,

inspiration of the highest order. But they knew the working of their

faculty as well as any of the inventors knew the intricacies of their

machines. There was nothing mysterious about it. Their clear knowledge

of its constitution and of the conditions that favoured its growth

made it easy for them to predict when its pace and volume would be

torrential, and every preparation was made by the pioneering families

to meet the exceptional drain on their energies at the close of every

century.

Loomiefa was then the scene of the most striking prefigurant displays

that the human mind could conceive. The resources of Limanoran skill

and ingenuity were brought to bear on it, and nothing was left

undone to impress the event upon the imaginations and memories of

the younger, for the elders expected that it would thus mould the

natures of the coming generation through the minds of the prospective

parents. The world as it might be, if certain lines of development were

followed, was pictured in the most impressive way possible; and to this

people, it seemed to me, everything was possible. The Imanora had the

sublimity and transcendent consecration of a great religious departure,

whose significance was fully foreseen.

CHAPTER XI

ETHICS

I AFTERWARDS found that Imanora necessarily differed from Imanora

as widely as age from age or man from man, it being as it was the

universal outlook of so progressive a people. What one centennial mount

of vision foresaw as a possibility the next viewed as an accomplished

fact. What one century peered into the darkness to descry, another

brought into the daylight of achievement, and a third antiquated.

But there were other and wider differences than this I have stated.

Though all phases of the civilisation were reviewed in relation to

the future, generally one phase took prominence and gave character

to each Imanora. In the earlier periods, after the purgations, the

physiological and biological sciences and arts predominated; for the

elders were most anxious then to bring the physical basis of their

life up to the level of quickening progress. Then came the periods

specially devoted to advance in chemistry and physics and the other

sciences and arts that gave them new power over the outside world. One

century was the great astronomical period, when the imagination of the

race stretched out with yearning to other stars. Another was the great

inventive era, when it seemed as easy as a dream to make new machines

which should open out wide prospects of additional conquest over nature

and humanity.

In the more recent centuries ethics had again come to the front,

new points of view having been shown by the great discoveries and

inventions of many centuries. The first Imanora after the series of

purgations was complete had been predominantly ethical. The race had

bent its attention so exclusively upon the crimes and vices which had

hindered their advance for ages, that they could think of almost no

other development than the ethical. The elders had been investigating

for years little else than the defects in the moral nature, their bases

in the physical system, and the methods of remedying them. They had

come to the conclusion after all their researches that nothing could

be done for the cure of the minor vices till the most vicious and

defective characters had been cleared out. A systematic purification

of the commonweal must precede attempts at moral reform. Most of the

purgations were managed by wise and cautious diplomacy; the bait of

more than their share of the wealth of the island in portable form,

and the chance of a new country in which to indulge their vice to

license, induced them to ship off to a distance. Only a few needed

forcible measures to make them remove. The lying and hypocritical, the

licentious, the envious and jealous, the boastful and the epicurean,

the religiously intolerant and superstitious, readily seized the

opportunity of seeking a country where they might make their own laws

and shape their customs to suit their special weakness. The warlike

and murderous and the thievish and socialistic thought they could

force a still better bargain; they had strong inner doubts whether

they would be likely to have as fine an arena for their talents in a

new country, and whether they would make the best companions for one

another. An increase of the inducement had little effect on them; they

felt that their special vices would lose half their attraction when

removed from the presence of the contrasted and shrinking virtues.

Much of the pleasure of a murder or a theft lay in the necessity for

its concealment, and the ingenuity required to evade punishment.

The occupations ceased to be fine arts as soon as they became the

occupations of the whole community. To these criminal sections of the

race force had to be applied before they left the island; it had to be

a policy of deportation.

It was little wonder that for a century after absorption in such work

the civilisation of Limanora was essentially ethical. To rid themselves

of every trace of the detestable vices of which they had just seen the

worst specimens deported over the horizon, became the one aim and ideal

of the now-expurgated people. Development seemed nothing more than

greater ease and habitualness in the virtues. To be purer, truer, more

tolerant, more generous, more gentle and modest and loving, was their

one idea of progress. The outlook from the first Imanora was towards

an ideal of such benignity and kindliness as would make all personal

relations easy and happy beyond the conception of other nations.

