FREEDOM AND REVOLUTION
YET they gloried in their freedom and their love of freedom. No people
could be freer than they. Daily in their temples were there songs and
hymns chanted in honour of liberty. It was a truism of the journals that
liberty and liberty alone could be the true spiritual atmosphere of a
nation. They loved to worship superiors and reverence especially the
vicegerent of God upon earth—the head of the Bureau of Fame. They bowed
to him and did him every obeisance because he was the head of the church
and worthy of all manner of worshipful obedience. But he had no control
over their actions except the moral and religious control which they
willingly acknowledged.
As an instance of their complete freedom of action they pointed to the
way in which the government allowed them to do as they liked with the
peasants and artisans and the lower classes generally who were in their
service. In the discipline of these they were untrammelled. They
acknowledged that they were responsible to the state for the good
conduct of their servants; but on the other hand the state passed over
to them the power of life and death over these so that their authority
should be no mere nominal thing. Ah, freedom was indeed the noblest
feature of life; they might as well pass into the grave at once as give
it up or allow it to be interfered with.
I was afraid to suggest to them the information I had received from a
foreigner in the lower city about a large part of the country people.
All the former inhabitants of the island and most of the artisans were
in semi-slavery. They saw the hesitation in my face and guessed its
purport. And one of my eulogists of liberty launched into a prelection
on the necessity of a stage of servitude in the history of all
ascensions to civilisation. A people that had not long issued from the
animal stage could never become anything better than half-brutes but
through bondage to a more advanced race. It was indeed a noble mission
of theirs thus to spend ages on the task of assisting a tribe of
half-savages to subdue their foul passions. The peasantry would be
nothing but wild beasts without such restraint. The process had been
going on for centuries, and it showed the great patience and love of the
Aleofanians that they persisted in such a repulsive and fruitless task.
The artisans were those of them who had improved under the discipline,
and so they had been partially freed. But even they were still somewhat
savage in their natures; even they needed to be treated with great
long-suffering. The marble Aleofanians were as patient with these
degraded beings as a mother with her child, never sparing the rod when
it was needed, although it lacerated their finer feelings to use such a
means of discipline. He compared their conduct in this matter with their
treatment of monetary relations. They were equally generous and
self-denying and protective of the good of all the other people of the
nation in dealing with money; they held it the root of all evil, and to
prevent its working havoc widespread they concentrated it in the hands
of a few,—the marble citizens,—who could not so easily be harmed by it.
I called his attention to the numerous interferences with liberty of
action in the various laws that fenced them in from the indulgence of
certain passions. Ah, that was one of the noblest instances of their
worship of freedom; so devoted were they to it that they prohibited
everything that would lead to a breach of it; no man could be allowed to
circumscribe his own liberty; and all vice circumscribed liberty; hence
all vice had to be checked. It was only in the interest of liberty that
liberty was ever interfered with.
He slid into another eulogy of freedom and instanced the devotion of the
Aleofanians to it in their conversation. No one was checked in his
criticism of a neighbour or fellow-citizen; their city was indeed a
mutual fellowship society in which the freest censure of each other was
allowed for mutual benefit. The keen contest of wits moulded their
characters and intellects. No one dared be absent from any social or
conversational fête, lest he should suffer in reputation from becoming
the topic of the meeting. Never would they descend to vulgar
depreciation; they were masters of refined insinuation and veiled
malignity. They could whisper away a reputation with the grace of a
duellist; and at the climax of a mortal combat of wits their serenity
remained unruffled. Oh, the grace and beauty of their social life! They
were never done admiring it. But without this freedom of criticism it
would be nothing. Ah, life in Aleofane was indeed a noble thing, so
happy and free were all classes of the people, from monarch to peasant,
from the bureaucrat of fame to the poorest artisan!
