PART I: THIS WORLD

"Be patient, for the world is broad and wide."

Section 1. Of the Nature of Flatland

I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its

nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in

Space.

Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles,

Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining

fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but

without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like

shadows--only hard and with luminous edges--and you will then have a

pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen. Alas, a few years

ago, I should have said "my universe": but now my mind has been opened

to higher views of things.

In such a country, you will perceive at once that it is impossible that

there should be anything of what you call a "solid" kind; but I dare

say you will suppose that we could at least distinguish by sight the

Triangles, Squares, and other figures, moving about as I have described

them. On the contrary, we could see nothing of the kind, not at least

so as to distinguish one figure from another. Nothing was visible, nor

could be visible, to us, except Straight Lines; and the necessity of

this I will speedily demonstrate.

Place a penny on the middle of one of your tables in Space; and leaning

over it, look down upon it. It will appear a circle.

But now, drawing back to the edge of the table, gradually lower your

eye (thus bringing yourself more and more into the condition of the

inhabitants of Flatland), and you will find the penny becoming more and

more oval to your view, and at last when you have placed your eye

exactly on the edge of the table (so that you are, as it were, actually

a Flatlander) the penny will then have ceased to appear oval at all,

and will have become, so far as you can see, a straight line.

The same thing would happen if you were to treat in the same way a

Triangle, or Square, or any other figure cut out of pasteboard. As

soon as you look at it with your eye on the edge on the table, you will

find that it ceases to appear to you a figure, and that it becomes in

appearance a straight line. Take for example an equilateral

Triangle--who represents with us a Tradesman of the respectable class.

Fig. 1 represents the Tradesman as you would see him while you were

bending over him from above; figs. 2 and 3 represent the Tradesman, as

you would see him if your eye were close to the level, or all but on

the level of the table; and if your eye were quite on the level of the

table (and that is how we see him in Flatland) you would see nothing

but a straight line.

[Illustration 1]

[ASCII approximation follows]

(1) __________ (2) ___________ (3) _________

\ / --__ __-- ---

\ / -

\/

When I was in Spaceland I heard that your sailors have very similar

experiences while they traverse your seas and discern some distant

island or coast lying on the horizon. The far-off land may have bays,

forelands, angles in and out to any number and extent; yet at a

distance you see none of these (unless indeed your sun shines bright

upon them revealing the projections and retirements by means of light

and shade), nothing but a grey unbroken line upon the water.

Well, that is just what we see when one of our triangular or other

acquaintances comes toward us in Flatland. As there is neither sun

with us, nor any light of such a kind as to make shadows, we have none

of the helps to the sight that you have in Spaceland. If our friend

comes closer to us we see his line becomes larger; if he leaves us it

becomes smaller: but still he looks like a straight line; be he a

Triangle, Square, Pentagon, Hexagon, Circle, what you will--a straight

Line he looks and nothing else.

You may perhaps ask how under these disadvantageous circumstances we

are able to distinguish our friends from one another: but the answer to

this very natural question will be more fitly and easily given when I

come to describe the inhabitants of Flatland. For the present let me

defer this subject, and say a word or two about the climate and houses

in our country.

Section 2. Of the Climate and Houses in Flatland

As with you, so also with us, there are four points of the compass

North, South, East, and West.

There being no sun nor other heavenly bodies, it is impossible for us

to determine the North in the usual way; but we have a method of our

own. By a Law of Nature with us, there is a constant attraction to the

South; and, although in temperate climates this is very slight--so that

even a Woman in reasonable health can journey several furlongs

northward without much difficulty--yet the hampering effect of the

southward attraction is quite sufficient to serve as a compass in most

parts of our earth. Moreover, the rain (which falls at stated

intervals) coming always from the North, is an additional assistance;

and in the towns we have the guidance of the houses, which of course

have their side-walls running for the most part North and South, so

that the roofs may keep off the rain from the North. In the country,

where there are no houses, the trunks of the trees serve as some sort

of guide. Altogether, we have not so much difficulty as might be

expected in determining our bearings.

Yet in our more temperate regions, in which the southward attraction is

hardly felt, walking sometimes in a perfectly desolate plain where

there have been no houses nor trees to guide me, I have been

occasionally compelled to remain stationary for hours together, waiting

till the rain came before continuing my journey. On the weak and aged,

and especially on delicate Females, the force of attraction tells much

more heavily than on the robust of the Male Sex, so that it is a point

of breeding, if you meet a Lady in the street, always to give her the

North side of the way--by no means an easy thing to do always at short

notice when you are in rude health and in a climate where it is

difficult to tell your North from your South.

Windows there are none in our houses: for the light comes to us alike

in our homes and out of them, by day and by night, equally at all times

and in all places, whence we know not. It was in old days, with our

learned men, an interesting and oft-investigated question, "What is the

origin of light?" and the solution of it has been repeatedly attempted,

with no other result than to crowd our lunatic asylums with the

would-be solvers. Hence, after fruitless attempts to suppress such

investigations indirectly by making them liable to a heavy tax, the

Legislature, in comparatively recent times, absolutely prohibited them.

I--alas, I alone in Flatland--know now only too well the true solution

of this mysterious problem; but my knowledge cannot be made

intelligible to a single one of my countrymen; and I am mocked at--I,

the sole possessor of the truths of Space and of the theory of the

introduction of Light from the world of three Dimensions--as if I were

the maddest of the mad! But a truce to these painful digressions: let

me return to our houses.

The most common form for the construction of a house is five-sided or

pentagonal, as in the annexed figure. The two Northern sides RO, OF,

constitute the roof, and for the most part have no doors; on the East

is a small door for the Women; on the West a much larger one for the

Men; the South side or floor is usually doorless.

Square and triangular houses are not allowed, and for this reason. The

angles of a Square (and still more those of an equilateral Triangle),

being much more pointed than those of a Pentagon, and the lines of

inanimate objects (such as houses) being dimmer than the lines of Men

and Women, it follows that there is no little danger lest the points of

a square or triangular house residence might do serious injury to an

inconsiderate or perhaps absent-minded traveller suddenly therefore,

running against them: and as early as the eleventh century of our era,

triangular houses were universally forbidden by Law, the only

exceptions being fortifications, powder-magazines, barracks, and other

state buildings, which it is not desirable that the general public

should approach without circumspection.

[Illustration 2]

[ASCII approximation follows]

O

/\

/ \

/ \

/ \

/ \

R/ \F

\_ /

_/

Men's door _ Women's door

_ /

\____________/

A B

At this period, square houses were still everywhere permitted, though

discouraged by a special tax. But, about three centuries afterwards,

the Law decided that in all towns containing a population above ten

thousand, the angle of a Pentagon was the smallest house-angle that

could be allowed consistently with the public safety. The good sense

of the community has seconded the efforts of the Legislature; and now,

even in the country, the pentagonal construction has superseded every

other. It is only now and then in some very remote and backward

agricultural district that an antiquarian may still discover a square

house.

Section 3. Concerning the Inhabitants of Flatland

The greatest length or breadth of a full grown inhabitant of Flatland

may be estimated at about eleven of your inches. Twelve inches may be

regarded as a maximum.

Our Women are Straight Lines.

Our Soldiers and Lowest Classes of Workmen are Triangles with two equal

sides, each about eleven inches long, and a base or third side so short

(often not exceeding half an inch) that they form at their vertices a

very sharp and formidable angle. Indeed when their bases are of the

most degraded type (not more than the eighth part of an inch in size),

they can hardly be distinguished from Straight Lines or Women; so

extremely pointed are their vertices. With us, as with you, these

Triangles are distinguished from others by being called Isosceles; and

by this name I shall refer to them in the following pages.

Our Middle Class consists of Equilateral or Equal-Sided Triangles.

Our Professional Men and Gentlemen are Squares (to which class I myself

belong) and Five-Sided Figures or Pentagons.

Next above these come the Nobility, of whom there are several degrees,

beginning at Six-Sided Figures, or Hexagons, and from thence rising in

the number of their sides till they receive the honourable title of

Polygonal, or many-sided. Finally when the number of the sides becomes

so numerous, and the sides themselves so small, that the figure cannot

be distinguished from a circle, he is included in the Circular or

Priestly order; and this is the highest class of all.

It is a Law of Nature with us that a male child shall have one more

side than his father, so that each generation shall rise (as a rule)

one step in the scale of development and nobility. Thus the son of a

Square is a Pentagon; the son of a Pentagon, a Hexagon; and so on.

But this rule applies not always to the Tradesmen, and still less often

to the Soldiers, and to the Workmen; who indeed can hardly be said to

deserve the name of human Figures, since they have not all their sides

equal. With them therefore the Law of Nature does not hold; and the

son of an Isosceles (i.e. a Triangle with two sides equal) remains

Isosceles still. Nevertheless, all hope is not shut out, even from the

Isosceles, that his posterity may ultimately rise above his degraded

condition. For, after a long series of military successes, or diligent

and skilful labours, it is generally found that the more intelligent

among the Artisan and Soldier classes manifest a slight increase of

their third side or base, and a shrinkage of the two other sides.

Intermarriages (arranged by the Priests) between the sons and daughters

of these more intellectual members of the lower classes generally

result in an offspring approximating still more to the type of the

Equal-Sided Triangle.

