the Women were violently agitated. Sympathy with the miserable victim and
anticipations of similar deceptions for themselves, their sisters, and
their daughters, made them now regard the Colour Bill in an entirely new
aspect. Not a few openly avowed themselves converted to antagonism; the
rest needed only a slight stimulus to make a similar avowal. Seizing this
favourable opportunity the Circles hastily convened an extraordinary
Assembly of the States; and besides the usual guard of Convicts, they
secured the attendance of a large number of reactionary Women.
Amidst an unprecedented concourse, the Chief Circle of those days—by name
Pantocyclus—arose to find himself hissed and hooted by a hundred and
twenty thousand Isosceles. But he secured silence by declaring that
henceforth the Circles would enter on a policy of Concession; yielding to
the wishes of the majority, they would accept the Colour Bill. The uproar
being at once converted to applause, he invited Chromatistes, the leader
of the Sedition, into the centre of the hall, to receive in the name of
his followers the submission of the Hierarchy. Then followed a speech, a
masterpiece of rhetoric, which occupied nearly a day in the delivery, and
to which no summary can do justice.
With a grave appearance of impartiality he declared that as they were now
finally committing themselves to Reform or Innovation, it was desirable
that they should take one last view of the perimeter of the whole
subject, its defects as well as its advantages. Gradually introducing the
mention of the dangers to the Tradesmen, the Professional Classes and the
Gentlemen, he silenced the rising murmurs of the Isosceles by reminding
them that, in spite of all these defects, he was willing to accept the
Bill if it was approved by the majority. But it was manifest that all,
except the Isosceles, were moved by his words and were either neutral or
averse to the Bill.
Turning now to the Workmen he asserted that their interests must not be
neglected, and that, if they intended to accept the Colour Bill, they
ought at least to do so with a full view of the consequences. Many of
them, he said, were on the point of being admitted to the class of the
Regular Triangles; others anticipated for their children a distinction
they could not hope for themselves. That honourable ambition would now
have to be sacrificed. With the universal adoption of Colour, all
distinctions would cease; Regularity would be confused with Irregularity;
development would give place to retrogression; the Workman would in a few
generations be degraded to the level of the Military, or even the Convict
Class; political power would be in the hands of the greatest number, that
is to say the Criminal Classes, who were already more numerous than the
Workmen, and would soon out-number all the other Classes put together
when the usual Compensative Laws of Nature were violated.
A subdued murmur of assent ran through the ranks of the Artisans, and
Chromatistes, in alarm, attempted to step forward and address them. But
he found himself encompassed with guards and forced to remain silent
while the Chief Circle in a few impassioned words made a final appeal to
the Women, exclaiming that, if the Colour Bill passed, no marriage would
henceforth be safe, no woman’s honour secure; fraud, deception, hypocrisy
would pervade every household; domestic bliss would share the fate of the
Constitution and pass to speedy perdition. Sooner than this, he cried
“Come death.”
At these words, which were the preconcerted signal for action, the
Isosceles Convicts fell on and transfixed the wretched Chromatistes; the
Regular Classes opening their ranks, made way for a band of Women who,
under direction of the Circles, moved, back foremost, invisibly and
unerringly upon the unconscious Soldiers; the Artisans, imitating the
example of their betters, also opened their ranks. Meantime bands of
Convicts occupied every entrance with an impenetrable phalanx.
The battle, or rather carnage, was of short duration. Under the skilful
generalship of the Circles almost every Woman’s charge was fatal, and
very many extracted their sting uninjured, ready for a second slaughter.
But no second blow was needed; the rabble of the Isosceles did the rest
of the business for themselves. Surprised, leader-less, attacked in front
by invisible foes, and finding egress cut off by the Convicts behind
them, they at once—after their manner—lost all presence of mind, and
raised the cry of “treachery.” This sealed their fate. Every Isosceles
now saw and felt a foe in every other. In half an hour not one of that
vast multitude was living; and the fragments of seven score thousand of
the Criminal Class slain by one another’s angles attested the triumph of
Order.
