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02 - Flatland- A Romance of Many Dimensions - Edwin Abbott Abbott · Science Fiction Books - Daily

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Part one, Section four concerning the women. If our highly pointed triangles of
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the soldier class are formidable, it may be readily inferred that far more formidable
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are our women. For if a soldier is a wedge, a woman is
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a needle, being, so to speak, all point at least at the
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two extremities. Add to this the power of making herself practically invisible at will,
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and you will perceive that a female in flatland is a creature by no
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means to be trifled with. But here perhaps some of my younger readers may
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ask how a woman in flatland can make herself invisible? This ought, I
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think to be apparent without any explanation. However, a few words will make
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it clear to the most unreflecting. Place a needle on a table, Then,
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with your eye on the level of the table, look at its sideways,
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and you see the whole length of it. But look at it endways,
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and you see nothing but a point. It has become practically invisible.
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Just so is it with one of our women. When her side is turned
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towards us, we see her as a straight line, when the end containing
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her eye or mouth. For with us these two organs are identical is the
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part that meets our eye, then we see nothing but a highly lustrous point.
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But when the back is presented to our view, then, being only
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sublustrous, and indeed almost as dim as an inanimate object, her hinder extremity
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serves her as a kind of invisible cap. The dangers to which we are
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exposed from our women must now be manifest to the meanest capacity in spaceland.
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If even the angle of a respectable triangle in the middle class is not without
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its dangers. If to run against a working man involves a gash, if
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collision with an officer of the military class necessitates a serious wound, if a
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mere touch from the vertex of a private soldier brings with it danger of death,
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what can it be to run against a woman except absolute and immediate destruction?
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And when a woman is invisible, or visible only as a dim,
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sublustrous point, how difficult must it be even for the most cautious always to
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avoid collision. Many are the enactments made at different times in the different states
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of flatland in order to minimize this peril, and in the southern and less
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temperate climates where the force of gravitation is greater and human beings more liable to
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casual and involuntary motions. The laws concerning women are naturally much more stringent,
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but a general view of the code may be obtained from the following summary.
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One. Every house shall have one entrance in the eastern side for the use
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of females only, by which all females shall enter in a becoming and respectful
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manner, and not by the men's or western door. Footnote. When I
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was in Spaceland, I understood that some of your priestly circles have in the
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same way a separate entrance for villagers, farmers, and teachers of board schools
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Spectator, September eighteen eighty four, Page one, two five five, that
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they may approach in a becoming and respectful manner. End of footnote. Two.
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No female shall walk in any public place without continually keeping up her peace
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cry, under penalty of death. Three. Any female duly certified to be
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suffering from Saint Vitus's dance fits, chronic cold accompanied by violence, sneezing,
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or any disease necessitating involuntary motions, shall be instantly destroyed. In some of
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the states, there is an additional law forbidding females under penalty of death,
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from walking or standing in any public place without moving their backs constantly from right
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to left, so as to indicate their presence to those behind them. Others
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obliged to woman, when traveling, to be followed by one of her sons
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or servants, or by her husband. Others confine women altogether to their houses,
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except during the religious festivals. But it has been found by the wisest
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of our circles or statesmen, that the multiplication of restricttions on females tends not
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only to the debilitation and diminution of the race, but also to the increase
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of domestic murders, to such an extent that a state loses more than it
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gains by a too prohibitive code. For whenever the temper of the women is
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thus exasperated by confinement at home or hampering regulations abroad, they are apt to
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vent their spleen upon their husbands and children. And in the less temperate climates,
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the whole male population of a village has been sometimes destroyed in one or
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two hours of simultaneous female outbreak. Hence, the three laws mentioned above suffice
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for the better regulated states, and may be accepted as a rough exemplification of
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our female code. After all, our principal safeguard is found not in legislature
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but in the interests of the women themselves. For although they can inflict instantaneous
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death by a retrograde movement, yet unless they can at once disengage their stinging
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extremity from the struggling body of their victim, their own frail bodies are liable
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to be shattered. The power of fashion is also on our side. I
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pointed out that in some less civilized states, no female is suffered to stand
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in any public place without swaying her back from right to left. This practice
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has been universal among ladies of any pretensions to breeding in all well governed states
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as far back as the memory of figures can reach. It is considered a
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disgrace to any state that legislation should have to enforce what ought to be and