Rarely--in proportion to the vast numbers of Isosceles births--is a

genuine and certifiable Equal-Sided Triangle produced from Isosceles

parents. [Note: "What need of a certificate?" a Spaceland critic may

ask: "Is not the procreation of a Square Son a certificate from Nature

herself, proving the Equal-sidedness of the Father?" I reply that no

Lady of any position will marry an uncertified Triangle. Square

offspring has sometimes resulted from a slightly Irregular Triangle;

but in almost every such case the Irregularity of the first generation

is visited on the third; which either fails to attain the Pentagonal

rank, or relapses to the Triangular.] Such a birth requires, as its

antecedents, not only a series of carefully arranged intermarriages,

but also a long, continued exercise of frugality and self-control on

the part of the would-be ancestors of the coming Equilateral, and a

patient, systematic, and continuous development of the Isosceles

intellect through many generations.

The birth of a True Equilateral Triangle from Isosceles parents is the

subject of rejoicing in our country for many furlongs around. After a

strict examination conducted by the Sanitary and Social Board, the

infant, if certified as Regular, is with solemn ceremonial admitted

into the class of Equilaterals. He is then immediately taken from his

proud yet sorrowing parents and adopted by some childless Equilateral,

who is bound by oath never to permit the child henceforth to enter his

former home or so much as to look upon his relations again, for fear

lest the freshly developed organism may, by force of unconscious

imitation, fall back again into his hereditary level.

The occasional emergence of an Equilateral from the ranks of his

serf-born ancestors is welcomed, not only by the poor serfs themselves,

as a gleam of light and hope shed upon the monotonous squalor of their

existence, but also by the Aristocracy at large; for all the higher

classes are well aware that these rare phenomena, while they do little

or nothing to vulgarize their own privileges, serve as a most useful

barrier against revolution from below.

Had the acute-angled rabble been all, without exception, absolutely

destitute of hope and of ambition, they might have found leaders in

some of their many seditious outbreaks, so able as to render their

superior numbers and strength too much even for the wisdom of the

Circles. But a wise ordinance of Nature has decreed that, in

proportion as the working-classes increase in intelligence, knowledge,

and all virtue, in that same proportion their acute angle (which makes

them physically terrible) shall increase also and approximate to the

comparatively harmless angle of the Equilateral Triangle. Thus, in the

most brutal and formidable of the soldier class--creatures almost on a

level with women in their lack of intelligence--it is found that, as

they wax in the mental ability necessary to employ their tremendous

penetrating power to advantage, so do they wane in the power of

penetration itself.

How admirable is this Law of Compensation! And how perfect a proof of

the natural fitness and, I may almost say, the divine origin of the

aristocratic constitution of the States in Flatland! By a judicious

use of this Law of Nature, the Polygons and Circles are almost always

able to stifle sedition in its very cradle, taking advantage of the

irrepressible and boundless hopefulness of the human mind. Art also

comes to the aid of Law and Order. It is generally found possible--by

a little artificial compression or expansion on the part of the State

physicians--to make some of the more intelligent leaders of a rebellion

perfectly Regular, and to admit them at once into the privileged

classes; a much larger number, who are still below the standard,

allured by the prospect of being ultimately ennobled, are induced to

enter the State Hospitals, where they are kept in honourable

confinement for life; one or two alone of the more obstinate, foolish,

and hopelessly irregular are led to execution.

Then the wretched rabble of the Isosceles, planless and leaderless, are

either transfixed without resistance by the small body of their

brethren whom the Chief Circle keeps in pay for emergencies of this

kind; or else more often, by means of jealousies and suspicions

skilfully fomented among them by the Circular party, they are stirred

to mutual warfare, and perish by one another's angles. No less than

one hundred and twenty rebellions are recorded in our annals, besides

minor outbreaks numbered at two hundred and thirty-five; and they have

all ended thus.

Section 4. Concerning the Women

If our highly pointed Triangles of the Soldier class are formidable, it

may be readily inferred that far more formidable are our Women. For if

a Soldier is a wedge, a Woman is a needle; being, so to speak, ALL

point, at least at the two extremities. Add to this the power of

making herself practically invisible at will, and you will perceive

that a Female, in Flatland, is a creature by no means to be trifled

with.

But here, perhaps, some of my younger Readers may ask HOW a woman in

Flatland can make herself invisible. This ought, I think, to be

apparent without any explanation. However, a few words will make it

clear to the most unreflecting.

Place a needle on a table. Then, with your eye on the level of the

table, look at it side-ways, and you see the whole length of it; but

look at it end-ways, and you see nothing but a point, it has become

practically invisible. Just so is it with one of our Women. When her

side is turned towards us, we see her as a straight line; when the end

containing her eye or mouth--for with us these two organs are

identical--is the part that meets our eye, then we see nothing but a

highly lustrous point; but when the back is presented to our view,

then--being only sub-lustrous, and, indeed, almost as dim as an

inanimate object--her hinder extremity serves her as a kind of

Invisible Cap.

The dangers to which we are exposed from our Women must now be manifest

to the meanest capacity in Spaceland. If even the angle of a

respectable Triangle in the middle class is not without its dangers; if

to run against a Working Man involves a gash; if collision with an

officer of the military class necessitates a serious wound; if a mere

touch from the vertex of a Private Soldier brings with it danger of

death;--what can it be to run against a Woman, except absolute and

immediate destruction? And when a Woman is invisible, or visible only

as a dim sub-lustrous point, how difficult must it be, even for the

most cautious, always to avoid collision!

Many are the enactments made at different times in the different States

of Flatland, in order to minimize this peril; and in the Southern and

less temperate climates where the force of gravitation is greater, and

human beings more liable to casual and involuntary motions, the Laws

concerning Women are naturally much more stringent. But a general view

of the Code may be obtained from the following summary:--

1. Every house shall have one entrance in the Eastern side, for the

use of Females only; by which all females shall enter "in a becoming

and respectful manner" and not by the Men's or Western door. [Note:

When I was in Spaceland I understood that some of your Priestly circles

have in the same way a separate entrance for Villagers, Farmers and

Teachers of Board Schools (`Spectator', Sept. 1884, p. 1255) that they

may "approach in a becoming and respectful manner."]

2. No Female shall walk in any public place without continually

keeping up her Peace-cry, under penalty of death.

3. Any Female, duly certified to be suffering from St. Vitus's Dance,

fits, chronic cold accompanied by violent sneezing, or any disease

necessitating involuntary motions, shall be instantly destroyed.

In some of the States there is an additional Law forbidding Females,

under penalty of death, from walking or standing in any public place

without moving their backs constantly from right to left so as to

indicate their presence to those behind them; others oblige a Woman,

when travelling, to be followed by one of her sons, or servants, or by

her husband; others confine Women altogether to their houses except

during the religious festivals. But it has been found by the wisest of

our Circles or Statesmen that the multiplication of restrictions on

Females tends not only to the debilitation and diminution of the race,

but also to the increase of domestic murders to such an extent that a

State loses more than it gains by a too prohibitive Code.

For whenever the temper of the Women is thus exasperated by confinement

at home or hampering regulations abroad, they are apt to vent their

spleen upon their husbands and children; and in the less temperate

climates the whole male population of a village has been sometimes

destroyed in one or two hours of simultaneous female outbreak. Hence

the Three Laws, mentioned above, suffice for the better regulated

States, and may be accepted as a rough exemplification of our Female

Code.

After all, our principal safeguard is found, not in Legislature, but in

the interests of the Women themselves. For, although they can inflict

instantaneous death by a retrograde movement, yet unless they can at

once disengage their stinging extremity from the struggling body of

their victim, their own frail bodies are liable to be shattered.

The power of Fashion is also on our side. I pointed out that in some

less civilized States no female is suffered to stand in any public

place without swaying her back from right to left. This practice has

been universal among ladies of any pretensions to breeding in all

well-governed States, as far back as the memory of Figures can reach.

It is considered a disgrace to any State that legislation should have

to enforce what ought to be, and is in every respectable female, a

natural instinct. The rhythmical and, if I may so say, well-modulated

undulation of the back in our ladies of Circular rank is envied and

imitated by the wife of a common Equilateral, who can achieve nothing

beyond a mere monotonous swing, like the ticking of a pendulum; and the

regular tick of the Equilateral is no less admired and copied by the

wife of the progressive and aspiring Isosceles, in the females of whose

family no "back-motion" of any kind has become as yet a necessity of

life. Hence, in every family of position and consideration, "back

motion" is as prevalent as time itself; and the husbands and sons in

these households enjoy immunity at least from invisible attacks.

Not that it must be for a moment supposed that our Women are destitute

of affection. But unfortunately the passion of the moment

predominates, in the Frail Sex, over every other consideration. This

is, of course, a necessity arising from their unfortunate conformation.

For as they have no pretensions to an angle, being inferior in this

respect to the very lowest of the Isosceles, they are consequently

wholly devoid of brain-power, and have neither reflection, judgment nor

forethought, and hardly any memory. Hence, in their fits of fury, they

remember no claims and recognize no distinctions. I have actually

known a case where a Woman has exterminated her whole household, and

half an hour afterwards, when her rage was over and the fragments swept

away, has asked what has become of her husband and her children.

Obviously then a Woman is not to be irritated as long as she is in a

position where she can turn round. When you have them in their

apartments--which are constructed with a view to denying them that

power--you can say and do what you like; for they are then wholly

impotent for mischief, and will not remember a few minutes hence the

incident for which they may be at this moment threatening you with

death, nor the promises which you may have found it necessary to make

in order to pacify their fury.