The first few decades of the next century gave them exhilaration in

the pursuit of this aim. They took the greatest delight in eradicating

the seedling ferocities of their savage past. Spite, rancour, disdain,

pitilessness, vanity, surliness, ingratitude, partiality, want of

candour, acerbity, meanness, and all uncharitableness were rigorously

checked, and every thought or energy that might, when abused, tend in

these directions was finally mastered. It was a delight to help one

another in the crusade against these petty defects. Nothing seemed so

noble or progressive as to spend every leisure moment on cultivating

the generous attitude towards one another.

But they soon saw the limits of such a progress. The virtues became

easy and common to all and it grew difficult to find new ethical worlds

to conquer. Most of them indulged too eagerly in introspection and some

turned morbidly self-critical, finding defects where there were none.

Imagination became a factory of petty faults and vices. The result was

new and real faults, which threatened to maim their civilisation and

bar their further progress. They were painfully self-conscious, fearing

lest the eyes of a neighbour or comrade should discover in them germs

of moral disease which had escaped their own microscopic criticism.

They shrank from beginning any enterprise; they feared to come to

decisions or make resolves, lest they should be wrong. They tolerated

and even encouraged faults and defects in their friends which they

would have drastically eradicated from their own natures; they nursed

in pity and generosity weak characters and diseased systems into length

of life, and shrank from forbidding them parenthood and posterity.

They strained at gnats and swallowed camels and indulged in constant

casuistry. In short, the whole race fell into a chronic spiritual

invalidism and many of them were afflicted with moral hypochondria.

They felt the pulses of their souls daily and hourly, and were ever

haunted with the fear of the old vices returning on them, so losing

their masculine grit and self-command. Finally they threatened to

become a race of sinewless effeminates with nothing but spiritual

collapse and palsy before them.

It was clear that this microscopic introspection and moral unrest must

cease, if there was to be any real advance. They had already recognised

that ethics developed by stages, and that any attempt on the part of

a race to force it beyond the intellectual point of view which they

had reached only ended in temporary failure and retrogression. No new

moral outlook can be attained unless reason has ascended a higher

mount of vision. Revelation can never come without new achievement. A

fixed quantity of ethical knowledge in a nation is moral death, and to

systematise ethical maxims into an absolute code for all time is to

enslave the reason of the world. For what is the almost unattainable

ideal of one stage of racial development is the antiquated truism of

a later stage. Savage man compares ill in polity and moral code with

the republics of the bee and the ant, just as his engineering and

architectural skill are infantile beside those of the beaver. How

unprotective and even cruel he is to his aged and women and children,

compared with many animals! How unadvanced even the most civilised are

in truth and loyalty compared with the dog! How weak in the reasoning

that is based on the reports of the senses are men in general compared

with the wild animals! There is evidently an infinite variety of

stages in the ethical and intellectual development and vision of man,

as there is in those of the animals. The most advanced human beings,

just like the least advanced, are, in some points, lower than the

beasts. But man can, if he will, have mastery of his circumstances and

conditions, inasmuch as he can examine himself by reflection, and tends

to examine himself through self-consciousness. The power and tendency,

however, are only fitfully taken advantage of, and it is therefore at

long intervals that even the best races accelerate the pace of their

progress beyond that which nature herself indicates.

The elders, and through them the people, were persuaded that this

absorbing pursuit of ethical improvement must be abandoned. The

development of the physical system was the first distraction that they

thought of; and their bodies grew in muscular power, in grace of form,

and in litheness of movement. It was during this athletic period that

flight through the air was achieved; then, too, physiology and medicine

grew into real sciences and began to direct the evolution of physical

man, and the struggle against the hosts of microscopic parasites that

over-populate the elements and have to seek pastures in the human body.

It was in this era, too, that they mastered the secret of prolonging

life and began the series of experiments in food and other forms of

sustenance, and in heredity, which ended in giving them centuries

instead of decades to live.

It soon came to be noticed, however, that a new but analogous

hypochondria began to seize even the youthful athletes of the race.

There was too much direct attention paid to the state and development

of the body to be wholesome. Athletic egotism became rampant, and as

a result of it a scorn of intellectual pursuits. It was as truly a

diseased state of the human system as the moral invalidism with which

they had been afflicted in the previous era. Thews and sinews were

measured and examined with scientific minuteness. Muscular development

was appraised and applauded as moral qualities had formerly been.

The spirit began to be impoverished; the brain decreased in weight

and fineness of convolution. Athletic introspection was coming to be

as painful and masterful a disease as moral introspection had been.

