Limanora the island of progress
nations and put into their hands the secret of the idlumian, or who
should himself pass round the world and sterilise all the morally or
physically diseased amongst rich and poor, amongst gentle and simple.
Within two generations the races of humanity would take such a leap
into light and noble vitality and love of progress as would make the
most brilliant civilisation of the past seem barbaric. Then would they
take command of their own destiny, and look unflinchingly into the
future for the path they should take. Advance in material or in the
accumulation of force is vain, unless it goes hand in hand with such
universal moral and intellectual advance. It is progress in the human
system through all its parts that should be the aim of every race.
I gradually came to understand the importance they attached to this
new instrument as the most humane and effective of missionaries. Had
it come before their great series of purgations, there would have been
little need for the expatriation policy. If they had had to eject, they
would have taken care that the different sections of exiles should
vanish in a generation. They shrank from extinguishing the individual
life that had already been brought into being. They would have had no
scruple in giving euthanasia to an evil race or a section of a race;
for this meant only preventing a posterity coming into existence to
take up their burden of evil. And even now it was a question to be
seriously discussed and answered whether they would not sweep out the
pollution from the rest of the archipelago by the help of this humane
little doorkeeper of posterity. Would it not prevent the lifelong
evil of thousands? Where lay the humanity or love in allowing a
retrogressive and unhappy race to hand on to myriads to come the evil
they had received from their ancestors?
CHAPTER IX
POLITY
I WAS privileged to hear, or rather to be conscious of, the discussion
that the question of idlumian-missionaryism underwent. I had now
reached the age and stage of my training which gave me the entry as
audience to the councils of the race. It would not have been wise to
admit to the treatment of difficult and advanced themes natures that
were still hemmed in by the limits of long-past ages of history. They
could not have sympathised in, or even followed, the attitude taken up
by the elders of the people; and they would have gone back from the
meeting with minds perplexed and bewildered by questions too complex
and futuritive for them to fathom. Many of them would have suffered a
warping of their natures from the strain, and this would have meant
years of additional training and care to set it right. The exclusion
of the immature from the national councils was a matter of educational
policy rather than of political necessity.
It was evidently for my own benefit that I was present at the
discussion of the sterilising embassy. This was somewhat difficult
for me to follow, for my magnetic power and faculties had not been
developed enough to interpret the silences between the rare speeches.
As I sat, my mind ran back to a Quakers’ meeting to which I had been
taken by my mother; then much self-control had been necessary in order
to restrain the expression of my amusement; now I felt as if in the
presence of gods who needed none of the babble of human speech to
open a pathway from mind to mind. I had sloughed off that singular
prepossession of the Western nature in favour of verbal intercourse
and had ceased to think that silence, where two or three were gathered
together, was a mark of inanity, or incompetence, or at least
passivity. I remembered with a shudder the awkwardness that accompanied
social lockjaw, even where friends met; each grew afraid of the
thoughts of the others; none knew what the silence meant; everyone was
frantically searching for something that would break the gag without
appearing unnatural. Loquacity, instead of being a bar to ideas, was
counted an accomplishment; and freedom of speech was one of the great
political watchwords. It was only on rare occasions that reserve was
not considered a defect.
Now I felt that there was nothing so powerful as these silences in
council. The magnetism of thought and feeling was flowing from mind to
mind, all the more that there was not a word or sound to interrupt it.
Now and again, when the divergence of thoughts was dominant, one of
the oldest and wisest would call them in from their different tracks
to a common centre. Speech was rather a method of focussing thoughts
than one of chasing and criticising them. The speaker would review
all the mental discussion and concentrate its lines, so that everyone
present might have a view of the whole field from a high point. It
was marvellous how rapidly they went though the business in hand by
means of these noble silences, broken by occasional reviews. There were
no displays of mental or stylistic legerdemain, no appeals to common
feeling, no captious criticisms, such as form the staple of a debate
in a Western assembly even of the wisest men. Every fallacy that crept
into the discussion was unmasked in a gentle, fair, and kindly way.
There was no partisanship, no war-whoop of prospective victory, no
lash of sarcasm, and they abhorred above all things the sweetness of
harangue.
Yet, the absence of Western methods of beating out a subject was a
disadvantage for me, who had as yet little of the magnetic penetration
or sympathy needed for the appreciation of their meetings. But my deep
reverence for the humanity of the elders, and great sympathy for their
aims, made up in part for the lack of magnetic interpretation of their
thoughts. At the close of the council I talked the matter over with my
proparents, and eked out my own observations and reflections on its
proceedings and thus came to a just view of the whole discussion.