On the whole we get on pretty smoothly in our domestic relations,

except in the lower strata of the Military Classes. There the want of

tact and discretion on the part of the husbands produces at times

indescribable disasters. Relying too much on the offensive weapons of

their acute angles instead of the defensive organs of good sense and

seasonable simulation, these reckless creatures too often neglect the

prescribed construction of the women's apartments, or irritate their

wives by ill-advised expressions out of doors, which they refuse

immediately to retract. Moreover a blunt and stolid regard for literal

truth indisposes them to make those lavish promises by which the more

judicious Circle can in a moment pacify his consort. The result is

massacre; not, however, without its advantages, as it eliminates the

more brutal and troublesome of the Isosceles; and by many of our

Circles the destructiveness of the Thinner Sex is regarded as one among

many providential arrangements for suppressing redundant population,

and nipping Revolution in the bud.

Yet even in our best regulated and most approximately Circular families

I cannot say that the ideal of family life is so high as with you in

Spaceland. There is peace, in so far as the absence of slaughter may

be called by that name, but there is necessarily little harmony of

tastes or pursuits; and the cautious wisdom of the Circles has ensured

safety at the cost of domestic comfort. In every Circular or Polygonal

household it has been a habit from time immemorial--and now has become

a kind of instinct among the women of our higher classes--that the

mothers and daughters should constantly keep their eyes and mouths

towards their husband and his male friends; and for a lady in a family

of distinction to turn her back upon her husband would be regarded as a

kind of portent, involving loss of STATUS. But, as I shall soon shew,

this custom, though it has the advantage of safety, is not without its

disadvantages.

In the house of the Working Man or respectable Tradesman--where the

wife is allowed to turn her back upon her husband, while pursuing her

household avocations--there are at least intervals of quiet, when the

wife is neither seen nor heard, except for the humming sound of the

continuous Peace-cry; but in the homes of the upper classes there is

too often no peace. There the voluble mouth and bright penetrating eye

are ever directed towards the Master of the household; and light itself

is not more persistent than the stream of feminine discourse. The tact

and skill which suffice to avert a Woman's sting are unequal to the

task of stopping a Woman's mouth; and as the wife has absolutely

nothing to say, and absolutely no constraint of wit, sense, or

conscience to prevent her from saying it, not a few cynics have been

found to aver that they prefer the danger of the death-dealing but

inaudible sting to the safe sonorousness of a Woman's other end.

To my readers in Spaceland the condition of our Women may seem truly

deplorable, and so indeed it is. A Male of the lowest type of the

Isosceles may look forward to some improvement of his angle, and to the

ultimate elevation of the whole of his degraded caste; but no Woman can

entertain such hopes for her sex. "Once a Woman, always a Woman" is a

Decree of Nature; and the very Laws of Evolution seem suspended in her

disfavour. Yet at least we can admire the wise Prearrangement which

has ordained that, as they have no hopes, so they shall have no memory

to recall, and no forethought to anticipate, the miseries and

humiliations which are at once a necessity of their existence and the

basis of the constitution of Flatland.

Section 5. Of our Methods of Recognizing one another

You, who are blessed with shade as well as light, you, who are gifted

with two eyes, endowed with a knowledge of perspective, and charmed

with the enjoyment of various colours, you, who can actually SEE an

angle, and contemplate the complete circumference of a circle in the

happy region of the Three Dimensions--how shall I make clear to you the

extreme difficulty which we in Flatland experience in recognizing one

another's configuration?

Recall what I told you above. All beings in Flatland, animate or

inanimate, no matter what their form, present TO OUR VIEW the same, or

nearly the same, appearance, viz. that of a straight Line. How then

can one be distinguished from another, where all appear the same?

The answer is threefold. The first means of recognition is the sense

of hearing; which with us is far more highly developed than with you,

and which enables us not only to distinguish by the voice our personal

friends, but even to discriminate between different classes, at least

so far as concerns the three lowest orders, the Equilateral, the

Square, and the Pentagon--for of the Isosceles I take no account. But

as we ascend in the social scale, the process of discriminating and

being discriminated by hearing increases in difficulty, partly because

voices are assimilated, partly because the faculty of

voice-discrimination is a plebeian virtue not much developed among the

Aristocracy. And wherever there is any danger of imposture we cannot

trust to this method. Amongst our lowest orders, the vocal organs are

developed to a degree more than correspondent with those of hearing, so

that an Isosceles can easily feign the voice of a Polygon, and, with

some training, that of a Circle himself. A second method is therefore

more commonly resorted to.

FEELING is, among our Women and lower classes--about our upper classes

I shall speak presently--the principal test of recognition, at all

events between strangers, and when the question is, not as to the

individual, but as to the class. What therefore "introduction" is

among the higher classes in Spaceland, that the process of "feeling" is

with us. "Permit me to ask you to feel and be felt by my friend Mr.

So-and-so"--is still, among the more old-fashioned of our country

gentlemen in districts remote from towns, the customary formula for a

Flatland introduction. But in the towns, and among men of business,

the words "be felt by" are omitted and the sentence is abbreviated to,

"Let me ask you to feel Mr. So-and-so"; although it is assumed, of

course, that the "feeling" is to be reciprocal. Among our still more

modern and dashing young gentlemen--who are extremely averse to

superfluous effort and supremely indifferent to the purity of their

native language--the formula is still further curtailed by the use of

"to feel" in a technical sense, meaning, "to

recommend-for-the-purposes-of-feeling-and-being-felt"; and at this

moment the "slang" of polite or fast society in the upper classes

sanctions such a barbarism as "Mr. Smith, permit me to feel Mr. Jones."

Let not my Reader however suppose that "feeling" is with us the tedious

process that it would be with you, or that we find it necessary to feel

right round all the sides of every individual before we determine the

class to which he belongs. Long practice and training, begun in the

schools and continued in the experience of daily life, enable us to

discriminate at once by the sense of touch, between the angles of an

equal-sided Triangle, Square, and Pentagon; and I need not say that the

brainless vertex of an acute-angled Isosceles is obvious to the dullest

touch. It is therefore not necessary, as a rule, to do more than feel

a single angle of an individual; and this, once ascertained, tells us

the class of the person whom we are addressing, unless indeed he

belongs to the higher sections of the nobility. There the difficulty

is much greater. Even a Master of Arts in our University of Wentbridge

has been known to confuse a ten-sided with a twelve-sided Polygon; and

there is hardly a Doctor of Science in or out of that famous University

who could pretend to decide promptly and unhesitatingly between a

twenty-sided and a twenty-four sided member of the Aristocracy.

Those of my readers who recall the extracts I gave above from the

Legislative code concerning Women, will readily perceive that the

process of introduction by contact requires some care and discretion.

Otherwise the angles might inflict on the unwary Feeler irreparable

injury. It is essential for the safety of the Feeler that the Felt

should stand perfectly still. A start, a fidgety shifting of the

position, yes, even a violent sneeze, has been known before now to

prove fatal to the incautious, and to nip in the bud many a promising

friendship. Especially is this true among the lower classes of the

Triangles. With them, the eye is situated so far from their vertex

that they can scarcely take cognizance of what goes on at that

extremity of their frame. They are, moreover, of a rough coarse

nature, not sensitive to the delicate touch of the highly organized

Polygon. What wonder then if an involuntary toss of the head has ere

now deprived the State of a valuable life!

I have heard that my excellent Grandfather--one of the least irregular

of his unhappy Isosceles class, who indeed obtained, shortly before his

decease, four out of seven votes from the Sanitary and Social Board for

passing him into the class of the Equal-sided--often deplored, with a

tear in his venerable eye, a miscarriage of this kind, which had

occured to his great-great-great-Grandfather, a respectable Working Man

with an angle or brain of 59 degrees 30 minutes. According to his

account, my unfortunate Ancestor, being afflicted with rheumatism, and

in the act of being felt by a Polygon, by one sudden start accidentally

transfixed the Great Man through the diagonal; and thereby, partly in

consequence of his long imprisonment and degradation, and partly

because of the moral shock which pervaded the whole of my Ancestor's

relations, threw back our family a degree and a half in their ascent

towards better things. The result was that in the next generation the

family brain was registered at only 58 degrees, and not till the lapse

of five generations was the lost ground recovered, the full 60 degrees

attained, and the Ascent from the Isosceles finally achieved. And all

this series of calamities from one little accident in the process of

Feeling.

At this point I think I hear some of my better educated readers

exclaim, "How could you in Flatland know anything about angles and

degrees, or minutes? We can SEE an angle, because we, in the region of

Space, can see two straight lines inclined to one another; but you, who

can see nothing but one straight line at a time, or at all events only

a number of bits of straight lines all in one straight line--how can

you ever discern any angle, and much less register angles of different

sizes?"

I answer that though we cannot SEE angles, we can INFER them, and this

with great precision. Our sense of touch, stimulated by necessity, and

developed by long training, enables us to distinguish angles far more

accurately than your sense of sight, when unaided by a rule or measure

of angles. Nor must I omit to explain that we have great natural

helps. It is with us a Law of Nature that the brain of the Isosceles

class shall begin at half a degree, or thirty minutes, and shall

increase (if it increases at all) by half a degree in every generation;

until the goal of 60 degrees is reached, when the condition of serfdom

is quitted, and the freeman enters the class of Regulars.

Consequently, Nature herself supplies us with an ascending scale or

Alphabet of angles for half a degree up to 60 degrees, Specimens of

which are placed in every Elementary School throughout the land. Owing

to occasional retrogressions, to still more frequent moral and

intellectual stagnation, and to the extraordinary fecundity of the

Criminal and Vagabond Classes, there is always a vast superfluity of

individuals of the half degree and single degree class, and a fair

abundance of Specimens up to 10 degrees. These are absolutely

destitute of civic rights; and a great number of them, not having even

intelligence enough for the purposes of warfare, are devoted by the

States to the service of education. Fettered immovably so as to remove

all possibility of danger, they are placed in the class rooms of our

Infant Schools, and there they are utilized by the Board of Education

for the purpose of imparting to the offspring of the Middle Classes

that tact and intelligence of which these wretched creatures themselves

are utterly devoid.