Diet and exercise became the absorbing topics of daily conversation

and nothing was invented but machines for training the body. Most

palpable of all the consequences was the growth of arrogant gait and

rough manners, and this was the first symptom to call attention to

the new malady. It became clear to the elders that the worst form of

atavism, return to the savagery that is just above animalism, was

about to reappear, and with it would come weakened heart and lungs and

disordered digestion; for the new training overstrained all the organs,

and threw them into disrepair.

The conclusions drawn from these two experiences were that variety of

occupation was one of the first essentials of mental and bodily health,

and that absorption in the improvement of any part or section of the

human system induced disease both of mind and body; morality and health

are better cultivated as indirect aims of individual existence; they

defeat their own ends when they become egoistic or introspective. In

order to remedy the evils which were threatening the life of the state,

its framework was completely reformed. To every family and individual

was assigned an external work that would draw the thoughts away from

self for the greater part of the twenty-four hours; every mature member

of the community was expected to achieve something unconnected with

himself every day. Exercise merely for amusement was cut down to a

minimum, and in order to keep the body in full vigour, the centre of

force was organised, where every man and woman had to do so much useful

physical work in the round of the clock. The care of the health,

both mental and bodily, was handed over to the medical elders, who

were, first of all, the healthiest and healthiest-minded of the older

men of the nation. Watching for symptoms of disease in one’s system,

whether moral or corporeal, fell into oblivion, and the great era

of external achievement began. Specialisation of work was its chief

principle and the source of its success, but no one was allowed to fall

into excessive specialism, such as would atrophy all but one set of

faculties and energies. No part of the body or mind was left without

daily or weekly exercise. The elders mapped out the various types of

intellectual and physical work from which a man or woman might select

to fill leisure time. Everyone had a large choice within a limited

number of kinds of work, generally kinds of work which were dissimilar

to his special employment. If it were left to a man to choose his own

type of distractions, he might select that which would feed high the

sides of his nature he most used, and atrophy those that most needed

development; for ease of application is an important factor in his

choice of exercise and amusement, and might become too dominant.

It was not in order to assimilate the bases of the natures of the

community that this limitation of leisure employments was adopted.

On the contrary, one of the subordinate aims of the elders was to

introduce as great a variety as possible into the talents, faculties,

and tendencies of the race. Equality, and still more similarity, of

members of a community, they well knew from the laws of nature meant

stagnation if not complete national death. Throughout the cosmos it

was the unequal degree to which various bodies and existences shared

in different types of energy that produced the unstable equilibrium we

call life. The disparate masses of the planets induced those currents

of influence we call gravitation, one of the greatest sources of power

in our world. The differences in temperature between the sun and the

planets make it of such vast importance as a source of heat and energy

to them, and it is the difference of two bodies as to electric state

that induces currents of electricity between them. As soon as there

is equilibrium of all the atoms or bodies or existences within a

certain sphere of influence there ceases to be movement in it and death

supervenes; and if all bodies and existences in the cosmos had an equal

and similar share of all its elements and forces, it would be dead.

The Deity himself, the sum and source of all life, must, as an eternal

existence, have unending variety.

The law of the universe is the law of the political and moral world.

There can be no life where there is complete stable equilibrium, that

is, where every member of a community is exactly similar to every

other member in privileges. Currents of influence cease. Impetus and

motive vanish. Desire and yearning and love disappear with passion and

ambition. The socialistic ideal is social and political death.

The everlasting flow of influence or power from point to point is the

essential condition of vigorous existence in a community or race,

therefore one of the chief subsidiary aims of the directors of Limanora

was the creation of variety and inequality of nature and position. This

made them adopt the family as the unit in the state, for in the family

there would be shelter for any new individual talent, and heredity

would cherish and increase it as it handed it on. In the Western

states the influence of the family over its children ceases not long

after boyhood or girlhood, and the world soon puts them into the same

moulds as its favourite men and women; individuality and originality

in most are planed down by the recognised conventions. A longer

continuance of family life and influence would secure and strengthen

any new variations in a talent or tendency, till the character was

strong enough to stand by them as its own and defend them against the

criticism of aliens and strangers. Diversity in unity was the ideal of

family life in Limanora. The elders of a family watched with eagerness

for any modification of the special faculties or powers, and nursed it

with the most anxious care, if they decided that it would assist the

advance of the race, and the medical elders were ever suggesting the

proper cross for producing a new variety of the old talents. Indeed,

one of the most responsible duties of the council of elders was to

decide as to the matings and parenthoods of the community; in this lay,

they felt, the guidance of their destiny, the real germ of the future.