“Even the criminals were happy” was the climax of his eloquence. I asked
him for an explanation. He proceeded to show me how it was failure that
constituted crime. To deceive successfully was the highest art of life;
for the essence of art was to conceal itself. And to be discovered was
to fail in this. Whoever suffered this indignity was convicted of the
special vice he had been concealing and sent to the hulks, that is, was
turned into a journalist or priest. In these professions they were
perfectly happy, for they were allowed in them to revel in their own
special vices. The journalists manufactured their news whenever they
found events fail them, and the priests manufactured their myths and
creed whenever the sacred books failed them. So their capacity of
fiction was exercised daily and hourly. And provided it was exercised in
accordance with the purpose of the bureau, no one interfered with their
enjoyment. The newspapers and the church were the home of fiction; and
when truth was told there, it passed unrecognised. In order to keep up
the interest of readers the journalists manufactured sensational news
one day and contradicted it the next; and in order to draw crowds one
priest would preach a most heterodox interpretation of the sacred books
in his sermon and another would reply to him in his and contradict him.
This neutralised the evil that might arise from journalism and its
personalities and from sermons and their heterodoxies. It would never
have done to put ordinary citizens or successful deceivers and
slanderers into such posts; they would be too astute in deceiving the
people; their fictions would not be so palpable and gross or so mutually
contradictory that the simplest reader or hearer would discover them. So
much had the Aleofanian palate become accustomed to such journalism and
pulpit oratory that if the writers ever described facts or indulged in
truths, they had to give them the flavour of fiction; and if ever the
priests indulged in orthodox doctrines they had to give them the tinge
of the heterodox. Ah, surely the whole people were happy, for all were
so free as to be able to indulge their special appetites and likings!
I was scarcely convinced by this subtle and eloquent eulogy of
Aleofanian life and liberty, and I determined to visit the common people
and see for myself. I had already examined the journals intended for
them and seen how different they were from the fashionable literature of
the marble city. They were generally presented to strangers and must
have greatly impressed them, for they were full of noble sentiments and
moralisations subtly interwoven with eulogies of the Aleofanian leaders
of state and fashion for their great virtues and goodness. It was most
edifying to read these sermonised news-sheets, saturated as they were
with the highest ethics and deepest piety, and especially the doctrine
that it was the duty of every man to adhere to the station in which God
had placed him. But I was struck after I came into the marble city with
the tone adopted towards them by the citizens of the higher class; they
spoke of them with a patronising smile and disinterested approval, as if
they were talking of children’s Sunday-school literature or fairy tales.
And about all the fiction in these popular journals there was the
atmosphere of a child’s fairyland; everything was happy and beautiful
and as it should be. After reading a series of them I could easily have
concluded that Aleofane was another paradise for the unambitious and
lowly, and that death must be looked upon by the common people as an
overwhelming catastrophe in that it put a stop to this full current of
joy and happiness.
My curiosity was greatly piqued. I wished to see this other Eden upon
earth. So with letters and passports and a guide, one of the
journalists, I set out. And for the first few days everything was
idyllic. But drunkenness, the special vice of my cicerone, got hold of
him, and he collapsed by the way. Thereafter I found the whole scene
change. It was now nothing but squalor and gloom and the lash of the
whip.
A stranger from a neighbouring island, whom I had met in my first
hostelry, explained to me the histrionic character of the first few
days’ experience and the reality of the last. He took me in hand, and
under his guidance I visited one of their provincial cities. Here I saw
men and women of the same race as the marble citizens crawling in filth
and starvation, prostrate in a magnificent temple before the
sleight-of-hand and the mesmerism of the priests. They were bound in the
chains of superstition and ignorance, and they were encouraged to do
little else than procreate and multiply; for to pauperise by religion
was the first rule of the Aleofanian government, and to enslave the soul
by pauperism and ignorance was its corollary.
Yet in a cave outside of the town we witnessed from our hiding-place
awful and mysterious rites of a revolutionary propaganda proceeding. We
saw thousands of the ignorant peasants and artisans getting initiated.
And when the ceremony was finished we almost burst into laughter over
the pathos as the agitators gathered round a fire and gorged. My guide
had evidently something to do with this rising revolution; and he was so
enraged to find that an agent from the communistic island of Tirralaria
had crept in amongst the revolutionists. The heavens confound his
impudence and cant! What he and his beggarly crew from the isle of
thieves wanted was to divide the plunder of another island. They had
communised Tirralaria into a cipher. Of the wealth that they had counted
by thousands, when they landed there, naught remained but the nothings.