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is in every respectable female a natural instinct. The rhythmical and if I may
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say so, well modulated undulation of the back in our ladies of circular rank
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is envied and imitated by the wife of a common equilateral who can achieve nothing
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beyond a mere monotonous swing like the ticking of a pendulum, and the regular
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tick of the equilateral is no less admired and copied by the wife of the
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progressive and aspiring isosceles. In the females of whose family, no back motion
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of any kind has become as yet a necessity of life. Hence, in
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every family of position and consideration, back motion is as prevalent as time itself,
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and the husbands and sons in these households enjoy immunity, at least from
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invisible attacks. Not that it must be for a moment supposed that our women
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are destitute of affection, but unfortunately the passion of the moment predominates in the
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frail sex over every other consideration. This is of course a necessity arising from
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their unfortunate conformation, for as they have no pretensions to an angle, being
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inferior in this respect to the very lowest of the isosceles, they are consequently
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wholly devoid of brain power, and have neither reflection, judgment, nor forethought,
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and hardly any memory. Hence, in their fits of fury they remember
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no claims and recognize no distinctions. I have actually known a case where a
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woman has exterminated her whole household and half an hour afterwards, when her rage
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was over and the fragments swept away, has asked what has become of her
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husband and her children. Obviously, then a woman is not to be irritated
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as long as she is in a position where she can turn round. When
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you have them in their apartments, which are constructed with a view to denying
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them that power, you can say and do what you like, for they
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are then wholly impotent for mischief, and will not remember a few minutes.
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Hence the incident for which they may be at this moment threatening you with death,
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nor the promises which you may have found it necessary to make in order
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to pacify their fury. On the whole, we get on pretty smoothly in
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our domestic relations, except in the lower strata of the military classes. There,
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the want of tact and discretion on the part of the husbands produces at
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times indescribable disasters. Relying too much on the offensive weapons of their acute angles
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instead of the defensive organs of good sense and seasonal simulations, these reckless creatures
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too often neglect the prescribed construction of the women's apartments, or irritate their wives
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by ill advised expressions out of doors, which they refuse immediately to retract.
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Moreover, a blunt and stolid regard for literal truth indisposes them to make those
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lavish promises by which the more judicious circle can in a moment pacify his consort.
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The result is massacre, not, however, without its advantages, as
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it eliminates the more brutal and troublesome of the isosceles, and by many of
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our circles, the destructiveness of the thinner sex is regarded as one among many
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providential arrangements for suppressing redundant population and nipping revolution in the bud. Yet,
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even in our best regulated and most approximate circular families, I cannot say that
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the ideal of family life is so high as with you in spaceland. There
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is peace in so far as the absence of slaughter may be called by that
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name. But there is necessarily little harmony of tastes or pursuits, and the
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cautious wisdom of the circles has ensured safety at the cost of domestic comfort in
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every circular or polygonal household. It has been a habit from time immemorial,
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and has now become a kind of instinct among the women of our higher classes,
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that the mothers and daughters should constantly keep their eyes and mouths towards their
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husband and his male friends. And for a lady in a family of distinction
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to turn her back upon her husband would be regarded as a kind of portent
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involving loss of status. But as I shall soon show, this custom,
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though it has the advantage of safety, is not without its disadvantages. In
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the house of the working man or respectable tradesman, where the wife is allowed
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to turn her back upon her husband while pursuing her household avocations, there are
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at least intervals of quiet when the wife is neither seen nor heard except for
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the humming sound of the continuous peace cry. But in the homes of the
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upper classes there is too often no peace. There. The voluble mouth and
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bright penetrating eye are ever directed towards the master of the household, and light
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itself is not more persistent than the stream of feminine discourse. The tact and
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skill which suffice to avert a woman's sting are unequal to the task of stopping
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a woman's mind. And as the wife has absolutely nothing to say and absolutely
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no constraint of wit, sense, or conscience to prevent her from saying it.
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Not a few cynics have been found to aver that they prefer the danger
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of the death dealing but inaudible sting to the safe sonorousness of a woman's other
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end to my readers in Spaceland, the condition of our women may seem truly
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deplorable, and so indeed it is. A male of the lowest type of
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the Isosceles may look forward to some improvement of his angle and to the ultimate
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elevation of the whole of his degraded caste. But no woman can entertain such
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hopes for her sex. Once a woman, always a woman is a decree
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of nature, and the very laws of evolution seem suspended in her disfavor.