The Circles delayed not to push their victory to the uttermost. The
Working Men they spared but decimated. The Militia of the Equilaterals
was at once called out; and every Triangle suspected of Irregularity on
reasonable grounds, was destroyed by Court Martial, without the formality
of exact measurement by the Social Board. The homes of the Military and
Artisan classes were inspected in a course of visitations extending
through upwards of a year; and during that period every town, village,
and hamlet was systematically purged of that excess of the lower orders
which had been brought about by the neglect to pay the Tribute of
Criminals to the Schools and University, and by the violation of the
other natural Laws of the Constitution of Flatland. Thus the balance of
classes was again restored.
Needless to say that henceforth the use of Colour was abolished, and its
possession prohibited. Even the utterance of any word denoting Colour,
except by the Circles or by qualified scientific teachers, was punished
by a severe penalty. Only at our University in some of the very highest
and most esoteric classes—which I myself have never been privileged to
attend—it is understood that the sparing use of Colour is still
sanctioned for the purpose of illustrating some of the deeper problems of
mathematics. But of this I can only speak from hearsay.
Elsewhere in Flatland, Colour is now non-existent. The art of making it
is known to only one living person, the Chief Circle for the time being;
and by him it is handed down on his death-bed to none but his Successor.
One manufactory alone produces it; and, lest the secret should be
betrayed, the Workmen are annually consumed, and fresh ones introduced.
So great is the terror with which even now our Aristocracy looks back to
the far-distant days of the agitation for the Universal Colour Bill.
§ 11.—_Concerning our Priests._
It is high time that I should pass from these brief and discursive notes
about things in Flatland to the central event of this book, my initiation
into the mysteries of Space. _That_ is my subject; all that has gone
before is merely preface.
For this reason I must omit many matters of which the explanation would
not, I flatter myself, be without interest for my Readers: as for
example, our method of propelling and stopping ourselves, although
destitute of feet; the means by which we give fixity to structures of
wood, stone, or brick, although of course we have no hands, nor can we
lay foundations as you can, nor avail ourselves of the lateral pressure
of the earth; the manner in which the rain originates in the intervals
between our various zones, so that the northern regions do not intercept
the moisture from falling on the southern; the nature of our hills and
mines, our trees and vegetables, our seasons and harvests; our Alphabet,
and method of writing, adapted to our linear tablets; these and a hundred
other details of our physical existence I must pass over, nor do I
mention them now except to indicate to my readers that their omission
proceeds not from forgetfulness on the part of the Author, but from his
regard for the time of the Reader.
Yet before I proceed to my legitimate subject some few final remarks will
no doubt be expected by my Readers upon those pillars and mainstays of
the Constitution of Flatland, the controllers of our conduct and shapers
of our destiny, the objects of universal homage and almost of adoration:
need I say that I mean our Circles or Priests?
When I call them Priests, let me not be understood as meaning no more
than the term denotes with you. With us, our Priests are Administrators
of all Business, Art, and Science; Directors of Trade, Commerce,
Generalship, Architecture, Engineering, Education, Statesmanship,
Legislature, Morality, Theology; doing nothing themselves, they are the
Causes of everything, worth doing, that is done by others.
Although popularly every one called a Circle is deemed a Circle, yet
among the better educated Classes it is known that no Circle is really a
Circle, but only a Polygon with a very large number of very small sides.
In proportion to the number of the sides the Polygon approximates to a
Circle; and, when the number is very great, say for example three or four
hundred, it is extremely difficult for the most delicate touch to feel
any polygonal angles. Let me say rather, it _would_ be difficult: for, as
I have shown above, Recognition by Feeling is unknown among the highest
society, and to _feel_ a Circle would be considered a most audacious
insult. This habit of abstention from Feeling in the best society enables
a Circle the more easily to sustain the veil of mystery in which, from
his earliest years, he is wont to enwrap the exact nature of his
Perimeter or Circumference. Three feet being the average Perimeter it
follows that, in a Polygon of three hundred sides, each side will be no
more than the hundredth part of a foot in length, or little more than the
tenth part of an inch; and in a Polygon of six or seven hundred sides the
sides are little larger than the diameter of a Spaceland pin-head. It is
always assumed, by courtesy, that the Chief Circle for the time being has
ten thousand sides.