In some States the Specimens are occasionally fed and suffered to exist

for several years; but in the more temperate and better regulated

regions, it is found in the long run more advantageous for the

educational interests of the young, to dispense with food, and to renew

the Specimens every month--which is about the average duration of the

foodless existence of the Criminal class. In the cheaper schools, what

is gained by the longer existence of the Specimen is lost, partly in

the expenditure for food, and partly in the diminished accuracy of the

angles, which are impaired after a few weeks of constant "feeling".

Nor must we forget to add, in enumerating the advantages of the more

expensive system, that it tends, though slightly yet perceptibly, to

the diminution of the redundant Isosceles population--an object which

every statesman in Flatland constantly keeps in view. On the whole

therefore--although I am not ignorant that, in many popularly elected

School Boards, there is a reaction in favour of "the cheap system" as

it is called--I am myself disposed to think that this is one of the

many cases in which expense is the truest economy.

But I must not allow questions of School Board politics to divert me

from my subject. Enough has been said, I trust, to shew that

Recognition by Feeling is not so tedious or indecisive a process as

might have been supposed; and it is obviously more trustworthy than

Recognition by hearing. Still there remains, as has been pointed out

above, the objection that this method is not without danger. For this

reason many in the Middle and Lower classes, and all without exception

in the Polygonal and Circular orders, prefer a third method, the

description of which shall be reserved for the next section.

Section 6. Of Recognition by Sight

I am about to appear very inconsistent. In previous sections I have

said that all figures in Flatland present the appearance of a straight

line; and it was added or implied, that it is consequently impossible

to distinguish by the visual organ between individuals of different

classes: yet now I am about to explain to my Spaceland critics how we

are able to recognize one another by the sense of sight.

If however the Reader will take the trouble to refer to the passage in

which Recognition by Feeling is stated to be universal, he will find

this qualification--"among the lower classes". It is only among the

higher classes and in our temperate climates that Sight Recognition is

practised.

That this power exists in any regions and for any classes is the result

of Fog; which prevails during the greater part of the year in all parts

save the torrid zones. That which is with you in Spaceland an unmixed

evil, blotting out the landscape, depressing the spirits, and

enfeebling the health, is by us recognized as a blessing scarcely

inferior to air itself, and as the Nurse of arts and Parent of

sciences. But let me explain my meaning, without further eulogies on

this beneficent Element.

If Fog were non-existent, all lines would appear equally and

indistinguishably clear; and this is actually the case in those unhappy

countries in which the atmosphere is perfectly dry and transparent.

But wherever there is a rich supply of Fog objects that are at a

distance, say of three feet, are appreciably dimmer than those at a

distance of two feet eleven inches; and the result is that by careful

and constant experimental observation of comparative dimness and

clearness, we are enabled to infer with great exactness the

configuration of the object observed.

An instance will do more than a volume of generalities to make my

meaning clear.

Suppose I see two individuals approaching whose rank I wish to

ascertain. They are, we will suppose, a Merchant and a Physician, or

in other words, an Equilateral Triangle and a Pentagon: how am I to

distinguish them?

[Illustration 3]

[ASCII approximation follows]

C (1)

|\ - _ D

| \ ||- _

| \ || - _

| <--- >|| -----------+(> Eye-glance

___C' (2) | / A|| _ -

___--- \ - _D' | / ||_ -

__--- \ || - _ |/ _ - E

| \ || - _ B

| \ || - _

| Eye-glance \ || - _

| <----------- A'>|| ------------------------+(>

| / || _ -

| / || _ -

|__ / || _ -

---___ / || _ -

---___/ _ -E'

B'

It will be obvious, to every child in Spaceland who has touched the

threshold of Geometrical Studies, that, if I can bring my eye so that

its glance may bisect an angle (A) of the approaching stranger, my view

will lie as it were evenly between his two sides that are next to me

(viz. CA and AB), so that I shall contemplate the two impartially, and

both will appear of the same size.

Now in the case of (1) the Merchant, what shall I see? I shall see a

straight line DAE, in which the middle point (A) will be very bright

because it is nearest to me; but on either side the line will shade

away RAPIDLY INTO DIMNESS, because the sides AC and AB RECEDE RAPIDLY

INTO THE FOG and what appear to me as the Merchant's extremities, viz.

D and E, will be VERY DIM INDEED.

On the other hand in the case of (2) the Physician, though I shall here

also see a line (D'A'E') with a bright centre (A'), yet it will shade

away LESS RAPIDLY into dimness, because the sides (A'C', A'B') RECEDE

LESS RAPIDLY INTO THE FOG: and what appear to me the Physician's

extremities, viz. D' and E', will not be NOT SO DIM as the extremities

of the Merchant.

The Reader will probably understand from these two instances how--after

a very long training supplemented by constant experience--it is

possible for the well-educated classes among us to discriminate with

fair accuracy between the middle and lowest orders, by the sense of

sight. If my Spaceland Patrons have grasped this general conception,

so far as to conceive the possibility of it and not to reject my

account as altogether incredible--I shall have attained all I can

reasonably expect. Were I to attempt further details I should only

perplex. Yet for the sake of the young and inexperienced, who may

perchance infer--from the two simple instances I have given above, of

the manner in which I should recognize my Father and my Sons--that

Recognition by sight is an easy affair, it may be needful to point out

that in actual life most of the problems of Sight Recognition are far

more subtle and complex.

If for example, when my Father, the Triangle, approaches me, he happens

to present his side to me instead of his angle, then, until I have

asked him to rotate, or until I have edged my eye round him, I am for

the moment doubtful whether he may not be a Straight Line, or, in other

words, a Woman. Again, when I am in the company of one of my two

hexagonal Grandsons, contemplating one of his sides (AB) full front, it

will be evident from the accompanying diagram that I shall see one

whole line (AB) in comparative brightness (shading off hardly at all at

the ends) and two smaller lines (CA and BD) dim throughout and shading

away into greater dimness towards the extremities C and D.

[Illustration 4]

[ASCII approximation follows]

/\ - _ C

/ \ || _

/ \ || - _

/ \|| - _

| A || - _

| || -+(> (Eye)

| B || _ -

\ /|| _ -

\ / || _ -

\ / || -

\/ _ - D

But I must not give way to the temptation of enlarging on these topics.

The meanest mathematician in Spaceland will readily believe me when I

assert that the problems of life, which present themselves to the

well-educated--when they are themselves in motion, rotating, advancing

or retreating, and at the same time attempting to discriminate by the

sense of sight between a number of Polygons of high rank moving in

different directions, as for example in a ball-room or

conversazione--must be of a nature to task the angularity of the most

intellectual, and amply justify the rich endowments of the Learned

Professors of Geometry, both Static and Kinetic, in the illustrious

University of Wentbridge, where the Science and Art of Sight

Recognition are regularly taught to large classes of the ELITE of the

States.

It is only a few of the scions of our noblest and wealthiest houses,

who are able to give the time and money necessary for the thorough

prosecution of this noble and valuable Art. Even to me, a

Mathematician of no mean standing, and the Grandfather of two most

hopeful and perfectly regular Hexagons, to find myself in the midst of

a crowd of rotating Polygons of the higher classes, is occasionally

very perplexing. And of course to a common Tradesman, or Serf, such a

sight is almost as unintelligible as it would be to you, my Reader,

were you suddenly transported into our country.

In such a crowd you could see on all sides of you nothing but a Line,

apparently straight, but of which the parts would vary irregularly and

perpetually in brightness or dimness. Even if you had completed your

third year in the Pentagonal and Hexagonal classes in the University,

and were perfect in the theory of the subject, you would still find

that there was need of many years of experience, before you could move

in a fashionable crowd without jostling against your betters, whom it

is against etiquette to ask to "feel", and who, by their superior

culture and breeding, know all about your movements, while you know

very little or nothing about theirs. In a word, to comport oneself

with perfect propriety in Polygonal society, one ought to be a Polygon

oneself. Such at least is the painful teaching of my experience.

It is astonishing how much the Art--or I may almost call it

instinct--of Sight Recognition is developed by the habitual practice of

it and by the avoidance of the custom of "Feeling". Just as, with you,

the deaf and dumb, if once allowed to gesticulate and to use the

hand-alphabet, will never acquire the more difficult but far more

valuable art of lipspeech and lip-reading, so it is with us as regards

"Seeing" and "Feeling". None who in early life resort to "Feeling"

will ever learn "Seeing" in perfection.

For this reason, among our Higher Classes, "Feeling" is discouraged or

absolutely forbidden. From the cradle their children, instead of going

to the Public Elementary schools (where the art of Feeling is taught),

are sent to higher Seminaries of an exclusive character; and at our

illustrious University, to "feel" is regarded as a most serious fault,

involving Rustication for the first offence, and Expulsion for the

second.

But among the lower classes the art of Sight Recognition is regarded as

an unattainable luxury. A common Tradesman cannot afford to let his

son spend a third of his life in abstract studies. The children of the

poor are therefore allowed to "feel" from their earliest years, and

they gain thereby a precocity and an early vivacity which contrast at

first most favourably with the inert, undeveloped, and listless

behaviour of the half-instructed youths of the Polygonal class; but

when the latter have at last completed their University course, and are

prepared to put their theory into practice, the change that comes over

them may almost be described as a new birth, and in every art, science,

and social pursuit they rapidly overtake and distance their Triangular

competitors.

