Limanora the island of progress
shelter, lest the invisible foe should take advantage of their palsy
and reap his harvest of blood. But no enemy came. No carnage followed
the strange catastrophe. The morning dawned, and the waters of the bay
shone as peacefully in the level rays of the sun as if no fleet had
ever been there, as if no conflagration had occurred. Not a boat or
sign of an enemy was to be seen. Out crept the soldiers and sailors
from their shelters, the people in their rear, and soon the harbour was
alive with craft, seeking relics and explanation of the disaster.
But no explanation could be found in all the babel of theories that
chattered and echoed over the water. A council of the royal advisers
was called; they consulted and questioned every admiral and general;
but all in vain. The stranger, who had brought the fleet and its
equipment into existence, failed to account for the occurrence. He
refuted all charges of negligence, and appealed to the desire of the
people and the command of the king as his warrant for withdrawing the
crews from the ships for the night. Treachery there must have been;
there were a thousand conjectures, but no sure knowledge as to whence
it came. With the irrationality and ingratitude which mark all panic
in nations or other aggregations of men when unexplained disaster has
overtaken them, they broke out in fury against the very hero of the
night’s festivities. They had to find a scapegoat and his figure was
foremost in every man’s mind; the destructive magnetism of the crowd
gathered round the name that was on every lip, and the cry arose that
he was the traitor. The mob howled outside the council-room for his
blood. He had to be bundled off by a secret passage to the outskirts of
the city and thence into the mountains, and to appease their frantic
passions the king had to proclaim his exile, and to promise that no
such engines of war should again be forged in the royal armories. Fear
of the isle of demons again crept over the superstitious hearts of the
people. As they brooded over the mystery, they felt that somehow or
other it was connected with that inexpugnable centre which had defied
all their efforts at its invasion.
And this was right. For the Limanorans had watched the long preparation
for the assault, and made calmly ready to defeat it. They knew that, if
they ever allowed the fleet to sail, they could not well beat it off
without loss of life amongst its crews. It could lie in the shelter
of an island some miles distant from their shores and rain great
projectiles upon them. The repulse must be accomplished long before
this had been reached. They therefore waited till the ammunition was
on board each ship. Then, in order to avoid the destruction of life,
they sent into the air of Broolyi the exhilarative magnetism required,
and into the minds of the inhabitants the suggestion that the whole
fleet should be fêted. When the ships had been deserted and not a human
being was within reach of them, they launched through the air in its
direction a series of electric shocks, which, as soon as they came in
contact with the metals of the magazine, ignited the ammunition. Most
of the ships were set on fire in this way, the rest by the falling
fragments and sparks from their exploding sisters.
Thus was the new threat to Limanoran civilisation frustrated without
loss of life or breach of the mystery that sealed the central isle. But
the waste of time and progress upon such threats by the withdrawal of
so many Limanorans from their ordinary pursuits was an evil not to be
tolerated. Something must be done to prevent the recurrence of these
expeditions. It was generally from Broolyi they came, the result of
warlike ambition. It would be a service to the whole archipelago to
reduce this military people to insignificance and silence. There was
no security in their subjugation by the people of another island, for
the war-fanaticism would surge up again in a later generation. The
conversion of them to a religion of peace would mean no change in the
blood; it would only transform the method and cue of attack.
What was needed was the elimination of the ambitious and military
natures from the Broolyians. For only the aristocracy and the
descendants of the original conquering exiles had set their hearts on
military pursuits; the conquered and many of the families that came to
the island at later dates than the great purgation, were not unwilling
to keep to their own bounds, and preferred possession to dispossession.
There was no need of extermination of the people, but only decimation.
Nor would the Limanorans endure any shedding of blood in the process.
It must be gradual, peaceful, free from torture and bloodshed, and
almost unobservable.
The physiological and physicist families worked out a scheme that would
fulfil all these conditions, and yet finally eject the disturbers of
peace from the archipelago within a generation. The scare they had just
suffered and the exile of the balloonist ensured to Limanora freedom
from their attacks for some years. But they aimed at permanent immunity
and this could be secured by nothing less than the sterilisation of the
warlike element in Broolyi.
The end was accomplished in the next aggression upon a neighbouring
island. The expedition was formidable, and included all the bellicose
males of the offending people. After landing, it lay encamped in the
open air; then a band of Limanorans set out on wings by night, armed
with a new surgical instrument, called the idlumian, which could give
an electric shock to any part of the human system and paralyse it
either for a time or permanently, according to the power put into it.
