CHAPTER XIIFREEDOM AND REVOLUTION
YET they gloried in their freedom and their love of freedom. No people could be freer than they. Daily in their temples were there songs and hymns chanted in honour of liberty. It was a truism of the journals that liberty and liberty alone could be the true spiritual atmosphere of a nation. They loved to worship superiors and reverence especially the vicegerent of God upon earth—the head of the Bureau of Fame. They bowed to him and did him every obeisance because he was the head of the church and worthy of all manner of worshipful obedience. But he had no control over their actions except the moral and religious control which they willingly acknowledged.
As an instance of their complete freedom of action they pointed to the way in which the government allowed them to do as they liked with the peasants and artisans and the lower classes generally who were in their service. In the discipline of these they were untrammelled. They acknowledged that they were responsible to the state for the good conduct of their servants; but on the other hand the state passed over to them the power of life and death over these so that their authority should be no mere nominal thing. Ah, freedom was indeed the noblest feature of life; they might as well pass into the grave at once as give it up or allow it to be interfered with.
I was afraid to suggest to them the information I had received from a foreigner in the lower city about a large part of the country people. All the former inhabitants of the island and most of the artisans were in semi-slavery. They saw the hesitation in my face and guessed its purport. And one of my eulogists of liberty launched into a prelection on the necessity of a stage of servitude in the history of all ascensions to civilisation. A people that had not long issued from the animal stage could never become anything better than half-brutes but through bondage to a more advanced race. It was indeed a noble mission of theirs thus to spend ages on the task of assisting a tribe of half-savages to subdue their foul passions. The peasantry would be nothing but wild beasts without such restraint. The process had been going on for centuries, and it showed the great patience and love of the Aleofanians that they persisted in such a repulsive and fruitless task. The artisans were those of them who had improved under the discipline, and so they had been partially freed. But even they were still somewhat savage in their natures; even they needed to be treated with great long-suffering. The marble Aleofanians were as patient with these degraded beings as a mother with her child, never sparing the rod when it was needed, although it lacerated their finer feelings to use such a means of discipline. He compared their conduct in this matter with their treatment of monetary relations. They were equally generous and self-denying and protective of the good of all the other people of the nation in dealing with money; they held it the root of all evil, and to prevent its working havoc widespread they concentrated it in the hands of a few,—the marble citizens,—who could not so easily be harmed by it.
I called his attention to the numerous interferences with liberty of action in the various laws that fenced them in from the indulgence of certain passions. Ah, that was one of the noblest instances of their worship of freedom; so devoted were they to it that they prohibited everything that would lead to a breach of it; no man could be allowed to circumscribe his own liberty; and all vice circumscribed liberty; hence all vice had to be checked. It was only in the interest of liberty that liberty was ever interfered with.
He slid into another eulogy of freedom and instanced the devotion of the Aleofanians to it in their conversation. No one was checked in his criticism of a neighbour or fellow-citizen; their city was indeed a mutual fellowship society in which the freest censure of each other was allowed for mutual benefit. The keen contest of wits moulded their characters and intellects. No one dared be absent from any social or conversational fête, lest he should suffer in reputation from becoming the topic of the meeting. Never would they descend to vulgar depreciation; they were masters of refined insinuation and veiled malignity. They could whisper away a reputation with the grace of a duellist; and at the climax of a mortal combat of wits their serenity remained unruffled. Oh, the grace and beauty of their social life! They were never done admiring it. But without this freedom of criticism it would be nothing. Ah, life in Aleofane was indeed a noble thing, so happy and free were all classes of the people, from monarch to peasant, from the bureaucrat of fame to the poorest artisan!
