After the conversation with Zee just recorded, I fell into a profound
melancholy. The curious interest with which I had hitherto examined the
life and habits of this marvellous community was at an end. I could not
banish from my mind the consciousness that I was among a people who,
however kind and courteous, could destroy me at any moment without
scruple or compunction. The virtuous and peaceful life of the
people which, while new to me, had seemed so holy a contrast to the
contentions, the passions, the vices of the upper world, now began
to oppress me with a sense of dulness and monotony. Even the serene
tranquility of the lustrous air preyed on my spirits. I longed for a
change, even to winter, or storm, or darkness. I began to feel that,
whatever our dreams of perfectibility, our restless aspirations towards
a better, and higher, and calmer, sphere of being, we, the mortals of
the upper world, are not trained or fitted to enjoy for long the very
happiness of which we dream or to which we aspire.
Now, in this social state of the Vril-ya, it was singular to mark how
it contrived to unite and to harmonise into one system nearly all the
objects which the various philosophers of the upper world have placed
before human hopes as the ideals of a Utopian future. It was a state in
which war, with all its calamities, was deemed impossible,--a state in
which the freedom of all and each was secured to the uttermost degree,
without one of those animosities which make freedom in the upper world
depend on the perpetual strife of hostile parties. Here the corruption
which debases democracies was as unknown as the discontents which
undermine the thrones of monarchies. Equality here was not a name; it
was a reality. Riches were not persecuted, because they were not envied.
Here those problems connected with the labours of a working class,
hitherto insoluble above ground, and above ground conducing to such
bitterness between classes, were solved by a process the simplest,--a
distinct and separate working class was dispensed with altogether.
Mechanical inventions, constructed on the principles that baffled my
research to ascertain, worked by an agency infinitely more powerful and
infinitely more easy of management than aught we have yet extracted from
electricity or steam, with the aid of children whose strength was
never overtasked, but who loved their employment as sport and pastime,
sufficed to create a Public-wealth so devoted to the general use that
not a grumbler was ever heard of. The vices that rot our cities here
had no footing. Amusements abounded, but they were all innocent. No
merry-makings conduced to intoxication, to riot, to disease. Love
existed, and was ardent in pursuit, but its object, once secured, was
faithful. The adulterer, the profligate, the harlot, were phenomena so
unknown in this commonwealth, that even to find the words by which they
were designated one would have had to search throughout an obsolete
literature composed thousands of years before. They who have been
students of theoretical philosophies above ground, know that all these
strange departures from civilised life do but realise ideas which have
been broached, canvassed, ridiculed, contested for; sometimes partially
tried, and still put forth in fantastic books, but have never come
to practical result. Nor were these all the steps towards theoretical
perfectibility which this community had made. It had been the sober
belief of Descartes that the life of man could be prolonged, not,
indeed, on this earth, to eternal duration, but to what he called the
age of the patriarchs, and modestly defined to be from 100 to 150 years
average length. Well, even this dream of sages was here fulfilled--nay,
more than fulfilled; for the vigour of middle life was preserved even
after the term of a century was passed. With this longevity was combined
a greater blessing than itself--that of continuous health. Such diseases
as befell the race were removed with ease by scientific applications of
that agency--life-giving as life-destroying--which is inherent in vril.
Even this idea is not unknown above ground, though it has generally
been confined to enthusiasts or charlatans, and emanates from confused
notions about mesmerism, odic force, &c. Passing by such trivial
contrivances as wings, which every schoolboy knows has been tried and
found wanting, from the mythical or pre-historical period, I proceed to
that very delicate question, urged of late as essential to the perfect
happiness of our human species by the two most disturbing and potential
influences on upper-ground society,--Womankind and Philosophy. I mean,
the Rights of Women.
Now, it is allowed by jurisprudists that it is idle to talk of rights
where there are not corresponding powers to enforce them; and above
ground, for some reason or other, man, in his physical force, in the use
of weapons offensive and defensive, when it come to positive personal
contest, can, as a rule of general application, master women. But among
this people there can be no doubt about the rights of women, because, as
I have before said, the Gy, physically speaking, is bigger and stronger
than the An; and her will being also more resolute than his, and will
being essential to the direction of the vril force, she can bring to
bear upon him, more potently than he on herself, the mystical agency
which art can extract from the occult properties of nature. Therefore
all that our female philosophers above ground contend for as to rights
of women, is conceded as a matter of course in this happy commonwealth.
Besides such physical powers, the Gy-ei have (at least in youth) a keen
desire for accomplishments and learning which exceeds that of the male;
and thus they are the scholars, the professors--the learned portion, in
short, of the community.
Of course, in this state of society the female establishes, as I have
shown, her most valued privilege, that of choosing and courting her
wedding partner. Without that privilege she would despise all the
others. Now, above ground, we should not unreasonably apprehend that a
female, thus potent and thus privileged, when she had fairly hunted us
down and married us, would be very imperious and tyrannical. Not so with
the Gy-ei: once married, the wings once suspended, and more amiable,
complacent, docile mates, more sympathetic, more sinking their loftier
capacities into the study of their husbands’ comparatively frivolous
tastes and whims, no poet could conceive in his visions of conjugal
bliss. Lastly, among the more important characteristics of the Vril-ya,
as distinguished from our mankind--lastly, and most important on the
bearings of their life and the peace of their commonwealths, is their
universal agreement in the existence of a merciful beneficent Diety, and
of a future world to the duration of which a century or two are moments
too brief to waste upon thoughts of fame and power and avarice; while
with that agreement is combined another--viz., since they can know
nothing as to the nature of that Diety beyond the fact of His supreme
goodness, nor of that future world beyond the fact of its felicitous
existence, so their reason forbids all angry disputes on insoluble
questions. Thus they secure for that state in the bowels of the earth
what no community ever secured under the light of the stars--all the
blessings and consolations of a religion without any of the evils and
calamities which are engendered by strife between one religion and
another.