They approached the whole army as it lay asleep, and by the whiff of a
soporific which they diffused through the air, they steeped the systems
of the sentinels in lethargy and by the same means ensured the depth
and continuance of the slumbers of the embattled host. Before a single
soldier had awakened from his deep sleep, the whole Broolyian army
was defertilised without being in the least conscious of any loss of
vitality or manhood or enjoyment of life. When the sentries awoke and
the troops began to move about in preparation for their struggle, the
medical embassy had winged its way back to Limanora. Not till twenty
or thirty years after did it strike the Broolyians that the fountain
of their military power was dried up, and soon they began to attribute
the strange infecundity of their aristocratic and warlike families to
the witchcraft of the isle of demons, a belief that finally sealed that
centre of the archipelago as with walls of adamant against aggression
on the part of their neighbours.
My Western instincts, in spite of all my training, would reappear at
intervals--which happily became longer and longer--and for a time
I could not repress my instinctive disapproval of the use of this
idlumian or electro steriliser. Yet my reason told me that it was the
only effective method of permanently stopping the horrors of war in the
archipelago. Heredity and circumstances would have circumvented any
other bloodless attempt at relief from the Broolyian nightmare. A few
discussions with my proparents made this rational view of the matter
dominant over the conservative instinct in me, and before many years my
instinct was quite the other way; it became the ally of the reason; and
I had no need to argue with myself on the point or confirm my faith by
arguing with others who knew better than I.
There was another Western instinct of mine which gave me frequent
though lessening trouble and came into conflict with the reason of
the community at this time and on this topic. It was my approval
of propagandism. Into my blood had grown through the centuries of
Christendom the feeling that a faith could not well prove itself unless
it spread out amongst new and alien peoples. It is the prerogative and
principle of belief to yearn for universality of acceptance amongst
human beings. And it urges on the devotees of any faith to spread it
through the world at all costs. After centuries of propagandism the
habit becomes an instinct, and it seems to be a dictate of nature to
attempt to convert the world to the tenets which have grown up in us
from infancy and been incorporated into our very life. The Christian
has ever been from its outset a great missionary religion, and it
is difficult for one brought up in Christendom to get rid of the
missionary attitude of mind which assumes every alien to it to be sunk
in wickedness and unprofitableness, and certain to lose all the future
blessings promised to true believers.
I could not obliterate this instinct wholly from my nature, and
whenever I reflected on the wisdom and nobleness of the Limanoran
civilisation, or noticed the marvellous progressiveness of some
new phase of it, I found myself longing to go back to the Western
world with my knowledge. Thus I often drifted into appeals to the
propagandist spirit which I assumed to exist in the breasts of my
friends and fellow-citizens, but I was not allowed to rest long in
such dreams. Each time I uttered or even thought over my missionary
desire, I was brought to book with the widest of knowledge and the
keenest of penetration into human nature and its history. I felt that
it was almost as useless for Europeans to go out amongst the tribes of
monkeys and spend their lives trying to bring them up to such a level
of intelligence as is implied in the appreciation of the Christian
religion, as for the Limanorans to apostolise amongst mankind, and
struggle to drag them up to the stage of progress these islanders had
reached.
But now, whenever my missionary mood returned upon me, my friends
would point with a smile to the new invention, the electro-steriliser;
and if pressed by the disapproving skepticism of my thoughts, they
would urge in words the omnipotence of this little instrument as the
apostle of progress. By this and this alone was the snail-pace advance
of mankind likely to be quickened. Without more rapid elimination of
the unfit than was afforded by natural selection, sexual selection,
and the accidents of surroundings, there was little hope of wise
propagation of the human race. The blunders and defects and maladies
of every new century were treasured up by heredity in the tissues of
mankind along with any feeble tendency to advance that might appear.
The struggle was a losing one in spite of the development of science
and wealth. And all reforming theories and efforts were but stumblings
in the dark till there had been a thorough purgation of traditional
and epidemic diseases, moral as well as physical. Nine tenths of the
race, as at present constituted, were unworthy to hand on their natures
to posterity. Under the régime of propagational license universal
among all peoples of the earth, the evil and diseased multiplied at
a much greater rate than the sound in mind and body. The progressive
element in mankind was dragged back by the dead weight of the criminal,
the diseased, the habitually pauper, and the naturally incompetent.
Some religions even set themselves to encourage the vitalisation and
propagation of the last. It was noble and good to assuage the evils
that heredity had accumulated in their systems; but it was anything
but noble and good to encourage them to perpetuate their misfortunes
throughout a wide posterity. “Multiply” should be the last word of an
advancing civilisation instead of the first, unless there be added to
it the condition “only the best.” And who cares or dares to preach
this true gospel of progress, when it touches a theme that all are
ashamed to mention? If ever there was a sacred mission upon earth it
would be that of the man who should go to the wise and good men of all