The ascent of the posterity of the Circles in the social scale is not
restricted, as it is among the lower Regular classes, by the Law of
Nature which limits the increase of sides to one in each generation. If
it were so, the number of sides in a Circle would be a mere question of
pedigree and arithmetic, and the four hundred and ninety-seventh
descendant of an Equilateral Triangle would necessarily be a Polygon with
five hundred sides. But this is not the case. Nature’s Law prescribes two
antagonistic decrees affecting Circular propagation; first, that as the
race climbs higher in the scale of development, so development shall
proceed at an accelerated pace; second, that in the same proportion, the
race shall become less fertile. Consequently in the home of a Polygon of
four or five hundred sides it is rare to find a son; more than one is
never seen. On the other hand the son of a five-hundred-sided Polygon has
been known to possess five hundred and fifty, or even six hundred sides.
Art also steps in to help the process of the higher Evolution. Our
physicians have discovered that the small and tender sides of an infant
Polygon of the higher class can be fractured, and his whole frame re-set,
with such exactness that a Polygon of two or three hundred sides
sometimes—by no means always, for the process is attended with serious
risk—but sometimes overleaps two or three hundred generations, and as it
were doubles at a stroke, the number of his progenitors and the nobility
of his descent.
Many a promising child is sacrificed in this way. Scarcely one out of ten
survives. Yet so strong is the parental ambition among those Polygons who
are, as it were, on the fringe of the Circular class, that it is very
rare to find a Nobleman of that position in society, who has neglected to
place his first-born son in the Circular Neo-Therapeutic Gymnasium before
he has attained the age of a month.
One year determines success or failure. At the end of that time the child
has, in all probability, added one more to the tombstones that crowd the
Neo-Therapeutic Cemetery; but on rare occasions a glad procession bears
back the little one to his exultant parents, no longer a Polygon, but a
Circle, at least by courtesy: and a single instance of so blessed a
result induces multitudes of Polygonal parents to submit to similar
domestic sacrifices, which have a dissimilar issue.
§ 12.—_Of the Doctrine of our Priests._
As to the doctrine of the Circles it may briefly be summed up in a single
maxim, “Attend to your Configuration.” Whether political, ecclesiastical,
or moral, all their teaching has for its object the improvement of
individual and collective Configuration—with special reference of course
to the Configuration of the Circles, to which all other objects are
subordinated.
It is the merit of the Circles that they have effectually suppressed
those ancient heresies which led men to waste energy and sympathy in the
vain belief that conduct depends upon will, effort, training,
encouragement, praise, or anything else but Configuration. It was
Pantocyclus—the illustrious Circle mentioned above, as the queller of the
Colour Revolt—who first convinced mankind that Configuration makes the
man; that if, for example, you are born an Isosceles with two uneven
sides, you will assuredly go wrong unless you have them made even—for
which purpose you must go to the Isosceles Hospital; similarly, if you
are a Triangle, or Square, or even a Polygon, born with any Irregularity,
you must be taken to one of the Regular Hospitals to have your disease
cured; otherwise you will end your days in the State Prison or by the
angle of the State Executioner.
All faults or defects, from the slightest misconduct to the most
flagitious crime, Pantocyclus attributed to some deviation from perfect
Regularity in the bodily figure, caused perhaps (if not congenital) by
some collision in a crowd; by neglect to take exercise, or by taking too
much of it; or even by a sudden change of temperature, resulting in a
shrinkage or expansion in some too susceptible part of the frame.
Therefore, concluded that illustrious Philosopher, neither good conduct
nor bad conduct is a fit subject, in any sober estimation, for either
praise or blame. For why should you praise, for example, the integrity of
a Square who faithfully defends the interests of his client, when you
ought in reality rather to admire the exact precision of his Rectangles?
