Limanora the island of progress
education rendered this inoperative; in fact this epidemic nature of
the moral disorders of children made the adoption of the one-child
household and the one-pupil school seem an absolute necessity.
Occasionally, through some strong atavistic taint in the nature, the
appearance of one or more of these maladies in a child threatened its
whole spiritual life; then all the science and wisdom of the island
were brought to bear upon it; the nerves and tissues of the part of the
human system affected, whether in brain or heart, were isolated and
powerful electro-magnetic instruments were applied to them so as to
atrophy them and render them inactive; the most successful educators of
the island were joined to the parents or proparents in the effort to
get rid of the evil; and the child or youth was constantly brought into
intercourse with the noblest natures who exercised to the full their
morally healing powers. If the malady still tainted the nature up to
maturity and outbalanced all the good in it in spite of such continued
curative efforts, then were the elders sadly driven to the ultimate
step of deporting the diseased personality. But this had not occurred
for generations, and it was hoped that the necessity for drastic
remedies would cease in a few years. Already the virulence of these
childish ailments had almost disappeared and they had grown so mild in
their attacks that few but the guardians observed their approach. They
were generally confined to fixed periods of childhood or youth, periods
that corresponded to the ages of past history in which they severally
raged in the natures of their ancestors. But every new generation saw
these periods shortened and driven farther back towards the beginning
of life.
The sense of shame that attaches to some or all of these emotions in
the best of advanced races is a sign that they are recognised as moral
maladies and that with farther advance they will be forced back into
the earlier stages of life. But, as they are, the need to conceal envy
and jealousy, malice, anger, and lust and their symptoms, is felt,
and this induces and confirms wide-spread habits of insincerity and
deception in most civilised peoples, Western as well as Eastern. This
desire of concealment has seated the habit of dissimulation so widely
and so deeply in the breasts of all that the bolder and more roughly
practical openly avow it as a means necessary to their advancement in
life. It had been felt ages before in Limanora that as long as these
hateful emotions lurked in the hearts of men and women, there could
be no final expulsion of the still more hateful insincerity. Now that
they were relegated to childhood, concealment of the inner emotions
had vanished and the habit of petty evasion and dissimulation had
been entirely eradicated. Even the histrionic in manner and gesture
and facial expression had disappeared after having been subjected to
drastic treatment; it had been criticised and derided whenever it
showed itself in any youth; for it was only by the young and immature
that so crude an artificiality could ever be adopted.
One of the last refuges of insincerity was artificial self-abasement.
As soon as humility before the daily marvels of the universe came to be
a common attitude amongst them, its ape, spurious self-depreciation,
appeared. Young men and women would grossly understate their
achievements or claims, chiefly in order to set up a reaction in the
minds of their friends and companions, and tempt them to overstatement.
Ridicule soon put this habit of poor and common natures to rout. The
Limanorans were now proud of anything they had done well or nobly
and were not ashamed to acknowledge it. They were willing without
vaunting or mock-modesty to talk of any invention or discovery or
any good or courageous deed, but in that simple, ingenuous way which
revealed nothing but anxiety to enlighten others as to the methods of
success and to stir them to advance beyond it. They needed none of
that self-advertisement which is the bane of advanced and ambitious
civilisations; everything of merit in their conduct and labour and
its products was valuated, they knew, with an exactitude that left no
room for misacceptation by their friends and companions. Everyone was
so eager to find an advance in his neighbour’s work or system that no
effort was needed to explain or commend it. When done its merits would
be recognised to the full. The elders in their periodical reviews of
the work and the progress of the community would estimate it at its
full value, and it was one of the most important parts of the training
of the youth to appraise the value of every deed and step with a strict
impartiality of judgment. To mete out justice to everything in life was
impressed upon the young nature as one of the foremost of duties; and
to see every feature of history and existence with a dispassionate and
unerring eye was one of the chief aims of Limanoran education.
Thus it was that for a time they enjoyed the comedy of life as it
passed in other regions of the world, for they could see very clearly
the exact merits of every man and every deed, and the credulity and
infatuation which made them unrecognisable in popular estimation.
Delusion reigned supreme and the best of the comedy was the ease with
which some masters of the art of self-advertisement could swell their
puny proportions into the appearance of colossal amplitude; they
knew every stop in public opinion, and could play on its gullibility
with consummate art. The Limanoran was taught to place every human
achievement in the perspective of the future, and as he looked and
heard through the idrovamolan, the whole of life, as it went in other
nations, seemed one continued bathos, ridiculous disproportion between
what it appeared to be and what it was.