“Even the criminals were happy” was the climax of his eloquence. I asked him for an explanation. He proceeded to show me how it was failure that constituted crime. To deceive successfully was the highest art of life; for the essence of art was to conceal itself. And to be discovered was to fail in this. Whoever suffered this indignity was convicted of the special vice he had been concealing and sent to the hulks, that is, was turned into a journalist or priest. In these professions they were perfectly happy, for they were allowed in them to revel in their own special vices. The journalists manufactured their news whenever they found events fail them, and the priests manufactured their myths and creed whenever the sacred books failed them. So their capacity of fiction was exercised daily and hourly. And provided it was exercised in accordance with the purpose of the bureau, no one interfered with their enjoyment. The newspapers and the church were the home of fiction; and when truth was told there, it passed unrecognised. In order to keep up the interest of readers the journalists manufactured sensational news one day and contradicted it the next; and in order to draw crowds one priest would preach a most heterodox interpretation of the sacred books in his sermon and another would reply to him in his and contradict him. This neutralised the evil that might arise from journalism and its personalities and from sermons and their heterodoxies. It would never have done to put ordinary citizens or successful deceivers and slanderers into such posts; they would be too astute in deceiving the people; their fictions would not be so palpable and gross or so mutually contradictory that the simplest reader or hearer would discover them. So much had the Aleofanian palate become accustomed to such journalism and pulpit oratory that if the writers ever described facts or indulged in truths, they had to give them the flavour of fiction; and if ever the priests indulged in orthodox doctrines they had to give them the tinge of the heterodox. Ah, surely the whole people were happy, for all were so free as to be able to indulge their special appetites and likings!
I was scarcely convinced by this subtle and eloquent eulogy of Aleofanian life and liberty, and I determined to visit the common people and see for myself. I had already examined the journals intended for them and seen how different they were from the fashionable literature of the marble city. They were generally presented to strangers and must have greatly impressed them, for they were full of noble sentiments and moralisations subtly interwoven with eulogies of the Aleofanian leaders of state and fashion for their great virtues and goodness. It was most edifying to read these sermonised news-sheets, saturated as they were with the highest ethics and deepest piety, and especially the doctrine that it was the duty of every man to adhere to the station in which God had placed him. But I was struck after I came into the marble city with the tone adopted towards them by the citizens of the higher class; they spoke of them with a patronising smile and disinterested approval, as if they were talking of children’s Sunday-school literature or fairy tales. And about all the fiction in these popular journals there was the atmosphere of a child’s fairyland; everything was happy and beautiful and as it should be. After reading a series of them I could easily have concluded that Aleofane was another paradise for the unambitious and lowly, and that death must be looked upon by the common people as an overwhelming catastrophe in that it put a stop to this full current of joy and happiness.
My curiosity was greatly piqued. I wished to see this other Eden upon earth. So with letters and passports and a guide, one of the journalists, I set out. And for the first few days everything was idyllic. But drunkenness, the special vice of my cicerone, got hold of him, and he collapsed by the way. Thereafter I found the whole scene change. It was now nothing but squalor and gloom and the lash of the whip.
A stranger from a neighbouring island, whom I had met in my first hostelry, explained to me the histrionic character of the first few days’ experience and the reality of the last. He took me in hand, and under his guidance I visited one of their provincial cities. Here I saw men and women of the same race as the marble citizens crawling in filth and starvation, prostrate in a magnificent temple before the sleight-of-hand and the mesmerism of the priests. They were bound in the chains of superstition and ignorance, and they were encouraged to do little else than procreate and multiply; for to pauperise by religion was the first rule of the Aleofanian government, and to enslave the soul by pauperism and ignorance was its corollary.
Yet in a cave outside of the town we witnessed from our hiding-place awful and mysterious rites of a revolutionary propaganda proceeding. We saw thousands of the ignorant peasants and artisans getting initiated. And when the ceremony was finished we almost burst into laughter over the pathos as the agitators gathered round a fire and gorged. My guide had evidently something to do with this rising revolution; and he was so enraged to find that an agent from the communistic island of Tirralaria had crept in amongst the revolutionists. The heavens confound his impudence and cant! What he and his beggarly crew from the isle of thieves wanted was to divide the plunder of another island. They had communised Tirralaria into a cipher. Of the wealth that they had counted by thousands, when they landed there, naught remained but the nothings. The growth of the dummy citizen or cipher in the denominator had made Tirralarian property a vanishing point. The game of this Garrulesi was not to establish socialism in Aleofane, but to socialise its property into Tirralaria.
