CHAPTER XIXWOTNEKST
THERE was an island near that carried the belief in the potency of law to a still more insane pitch. I had heard of people with new-born legislative functions thinking that they could accomplish anything they desired by merely passing a law. Revolutionary fervour even in the West had worked wonders with the human power of self-delusion. But the story of the isle of Wotnekst or Godlaw, as it might be translated, roused my curiosity. I could not believe that there existed outside of lunatic asylums a people so far gone in hallucination.
Much against the will of Sneekape we were driven by the current and the wind right upon a lonely beach of the island. As it was evening, I persuaded him to camp on the shore for the night. Before we were fully awake in the morning we were surrounded by a crowd of the most tattered and slovenly men and women I had ever seen, and this after I had been in Tirralaria. There was a wild, fanatic light in their eyes that warned us to humour their fondest freak. They stood between us and the margin of the sea where our boat was beached, and we saw that they meant to shepherd us inland, whether as prey or guests we could not tell. Sneekape made the best of a bad bargain and, after taking a slender meal of what we had left from supper, he marched away from the shore and I followed. The tatterdemalions began to move too.
It was one of our pieces of good fortune that my companion, though he had never made an expedition to the island, because of its lack of attractive quarry, had amongst his many accomplishments acquired a smattering of its language from some of the descendants of those who had escaped from it. For they had not long before passed a law that their language should be and was the universal language of the world; they had long enough suffered from having to learn the languages of barbarians and foreigners, in order to have intercourse with them; they would suffer the indignity no longer; other men must learn Wotnekstian; and in fact it was their true, natural, or mother tongue, and they had forgotten it only through their negligence; it was time that they picked it up again, and they would have no trouble in doing so, once the auxiliary series of laws was passed for enabling foreigners to learn the language in a day. They should like to know how any man could fail to learn it once the legislature of Wotnekst had taken the matter in hand and passed the necessary laws. They should like to know what Nature had been doing all these centuries in letting the native tongue of the earth fall into desuetude in so many nations. Nature knew well that Wotnekst was the primitive source of all mankind and had remained the leading country of the earth and the model for men to follow. It had been foremost in legislation and had shown the way to the whole world; for legislation was the supreme factor of life.
I heard the loud and threatening eloquence, and though I did not understand the import of it I knew from its tone that I had better keep silence. I sheltered under the knowledge of Sneekape, and watched him negotiate and cringe and flatter. I afterwards discovered that it was his knowledge of the language, meagre though it was, that saved us from terrors they did not attempt to define. Sneekape knew their general reputation in the archipelago as a feeble folk too loquacious to do any harm. Yet he showed by his cowering and fawning look that he was not quite sure what might occur; and the more he spanielled them the louder and more arrogant they grew. It was then I knew by instinct that they were cowards, attempting to hide their cowardice and drive courage and boldness out of the hearts of possible assailants. Once Sneekape took in the situation, he changed his attitude and adopted their loud voice and swaggering gait. He was, as I had seen, a master of effrontery and fanfaronade. But his change of rôle was too sudden to impress them; and they had gathered confidence and impetus from the torrent of their own blustering and rhodomontade and from their growing numbers as they approached the town. They outbrassed the insolence and swagger of Sneekape, and he cut but a poor figure for the rest of the march to our destination.
We could not see the houses for a long time; and when we came amongst them we still looked for the town ahead of us. The hovels were so squat and mean and filthy that we could not imagine human beings living in them; but we soon stopped before one that was conspicuous for having been built as a penthouse to the ruin of what had once been a considerable edifice. We were informed that this was the capital, the very centre of the civilisation and power of the world, and that what we saw around us was the greatest city on the face of the earth. The filthy kennels were the town, and this pigsty was the residence of the government.
We were led to the door, and one examined the contents of my pockets and handed them over to an official within. Another took his place and examined my hat and grubbed in my hair. A third stepped forward and ransacked the inner places of my garments. And so on the investigation proceeded over the whole of my person till every crevice and opening was examined. Then marched up another group, and through Sneekape made sundry inquiries as to our origin, past history, means of subsistence, ultimate destination, race, religion, political tenets, attitude towards the existing government, views on the exciting questions of the island and the day, and endless details that were of no consequence to any but ourselves and of little consequence to ourselves. A third set pursued an investigation into our health; and a fourth into the health of the island we had last visited. In fact our examination continued all through the day; and my belief is that it would have gone on for weeks till we had dropped from emaciation and fatigue, but that the leading politician had been disturbed in his attempt at sleeping inside, and had rushed out in a frenzy and dispersed the crowd.