Thus and thus alone were they able to keep up that divergence of new

species which would ensure an ever-quickening flow of life in the race.

They had cut off by their policy of complete isolation most of the

stimulus that comes from alien rivalry. Such rivalry, they thought,

would be worse than none; for it would at last drive them to adopt

the means and weapons of their rivals, which they considered wholly

retrograde and evil. It would be not unlike a competition between

man and the wild beasts. Any kind of communication with those who

were below them in civilisation and deliberately unprogressive, was

certain to taint and drag down, and the strong consciousness of this

fact checked the natural tendency of such benignity as theirs towards

missionaryism.

At the same time they knew well that no people would ever advance

without competition and the struggle that ensues on competition. They

greatly encouraged variation and inequality within their state, but

were certain that this was not enough. There must be the knowledge, if

not the immediate presence, of another type of being, similar to their

own yet higher in some features, in order to stimulate advance. To

get this was the object of their system of couriers into space, both

mechanic and human. They were never weary of gathering in all possible

indications of higher intelligences in extra-terrestrial elements and

regions. For a long period they had been satisfied with the reports

of their idrovamolans, and other recorders of events which occurred

on the earth, out of reach of their unaided senses. But it gradually

pressed itself home upon them that the comedy of terrestrial existence

gave no stimulus to progress; it stirred their laughter, or scorn, or

indignation, or disgust too often to edify. Rare, indeed, was it to

witness a deed or phase of civilisation that gave them a new model, or

inspired them to higher life. It was, as a rule, degrading to watch

beings in their own shape waste their noble faculties on the cruelties

of war, the meannesses of commerce and industrialism, the pettinesses

of social intercourse, and the gross deceits and pretences of politics,

diplomacy, and public life.

Year by year the racial energy was drawn off from the spectacle of

terrestrial history. It grew less and less attractive, and the elders

came to the decision that it had almost better pass unnoticed by all

but the most mature and experienced. Thus it became the more necessary

to open up other spheres of stimulus and inspiration. The thoughts of

the race gravitated, first to other stars, then to the exuberant life

they found in interstellar space. For a time they thought that only in

other worlds could be found intelligences like their own to stimulate

them by their competition; and their intellectual energy was set upon

opening up intercourse with the inhabitants of these. The imaginative

families published book after book on the possibilities and means

of stellar intercommunication, and afterwards of stellar migration.

Astronomy and its subsidiary and allied sciences and arts for several

centuries outpaced all others in development. The world began to seem

narrow and prison-like, so eager was Limanoran thought after stellar

flight. All the conditions of voyaging through space were investigated,

all available means experimented on, all the possible routes and their

laws discovered. It seemed as if within a few centuries the round

of the earth would be spurned, and the nearest star colonised by

terrestrial beings.

The discovery of the varied life inhabiting the ether gave pause to

all such speculations and schemes. It was manifestly possible to find

stimulus from intelligences nearer than the other planets. Infinite

space, instead of being a desert strewn with the wrecks or embryos of

stars, is as full of life, and of the elements and nuclei of life, as

any world which spins through it. They had ever counted it as unlikely

that the life and the life-energy of the cosmos should be confined to

the star-dust strewn over it, or that its vast interstellar spaces

should be given up to nothing but the passage of rays from star to

star, cold and inhospitable to every form of existence. They felt it to

be more in accordance with the lavishness of nature that these spaces

should be life-crammed instead of life-proof. Why should life be unable

to adapt itself to the conditions of space, when it has been found to

adapt itself to the bewildering variety of conditions existing on the

surface of any one world at different stages of its development, and

even to the infinite variety of conditions that govern the countless

stars?

On the first discovery of life beyond the atmosphere they were led

by the medical investigators to think that it was merely embryonic,

waiting to colonise the worlds that pushed through it. But recent

reports and researches showed that the existences of interstellar space

were far beyond the rudimental stage. Beings as intricately organised

as themselves left impressions on their supra-aerial lavolans. They

grew more and more convinced that the senses which had evolved in them,

amid the gross atmosphere of the earth and with the gross feeding that

alone would suit terrene constitutions, were fit to detect no other

creatures than those developed under similar terrestrial conditions.

