Limanora the island of progress
Where would their civilisation or their ideals or great future be
without this marvellous concentration of naked energy? What would have
become of the race, had a base ambition or an insane caprice entered
into the thoughts of anyone of their masters of force while he held
the reins of dominion in his hands? It was the duty, therefore, of
everyone who was elected to the office, however often he had held it,
however noble he had proved himself, however trusted he might be by
all, to submit himself the hour before he entered Rimla to the tests of
the inner nature and thoughts that the race knew, and this in presence
of the oldest of the senate. The workings of his brain and heart were
stringently investigated, and after that he was sent to sleep, in
order to have his dreams read and interpreted. If any of the tests
gave dubious answer, he resigned his office and another was chosen in
his place. For almost a generation this had never occurred, yet the
precautions were as rigidly enforced as if the tests had often revealed
defects. For the master of force held in his hands the key of their
civilisation and progress. To the elders all private ends and honours
seemed trivial beside the aim of the race, the only divine thing,
they thought, that they held in their hearts. To have been able to
substitute anything on earth for it even for a moment was to them so
absurd and insane as to appear impossible for any Limanoran. All this
safeguarding of the probity and the sanity of the masters of force was
therefore counted rather as a tribute to the importance of the office
than a slur upon the individual.
It was not that private motive or stimulus had been annihilated. On
the contrary they considered that the chief spur to progress was the
struggle of the individual in competition with his fellows. He who
could attain most rapidly to the ideal set immediately before the race
was a marked and striking personality. To level all means of advance
so as to make them the same for all was to destroy this stimulus to
development. To be respected and at last reverenced by his neighbours
was longed for by every man in the community, and everyone had his own
special faculty and means for gaining such respect and reverence. At
the great purgation of the island’s socialists and thieves, private
property had not been abolished, but only disgraded. The socialists had
been willing to erase all other methods of civilisation and progress
for the sake of the impossible dream, the equalisation of property;
the thieves had been willing to do the same for the sake of the swift
acquisition of their share of it. They kept up an abnormal and morbid
appetite for property which raised it completely out of scale and
proportion, compared with the other symbols of power and means of
advance. It became a disease that perverted their whole view of life,
and nothing wholesome could be done till they were expelled. After
their expulsion it was found that property lost its importance, and the
word “fortune” ceased to be identified with its acquisition. It fell
to its natural and true position in the scale of means of development.
The motive that the socialists had most prominently put forward for
their schemes, the benefit of their poverty-stricken and starving
brethren, had long become too artificial to hoodwink the wiser
patriots. Not since the barbarous stage of their past had bare
subsistence been a struggle and aim in the race. They had become too
provident to allow population to outrun means or demand. There never
had been for centuries anyone who needed his neighbour or the state to
aid him with food or clothing or other of the vital necessaries. If
there had, he would have been too deeply ashamed of his mismanagement
of his life, or his improvidence, to allow anyone to know of it. The
arrangements of the state and the carefully proportioned size of the
population left no room for him to throw the blame on others. The body
of the people laughed at the socialists for the patent absurdity of
their pretext, and helped the wise leaders to drive them out. Even if
this motive had been the real one, to disorganise the whole political
and social system, and to throw overboard the aim of the race for the
sake of securing a beggarly pittance for feebler folk who ought not
to have been brought into the world, and ought not to be allowed to
perpetuate their kind, was a monstrous waste of vital power. There had
become deeply implanted in them a racial instinct that no step should
ever be taken which could in any way weaken or endanger the sense of
individual responsibility. They knew that no amount of self-sacrifice,
no kind of guaranty of certain subsistence on the part of the workers
in the state, would ever make true and good citizens of those who had
lost this.
Even when they had come to have a far more comprehensive and
scientific command of the problem of population, and when the
communising of property would have led to no evil results, they refused
to think of such a measure. Every man was allowed to accumulate as
much wealth as he desired. But none had now the ambition to accumulate
it. And as soon as communication with the neighbouring islands was cut
off, commerce ceased, and with it all opportunity for growing opulent.
Everyone had enough for his needs, and these were great in a country
so rich in resources and devices and so rapid in its development. The
family safeguarded the solvency of every member of it, as it guaranteed
his capacity to do competent work for the state and for himself. The
state demanded nothing that could be called taxation from the citizens;
part of their time, ability, and work was all that it required. But
it was one of the methods of showing patriotism to give freely to the
state.