Only a few of the Polygonal Class fail to pass the Final Test or

Leaving Examination at the University. The condition of the

unsuccessful minority is truly pitiable. Rejected from the higher

class, they are also despised by the lower. They have neither the

matured and systematically trained powers of the Polygonal Bachelors

and Masters of Arts, nor yet the native precocity and mercurial

versatility of the youthful Tradesman. The professions, the public

services, are closed against them; and though in most States they are

not actually debarred from marriage, yet they have the greatest

difficulty in forming suitable alliances, as experience shews that the

offspring of such unfortunate and ill-endowed parents is generally

itself unfortunate, if not positively Irregular.

It is from these specimens of the refuse of our Nobility that the great

Tumults and Seditions of past ages have generally derived their

leaders; and so great is the mischief thence arising that an increasing

minority of our more progressive Statesmen are of opinion that true

mercy would dictate their entire suppression, by enacting that all who

fail to pass the Final Examination of the University should be either

imprisoned for life, or extinguished by a painless death.

But I find myself digressing into the subject of Irregularities, a

matter of such vital interest that it demands a separate section.

Section 7. Concerning Irregular Figures

Throughout the previous pages I have been assuming--what perhaps should

have been laid down at the beginning as a distinct and fundamental

proposition--that every human being in Flatland is a Regular Figure,

that is to say of regular construction. By this I mean that a Woman

must not only be a line, but a straight line; that an Artisan or

Soldier must have two of his sides equal; that Tradesmen must have

three sides equal; Lawyers (of which class I am a humble member), four

sides equal, and generally, that in every Polygon, all the sides must

be equal.

The size of the sides would of course depend upon the age of the

individual. A Female at birth would be about an inch long, while a

tall adult Woman might extend to a foot. As to the Males of every

class, it may be roughly said that the length of an adult's sides, when

added together, is two feet or a little more. But the size of our

sides is not under consideration. I am speaking of the EQUALITY of

sides, and it does not need much reflection to see that the whole of

the social life in Flatland rests upon the fundamental fact that Nature

wills all Figures to have their sides equal.

If our sides were unequal our angles might be unequal. Instead of its

being sufficient to feel, or estimate by sight, a single angle in order

to determine the form of an individual, it would be necessary to

ascertain each angle by the experiment of Feeling. But life would be

too short for such a tedious grouping. The whole science and art of

Sight Recognition would at once perish; Feeling, so far as it is an

art, would not long survive; intercourse would become perilous or

impossible; there would be an end to all confidence, all forethought;

no one would be safe in making the most simple social arrangements; in

a word, civilization would relapse into barbarism.

Am I going too fast to carry my Readers with me to these obvious

conclusions? Surely a moment's reflection, and a single instance from

common life, must convince every one that our whole social system is

based upon Regularity, or Equality of Angles. You meet, for example,

two or three Tradesmen in the street, whom you recognize at once to be

Tradesmen by a glance at their angles and rapidly bedimmed sides, and

you ask them to step into your house to lunch. This you do at present

with perfect confidence, because everyone knows to an inch or two the

area occupied by an adult Triangle: but imagine that your Tradesman

drags behind his regular and respectable vertex, a parallelogram of

twelve or thirteen inches in diagonal:--what are you to do with such a

monster sticking fast in your house door?

But I am insulting the intelligence of my Readers by accumulating

details which must be patent to everyone who enjoys the advantages of a

Residence in Spaceland. Obviously the measurements of a single angle

would no longer be sufficient under such portentous circumstances;

one's whole life would be taken up in feeling or surveying the

perimeter of one's acquaintances. Already the difficulties of avoiding

a collision in a crowd are enough to tax the sagacity of even a

well-educated Square; but if no one could calculate the Regularity of a

single figure in the company, all would be chaos and confusion, and the

slightest panic would cause serious injuries, or--if there happened to

be any Women or Soldiers present--perhaps considerable loss of life.

Expediency therefore concurs with Nature in stamping the seal of its

approval upon Regularity of conformation: nor has the Law been

backward in seconding their efforts. "Irregularity of Figure" means

with us the same as, or more than, a combination of moral obliquity and

criminality with you, and is treated accordingly. There are not

wanting, it is true, some promulgators of paradoxes who maintain that

there is no necessary connection between geometrical and moral

Irregularity. "The Irregular", they say, "is from his birth scouted by

his own parents, derided by his brothers and sisters, neglected by the

domestics, scorned and suspected by society, and excluded from all

posts of responsibility, trust, and useful activity. His every

movement is jealously watched by the police till he comes of age and

presents himself for inspection; then he is either destroyed, if he is

found to exceed the fixed margin of deviation, or else immured in a

Government Office as a clerk of the seventh class; prevented from

marriage; forced to drudge at an uninteresting occupation for a

miserable stipend; obliged to live and board at the office, and to take

even his vacation under close supervision; what wonder that human

nature, even in the best and purest, is embittered and perverted by

such surroundings!"

All this very plausible reasoning does not convince me, as it has not

convinced the wisest of our Statesmen, that our ancestors erred in

laying it down as an axiom of policy that the toleration of

Irregularity is incompatible with the safety of the State. Doubtless,

the life of an Irregular is hard; but the interests of the Greater

Number require that it shall be hard. If a man with a triangular front

and a polygonal back were allowed to exist and to propagate a still

more Irregular posterity, what would become of the arts of life? Are

the houses and doors and churches in Flatland to be altered in order to

accommodate such monsters? Are our ticket-collectors to be required to

measure every man's perimeter before they allow him to enter a theatre

or to take his place in a lecture room? Is an Irregular to be exempted

from the militia? And if not, how is he to be prevented from carrying

desolation into the ranks of his comrades? Again, what irresistible

temptations to fraudulent impostures must needs beset such a creature!

How easy for him to enter a shop with his polygonal front foremost, and

to order goods to any extent from a confiding tradesman! Let the

advocates of a falsely called Philanthropy plead as they may for the

abrogation of the Irregular Penal Laws, I for my part have never known

an Irregular who was not also what Nature evidently intended him to

be--a hypocrite, a misanthropist, and, up to the limits of his power, a

perpetrator of all manner of mischief.

Not that I should be disposed to recommend (at present) the extreme

measures adopted by some States, where an infant whose angle deviates

by half a degree from the correct angularity is summarily destroyed at

birth. Some of our highest and ablest men, men of real genius, have

during their earliest days laboured under deviations as great as, or

even greater than, forty-five minutes: and the loss of their precious

lives would have been an irreparable injury to the State. The art of

healing also has achieved some of its most glorious triumphs in the

compressions, extensions, trepannings, colligations, and other surgical

or diaetetic operations by which Irregularity has been partly or wholly

cured. Advocating therefore a VIA MEDIA, I would lay down no fixed or

absolute line of demarcation; but at the period when the frame is just

beginning to set, and when the Medical Board has reported that recovery

is improbable, I would suggest that the Irregular offspring be

painlessly and mercifully consumed.

Section 8. Of the Ancient Practice of Painting

If my Readers have followed me with any attention up to this point,

they will not be surprised to hear that life is somewhat dull in

Flatland. I do not, of course, mean that there are not battles,

conspiracies, tumults, factions, and all those other phenomena which

are supposed to make History interesting; nor would I deny that the

strange mixture of the problems of life and the problems of

Mathematics, continually inducing conjecture and giving the opportunity

of immediate verification, imparts to our existence a zest which you in

Spaceland can hardly comprehend. I speak now from the aesthetic and

artistic point of view when I say that life with us is dull;

aesthetically and artistically, very dull indeed.

How can it be otherwise, when all one's prospect, all one's landscapes,

historical pieces, portraits, flowers, still life, are nothing but a

single line, with no varieties except degrees of brightness and

obscurity?

It was not always thus. Colour, if Tradition speaks the truth, once

for the space of half a dozen centuries or more, threw a transient

splendour over the lives of our ancestors in the remotest ages. Some

private individual--a Pentagon whose name is variously reported--having

casually discovered the constituents of the simpler colours and a

rudimentary method of painting, is said to have begun decorating first

his house, then his slaves, then his Father, his Sons, and Grandsons,

lastly himself. The convenience as well as the beauty of the results

commended themselves to all. Wherever Chromatistes,--for by that name

the most trustworthy authorities concur in calling him,--turned his

variegated frame, there he at once excited attention, and attracted

respect. No one now needed to "feel" him; no one mistook his front for

his back; all his movements were readily ascertained by his neighbours

without the slightest strain on their powers of calculation; no one

jostled him, or failed to make way for him; his voice was saved the

labour of that exhausting utterance by which we colourless Squares and

Pentagons are often forced to proclaim our individuality when we move

amid a crowd of ignorant Isosceles.

The fashion spread like wildfire. Before a week was over, every Square

and Triangle in the district had copied the example of Chromatistes,

and only a few of the more conservative Pentagons still held out. A

month or two found even the Dodecagons infected with the innovation. A

year had not elapsed before the habit had spread to all but the very

highest of the Nobility. Needless to say, the custom soon made its way

from the district of Chromatistes to surrounding regions; and within

two generations no one in all Flatland was colourless except the Women

and the Priests.

Here Nature herself appeared to erect a barrier, and to plead against

extending the innovation to these two classes. Many-sidedness was

almost essential as a pretext for the Innovators. "Distinction of

sides is intended by Nature to imply distinction of colours"--such was

the sophism which in those days flew from mouth to mouth, converting

whole towns at a time to the new culture. But manifestly to our

Priests and Women this adage did not apply. The latter had only one

side, and therefore--plurally and pedantically speaking--NO SIDES. The

former--if at least they would assert their claim to be really and

truly Circles, and not mere high-class Polygons with an infinitely

large number of infinitesimally small sides--were in the habit of

boasting (what Women confessed and deplored) that they also had no

sides, being blessed with a perimeter of one line, or, in other words,

a Circumference. Hence it came to pass that these two Classes could

see no force in the so-called axiom about "Distinction of Sides

implying Distinction of Colour"; and when all others had succumbed to

the fascinations of corporal decoration, the Priests and the Women

alone still remained pure from the pollution of paint.