Left to our own resources, Sneekape and I foraged about till we found a few scraps to eat; for we were famishing; and from sheer fatigue we lay down under the shelter of a tree, and without troubling to find an elevation or even a stone for a pillow we were dead asleep at once. We awoke in broad daylight to find ourselves again the centre of a tattered and inquisitive crowd. I heard Sneekape mutter under his breath: “God help us! another plague of inspectors!” Then I realised what we had gone through and what we might have still to go through. Every person in that mob which had shepherded us up from our boat was a government inspector of immigration and importation, and had to show his zeal for administration whenever a stranger landed. They had several thousand acts relating to aliens who approached their shores, and every act had necessitated the appointment of so many officials to see its provisions carried out. There had been in former ages considerable commerce centring in the island; but the minute regulations for its conduct had frightened every merchant and sailor from its shores. There was nothing left of its olden trade but the countless laws passed for its administration and development and the mob of inspectors to see them enforced. There were inspectors of tides, of harbours, of fore-shores, of weather, of clouds, of shoals, of rocks, of captains, of crews, of native sailors, of foreign sailors, of native passengers, of aliens, of goods, of native and foreign clothing, of native and alien epidermis, of native and alien vermin, of native and alien diseases; the list proceeds through a whole encyclopedia of detail. Yet all the imports they were able to inspect were the planks and nails and bolts of an occasional shipwreck, and all the human beings were strangers driven by stress of weather or current on to their inhospitable beaches. Our arrival was an era in the existence of this host of inspectors.
But the legislators were as eager to have a foreign audience, and rescued us from the tender mercies of the inspectorate. A special act was passed relieving us from the jurisdiction of the thousand alien laws that were to be found on the statute-book and of the ten thousand inspectors who were to enforce them. We were fêted and banquetted and made so much of that we could not get a moment to ourselves or sufficient hours for sleep. The worst of it was that all their feasts were of the Barmecide order. We were urged to help ourselves; but there was never anything to help ourselves to. The speeches were most grandiloquent, and often laudatory; but we should have been better satisfied with a crust of bread. Nor dared we hint that we were starving; for that would have reflected on their hospitality, and perhaps led to unpleasant consequences. Now and again we tried to get away from our eulogists amongst the fruit trees that Nature provided on the island; but on our escapades we generally found every branch rifled; and we were generally captured before we went far, they were so eager to induce foreigners to settle on their island or traffic with them. If only we would return and bring others with us, they would pass innumerable laws for our benefit. They had not yet realised that it was too much legislation that had isolated them; for it was now the only thing they had to lavish. But Sneekape saw his opportunity and seized it. He promised that he would flood their shores with merchants and traders; and he effected his purpose. We were allowed to depart before emaciation made us incapable of leaving; and we were accorded on the beach the most fervent of farewells.
When we had drawn out of sight of the land, the wind favouring us, Sneekape pulled from underneath the planking of the boat some of the fruits we were familiar with on these islands. Without my stopping to inquire how he had got them, we ravenously ate them. Feeling appeased, I tried to find out what ingenuity of his had extracted food from an island that seemed to be without it. He had managed to get into one of their households and to flatter the women and they had provided him. I suspected from his look and his reluctance that there was some baseness or intrigue that even his mean spirit had become ashamed of, and I pressed him no further.
He was quick to recover from such an unusual emotion; and after a few hours’ sleep in the bottom of the boat, his vanity came uppermost. He awoke in the best of humour with himself and his achievements and discernment, and I had a full account of his past knowledge of the island and his immediate observations on it.
It was the most fertile in the archipelago and the richest in the precious metals and the common minerals; and it had at one time bidden fair to be the most opulent. The people, though too fond of politics, had been industrious and thrifty. There were several large cities in the island full of splendid buildings public and private. The coast was studded with excellent harbours constantly filled with ships loading for other parts of the archipelago. They kept a strong fleet for the protection of themselves and their commerce. Wotnekst was the envy of the other islands.
