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.
Nothing so greatly astonished the Limanorans as the concomitant disappearance of detraction and vanity from their midst. One of their earliest crusades was that against evil speaking; it was easier than they had thought, for already the principle of generosity to others had begun to work and reputation was counted more valuable than any property. When magnanimity had eradicated the habit of disparagement, the training in impartial use of the judgment prevented the nature swinging into the opposite extreme of shouting hosannas over the nothings of daily life. As they gained clear-sightedness in estimating human actions and character, they found that the cues of vanity had disappeared. They had no need of crusading against the vice; it had been vanquished.