Immoral, licentious, anarchical, unscientific--call them by what names

you will--yet, from an aesthetic point of view, those ancient days of

the Colour Revolt were the glorious childhood of Art in Flatland--a

childhood, alas, that never ripened into manhood, nor even reached the

blossom of youth. To live was then in itself a delight, because living

implied seeing. Even at a small party, the company was a pleasure to

behold; the richly varied hues of the assembly in a church or theatre

are said to have more than once proved too distracting for our greatest

teachers and actors; but most ravishing of all is said to have been the

unspeakable magnificence of a military review.

The sight of a line of battle of twenty thousand Isosceles suddenly

facing about, and exchanging the sombre black of their bases for the

orange and purple of the two sides including their acute angle; the

militia of the Equilateral Triangles tricoloured in red, white, and

blue; the mauve, ultra-marine, gamboge, and burnt umber of the Square

artillerymen rapidly rotating near their vermilion guns; the dashing

and flashing of the five-coloured and six-coloured Pentagons and

Hexagons careering across the field in their offices of surgeons,

geometricians and aides-de-camp--all these may well have been

sufficient to render credible the famous story how an illustrious

Circle, overcome by the artistic beauty of the forces under his

command, threw aside his marshal's baton and his royal crown,

exclaiming that he henceforth exchanged them for the artist's pencil.

How great and glorious the sensuous development of these days must have

been is in part indicated by the very language and vocabulary of the

period. The commonest utterances of the commonest citizens in the time

of the Colour Revolt seem to have been suffused with a richer tinge of

word or thought; and to that era we are even now indebted for our

finest poetry and for whatever rhythm still remains in the more

scientific utterance of these modern days.

Section 9. Of the Universal Colour Bill

But meanwhile the intellectual Arts were fast decaying.

The Art of Sight Recognition, being no longer needed, was no longer

practised; and the studies of Geometry, Statics, Kinetics, and other

kindred subjects, came soon to be considered superfluous, and fell into

disrespect and neglect even at our University. The inferior Art of

Feeling speedily experienced the same fate at our Elementary Schools.

Then the Isosceles classes, asserting that the Specimens were no longer

used nor needed, and refusing to pay the customary tribute from the

Criminal classes to the service of Education, waxed daily more numerous

and more insolent on the strength of their immunity from the old burden

which had formerly exercised the twofold wholesome effect of at once

taming their brutal nature and thinning their excessive numbers.

Year by year the Soldiers and Artisans began more vehemently to

assert--and with increasing truth--that there was no great difference

between them and the very highest class of Polygons, now that they were

raised to an equality with the latter, and enabled to grapple with all

the difficulties and solve all the problems of life, whether Statical

or Kinetical, by the simple process of Colour Recognition. Not content

with the natural neglect into which Sight Recognition was falling, they

began boldly to demand the legal prohibition of all "monopolizing and

aristocratic Arts" and the consequent abolition of all endowments for

the studies of Sight Recognition, Mathematics, and Feeling. Soon, they

began to insist that inasmuch as Colour, which was a second Nature, had

destroyed the need of aristocratic distinctions, the Law should follow

in the same path, and that henceforth all individuals and all classes

should be recognized as absolutely equal and entitled to equal rights.

Finding the higher Orders wavering and undecided, the leaders of the

Revolution advanced still further in their requirements, and at last

demanded that all classes alike, the Priests and the Women not

excepted, should do homage to Colour by submitting to be painted. When

it was objected that Priests and Women had no sides, they retorted that

Nature and Expediency concurred in dictating that the front half of

every human being (that is to say, the half containing his eye and

mouth) should be distinguishable from his hinder half. They therefore

brought before a general and extraordinary Assembly of all the States

of Flatland a Bill proposing that in every Woman the half containing

the eye and mouth should be coloured red, and the other half green.

The Priests were to be painted in the same way, red being applied to

that semicircle in which the eye and mouth formed the middle point;

while the other or hinder semicircle was to be coloured green.

There was no little cunning in this proposal, which indeed emanated not

from any Isosceles--for no being so degraded would have had angularity

enough to appreciate, much less to devise, such a model of

state-craft--but from an Irregular Circle who, instead of being

destroyed in his childhood, was reserved by a foolish indulgence to

bring desolation on his country and destruction on myriads of his

followers.

On the one hand the proposition was calculated to bring the Women in

all classes over to the side of the Chromatic Innovation. For by

assigning to the Women the same two colours as were assigned to the

Priests, the Revolutionists thereby ensured that, in certain positions,

every Woman would appear like a Priest, and be treated with

corresponding respect and deference--a prospect that could not fail to

attract the Female Sex in a mass.

But by some of my Readers the possibility of the identical appearance

of Priests and Women, under the new Legislation, may not be recognized;

if so, a word or two will make it obvious.

Imagine a woman duly decorated, according to the new Code; with the

front half (i.e. the half containing eye and mouth) red, and with the

hinder half green. Look at her from one side. Obviously you will see

a straight line, HALF RED, HALF GREEN.

[Illustration 5]

[ASCII approximation follows]

[for simplicity's sake, the circle is approximated as an octogon]

M

_____

/ \ - C_

/ \|| - _

| || - _

A|- - - - - - -||B- - - - - -_-+(> (Eye)

| || _ -

\ /||_ -

\ _____ / - D

Now imagine a Priest, whose mouth is at M, and whose front semicircle

(AMB) is consequently coloured red, while his hinder semicircle is

green; so that the diameter AB divides the green from the red. If you

contemplate the Great Man so as to have your eye in the same straight

line as his dividing diameter (AB), what you will see will be a

straight line (CBD), of which ONE HALF (CB) WILL BE RED, AND THE OTHER

(BD) GREEN. The whole line (CD) will be rather shorter perhaps than

that of a full-sized Woman, and will shade off more rapidly towards its

extremities; but the identity of the colours would give you an

immediate impression of identity of Class, making you neglectful of

other details. Bear in mind the decay of Sight Recognition which

threatened society at the time of the Colour Revolt; add too the

certainty that Women would speedily learn to shade off their

extremities so as to imitate the Circles; it must then be surely

obvious to you, my dear Reader, that the Colour Bill placed us under a

great danger of confounding a Priest with a young Woman.

How attractive this prospect must have been to the Frail Sex may

readily be imagined. They anticipated with delight the confusion that

would ensue. At home they might hear political and ecclesiastical

secrets intended not for them but for their husbands and brothers, and

might even issue commands in the name of a priestly Circle; out of

doors the striking combination of red and green, without addition of

any other colours, would be sure to lead the common people into endless

mistakes, and the Women would gain whatever the Circles lost, in the

deference of the passers by. As for the scandal that would befall the

Circular Class if the frivolous and unseemly conduct of the Women were

imputed to them, and as to the consequent subversion of the

Constitution, the Female Sex could not be expected to give a thought to

these considerations. Even in the households of the Circles, the Women

were all in favour of the Universal Colour Bill.

The second object aimed at by the Bill was the gradual demoralization

of the Circles themselves. In the general intellectual decay they

still preserved their pristine clearness and strength of understanding.

From their earliest childhood, familiarized in their Circular

households with the total absence of Colour, the Nobles alone preserved

the Sacred Art of Sight Recognition, with all the advantages that

result from that admirable training of the intellect. Hence, up to the

date of the introduction of the Universal Colour Bill, the Circles had

not only held their own, but even increased their lead of the other

classes by abstinence from the popular fashion.

Now therefore the artful Irregular whom I described above as the real

author of this diabolical Bill, determined at one blow to lower the

status of the Hierarchy by forcing them to submit to the pollution of

Colour, and at the same time to destroy their domestic opportunities of

training in the Art of Sight Recognition, so as to enfeeble their

intellects by depriving them of their pure and colourless homes. Once

subjected to the chromatic taint, every parental and every childish

Circle would demoralize each other. Only in discerning between the

Father and the Mother would the Circular infant find problems for the

exercise of its understanding--problems too often likely to be

corrupted by maternal impostures with the result of shaking the child's

faith in all logical conclusions. Thus by degrees the intellectual

lustre of the Priestly Order would wane, and the road would then lie

open for a total destruction of all Aristocratic Legislature and for

the subversion of our Privileged Classes.

Section 10. Of the Suppression of the Chromatic Sedition

The agitation for the Universal Colour Bill continued for three years;

and up to the last moment of that period it seemed as though Anarchy

were destined to triumph.

A whole army of Polygons, who turned out to fight as private soldiers,

was utterly annihilated by a superior force of Isosceles Triangles--the

Squares and Pentagons meanwhile remaining neutral. Worse than all,

some of the ablest Circles fell a prey to conjugal fury. Infuriated by

political animosity, the wives in many a noble household wearied their

lords with prayers to give up their opposition to the Colour Bill; and

some, finding their entreaties fruitless, fell on and slaughtered their

innocent children and husband, perishing themselves in the act of

carnage. It is recorded that during that triennial agitation no less

than twenty-three Circles perished in domestic discord.

Great indeed was the peril. It seemed as though the Priests had no

choice between submission and extermination; when suddenly the course

of events was completely changed by one of those picturesque incidents

which Statesmen ought never to neglect, often to anticipate, and

sometimes perhaps to originate, because of the absurdly

disproportionate power with which they appeal to the sympathies of the

populace.

