Limanora the island of progress
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