The growth of the dummy citizen or cipher in the denominator had made
Tirralarian property a vanishing point. The game of this Garrulesi was
not to establish socialism in Aleofane, but to socialise its property
into Tirralaria.
After his burst of anger I tried to elicit more about this socialistic
community. Tirralaria was a large island, I got to know, into which had
been tumbled some centuries ago a few thousand socialists with
considerable wealth to their share. They had increased to tens of
thousands, and their wealth had gone down to little more than a shirt to
each back. After the besom of a tornado or a famine or a plague had
swept the island the population soon reached high-water mark again;
every square yard of the soil was littered with a stronger and lazier
humanity. The island stank of humanity miles to leeward. There was
scarcely room enough for graves, let alone beds. The lubberly and
oleaginous let themselves out as mattresses; and so the space was
economised, and another increase was possible. The unclean rogues, they
never washed, unless they chanced to get hustled off the edge of the
island into the sea. The description contrasted so strongly with the
rose-coloured picture that I had heard drawn by the socialist agent in
the cave that I determined to see for myself.
As we wandered through the forests of the island my guide told me of two
saviours that had landed on the coasts of Aleofane and become the
protectors of the poor. One refused to resort to the tricks of the
charlatan, and, deserted by his followers, perished at the hands of the
aristocracy, who then adopted his tenets and worked them into an
elaborate hypocrisy. The other, learning by his fate and bettering the
jugglery of the marble citizens, put heart and drill into the poor who
flocked to his standards, and led them to victory. He seized the throne,
but, flattered by the old aristocracy into belief in his own divinity
and into desertion of the cause of the poor, he vanished in pomp,
luxury, and corruption.
By dint of persistent inquiry I got him to explain his hints about the
island from which the ancestors of all of them had come. It was called
Faddalesa, or the isle of devils, because of the appalling phenomena
they encountered whenever they attempted to return to it. It had, he
acknowledged, been called Limanora, or the island of progress; but for
thousands of years that name had lapsed. And on the shores of now one
island and again another strangers had landed. But as they were wealthy,
and taciturn, no questions were asked, and their descendants had
vanished into the ranks of the aristocracy. It was many centuries since
any had come, though it was generally supposed in the archipelago that I
had come from the central island with my fireship. I saw the mistake
that they had made would serve my new resolve to make for this mother
isle; and I left it unchallenged in their minds.
In the great northern harbour of Aleofane I came across the same filth
and a similar rich temple; but I also found clearer evidence of
underground revolution approaching consummation. And for the sake of my
fireship and its powers of helping on the movement I was initiated into
the mysteries of one of their societies. The socialistic agent,
Garrulesi, insinuated himself into my acquaintanceship; and for the sake
of being able to return with him to his home I endured his eloquence on
the perfection of the altruistic life. Competition was the bane of the
human race; and its only products were poverty and disease and
unhappiness. It was responsible for property, and the only crime was
property. Was it not monstrous that one man should taboo what another
man needed! Obliterate property, and you wipe out crime too. How gentle
and amenable and humane was the true commonweal, where neither property
nor class existed! No law was needed, no law could persist. Every
natural instinct and passion of the human breast was allowed the fullest
scope. There was indeed no further stage to reach; need of progress, of
effort was passed. Man under such a rule had become all that he might
be, and he felt that whatever is is right. Evil and darkness had fled
before the light of primitive happiness, and existence had become the
throne of God.
As he dilated on the nobleness of Tirralarian civilisation I saw his eye
flicker and his colour change. A stranger had passed. He told me that we
were being watched. He wished me to take refuge in Tirralaria with my
fireship if anything occurred. But I had promised it to my guide and
fellow-traveller. He showed one flash of anger. But it vanished at once.
He led me to the shore and pointed out his falla or ship. In it he would
hang round the coasts for me, and he indicated an unfrequented point,
whither I could flee and find safety on board his ship. He offered to
take off to my crew any message that I desired to send; I might instruct
it to come to Tirralaria for me after it had been to the isle of dogs. I
wrote in English, and sent my orders to my comrades, knowing that the
language would be safe from his prying.
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