It happened that an Isosceles of a low type, with a brain little if at

all above four degrees--accidentally dabbling in the colours of some

Tradesman whose shop he had plundered--painted himself, or caused

himself to be painted (for the story varies) with the twelve colours of

a Dodecagon. Going into the Market Place he accosted in a feigned

voice a maiden, the orphan daughter of a noble Polygon, whose affection

in former days he had sought in vain; and by a series of

deceptions--aided, on the one side, by a string of lucky accidents too

long to relate, and on the other, by an almost inconceivable fatuity

and neglect of ordinary precautions on the part of the relations of the

bride--he succeeded in consummating the marriage. The unhappy girl

committed suicide on discovering the fraud to which she had been

subjected.

When the news of this catastrophe spread from State to State the minds

of the Women were violently agitated. Sympathy with the miserable

victim and anticipations of similar deceptions for themselves, their

sisters, and their daughters, made them now regard the Colour Bill in

an entirely new aspect. Not a few openly avowed themselves converted

to antagonism; the rest needed only a slight stimulus to make a similar

avowal. Seizing this favourable opportunity, the Circles hastily

convened an extraordinary Assembly of the States; and besides the usual

guard of Convicts, they secured the attendance of a large number of

reactionary Women.

Amidst an unprecedented concourse, the Chief Circle of those days--by

name Pantocyclus--arose to find himself hissed and hooted by a hundred

and twenty thousand Isosceles. But he secured silence by declaring

that henceforth the Circles would enter on a policy of Concession;

yielding to the wishes of the majority, they would accept the Colour

Bill. The uproar being at once converted to applause, he invited

Chromatistes, the leader of the Sedition, into the centre of the hall,

to receive in the name of his followers the submission of the

Hierarchy. Then followed a speech, a masterpiece of rhetoric, which

occupied nearly a day in the delivery, and to which no summary can do

justice.

With a grave appearance of impartiality he declared that as they were

now finally committing themselves to Reform or Innovation, it was

desirable that they should take one last view of the perimeter of the

whole subject, its defects as well as its advantages. Gradually

introducing the mention of the dangers to the Tradesmen, the

Professional Classes and the Gentlemen, he silenced the rising murmurs

of the Isosceles by reminding them that, in spite of all these defects,

he was willing to accept the Bill if it was approved by the majority.

But it was manifest that all, except the Isosceles, were moved by his

words and were either neutral or averse to the Bill.

Turning now to the Workmen he asserted that their interests must not be

neglected, and that, if they intended to accept the Colour Bill, they

ought at least to do so with full view of the consequences. Many of

them, he said, were on the point of being admitted to the class of the

Regular Triangles; others anticipated for their children a distinction

they could not hope for themselves. That honourable ambition would now

have to be sacrificed. With the universal adoption of Colour, all

distinctions would cease; Regularity would be confused with

Irregularity; development would give place to retrogression; the

Workman would in a few generations be degraded to the level of the

Military, or even the Convict Class; political power would be in the

hands of the greatest number, that is to say the Criminal Classes, who

were already more numerous than the Workmen, and would soon out-number

all the other Classes put together when the usual Compensative Laws of

Nature were violated.

A subdued murmur of assent ran through the ranks of the Artisans, and

Chromatistes, in alarm, attempted to step forward and address them.

But he found himself encompassed with guards and forced to remain

silent while the Chief Circle in a few impassioned words made a final

appeal to the Women, exclaiming that, if the Colour Bill passed, no

marriage would henceforth be safe, no woman's honour secure; fraud,

deception, hypocrisy would pervade every household; domestic bliss

would share the fate of the Constitution and pass to speedy perdition.

"Sooner than this," he cried, "Come death."

At these words, which were the preconcerted signal for action, the

Isosceles Convicts fell on and transfixed the wretched Chromatistes;

the Regular Classes, opening their ranks, made way for a band of Women

who, under direction of the Circles, moved, back foremost, invisibly

and unerringly upon the unconscious soldiers; the Artisans, imitating

the example of their betters, also opened their ranks. Meantime bands

of Convicts occupied every entrance with an impenetrable phalanx.

The battle, or rather carnage, was of short duration. Under the

skillful generalship of the Circles almost every Woman's charge was

fatal and very many extracted their sting uninjured, ready for a second

slaughter. But no second blow was needed; the rabble of the Isosceles

did the rest of the business for themselves. Surprised, leader-less,

attacked in front by invisible foes, and finding egress cut off by the

Convicts behind them, they at once--after their manner--lost all

presence of mind, and raised the cry of "treachery". This sealed their

fate. Every Isosceles now saw and felt a foe in every other. In half

an hour not one of that vast multitude was living; and the fragments of

seven score thousand of the Criminal Class slain by one another's

angles attested the triumph of Order.

The Circles delayed not to push their victory to the uttermost. The

Working Men they spared but decimated. The Militia of the Equilaterals

was at once called out; and every Triangle suspected of Irregularity on

reasonable grounds, was destroyed by Court Martial, without the

formality of exact measurement by the Social Board. The homes of the

Military and Artisan classes were inspected in a course of visitations

extending through upwards of a year; and during that period every town,

village, and hamlet was systematically purged of that excess of the

lower orders which had been brought about by the neglect to pay the

tribute of Criminals to the Schools and University, and by the

violation of the other natural Laws of the Constitution of Flatland.

Thus the balance of classes was again restored.

Needless to say that henceforth the use of Colour was abolished, and

its possession prohibited. Even the utterance of any word denoting

Colour, except by the Circles or by qualified scientific teachers, was

punished by a severe penalty. Only at our University in some of the

very highest and most esoteric classes--which I myself have never been

privileged to attend--it is understood that the sparing use of Colour

is still sanctioned for the purpose of illustrating some of the deeper

problems of mathematics. But of this I can only speak from hearsay.

Elsewhere in Flatland, Colour is now non-existent. The art of making

it is known to only one living person, the Chief Circle for the time

being; and by him it is handed down on his death-bed to none but his

Successor. One manufactory alone produces it; and, lest the secret

should be betrayed, the Workmen are annually consumed, and fresh ones

introduced. So great is the terror with which even now our Aristocracy

looks back to the far-distant days of the agitation for the Universal

Colour Bill.

Section 11. Concerning our Priests

It is high time that I should pass from these brief and discursive

notes about things in Flatland to the central event of this book, my

initiation into the mysteries of Space. THAT is my subject; all that

has gone before is merely preface.

For this reason I must omit many matters of which the explanation would

not, I flatter myself, be without interest for my Readers: as for

example, our method of propelling and stopping ourselves, although

destitute of feet; the means by which we give fixity to structures of

wood, stone, or brick, although of course we have no hands, nor can we

lay foundations as you can, nor avail ourselves of the lateral pressure

of the earth; the manner in which the rain originates in the intervals

between our various zones, so that the northern regions do not

intercept the moisture from falling on the southern; the nature of our

hills and mines, our trees and vegetables, our seasons and harvests;

our Alphabet and method of writing, adapted to our linear tablets;

these and a hundred other details of our physical existence I must pass

over, nor do I mention them now except to indicate to my readers that

their omission proceeds not from forgetfulness on the part of the

author, but from his regard for the time of the Reader.

Yet before I proceed to my legitimate subject some few final remarks

will no doubt be expected by my Readers upon those pillars and

mainstays of the Constitution of Flatland, the controllers of our

conduct and shapers of our destiny, the objects of universal homage and

almost of adoration: need I say that I mean our Circles or Priests?

When I call them Priests, let me not be understood as meaning no more

than the term denotes with you. With us, our Priests are

Administrators of all Business, Art, and Science; Directors of Trade,

Commerce, Generalship, Architecture, Engineering, Education,

Statesmanship, Legislature, Morality, Theology; doing nothing

themselves, they are the Causes of everything worth doing, that is done

by others.

Although popularly everyone called a Circle is deemed a Circle, yet

among the better educated Classes it is known that no Circle is really

a Circle, but only a Polygon with a very large number of very small

sides. As the number of the sides increases, a Polygon approximates to

a Circle; and, when the number is very great indeed, say for example

three or four hundred, it is extremely difficult for the most delicate

touch to feel any polygonal angles. Let me say rather, it WOULD be

difficult: for, as I have shown above, Recognition by Feeling is

unknown among the highest society, and to FEEL a Circle would be

considered a most audacious insult. This habit of abstention from

Feeling in the best society enables a Circle the more easily to sustain

the veil of mystery in which, from his earliest years, he is wont to

enwrap the exact nature of his Perimeter or Circumference. Three feet

being the average Perimeter it follows that, in a Polygon of three

hundred sides each side will be no more than the hundredth part of a

foot in length, or little more than the tenth part of an inch; and in a

Polygon of six or seven hundred sides the sides are little larger than

the diameter of a Spaceland pin-head. It is always assumed, by

courtesy, that the Chief Circle for the time being has ten thousand

sides.

The ascent of the posterity of the Circles in the social scale is not

restricted, as it is among the lower Regular classes, by the Law of

Nature which limits the increase of sides to one in each generation.

If it were so, the number of sides in a Circle would be a mere question

of pedigree and arithmetic, and the four hundred and ninety-seventh

descendant of an Equilateral Triangle would necessarily be a Polygon

with five hundred sides. But this is not the case. Nature's Law

prescribes two antagonistic decrees affecting Circular propagation;

first, that as the race climbs higher in the scale of development, so

development shall proceed at an accelerated pace; second, that in the

same proportion, the race shall become less fertile. Consequently in

the home of a Polygon of four or five hundred sides it is rare to find

a son; more than one is never seen. On the other hand the son of a

five-hundred-sided Polygon has been known to possess five hundred and

fifty, or even six hundred sides.

