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 Class 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 Tradesman, 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 such 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 skillful 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 (footnote 1).
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 round. 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 almost 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 their
comparatively harmless angle of the Equilateral Triangle. Thus, in
the most brutal and formidable off 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 the 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 of 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 gene [...]