Or again, why blame a lying, thievish Isosceles when you ought rather to
deplore the incurable inequality of his sides?
Theoretically, this doctrine is unquestionable; but it has practical
drawbacks. In dealing with an Isosceles, if a rascal pleads that he
cannot help stealing because of his unevenness, you reply that for that
very reason, because he cannot help being a nuisance to his neighbours,
you, the Magistrate, cannot help sentencing him to be consumed—and
there’s an end of the matter. But in little domestic difficulties, where
the penalty of consumption, or death, is out of the question, this theory
of Configuration sometimes comes in awkwardly; and I must confess that
occasionally when one of my own Hexagonal Grandsons pleads as an excuse
for his disobedience that a sudden change of the temperature has been too
much for his Perimeter, and that I ought to lay the blame not on him but
on his Configuration, which can only be strengthened by abundance of the
choicest sweetmeats, I neither see my way logically to reject, nor
practically to accept, his conclusions.
For my own part, I find it best to assume that a good sound scolding or
castigation has some latent and strengthening influence on my Grandson’s
Configuration; though I own that I have no grounds for thinking so. At
all events I am not alone in my way of extricating myself from this
dilemma; for I find that many of the highest Circles, sitting as Judges
in Law courts, use praise and blame towards Regular and Irregular
Figures; and in their homes I know by experience that, when scolding
their children, they speak about “right” or “wrong” as vehemently and
passionately as if they believed that these names represented real
existences, and that a human Figure is really capable of choosing between
them.
Consistently carrying out their policy of making Configuration the
leading idea in every mind, the Circles reverse the nature of that
Commandment which in Spaceland regulates the relations between parents
and children. With you, children are taught to honour their parents; with
us—next to the Circles, who are the chief object of universal homage—a
man is taught to honour his Grandson, if he has one; or, if not, his Son.
By “honour,” however, is by no means meant “indulgence,” but a reverent
regard for their highest interests: and the Circles teach that the duty
of fathers is to subordinate their own interests to those of posterity,
thereby advancing the welfare of the whole State as well as that of their
own immediate descendants.
The weak point in the system of the Circles—if a humble Square may
venture to speak of anything Circular as containing any element of
weakness—appears to me to be found in their relations with Women.
As it is of the utmost importance for Society that Irregular births
should be discouraged, it follows that no Woman who has any
Irregularities in her ancestry is a fit partner for one who desires that
his posterity should rise by regular degrees in the social scale.
Now the Irregularity of a Male is a matter of measurement; but as all
Women are straight, and therefore visibly Regular so to speak, one has to
devise some other means of ascertaining what I may call their invisible
Irregularity, that is to say their potential Irregularities as regards
possible offspring. This is effected by carefully-kept pedigrees, which
are preserved and supervised by the State; and without a certified
pedigree no Woman is allowed to marry.
Now it might have been supposed that a Circle—proud of his ancestry and
regardful for a posterity which might possibly issue hereafter in a Chief
Circle—would be more careful than any other to choose a wife who had no
blot on her escutcheon. But it is not so. The care in choosing a Regular
wife appears to diminish as one rises in the social scale. Nothing would
induce an aspiring Isosceles, who had hopes of generating an Equilateral
Son, to take a wife who reckoned a single Irregularity among her
Ancestors; a Square or Pentagon, who is confident that his family is
steadily on the rise, does not enquire above the five-hundredth
generation; a Hexagon or Dodecahedron is even more careless of the wife’s
pedigree; but a Circle has been known deliberately to take a wife who has
had an Irregular Great-Grandfather, and all because of some slight
superiority of lustre, or because of the charms of a low voice—which,
with us, even more than with you, is thought “an excellent thing in
Woman.”
