Herland
to know which method has been proved best--and we had to admit that
so far as we knew there had been no attempt at comparison, each people
pursuing its own custom in the fond conviction of superiority, and
either despising or quite ignoring the others.
With these women the most salient quality in all their institutions was
reasonableness. When I dug into the records to follow out any line of
development, that was the most astonishing thing--the conscious effort
to make it better.
They had early observed the value of certain improvements, had easily
inferred that there was room for more, and took the greatest pains to
develop two kinds of minds--the critic and inventor. Those who showed
an early tendency to observe, to discriminate, to suggest, were given
special training for that function; and some of their highest officials
spent their time in the most careful study of one or another branch of
work, with a view to its further improvement.
In each generation there was sure to arrive some new mind to detect
faults and show need of alterations; and the whole corps of inventors
was at hand to apply their special faculty at the point criticized, and
offer suggestions.
We had learned by this time not to open a discussion on any of their
characteristics without first priming ourselves to answer questions
about our own methods; so I kept rather quiet on this matter of
conscious improvement. We were not prepared to show our way was better.
There was growing in our minds, at least in Jeff’s and mine, a
keen appreciation of the advantages of this strange country and its
management. Terry remained critical. We laid most of it to his nerves.
He certainly was irritable.
The most conspicuous feature of the whole land was the perfection of
its food supply. We had begun to notice from that very first walk in the
forest, the first partial view from our ‘plane. Now we were taken to see
this mighty garden, and shown its methods of culture.
The country was about the size of Holland, some ten or twelve
thousand square miles. One could lose a good many Hollands along the
forest-smothered flanks of those mighty mountains. They had a population
of about three million--not a large one, but quality is something. Three
million is quite enough to allow for considerable variation, and these
people varied more widely than we could at first account for.
Terry had insisted that if they were parthenogenetic they’d be as alike
as so many ants or aphids; he urged their visible differences as proof
that there must be men--somewhere.
But when we asked them, in our later, more intimate conversations, how
they accounted for so much divergence without cross-fertilization,
they attributed it partly to the careful education, which followed each
slight tendency to differ, and partly to the law of mutation. This they
had found in their work with plants, and fully proven in their own case.
Physically they were more alike than we, as they lacked all morbid or
excessive types. They were tall, strong, healthy, and beautiful as a
race, but differed individually in a wide range of feature, coloring,
and expression.
“But surely the most important growth is in mind--and in the things we
make,” urged Somel. “Do you find your physical variation accompanied by
a proportionate variation in ideas, feelings, and products? Or, among
people who look more alike, do you find their internal life and their
work as similar?”
We were rather doubtful on this point, and inclined to hold that there
was more chance of improvement in greater physical variation.
“It certainly should be,” Zava admitted. “We have always thought it a
grave initial misfortune to have lost half our little world. Perhaps
that is one reason why we have so striven for conscious improvement.”
“But acquired traits are not transmissible,” Terry declared. “Weissman
has proved that.”
They never disputed our absolute statements, only made notes of them.
“If that is so, then our improvement must be due either to mutation, or
solely to education,” she gravely pursued. “We certainly have improved.
It may be that all these higher qualities were latent in the original
mother, that careful education is bringing them out, and that our
personal differences depend on slight variations in prenatal condition.”
“I think it is more in your accumulated culture,” Jeff suggested. “And
in the amazing psychic growth you have made. We know very little about
methods of real soul culture--and you seem to know a great deal.”
Be that as it might, they certainly presented a higher level of active
intelligence, and of behavior, than we had so far really grasped. Having
known in our lives several people who showed the same delicate courtesy
and were equally pleasant to live with, at least when they wore their
“company manners,” we had assumed that our companions were a carefully
chosen few. Later we were more and more impressed that all this gentle
breeding was breeding; that they were born to it, reared in it, that it
was as natural and universal with them as the gentleness of doves or the
alleged wisdom of serpents.
As for the intelligence, I confess that this was the most impressive
and, to me, most mortifying, of any single feature of Herland. We soon
ceased to comment on this or other matters which to them were such
obvious commonplaces as to call forth embarrassing questions about our
own conditions.
This was nowhere better shown than in that matter of food supply, which
I will now attempt to describe.
Having improved their agriculture to the highest point, and carefully
estimated the number of persons who could comfortably live on their
square miles; having then limited their population to that number, one
would think that was all there was to be done. But they had not thought
so. To them the country was a unit--it was theirs. They themselves were
a unit, a conscious group; they thought in terms of the community. As
such, their time-sense was not limited to the hopes and ambitions of an
individual life. Therefore, they habitually considered and carried out
plans for improvement which might cover centuries.