It would be, then, utterly impossible to deny that the state of
existence among the Vril-ya is thus, as a whole, immeasurably more
felicitous than that of super-terrestrial races, and, realising the
dreams of our most sanguine philanthropists, almost approaches to a
poet’s conception of some angelical order. And yet, if you would take
a thousand of the best and most philosophical of human beings you could
find in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, or even Boston, and place them
as citizens in the beatified community, my belief is, that in less than
a year they would either die of ennui, or attempt some revolution by
which they would militate against the good of the community, and be
burnt into cinders at the request of the Tur.
Certainly I have no desire to insinuate, through the medium of this
narrative, any ignorant disparagement of the race to which I belong. I
have, on the contrary, endeavoured to make it clear that the principles
which regulate the social system of the Vril-ya forbid them to produce
those individual examples of human greatness which adorn the annals of
the upper world. Where there are no wars there can be no Hannibal, no
Washington, no Jackson, no Sheridan;--where states are so happy that
they fear no danger and desire no change, they cannot give birth to a
Demosthenes, a Webster, a Sumner, a Wendell Holmes, or a Butler; and
where a society attains to a moral standard, in which there are no
crimes and no sorrows from which tragedy can extract its aliment of pity
and sorrow, no salient vices or follies on which comedy can lavish its
mirthful satire, it has lost the chance of producing a Shakespeare, or
a Moliere, or a Mrs. Beecher-Stowe. But if I have no desire to disparage
my fellow-men above ground in showing how much the motives that impel
the energies and ambition of individuals in a society of contest and
struggle--become dormant or annulled in a society which aims at securing
for the aggregate the calm and innocent felicity which we presume to be
the lot of beatified immortals; neither, on the other hand, have I the
wish to represent the commonwealths of the Vril-ya as an ideal form of
political society, to the attainment of which our own efforts of reform
should be directed. On the contrary, it is because we have so combined,
throughout the series of ages, the elements which compose human
character, that it would be utterly impossible for us to adopt the modes
of life, or to reconcile our passions to the modes of thought among
the Vril-ya,--that I arrived at the conviction that this people--though
originally not only of our human race, but, as seems to me clear by the
roots of their language, descended from the same ancestors as the Great
Aryan family, from which in varied streams has flowed the dominant
civilisation of the world; and having, according to their myths
and their history, passed through phases of society familiar to
ourselves,--had yet now developed into a distinct species with which it
was impossible that any community in the upper world could amalgamate:
and that if they ever emerged from these nether recesses into the light
of day, they would, according to their own traditional persuasions of
their ultimate destiny, destroy and replace our existent varieties of
man.
It may, indeed, be said, since more than one Gy could be found to
conceive a partiality for so ordinary a type of our super-terrestrial
race as myself, that even if the Vril-ya did appear above ground, we
might be saved from extermination by intermixture of race. But this is
too sanguine a belief. Instances of such ‘mesalliance’ would be as rare
as those of intermarriage between the Anglo-Saxon emigrants and the
Red Indians. Nor would time be allowed for the operation of familiar
intercourse. The Vril-ya, on emerging, induced by the charm of a sunlit
heaven to form their settlements above ground, would commence at once
the work of destruction, seize upon the territories already cultivated,
and clear off, without scruple, all the inhabitants who resisted
that invasion. And considering their contempt for the institutions of
Koom-Posh or Popular Government, and the pugnacious valour of my
beloved countrymen, I believe that if the Vril-ya first appeared in free
America--as, being the choicest portion of the habitable earth, they
would doubtless be induced to do--and said, “This quarter of the globe
we take; Citizens of a Koom-Posh, make way for the development of
species in the Vril-ya,” my brave compatriots would show fight, and not
a soul of them would be left in this life, to rally round the Stars and
Stripes, at the end of a week.
I now saw but little of Zee, save at meals, when the family assembled,
and she was then reserved and silent. My apprehensions of danger from an
affection I had so little encouraged or deserved, therefore, now faded
away, but my dejection continued to increase. I pined for escape to the
upper world, but I racked my brains in vain for any means to effect it.
I was never permitted to wander forth alone, so that I could not even
visit the spot on which I had alighted, and see if it were possible to
reascend to the mine. Nor even in the Silent Hours, when the household
was locked in sleep, could I have let myself down from the lofty floor
in which my apartment was placed. I knew not how to command the automata
who stood mockingly at my beck beside the wall, nor could I ascertain
the springs by which were set in movement the platforms that supplied
the place of stairs. The knowledge how to avail myself of these
contrivances had been purposely withheld from me. Oh, that I could but
have learned the use of wings, so freely here at the service of every
infant, then I might have escaped from the casement, regained the rocks,
and buoyed myself aloft through the chasm of which the perpendicular
sides forbade place for human footing!