Such ill-judged marriages are, as might be expected, barren, if they do
not result in positive Irregularity or in diminution of sides; but none
of these evils have hitherto proved sufficiently deterrent. The loss of a
few sides in a highly-developed Polygon is not easily noticed, and is
sometimes compensated by a successful operation in the Neo-Therapeutic
Gymnasium, as I have described above; and the Circles are too much
disposed to acquiesce in infecundity as a Law of the superior
development. Yet, if this evil be not arrested, the gradual diminution of
the Circular class may soon become more rapid, and the time may be not
far distant when, the race being no longer able to produce a Chief
Circle, the Constitution of Flatland must fall.
One other word of warning suggests itself to me, though I cannot so
easily mention a remedy; and this also refers to our relations with
Women. About three hundred years ago, it was decreed by the Chief Circle
that, since women are deficient in Reason but abundant in Emotion, they
ought no longer to be treated as rational, nor receive any mental
education. The consequence was that they were no longer taught to read,
nor even to master Arithmetic enough to enable them to count the angles
of their husband or children; and hence they sensibly declined during
each generation in intellectual power. And this system of female
non-education or quietism still prevails.
My fear is that, with the best intentions, this policy has been carried
so far as to react injuriously on the Male Sex.
For the consequence is that, as things now are, we Males have to lead a
kind of bi-lingual, and I may almost say bi-mental existence. With the
Women, we speak of “love,” “duty,” “right,” “wrong,” “pity,” “hope,” and
other irrational and emotional conceptions, which have no existence, and
the fiction of which has no object except to control feminine
exuberances; but among ourselves, and in our books, we have an entirely
different vocabulary and I may almost say, idiom. “Love” then becomes
“the anticipation of benefits;” “duty” becomes “necessity” or “fitness;”
and other words are correspondingly transmuted. Moreover, among Women, we
use language implying the utmost deference for their Sex; and they fully
believe that the Chief Circle Himself is not more devoutly adored by us
than they are: but behind their backs they are both regarded and spoken
of—by all except the very young—as being little better than “mindless
organisms.”
Our Theology also in the Women’s chambers is entirely different from our
Theology elsewhere.
Now my humble fear is that this double training, in language as well as
in thought, imposes somewhat too heavy a burden upon the young,
especially when, at the age of three years old, they are taken from the
maternal care and taught to unlearn the old language—except for the
purpose of repeating it in the presence of their Mothers and Nurses—and
to learn the vocabulary and idiom of science. Already methinks I discern
a weakness in the grasp of mathematical truth at the present time as
compared with the more robust intellect of our ancestors three hundred
years ago. I say nothing of the possible danger if a Woman should ever
surreptitiously learn to read and convey to her Sex the result of her
perusal of a single popular volume; nor of the possibility that the
indiscretion or disobedience of some infant Male might reveal to a Mother
the secrets of the logical dialect. On the simple ground of the
enfeebling of the Male intellect, I rest this humble appeal to the
highest Authorities to reconsider the regulations of Female Education.
_PART II
OTHER WORLDS_
“_O brave new worlds,_
_That have such people in them!_”
_PART II_
OTHER LANDS
§ 13.—_How I had a Vision of Lineland._
It was the last day but one of the 1999th year of our era, and the first
day of the Long Vacation. Having amused myself till a late hour with my
favourite recreation of Geometry, I had retired to rest with an unsolved
problem in my mind. In the night I had a dream.
I saw before me a vast multitude of small Straight Lines (which I
naturally assumed to be Women) interspersed with other Beings still
smaller and of the nature of lustrous Points—all moving to and fro in one
and the same Straight Line, and, as nearly as I could judge, with the
same velocity.
[Illustration: ]
A noise of confused, multitudinous chirping or twittering issued from
them at intervals as long as they were moving; but sometimes they ceased
from motion, and then all was silence.
Approaching one of the largest of what I thought to be Women, I accosted
her, but received no answer. A second and third appeal on my part were
equally ineffectual. Losing patience at what appeared to me intolerable
rudeness, I brought my mouth into a position full in front of her mouth
so as to intercept her motion, and loudly repeated my question, “Woman,
what signifies this concourse, and this strange and confused chirping,
and this monotonous motion to and fro in one and the same Straight Line?”