Their more recent and more refined developments of sensuous perception,

and still more their latest mechanical inventions, had brought them

within range of an infinity they had not dreamt of. Daily came in from

above the atmosphere reports that confirmed their old belief in the

vast and varied population of space. Beings, so constituted as never

to impress sight or hearing such as men had, yet fit to hold their own

with the noblest spirits that earthly imagination had ever conceived,

swam close to their atmosphere, close enough to leave their impress

on the sensitive films of their courier-instruments, close enough for

their own later-developed senses to perceive, if only these were more

exquisitely trained. What a vista of new stimulus the knowledge opened

up to their imaginations!

There was no more need of projects for stellar migration. Here were

beings loftier than themselves at the very gates of their senses,

possible sources of exalted, if not divine, influence. Out of them

would flow into this little island energy that would give measureless

impetus to its inhabitants. Who could place a limit to the nobleness

of the existences they might find in the ether, once they were on

this track, and were refining and ennobling the perceptive power of

their senses? There was no conceivable end to the ethical elevation

and development they might reach, now that they had pierced the prison

walls of the earth. The sublimer amongst their old beliefs were,

indeed, coming true in the fuller fruition of scientific discovery.

These they had long laid aside, lest they should be mere fancies

based upon illusion and delusion, when they saw the evil that the

perversions of them by churches and priests worked amongst men. Till

they discovered a sounder basis for them than faithmongers asserted

for their crude superstitions, they felt they must not entertain them

seriously or found action upon them; and over they threw them till they

should find their way to them again upon the solid ground of scientific

reason.

Now that they saw so wide a horizon before them they knew that they

need no longer seek stimulus in the races of men that they had left so

far behind them, and they rejoiced. For, though there were ever noble

and wise individuals to be found here and there throughout the masses

of the nations, and though they knew that these set the standard of

morality to the world around them, the bulk of men lagged far in the

rear and often, when unnoticed, sneaked into the barbarity and vice

which they had been persuaded to abandon. The moral law of a nation, or

race, or period is voluntarily carried into practice only by the few

best of the mature men and women; in fact, their lives and characters

are the makers and arbiters of the moral law. Their fellow-countrymen

and contemporaries feel the ideal thus held out practically before them

as a mysterious influence that surrounds and shepherds them into the

path of right. Sometimes, if the age or nation has degenerated, the

mystery comes from the best men of the past through books, or still

more powerfully through tradition and instinct; this unaccountable

influence they call conscience, or the sense of duty, or the voice

of God, or some other name that indicates its mystery, its directing

power, and its superior standpoint. Priests and primitive legislators

try to formulate its commands in definite codes, and at a later

stage thinkers and philosophers attempt to reason out its maxims,

and find a unity and universality in them. But the influence defies

such codification and rationalisation; with the growth of the ages it

overflows and antiquates the primitive attempt at its petrifaction,

and the variety of codes in different races or in different periods

laughs to scorn all efforts at finding a universal basis for them. As

soon as a code is proclaimed or a philosophical system worked out, it

begins to be antiquated; the best find a better ideal in front of them

and, striving after it, reveal the flaws in the life they have hitherto

lived, or they resign themselves passively to the drift of circumstance

and degenerate into luxury and license; in the one case the influence

overflows the code or system, and makes it seldom necessary or apparent

to the view of the race; in the other it ebbs from it and leaves it

high and dry, the flouted, neglected wreck of an age gone by.

After all, moral law is nothing but the example and character of

the best of them working dimly upon their yearning and capacity for

advance; and their best are limited by the point of view of their time

and surroundings. A progressive race or age soon discovers the flaws in

its accepted codes or systems and throws doubt on their authority. It

is only in a stagnant or retrograde period that there is no scepticism

or free thought; sufficient unto it is the law that has come down out

of the past; so satisfied are its people with it that they never live

up to it, and never feel any qualms of conscience or entertain troubled

thoughts about its neglect. Developing civilisation means developing

ethics; the best of a race advance to higher points of view, and soon

come to be astonished at the narrow and primitive moral law their

forefathers have handed down to them. As they advance in ideals, the

conscience of the mass of their countrymen or contemporaries advances

too; what is the rare virtue or heroism of the noblest of one age

becomes the commonplace of the next; what was the weakness or vice of

all becomes the crime of the outcast and atavist. Injunctions not to

kill are soon superfluous to all but the criminally inclined; addressed

to a whole people, they imply an age of the greatest rudeness and

ferocity.