What had brought most of its population together was the belief that if only they could each get his pet political theory put into practice, the world would be saved and the millennium would be here. Every leisure moment they had they spent in discussion with each other on their favourite topic. They had started as a republic with complete freedom of meeting and speech; and so there was no bridle to their dominant passion. Politics was talked of every hour of the day and dreamed of every hour of the night; and their dreams were perhaps less mad than their daylight projects. Every man tried to outvie his neighbour in the eccentricity of his theories and suggestions; and they were gauged and promoted not in proportion to their wisdom and practicability, but in proportion to their departure from the beaten paths of tradition. Every one was, of course, intended to order the world as it ought to be ordered; it professed universal prosperity and happiness as the certain goal. There would be no more poverty, no more evil, no more misery in the universe, if only it were adopted; and the electors, feeling the annoyances and woes pointed out to be real enough, and recognising the objects aimed at as excellent and quite in harmony with their own yearnings, eagerly adopted every such proposal. They did not stop to inquire whether the means were adequate to the ends, or whether they would not introduce evils greater than those to be remedied. The actual existence of the woes and the magnanimous motive were enough to secure their sympathy, and anyone who offered to criticise was howled down as the enemy of mankind and of all progress.
And, as always happens, there arose a set of politicians who pandered to this passion with a view to their own advantage and glory. If a scheme, however utopian, seemed likely to be acceptable to the majority they would trick it out with one or two special features of their own and proclaim it as their own discovery; and all their energies would be bent towards having it put in the form of a law on the statute-book. Statesman after statesman rose on such stepping-stones to power and fame; and at last it was recognised that the only way to success in Wotnekst was a brand-new project for the cure of all human ills.
The first stage of those panaceas was based on the idea, natural to a republic, that the suffrage was the noblest thing a man could wish for. What floods of eloquence were turned on to the theme! What pictures of the happy state that would ensue on each new expansion of the electorate proposed! How cruel and inhuman those who opposed it! The toughest struggle was the first for the removal of the most irrational of all the political disabilities and anomalies that had grown up with the growth of the community. If any human system remains untouched for a generation or two without any automatic power of self-adaptation, it becomes a caricature of justice and wisdom through the growth of the commonweal to which it is intended to apply. The Wotnekstians suddenly awoke to find the electorate, consecrated by long tradition, a nest of absurdities and wrongs; but it took the eloquence and ridicule of two generations of reformers to put it right and to get the franchise extended to all holders of a certain amount of property. The abolition of the property qualification was a struggle only second to this in its violence. Then the flood came. Every new statesman had to rise to power on some new suffrage scheme. From residence for a year it was brought down to residence for a month in the community. How irrational it seemed to place any time limit to the acquisition of political interest and insight and wisdom! Every limit, indeed, could be proved to be arbitrary and illogical; and the final step was easily taken to manhood suffrage.
Then they waited to see the effect; and there grew upon the people, first surprise, and then indignation that all human ills had not vanished from the island. There were poverty and crime and disease with them still in all their virulence. Who could be at the bottom of this failure? It could not be the patriots at home. It must be the foreigner who frequented their shores and marts. Then the second stage of panacea legislation began. This was occupied with taxing the foreign commerce of the island. Tariff after tariff was passed for the purpose of drawing as much blood as possible from the alien who came to their harbours, without actually killing him. He was getting fat on the trade with their island. Increase the revenues out of him, was ever the cry. For more and more was needed for the army of guardians and inspectors of the trade and for the statesmen who passed the tariffs and their followers; all the needy and the indolent amongst the middle classes looked to the new services for their sustenance. As commerce dwindled under the burden of inspectors and tariffs and regulations, the demand for revenue increased; till at last the harbours were empty, and the marts inhabited only by the government officers. No politician, however, dared to propose the reduction of this army of idle inspectors.
An ambitious young statesman who could not oust his opponents or get himself into office bethought himself of a new scheme. He knew what it was that had annihilated the commerce; but the electorate would not listen to him if he told them the truth; they thought that it was malignant envy that had driven foreign nations into withdrawing from the ports of the island; how could it be Wotnekstian legislation, when it had all been meant for the good of the human race? But let them go; they could do very well without foreigners. The youth saw it was vain to attempt to persuade them that their own laws and tariffs and inspectors had made commerce impossible; and he turned his attention to a new stepping-stone to power. In their anxiety to please and conciliate the middle classes who had achieved all the recent reforms, statesmen had forgotten the artisans and labourers; and everybody assumed that in passing laws for the benefit of employers, they were conferring benefits on the employees too; their interests were bound together. But this new candidate for power saw that the lion’s share went to the middle classes and that the interests of the two divisions of the community were by no means completely identical.