It was indeed one of the chief reasons for the retention of private
property that it allowed of an easy and ever available means of
cultivating benevolence. Personal work was a limited thing, and could
be given in aid of others only at fixed places and times and in defined
quantities. But if it could be concentrated in private possessions,
then there was ready at all times and places and in any quantity the
power of helping others. Without it generosity and self-sacrifice would
have to mourn their petty limitations. With it benignity was ever in
exercise, and remained an active and vital habit in the community. If
the state possessed all and demanded all, then the citizens were little
better than slaves; their virtues had no freedom, no exercise, and
were bound to disappear. To get as much as they could, to sate their
appetites as fully as they could, was the only competition amongst
neighbours in such a condition of affairs. The blessedness of giving
help spontaneously would never be experienced and would vanish from the
community, and in its train sympathy, beneficence, humanity.
The competition in Limanora was in giving, not in getting, though
getting was one of the conditions and bases of giving. It is true
that the advance of the race had almost superseded this palpable
method of revealing the bounty of the spirit. In former ages, when
hypocrisy was still possible, and language and smiles were too cheap
and ready a treasury to be wholly trusted as evidence of kindly intent,
private property enabled a man to give a trustworthy guaranty of his
generosity; the only other things he could sacrifice, work, liberty,
life, were too personal and too limited in opportunity to be symbols
of a bounteous heart. Now men and women needed no outer symbol to
interpret and pledge their thoughts and feelings. Everyone knew the
soul of his neighbour as he knew his own, and hypocrisy was a lost art,
having been long ago stripped of its motive.
This singular people retained the institution of private property,
fearing the apathy and languor that fall upon the energies of a
socialistic people. They had far higher stimuli to competitive vigour
in the devotion to progress and to the aim of the race, but they were
not so foolish as to abandon the more material stimuli. Everything that
would contribute to progress they retained, everything that would tend
to quicken the pace. Nor were they yet so far away from the more animal
stage of their civilisation as to be wholly rid of the fear of its
return. Should it return, the other motives, even that of patriotism,
would be so shadowy as to be impotent against the deluge of appetite
and indolence if the material competitive principle, the system of
private property, had been abolished. To avoid the risk of such a doom
as had fallen on Tirralaria, they refused to communise possessions. And
a certain sweetness of imagination, of memory, and of harmless romance
had hallowed the system in their minds; without it they would have felt
a distinct depreciation of life that would not have found compensation
in any advantage its abolition might have brought.
The evils that seemed to attach to the system in other times and
nations attached to all other symbols of power as well: birth,
position, influence, reputation, character, talent, opportunity, luck.
All that tended to differentiate one man from another and raise him
in the scale of the use of power was open to the same charge as the
institution of private property. But early in their reforming career
the Limanorans had discovered that the evils that seemed to attach to
these features of human life were not inherent in them; they arose from
the passions of envy and jealousy. As long as these had possession of
men’s hearts, the levelling process could never be final.
Communities that made the attempt to plane down human society to a
common level, and to equalise all symbols and opportunities of power
had an infinite task before them. They really began at the wrong end
and struck at the accidental consequences of what they thought an evil,
instead of getting to the root and source. The Limanorans had wisely
set themselves to bleach their natures of envy and jealousy; and once
this was accomplished they found that inequalities amongst them were,
instead of being an evil, the greatest good, the keenest stimulus of
progress. They smiled at the farce that went on in Tirralaria, a
farce that at intervals culminated in tragedy. They saw the inherent
futility of all efforts to do away with the occasions of envy and
jealousy, instead of eradicating the passions themselves. They compared
socialistic and equalising schemes to bailing out the ocean with a
sieve.
The disadvantages and abuses of private property and of all inequality
in the symbols of power vanish with the opportunity and the desire
to flaunt them in the faces of neighbours and rivals, to use them as
appeals to envy and jealousy. As a rule it is in small communities and
circles and narrow localities, where every man in almost every movement
kicks up against some neighbour, that envy and jealousy reach their
most virulent development and acquire the greatest refinement in the
use of their weapons. But that is in small communities that form parts
of wider arenas of ambition, and so learn arrogance and scorn of their
surroundings. Where a limited society lives, isolated from alien and
ambitious neighbours, a simple and unambitious life, it is generally
found to be almost free from the meaner emotions, envy, jealousy, and
their counterparts, disdain, pride, and insolence. Amongst them there
is little need of coercion or law or government; the more primitive
virtues of honesty, truth, loyalty, courage, come to them by nature;
the family eradicates or conceals all symptoms of lapse from them, all
rebellion against the interests of all. The great drawback to such
commonweals is that they are not progressive; they remain centuries
in one stage of civilisation, and seem to travellers from larger and