I realised this more and more clearly as I continued to live amongst

this wonderful people, and to see into their lives. The criminal and

grossly atavistic had been long ago swept out of the island and vicious

tendencies against the moral law of past ages had vanished before

selection, crossing, and training. They would have laughed if they had

been enjoined not to kill, or steal, or lie, or commit adultery. It

would be like telling the civilised Europeans not to eat each other,

especially when uncooked, or telling the latter-day Englishman not

to enslave his brothers. The proud tribes of wild men counted it as

one of their noblest prerogatives to banquet on their slain foes and

even on their dead relatives, and the fathers of the present race of

English and Americans, sensitive as these latter are to the crime of

enslavement, held their slaves with no feeling that they were outraging

the moral law, whilst their grandfathers winked at the horrors of the

slave trade. The best protested and gradually their opinions, and

still more their characters and lives, sank as a mysterious influence

into the hearts of the race. The next generation felt the protest as a

moral law and a conscience, stinging them to advance to the standard

of their noblest. The Greeks and Romans describe and applaud in their

finest literature vices that modern men are ashamed even to mention.

And it will be the same with acts and conduct that nineteenth century

society condones and even boasts of; if the European world advances, in

a century or two respectable men and women will be ashamed to hear them

spoken of.

The Limanorans repudiated scorn of their lowly kin, the animals;

they had long ago shed that blind and false shame which rejected

the affinity of universal nature; man was as truly kin in his lower

representatives to the mammoth as the mammoth to the mollusc, or the

mollusc to the microbe. It is true they desired close proximity to the

non-human animal as little as they did to undeveloped or degenerate

man; intercourse with a lower stage of life and intelligence, they had

long ago proved, leads ultimately to adoption of some of its features

and much of its standard, even where there is in it the aloofness

of the master to his slave, or the tamer to his beast; they desired

no masterdom over lower natures and so they exiled all animals and

all degenerate or undeveloped men from their island. They welcomed,

however, every indication of approach to human traits or human

intelligence in any section of terrestrial life; it was to them no

bewilderment that they found most species of animals more courageous

and many more provident and keen in their outlook than most men, some

of them more tender and humane to their fellows, and some infinitely

more loyal than the most advanced races. It is difficult to deny,

not merely the higher emotions, but the more difficult processes of

reasoning to many of the animals. The cunning of man is often outwitted

by them.

Facts like these, instead of driving them to find subtle methods of

explaining them away or denying them, urged them on to greater effort

in their own evolution. They saw in them evidence that the whole

creation was striving upwards, and they resolved to obey the universal

law more and more fully and to quicken their pace. Any new observation

of animal intelligence or advance only confirmed their faith in the

rational spirit that was working but half seen throughout the universe,

and gave them greater impetus on the path of development they had

chosen.

Every new age had seen them rise above the possibility of some old vice

or evil tendency, reach some new and higher mount of ethical vision,

and descry some nobler ideal ahead of them. They were far out of reach

of any return to the fierce vices or defects of a lawless or militant

past. Never since the exile of Noola had they observed any tendency

to belligerent atavism; and his return, purified and elevated, had

finally buried in oblivion that dead and degenerate preterition.

Thieving had vanished with such warlike means of destroying and

restoring the balance of political power, and its possibility ceased

with the devaluation of all property but time, talent, and character.

Once time was taken as the standard of everything of value instead of

any dull dead stuff like gold or jewels or land or houses, the whole

view of property had changed: for time is a living, moving entity that

becomes great or little, valuable or valueless with the method of using

it; the life of a man limits it in quantity as far as existence on the

earth is concerned; and as soon as a race realises this, it is the

rarest and most highly prized commodity in the world; nothing can take

away its value but the heedlessness or indolence of its possessor; no

man can steal it from us but ourselves. For many ages then it was in

terms of time that the Limanorans had expressed everything of value;

even talent and character were thus expressible, for their chief value

lay in their development; they were estimated according to the rapidity

with which they could advance a definite and measurable stage. Thus

theft became an impossible crime in this island, the true standard of

all value being inseparable from the life that possessed it.