After his burst of anger I tried to elicit more about this socialistic community. Tirralaria was a large island, I got to know, into which had been tumbled some centuries ago a few thousand socialists with considerable wealth to their share. They had increased to tens of thousands, and their wealth had gone down to little more than a shirt to each back. After the besom of a tornado or a famine or a plague had swept the island the population soon reached high-water mark again; every square yard of the soil was littered with a stronger and lazier humanity. The island stank of humanity miles to leeward. There was scarcely room enough for graves, let alone beds. The lubberly and oleaginous let themselves out as mattresses; and so the space was economised, and another increase was possible. The unclean rogues, they never washed, unless they chanced to get hustled off the edge of the island into the sea. The description contrasted so strongly with the rose-coloured picture that I had heard drawn by the socialist agent in the cave that I determined to see for myself.
As we wandered through the forests of the island my guide told me of two saviours that had landed on the coasts of Aleofane and become the protectors of the poor. One refused to resort to the tricks of the charlatan, and, deserted by his followers, perished at the hands of the aristocracy, who then adopted his tenets and worked them into an elaborate hypocrisy. The other, learning by his fate and bettering the jugglery of the marble citizens, put heart and drill into the poor who flocked to his standards, and led them to victory. He seized the throne, but, flattered by the old aristocracy into belief in his own divinity and into desertion of the cause of the poor, he vanished in pomp, luxury, and corruption.
By dint of persistent inquiry I got him to explain his hints about the island from which the ancestors of all of them had come. It was called Faddalesa, or the isle of devils, because of the appalling phenomena they encountered whenever they attempted to return to it. It had, he acknowledged, been called Limanora, or the island of progress; but for thousands of years that name had lapsed. And on the shores of now one island and again another strangers had landed. But as they were wealthy, and taciturn, no questions were asked, and their descendants had vanished into the ranks of the aristocracy. It was many centuries since any had come, though it was generally supposed in the archipelago that I had come from the central island with my fireship. I saw the mistake that they had made would serve my new resolve to make for this mother isle; and I left it unchallenged in their minds.
In the great northern harbour of Aleofane I came across the same filth and a similar rich temple; but I also found clearer evidence of underground revolution approaching consummation. And for the sake of my fireship and its powers of helping on the movement I was initiated into the mysteries of one of their societies. The socialistic agent, Garrulesi, insinuated himself into my acquaintanceship; and for the sake of being able to return with him to his home I endured his eloquence on the perfection of the altruistic life. Competition was the bane of the human race; and its only products were poverty and disease and unhappiness. It was responsible for property, and the only crime was property. Was it not monstrous that one man should taboo what another man needed! Obliterate property, and you wipe out crime too. How gentle and amenable and humane was the true commonweal, where neither property nor class existed! No law was needed, no law could persist. Every natural instinct and passion of the human breast was allowed the fullest scope. There was indeed no further stage to reach; need of progress, of effort was passed. Man under such a rule had become all that he might be, and he felt that whatever is is right. Evil and darkness had fled before the light of primitive happiness, and existence had become the throne of God.
As he dilated on the nobleness of Tirralarian civilisation I saw his eye flicker and his colour change. A stranger had passed. He told me that we were being watched. He wished me to take refuge in Tirralaria with my fireship if anything occurred. But I had promised it to my guide and fellow-traveller. He showed one flash of anger. But it vanished at once. He led me to the shore and pointed out his falla or ship. In it he would hang round the coasts for me, and he indicated an unfrequented point, whither I could flee and find safety on board his ship. He offered to take off to my crew any message that I desired to send; I might instruct it to come to Tirralaria for me after it had been to the isle of dogs. I wrote in English, and sent my orders to my comrades, knowing that the language would be safe from his prying.