But they ever saw a darker side to the spectacles they witnessed
through this singular instrument, and their laughter was softened and
modified by indignation and sorrow. There was a counterpart to the
gullibility and applause in the deep-rooted habit of detraction and
slander. If any had the power to see conduct and men as they were,
impartially and clearly, they were not allowed to use it, so busy were
the tongues of traducers and parasites. All human deeds were either
underestimated or overestimated, generally underestimated if the doer
or possessor had no favours to bestow and no power or influence to
exhibit. Aspersion and backbiting were common habits; for the majority
were undistinguished and only in courts and the circles of the great
did that of overestimation find any headway.
A trivial, yet pathetic, phase of the comedy was the excessive
self-esteem that ran parallel with the torrent of detraction. In
Limanora the fountains of both had dried up together. For vanity is
the effort of a man’s emotions to compensate for the fraud that others
constantly commit upon reputation. Robbery of material things is
sternly repressed in most civilised communities; thus far have they
attained in their hostility to socialism; finally one or two have
begun to be uneasy about fair fame as a possession more valuable than
any wealth and have attempted to formulate the crime in some crude
law of libel that is found yearly as inadequate and as primitive as
one of the codes of ancient legislators. But the petty robberies of
good fame rather than the open brigandage of it make none feel safe.
Tongues will keep wagging, and as long as they wag, the conduct or
character of some will surely be undervalued. The consciousness of
this, that none but the great or distinguished will get their due or
more than their due, keeps self-esteem alive in the breasts of all, and
self-approbation an unceasing attitude. Men feel that they must recoup
themselves out of the unwilling feelings of others for the perpetual
fraud upon their reputation. Self-overestimation is the natural
complement of the consciousness of detraction. Commonly the sensitive
organisation refuses to rest under the unending injustice and will try
to set itself right with the world; but most sink after a time into
sullen endurance of the wrong and cease to speak of it, thinking it
irremediable.
Nothing so greatly astonished the Limanorans as the concomitant
disappearance of detraction and vanity from their midst. One of their
earliest crusades was that against evil speaking; it was easier than
they had thought, for already the principle of generosity to others
had begun to work and reputation was counted more valuable than any
property. When magnanimity had eradicated the habit of disparagement,
the training in impartial use of the judgment prevented the nature
swinging into the opposite extreme of shouting hosannas over the
nothings of daily life. As they gained clear-sightedness in estimating
human actions and character, they found that the cues of vanity had
disappeared. They had no need of crusading against the vice; it had
been vanquished.
Another defect that seemed to have vanished without effort was
immodesty. The lustful had been exiled and it was easy to eradicate
from the natures of those that remained all trace of sexual passion,
and with it all pruriency. The chief purpose of sex in nature, that
of propagation of the family, became its sole purpose; and this, by
the control which the elders exercised over posterity, grew as rare
as death. Its other ends, the development of self-sacrifice and the
growth of love and friendship, had been completely detached from it
and rationalised. Procreation with the extension of the race into the
future was counted so tremendous a responsibility that most preferred
to postpone it as far in life as the instinct of the people would
allow. The sexual passion thus died out of their minds as out of
their natures, just as the mere appetites of eating and drinking had
died out. They had become parts of the rational nature when they were
thought of at all.
There was, therefore, nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to conceal.
Immodesty vanished with the cue and motive for modesty. They wore
irelium draperies more to temper the power of heat and cold and the
rigours of the upper atmosphere, and to aid them in flight, than to
hide their bodies from the eyes of others. For the draperies were
gossamer-like and semi-diaphanous and emphasised the beauty and grace
of the body as an expression of soul. It was not the face alone that
interpreted the mind, or attracted by its radiance. Magnetism rayed
from every limb; and none of the surface of the body was lost under
masses of garments; it all came into play as expressive of the life
within. They shrank at first from the unhealthy pallidity of my body
as it appeared when I first donned their raiment, but under the
transparency of my new garments it soon lost its ghastly whiteness and
acquired the ruddy, healthy tints of the face. For a time I shrank from
the eyes of my comrades, but as I grew accustomed to their absolute
purity of thought, I lost all consciousness of my body. There can be
no modesty or immodesty where there is nothing to conceal. It was one
of their subordinate aims to simplify and purify the functions of the
human system, so that none of them should be offensive to any of the
senses, new or old.
By this semi-diaphanous exposure of most of the surface of the body
there was far more space of skin for the development of sensations and
new types of senses. In their pre-purgation ages, when the greater part
of the corporeal system had to be muffled in opaque garments for the
sake of what was called decency, the finer modes of perception came to
be concentrated in the head and the hand; one sense crowded another
and blunted its observations. Now every inch of the corporeal surface