Lying and hypocrisy and all the crawling vermin that spawn from them

had long ago been ejected from their systems; and wherever atavistic

symptoms of them had appeared in any child they were cauterised by

every known method, gentle or drastic. The task of cleansing the

community of insincerity and artifice had by no means ended with

the exiling of all known liars and dissemblers. Open untruth and

fraudulence vanished when the development of the intelligence and

observation of the people made it easy and universal to divine motives

and inner thoughts quite apart from the word or the act. Yet there was

still in some a tendency to evasion, or equivocation, or overstatement.

The rags of the old conventionality still hung about them, and unawares

there would check them in their utterances an old fear lest candour

should be ill-manners, lest their freedom should hurt the feelings

of their auditor, or rouse the sleeping tiger in him. Year by year

was all this getting eradicated; but the process was quickened by

the evolution of the magnetic sense and by the clarifying of the

tissues of the body. The more transparent the human system became to

the senses and the keener the senses grew, the less cue and the less

chance was there for concealment of emotion or thought. They were

all thoroughly trained in the anatomy and physiology of the body and

the brain, and in the science that taught the physical equivalents

and accompaniments of each type of thought and emotion. Even without

their preternaturally keen senses they could tell from their practical

knowledge of the human system the natural results of any word or act,

and their eyes and ears could detect signs of emotion or motive which

seemed to be non-existent. It was, however, their magnetic sense that

was the greatest foe to all deception or concealment. They could read

the feelings that stirred in the heart of a neighbour, and were even

conscious of the definite thoughts passing in his brain.

The physical equivalents and symptoms of certain emotions and passions,

that used to be common before the exilings and are too common in all

other races, were scarcely ever to be found in any mature Limanoran;

they had to be studied in the bodies, and especially in the faces,

of children. Jealousy, envy, hate, malice, anger, lust, had become

obsolete in the race, and only the young were afflicted with them

now; they were classified as mild spiritual diseases that might, if

neglected, risk the permanence of the child in the community; they were

the record of a stage through which the race had long ago passed, and

they were treated as no fault of the child itself but its legacy from

an ancestry it could not be made responsible for. Great pains had been

taken with these moral childish maladies in former periods with the

result that their appearance was now seldom virulent or dangerous and

never fatal, and that every household knew by heart the simple rules

and specifics for checking their development. The worst characteristic

of them was that they were infectious; but the solitary system of

education rendered this inoperative; in fact this epidemic nature of

the moral disorders of children made the adoption of the one-child

household and the one-pupil school seem an absolute necessity.

Occasionally, through some strong atavistic taint in the nature, the

appearance of one or more of these maladies in a child threatened its

whole spiritual life; then all the science and wisdom of the island

were brought to bear upon it; the nerves and tissues of the part of the

human system affected, whether in brain or heart, were isolated and

powerful electro-magnetic instruments were applied to them so as to

atrophy them and render them inactive; the most successful educators of

the island were joined to the parents or proparents in the effort to

get rid of the evil; and the child or youth was constantly brought into

intercourse with the noblest natures who exercised to the full their

morally healing powers. If the malady still tainted the nature up to

maturity and outbalanced all the good in it in spite of such continued

curative efforts, then were the elders sadly driven to the ultimate

step of deporting the diseased personality. But this had not occurred

for generations, and it was hoped that the necessity for drastic

remedies would cease in a few years. Already the virulence of these

childish ailments had almost disappeared and they had grown so mild in

their attacks that few but the guardians observed their approach. They

were generally confined to fixed periods of childhood or youth, periods

that corresponded to the ages of past history in which they severally

raged in the natures of their ancestors. But every new generation saw

these periods shortened and driven farther back towards the beginning

of life.

The sense of shame that attaches to some or all of these emotions in

the best of advanced races is a sign that they are recognised as moral

maladies and that with farther advance they will be forced back into

the earlier stages of life. But, as they are, the need to conceal envy

and jealousy, malice, anger, and lust and their symptoms, is felt,

and this induces and confirms wide-spread habits of insincerity and

deception in most civilised peoples, Western as well as Eastern. This

desire of concealment has seated the habit of dissimulation so widely

and so deeply in the breasts of all that the bolder and more roughly

practical openly avow it as a means necessary to their advancement in

life. It had been felt ages before in Limanora that as long as these

hateful emotions lurked in the hearts of men and women, there could

be no final expulsion of the still more hateful insincerity. Now that

they were relegated to childhood, concealment of the inner emotions

had vanished and the habit of petty evasion and dissimulation had

been entirely eradicated. Even the histrionic in manner and gesture

and facial expression had disappeared after having been subjected to

drastic treatment; it had been criticised and derided whenever it

showed itself in any youth; for it was only by the young and immature

that so crude an artificiality could ever be adopted.