He sent his lieutenants and agents out amongst the workingmen and wooed their confidence by urging their grievances, which they suddenly awoke to find they had. His emissaries made the artisans pick quarrels with their masters, and he stepped in to settle them; but he settled them in such a way that they should be chronic ulcers. He encouraged their discontent and promised them a position in the commonwealth as good as their masters. At intervals the strife he provoked blazed out into open warfare; and he led the crusade. He was execrated by the middle classes; but he did not care for that; for, as soon as he had inspired the mass of the workingmen to act independently of their employers, he knew he would carry the day.
And after ten years of uphill struggle he came out victorious. He had rent the state in two; but he had the larger part behind him; and he took every precaution to bind it to him with all the bonds of self-interest and fear. There followed a long period of legislation in favour of the artisan and labourer. He drew his revenues from a new source, the penalisation of capital. Every man who employed others with profit, or who had any surplus from his earnings, was forced step by step to hand over his profits or his surplus to the state or in the form of wages to the employees. Industry after industry grew waterlogged and sank. All who were thrown out of employment had to be provided for by the state; those vile employers, through hatred of labour, had in their malignity withdrawn their capital from the industries, and many of them had gone abroad with it to escape taxation and the just laws that had been passed to guide them in the employment of their capital.
The new army of government inspectors and employees who had come into being in order to see the labour laws carried out could not be dismissed; and the government had to take over most of the industrial enterprises that had been abandoned. The labourers learned with facility the art of seeming to work when idling; and, as they were the masters through the ballot-box, it was no one’s interest to see that they did what they were paid to do. Things drifted from bad to worse; but the statesman put the best face upon them. Borrowings from abroad at huge rates and crooked accounts concealed the deficit for many years.
At last his rival, a younger and as unscrupulous a politician, advertised the disaster that was about to befall the state, and, though denounced as a liar and slanderer, persuaded half the electorate that he was not far from the truth, especially as the administration was driven to all kinds of dubious shifts to pay their employees; and a considerable section of the labouring class looked to them for work and support. But in the crusade against industrial capital and foreign trade the landlords and mine-owners had been forgotten. Agricultural work and mining had not been to the taste of the Wotnekstians, and they had allowed these employments to drift into the hands of introduced labourers, contracted, or, in other words, enslaved, for a number of years. The owners kept as silent as they could and shut the mouths of their foreign workmen by learning their language and allowing them no opportunity of learning Wotnekstian. It was assumed that they were contented and happy, as no one heard them complain, and all outsiders who could understand them were carefully kept out of their way. They cost little beyond their sustenance to their masters, who avoided any show of the wealth they were laying by, and even kept up the appearance of being poor.
The new candidate for power was an outcast from their ranks, and knew the enormous profits that came to them from their lands and mines. He spoke with authority when he declared that he could pay all the expenses of administration without laying any more burden on the existing taxpayers; he could in fact remove many of their taxes, enrich the state coffers, and give a higher rate of wages to all the employees of the government. His long-successful rival made a bold stroke for the retention of power. He knew that his own special party, the artisans, had the largest families, and had therefore the largest number of women and young men in their ranks; and he brought in a bill extending the suffrage to women and to youths of sixteen years and upwards. His opponent was suspiciously eager to help him in passing it; but he could not draw back; and it became law. The result was a still more overwhelming defeat for him and his followers. His rival had honeycombed the labour party with disloyalty by means of promised bribes.
Then began the new system of taxation, which was to draw all revenues from lands and mines. From time to time the taxes had to be increased in order to fill the gulf that was made by a new addition to the inspectorate. The owners had to resort to a lower and lower stratum of workers, who would work for nothing and whose food would cost less. The proletariate raised a cry against the introduction of such savages; and the artisans and labourers took it up, and insisted on native labour being substituted for the aliens. Stringent laws were passed excluding all aliens from the island; and real poverty began to take the place of seeming poverty amongst the landlords and mine-owners. A few generations of laws against foreigners and of taxation of natural products ruined this milch-cow of the state; and the end was that all lands and all mines had to be taken over from private owners.
Still there were new stepping-stones for youthful ambitions in politics to rise. One who thought that too many years were passing without the due recognition of his genius saw that his only chance lay in an utterly neglected section of the electorate. The paupers and the unimprisoned criminals, though long enfranchised, had been too unimportant to appeal to. But state employment, state doles, and state impecuniosity had by this time pauperised half the population, and the half-developed criminals had begun to recognise in the statesmen and politicians brothers-in-arms, whilst the constant torrent of legislation had induced utter contempt of all laws and made most of the people lawbreakers.