Art also steps in to help the process of the higher Evolution. Our

physicians have discovered that the small and tender sides of an infant

Polygon of the higher class can be fractured, and his whole frame

re-set, with such exactness that a Polygon of two or three hundred

sides sometimes--by no means always, for the process is attended with

serious risk--but sometimes overleaps two or three hundred generations,

and as it were doubles at a stroke, the number of his progenitors and

the nobility of his descent.

Many a promising child is sacrificed in this way. Scarcely one out of

ten survives. Yet so strong is the parental ambition among those

Polygons who are, as it were, on the fringe of the Circular class, that

it is very rare to find a Nobleman of that position in society, who has

neglected to place his first-born in the Circular Neo-Therapeutic

Gymnasium before he has attained the age of a month.

One year determines success or failure. At the end of that time the

child has, in all probability, added one more to the tombstones that

crowd the Neo-Therapeutic Cemetery; but on rare occasions a glad

procession bears back the little one to his exultant parents, no longer

a Polygon, but a Circle, at least by courtesy: and a single instance of

so blessed a result induces multitudes of Polygonal parents to submit

to similar domestic sacrifices, which have a dissimilar issue.

Section 12. Of the Doctrine of our Priests

As to the doctrine of the Circles it may briefly be summed up in a

single maxim, "Attend to your Configuration." Whether political,

ecclesiastical, or moral, all their teaching has for its object the

improvement of individual and collective Configuration--with special

reference of course to the Configuration of the Circles, to which all

other objects are subordinated.

It is the merit of the Circles that they have effectually suppressed

those ancient heresies which led men to waste energy and sympathy in

the vain belief that conduct depends upon will, effort, training,

encouragement, praise, or anything else but Configuration. It was

Pantocyclus--the illustrious Circle mentioned above, as the queller of

the Colour Revolt--who first convinced mankind that Configuration makes

the man; that if, for example, you are born an Isosceles with two

uneven sides, you will assuredly go wrong unless you have them made

even--for which purpose you must go to the Isosceles Hospital;

similarly, if you are a Triangle, or Square, or even a Polygon, born

with any Irregularity, you must be taken to one of the Regular

Hospitals to have your disease cured; otherwise you will end your days

in the State Prison or by the angle of the State Executioner.

All faults or defects, from the slightest misconduct to the most

flagitious crime, Pantocyclus attributed to some deviation from perfect

Regularity in the bodily figure, caused perhaps (if not congenital) by

some collision in a crowd; by neglect to take exercise, or by taking

too much of it; or even by a sudden change of temperature, resulting in

a shrinkage or expansion in some too susceptible part of the frame.

Therefore, concluded that illustrious Philosopher, neither good conduct

nor bad conduct is a fit subject, in any sober estimation, for either

praise or blame. For why should you praise, for example, the integrity

of a Square who faithfully defends the interests of his client, when

you ought in reality rather to admire the exact precision of his right

angles? Or again, why blame a lying, thievish Isosceles when you ought

rather to deplore the incurable inequality of his sides?

Theoretically, this doctrine is unquestionable; but it has practical

drawbacks. In dealing with an Isosceles, if a rascal pleads that he

cannot help stealing because of his unevenness, you reply that for that

very reason, because he cannot help being a nuisance to his neighbours,

you, the Magistrate, cannot help sentencing him to be consumed--and

there's an end of the matter. But in little domestic difficulties,

where the penalty of consumption, or death, is out of the question,

this theory of Configuration sometimes comes in awkwardly; and I must

confess that occasionally when one of my own Hexagonal Grandsons pleads

as an excuse for his disobedience that a sudden change of the

temperature has been too much for his Perimeter, and that I ought to

lay the blame not on him but on his Configuration, which can only be

strengthened by abundance of the choicest sweetmeats, I neither see my

way logically to reject, nor practically to accept, his conclusions.

For my own part, I find it best to assume that a good sound scolding or

castigation has some latent and strengthening influence on my

Grandson's Configuration; though I own that I have no grounds for

thinking so. At all events I am not alone in my way of extricating

myself from this dilemma; for I find that many of the highest Circles,

sitting as Judges in law courts, use praise and blame towards Regular

and Irregular Figures; and in their homes I know by experience that,

when scolding their children, they speak about "right" or "wrong" as

vehemently and passionately as if they believed that these names

represented real existences, and that a human Figure is really capable

of choosing between them.

Constantly carrying out their policy of making Configuration the

leading idea in every mind, the Circles reverse the nature of that

Commandment which in Spaceland regulates the relations between parents

and children. With you, children are taught to honour their parents;

with us--next to the Circles, who are the chief object of universal

homage--a man is taught to honour his Grandson, if he has one; or, if

not, his Son. By "honour", however, is by no means meant "indulgence",

but a reverent regard for their highest interests: and the Circles

teach that the duty of fathers is to subordinate their own interests to

those of posterity, thereby advancing the welfare of the whole State as

well as that of their own immediate descendants.

The weak point in the system of the Circles--if a humble Square may

venture to speak of anything Circular as containing any element of

weakness--appears to me to be found in their relations with Women.

As it is of the utmost importance for Society that Irregular births

should be discouraged, it follows that no Woman who has any

Irregularities in her ancestry is a fit partner for one who desires

that his posterity should rise by regular degrees in the social scale.

Now the Irregularity of a Male is a matter of measurement; but as all

Women are straight, and therefore visibly Regular so to speak, one has

to devise some other means of ascertaining what I may call their

invisible Irregularity, that is to say their potential Irregularities

as regards possible offspring. This is effected by carefully-kept

pedigrees, which are preserved and supervised by the State; and without

a certified pedigree no Woman is allowed to marry.

Now it might have been supposed that a Circle--proud of his ancestry

and regardful for a posterity which might possibly issue hereafter in a

Chief Circle--would be more careful than any other to choose a wife who

had no blot on her escutcheon. But it is not so. The care in choosing

a Regular wife appears to diminish as one rises in the social scale.

Nothing would induce an aspiring Isosceles, who had hopes of generating

an Equilateral Son, to take a wife who reckoned a single Irregularity

among her Ancestors; a Square or Pentagon, who is confident that his

family is steadily on the rise, does not inquire above the

five-hundredth generation; a Hexagon or Dodecagon is even more careless

of the wife's pedigree; but a Circle has been known deliberately to

take a wife who has had an Irregular Great-Grandfather, and all because

of some slight superiority of lustre, or because of the charms of a low

voice--which, with us, even more than you, is thought "an excellent

thing in Woman".

Such ill-judged marriages are, as might be expected, barren, if they do

not result in positive Irregularity or in diminution of sides; but none

of these evils have hitherto proved sufficiently deterrent. The loss

of a few sides in a highly-developed Polygon is not easily noticed, and

is sometimes compensated by a successful operation in the

Neo-Therapeutic Gymnasium, as I have described above; and the Circles

are too much disposed to acquiesce in infecundity as a Law of the

superior development. Yet, if this evil be not arrested, the gradual

diminution of the Circular class may soon become more rapid, and the

time may be not far distant when, the race being no longer able to

produce a Chief Circle, the Constitution of Flatland must fall.

One other word of warning suggests itself to me, though I cannot so

easily mention a remedy; and this also refers to our relations with

Women. About three hundred years ago, it was decreed by the Chief

Circle that, since women are deficient in Reason but abundant in

Emotion, they ought no longer to be treated as rational, nor receive

any mental education. The consequence was that they were no longer

taught to read, nor even to master Arithmetic enough to enable them to

count the angles of their husband or children; and hence they sensibly

declined during each generation in intellectual power. And this system

of female non-education or quietism still prevails.

My fear is that, with the best intentions, this policy has been carried

so far as to react injuriously on the Male Sex.

For the consequence is that, as things now are, we Males have to lead a

kind of bi-lingual, and I may almost say bi-mental, existence. With

Women, we speak of "love", "duty", "right", "wrong", "pity", "hope",

and other irrational and emotional conceptions, which have no

existence, and the fiction of which has no object except to control

feminine exuberances; but among ourselves, and in our books, we have an

entirely different vocabulary and I may almost say, idiom. "Love" then

becomes "the anticipation of benefits"; "duty" becomes "necessity" or

"fitness"; and other words are correspondingly transmuted. Moreover,

among Women, we use language implying the utmost deference for their

Sex; and they fully believe that the Chief Circle Himself is not more

devoutly adored by us than they are: but behind their backs they are

both regarded and spoken of--by all except the very young--as being

little better than "mindless organisms".

Our Theology also in the Women's chambers is entirely different from

our Theology elsewhere.

Now my humble fear is that this double training, in language as well as

in thought, imposes somewhat too heavy a burden upon the young,

especially when, at the age of three years old, they are taken from the

maternal care and taught to unlearn the old language--except for the

purpose of repeating it in the presence of their Mothers and

Nurses--and to learn the vocabulary and idiom of science. Already

methinks I discern a weakness in the grasp of mathematical truth at the

present time as compared with the more robust intellect of our

ancestors three hundred years ago. I say nothing of the possible

danger if a Woman should ever surreptitiously learn to read and convey

to her Sex the result of her perusal of a single popular volume; nor of

the possibility that the indiscretion or disobedience of some infant

Male might reveal to a Mother the secrets of the logical dialect. On

the simple ground of the enfeebling of the Male intellect, I rest this

humble appeal to the highest Authorities to reconsider the regulations

of Female education.