One of the last refuges of insincerity was artificial self-abasement.

As soon as humility before the daily marvels of the universe came to be

a common attitude amongst them, its ape, spurious self-depreciation,

appeared. Young men and women would grossly understate their

achievements or claims, chiefly in order to set up a reaction in the

minds of their friends and companions, and tempt them to overstatement.

Ridicule soon put this habit of poor and common natures to rout. The

Limanorans were now proud of anything they had done well or nobly

and were not ashamed to acknowledge it. They were willing without

vaunting or mock-modesty to talk of any invention or discovery or

any good or courageous deed, but in that simple, ingenuous way which

revealed nothing but anxiety to enlighten others as to the methods of

success and to stir them to advance beyond it. They needed none of

that self-advertisement which is the bane of advanced and ambitious

civilisations; everything of merit in their conduct and labour and

its products was valuated, they knew, with an exactitude that left no

room for misacceptation by their friends and companions. Everyone was

so eager to find an advance in his neighbour’s work or system that no

effort was needed to explain or commend it. When done its merits would

be recognised to the full. The elders in their periodical reviews of

the work and the progress of the community would estimate it at its

full value, and it was one of the most important parts of the training

of the youth to appraise the value of every deed and step with a strict

impartiality of judgment. To mete out justice to everything in life was

impressed upon the young nature as one of the foremost of duties; and

to see every feature of history and existence with a dispassionate and

unerring eye was one of the chief aims of Limanoran education.

Thus it was that for a time they enjoyed the comedy of life as it

passed in other regions of the world, for they could see very clearly

the exact merits of every man and every deed, and the credulity and

infatuation which made them unrecognisable in popular estimation.

Delusion reigned supreme and the best of the comedy was the ease with

which some masters of the art of self-advertisement could swell their

puny proportions into the appearance of colossal amplitude; they

knew every stop in public opinion, and could play on its gullibility

with consummate art. The Limanoran was taught to place every human

achievement in the perspective of the future, and as he looked and

heard through the idrovamolan, the whole of life, as it went in other

nations, seemed one continued bathos, ridiculous disproportion between

what it appeared to be and what it was.

But they ever saw a darker side to the spectacles they witnessed

through this singular instrument, and their laughter was softened and

modified by indignation and sorrow. There was a counterpart to the

gullibility and applause in the deep-rooted habit of detraction and

slander. If any had the power to see conduct and men as they were,

impartially and clearly, they were not allowed to use it, so busy were

the tongues of traducers and parasites. All human deeds were either

underestimated or overestimated, generally underestimated if the doer

or possessor had no favours to bestow and no power or influence to

exhibit. Aspersion and backbiting were common habits; for the majority

were undistinguished and only in courts and the circles of the great

did that of overestimation find any headway.

A trivial, yet pathetic, phase of the comedy was the excessive

self-esteem that ran parallel with the torrent of detraction. In

Limanora the fountains of both had dried up together. For vanity is

the effort of a man’s emotions to compensate for the fraud that others

constantly commit upon reputation. Robbery of material things is

sternly repressed in most civilised communities; thus far have they

attained in their hostility to socialism; finally one or two have

begun to be uneasy about fair fame as a possession more valuable than

any wealth and have attempted to formulate the crime in some crude

law of libel that is found yearly as inadequate and as primitive as

one of the codes of ancient legislators. But the petty robberies of

good fame rather than the open brigandage of it make none feel safe.

Tongues will keep wagging, and as long as they wag, the conduct or

character of some will surely be undervalued. The consciousness of

this, that none but the great or distinguished will get their due or

more than their due, keeps self-esteem alive in the breasts of all, and

self-approbation an unceasing attitude. Men feel that they must recoup

themselves out of the unwilling feelings of others for the perpetual

fraud upon their reputation. Self-overestimation is the natural

complement of the consciousness of detraction. Commonly the sensitive

organisation refuses to rest under the unending injustice and will try

to set itself right with the world; but most sink after a time into

sullen endurance of the wrong and cease to speak of it, thinking it

irremediable.