Our young political leader saw his opportunity, and knew that if he propounded a scheme that would appeal to both pauper and criminal he would seduce Wotnekstian human nature and rise into power. He proposed to give a competency to every man and woman above fifty who was poor enough or idle enough to appeal to the state for sustenance or employment. He did not reveal whence he would get his revenues to carry out his scheme, but assured the electorate with great confidence that he would find them. The semi-criminal was astute enough to see that it was out of his quiver that the new scheme must find its weapons. The pauper did not care whence the means came; and the two combined put the budding statesman into office. The financial scheme was of course to take from those who had saved and to give to those who had spent their all or had never earned. Anticipating the effect of his measures, he passed a law prohibiting emigration from the island; and he made the semi-criminal inspectors to see its provisions enforced. In spite of increasing deficits and increasing inability to borrow from the islands around even at exorbitant rates, statesman after statesman climbed to power by reducing the age at which a competency would be granted, and the age at which a boy or girl could begin to claim electoral rights.
Notwithstanding the army of inspectors and the precautions taken, the thrifty section of the people who did not care to abandon work dribbled away one by one clandestinely to neighbouring islands, along with their thrift. The wealthy had taken care to escape long before; and the state bank, which had gradually absorbed all other banks, had begun to feel the limit of its paper. Its chief reserve and plant had been for many years a printing-press. One ambitious youth of meagre intellectual capacity had leapt into power on the preaching of the doctrine that the only essentials of great wealth in a country were a good supply of paper and a good printing-press; the credit of the community did the rest. So thoroughly did the people come to believe in this that the precious metals and the movables of value were allowed to drift out of the island along with the rich or thrifty escapees. They were chary of accepting any piece of government paper in payment for anything they did or sold, and still the people believed in the inexhaustibility of the wealth of the state. Did not the whole of the industries and mines and lands of the island belong to it? Issue of paper followed issue of paper to meet the increasing deficit, each growing of less value and of less acceptance than the last. More than half the population were government inspectors, and the rest were government pensioners; and they had to be paid. At last there was nothing to pay them with but the state bank paper. Then there was indignant protest. Statesman after statesman in whom the electorate trusted to pay them in goods or the cash of other islands was hurled from power. Hundreds of laws were passed asserting the value of the paper money and refixing it at its original face value. Yet neither electors nor politicians would acknowledge the facts of the case, that as long as there was no one to work, there was nothing to be got to pay the inspectors and pensioners. There were the mines and lands as rich as ever they were; but there were none to dig or cultivate them. The alien labourers who used to work them had been thrust out, and the natives had worked in such a way that they did not earn their wages. There were the factories and industries; but they were silent and their buildings were falling into ruin.
Yet the electors were convinced that it was the politicians that were at fault; and the politicians had each his theory, which, if put into practice, he was sure would set everything to rights. Every new statesman had a new panacea, and when it failed to pay the state wages and pensions in goods, down he went. Another statesman rose into power and another political nostrum was tried. Fortunately for us the last favourite theory had been the encouragement of foreigners. A politician had shown that, if commerce were encouraged and aliens invited to settle in their midst, everything would be right again; and his brief term of office covered our compulsory visit to Wotnekst. That he would fail was as certain as that night would follow day. Yet none the less would the whole people believe that salvation was to be found in passing laws; and they would continue to spend their days and their energies in arguing out new political schemes for the return of prosperity, just as they and their ancestors had done for generations. Nature, meanwhile, was kind enough to save them from actual starvation; her wild roots and fruits were free to all, and in ordinary seasons gave them bare subsistence the year round. But when in one of her violent or barren moods she refused them food, then famine and ultimately plague blotted out by the thousand the less vigorous amongst these believers in the omnipotence of legislation. The survivors, as soon as they gathered strength to talk and argue, began to hammer out a new scheme for putting the state and the state bank and the state industries and state lands and mines on a sound footing. If the passing of laws did not bring them prosperity and happiness, then they were certain that nothing would.
Such was the outline that Sneekape gave me of the history and character of the Wotnekstians; but it seemed such a caricature of human nature that I half suspected he was playing off a jest on me. He saw my hesitation and he assured me on oath that he was speaking the truth. His oaths had never impressed me much, and I tell you his story for what it is worth. That a whole people should so insanely believe in the omnipotence of legislation is beyond credit. That a whole people should adopt such foolish schemes, and on their failure continue to forge and put into practice similar schemes would strain the most primitive credulity. But that any nation could bring themselves to think that the encouragement of idleness and unthrift would lead to anything else than leaving them to the mercy of the moods of Nature was indeed a jest too patent to impose on me.