They were strongly impelled by their love of the human race to the
missionary course, which would now be so simple and effective.
Missionaryism before meant the hoisting of every separate alien and
barbarous nature up to a higher platform, and continuing the process
with generation after generation, a gigantic task. There was more
chance of the missionaries levelling down to the civilisation of their
converts than of accomplishing their original purpose, while the
arguing, preaching, and persuading implied a Niagara of babble for
centuries. Where would lie the compensation for such abasement of the
mind? Now there was no need of condescension; it was a mere matter of
common professional work for the physiological families. The glib
energy of the old process was evaded and in its place came the need
of wide practical knowledge and keen judgment. For tongue-force and
subtlety of reasoning were substituted physiological exactness and
selective talent. The process was now eliminative rather than directly
creative.
But such pleading ignored the true difficulty, the acquisition of so
large a knowledge of local and temporal conditions as would enable
them to foresee the full effects of the step. How were they to be
certain that only the nobler natures would hand themselves on in each
race? Streams from the barbarous and evil past might flow through the
mothers. Who could guarantee that the reduced numbers of the next
generation would be able to accumulate energy quickly enough to keep
the mastery of the earth against its unreasoning and unmoral powers? As
it was, the peoples were able to fight with the seasons and the forces
of climate and weather, and with the exuberance of the plant and animal
kingdoms. If their numbers were greatly lessened by the elimination
of the coarser natures, would not the balance be destroyed, and the
natural enemies of man have the best of it?
Questions like these made them pause. To be able to answer them would
need prolonged and minute investigation of the human race and its
conditions, perhaps consuming centuries in the task. Meantime their
own forward march would have to be abandoned. Omniscience alone could
deal with the problem of missionaryism, and as things were, the
omniscience of nature was dealing with it. For evolution was proceeding
throughout the universe, however slowly. Those races that seemed to be
laggards on the upward path were evolving what was needed on their
part for the advance of the whole army of creation, and death was ever
opening new careers for the vital force of their individuals. It was
difficult to tell without complete knowledge of all the conditions
whether the spread of a certain faith or phase of civilisation was
going to be beneficent or maleficent for the world as a whole. And all
missionaryism that was not based on omniscience was striking out a path
through a jungle in the darkness. Even the idlumian, unless amongst
criminals and the morally and intellectually plague-stricken, might do
irremediable injury to the prospects of the human race. The problem of
propagandism was, as often before, abandoned as too complicated and too
far-reaching for limited knowledge and brain power.
But the discussion gave me an insight into what I had long been
curious about, their polity and methods of guiding the course of
their commonweal. I had not dared to inquire into the subject lest I
should meet with some rebuff, or find that I had been too inquisitive
where reverence was needed. Nor had I been able to see much evidence
of government or legislation, and had almost come to the conclusion
that there was no such thing in Limanora as sovereignty or state.
Though everything moved with the harmony and smoothness of perfect
organisation I could never find the organising hand.
At last I discovered part, at least, of the machinery of government.
There was one assembly or council to which reformers could appeal with
their schemes. The whole community often assembled; but it seemed to me
that it was more for training, for the reintegration of some faculty
or feeling, or for the purification and elevation of the life, than
for legislative purposes. The only trace of any approach to selection
and decision in these national gatherings was to be found in Loomiefa
and in the linguistic assemblies; in the one they practically accepted
or rejected some proposed revision of their ideals placed before
them in a new book; in the other they decided whether a new word, or
the adaptation or application of a word was worthy to live or die,
whether a new sense deserved to be kept alive in a form set apart for
it, or whether a new distinction was real or merely verbal. I could
see that these were the two great functions of a national assembly,
to accept or reject a new departure in life or in language, to see
that the path into the darkness of the unknown was the right path,
and that the verbal armour and weapons they bore allowed of no enemy
near. Discovery and advance had their own pitfalls and risks; but the
language they used in investigation and research was the most natural
ambush of fallacies and the scientific work of a generation might be
rendered nugatory by an ambiguous word or phrase. In past time they
could point out many ages, which had prided themselves on the marvels
of their progress in science and were now regarded as barren and
unprogressive; their advance had been apparent and not real, a mere
change of nomenclature and not a change of ideas or a discovery of
facts. It was natural then that the community, as a whole, should, from
the mere instinct of self-preservation, keep the most watchful eye on
this unguarded frontier of language, and almost as eager an eye on the
regions that lay before them, the ideals they were about to adopt.
I had now been led to see that there was a council for the decision