I had never seen, had scarcely imagined, human beings undertaking such
a work as the deliberate replanting of an entire forest area with
different kinds of trees. Yet this seemed to them the simplest common
sense, like a man’s plowing up an inferior lawn and reseeding it. Now
every tree bore fruit--edible fruit, that is. In the case of one
tree, in which they took especial pride, it had originally no fruit at
all--that is, none humanly edible--yet was so beautiful that they wished
to keep it. For nine hundred years they had experimented, and now
showed us this particularly lovely graceful tree, with a profuse crop of
nutritious seeds.
They had early decided that trees were the best food plants, requiring
far less labor in tilling the soil, and bearing a larger amount of food
for the same ground space; also doing much to preserve and enrich the
soil.
Due regard had been paid to seasonable crops, and their fruit and nuts,
grains and berries, kept on almost the year through.
On the higher part of the country, near the backing wall of mountains,
they had a real winter with snow. Toward the south-eastern point, where
there was a large valley with a lake whose outlet was subterranean, the
climate was like that of California, and citrus fruits, figs, and olives
grew abundantly.
What impressed me particularly was their scheme of fertilization. Here
was this little shut-in piece of land where one would have thought an
ordinary people would have been starved out long ago or reduced to an
annual struggle for life. These careful culturists had worked out a
perfect scheme of refeeding the soil with all that came out of it. All
the scraps and leavings of their food, plant waste from lumber work or
textile industry, all the solid matter from the sewage, properly treated
and combined--everything which came from the earth went back to it.
The practical result was like that in any healthy forest; an
increasingly valuable soil was being built, instead of the progressive
impoverishment so often seen in the rest of the world.
When this first burst upon us we made such approving comments that they
were surprised that such obvious common sense should be praised; asked
what our methods were; and we had some difficulty in--well, in
diverting them, by referring to the extent of our own land, and
the--admitted--carelessness with which we had skimmed the cream of it.
At least we thought we had diverted them. Later I found that besides
keeping a careful and accurate account of all we told them, they had a
sort of skeleton chart, on which the things we said and the things we
palpably avoided saying were all set down and studied. It really was
child’s play for those profound educators to work out a painfully
accurate estimate of our conditions--in some lines. When a given line of
observation seemed to lead to some very dreadful inference they always
gave us the benefit of the doubt, leaving it open to further knowledge.
Some of the things we had grown to accept as perfectly natural, or
as belonging to our human limitations, they literally could not have
believed; and, as I have said, we had all of us joined in a tacit
endeavor to conceal much of the social status at home.
“Confound their grandmotherly minds!” Terry said. “Of course they can’t
understand a Man’s World! They aren’t human--they’re just a pack of
Fe-Fe-Females!” This was after he had to admit their parthenogenesis.
“I wish our grandfatherly minds had managed as well,” said Jeff. “Do you
really think it’s to our credit that we have muddled along with all our
poverty and disease and the like? They have peace and plenty, wealth and
beauty, goodness and intellect. Pretty good people, I think!”
“You’ll find they have their faults too,” Terry insisted; and partly in
self-defense, we all three began to look for those faults of theirs.
We had been very strong on this subject before we got there--in those
baseless speculations of ours.
“Suppose there is a country of women only,” Jeff had put it, over and
over. “What’ll they be like?”
And we had been cocksure as to the inevitable limitations, the faults
and vices, of a lot of women. We had expected them to be given over to
what we called “feminine vanity”--“frills and furbelows,” and we found
they had evolved a costume more perfect than the Chinese dress, richly
beautiful when so desired, always useful, of unfailing dignity and good
taste.
We had expected a dull submissive monotony, and found a daring social
inventiveness far beyond our own, and a mechanical and scientific
development fully equal to ours.
We had expected pettiness, and found a social consciousness besides
which our nations looked like quarreling children--feebleminded ones at
that.
We had expected jealousy, and found a broad sisterly affection, a
fair-minded intelligence, to which we could produce no parallel.
We had expected hysteria, and found a standard of health and vigor, a
calmness of temper, to which the habit of profanity, for instance, was
impossible to explain--we tried it.
All these things even Terry had to admit, but he still insisted that we
should find out the other side pretty soon.
“It stands to reason, doesn’t it?” he argued. “The whole thing’s deuced
unnatural--I’d say impossible if we weren’t in it. And an unnatural
condition’s sure to have unnatural results. You’ll find some awful
characteristics--see if you don’t! For instance--we don’t know yet what
they do with their criminals--their defectives--their aged. You notice
we haven’t seen any! There’s got to be something!”
I was inclined to believe that there had to be something, so I took the