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Yet at least we can admire the wise pre arrangement which has ordained that as
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they have no hopes, so they shall have no memory to recall, and
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no forethought to anticipate the miseries and humiliations which are at once a necessity of
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their existence and the basis of the Constitution of Flatland. Section five of our
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methods of recognizing one another, You, who are blessed with shade as well
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as light. You who are gifted with two eyes, endowed with a knowledge
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of perspective, and charmed with the enjoyment of various colors, You who can
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actually see an angle and contemplate the complete circumference of a circle in the happy
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region of the three dimensions. How shall I make clear to you the extreme
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difficulty which we in Flatland it excl experience in recognizing one another's configurations. Recall
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what I told you above. All beings in Flatland, animate or inanimate,
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no matter what their form, present to our view the same or nearly the
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same appearance viz. That of a straight line. How then, can one
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be distinguished from another where all appear the same? The answer is threefold.
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The first means of recognition is the sense of hearing, which with us is
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far more highly developed than with you, and which enables us not only to
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distinguish by the voice our personal friends, but even to discriminate between different classes,
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at least so far as concerned the three lowest orders, the equilateral,
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the square, and the pentagon. For of the isosceles I take no account.
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But as we ascend in the social scale, the process of discriminating and
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being discriminated by hearing increases in difficulty, partly because voices are assimilated, partly
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because the faculty of voice discrimination is a plebeian virtue, not much developed among
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the aristocracy, and wherever there is any danger of imposture, we cannot trust
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to this method. Amongst our lowest orders, the vocal organs are developed to
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a degree more than correspondent with those of hearing, so that an isosceles can
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easily feign the voice of a polygon, and with some training, that of
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a circle himself. A second method is therefore more commonly resorted to. Feeling
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is among our women and lower classes. About our upper classes, I shall
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speak presently the principal test of reais recognition at all events between strangers, and
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when the question is not as to the individual, but as to the class.
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What therefore introduction is among the higher classes in spaceland, that the process
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of feeling is with us. Permit me to ask you to feel and be
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felt by my friend, mister so and so. Is still among the more
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old fashioned of our country, gentlemen, in districts remote from towns, the
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customary formula for a flatland introduction, but in the towns, and among men
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of business, the words be felt by are omitted, and the sentence is
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abbreviated to let me ask you to feel, mister so and so. Although
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it is assumed, of course, that the feeling is to be reciprocal among
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our still more modern and dashing young gentlemen, who are extremely averse to superfluous
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effort and supremely indifferent to the purity of their native life language, the formula
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is still further curtailed by the use of to feel in a technical sense,
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meaning to recommend for the purposes of feeling at being felt, and at this
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moment the slang of polite or fast society in the upper classes sanctions such a
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barbarism, as mister Smith, permit me to feel you, mister Jones.
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Let not, my reader, however, suppose that feeling is with us the
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tedious process, that it would be with you, or that we find it
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necessary to feel right round all the sides of every individual before we determine the
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class to which he belongs. Long practice and training, begun in the schools
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and continued in the experience of daily life, enable us to discriminate at once
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by the sense of touch between the angles of an equal sided triangle, square
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and pentagon. And I need not say that the brainless vertex of an acute
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angled eye soosely is obvious to the dullest touch. It is therefore not necessary
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as a rule, to do more than feel a single angle of any individual.
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And this, once ascertained, tells us the class of the person whom
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we are addressing, unless indeed he belongs to the higher sections of the nobility.
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There the difficulty is much greater. Even a master of Arts in our
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University of Wentbridge has been known to confuse a ten sided with a twelve sided
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polygon. And there is hardly a doctor of science in or out of that
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famous university who could pretend to decide promptly and unhesitatingly between a twenty sided and
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a twenty four sided member of the aristocracy. Those of my readers who recall
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the extracts I gave above from the Legislative Code concerning Women, will readily perceive
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that the process of introduction by contact requires some care and discretion, Otherwise the
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angles might inflict on the unwary feeler irreparable injury. It is essential for the
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safety of the feeler that the felt should stand perfectly still. A start,
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a fidgety shifting of the position, Yes, even a violent sneeze has been
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known before now to prove fatal to the incautious, and to nip in the
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bud many a promising friendship. Especially, is this true among the lower classes
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of the triangles. With them the eye is situated so far from their vertex
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that they can scarcely take cognizance of what goes on at that extremity of their
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frame. They are moreover of a rough, coarse nature, not sensitive to
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the delicate touch of the highly organized polygon. What wonder, then, if
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an involuntary toss of the head, as e'er now deprived the state of a
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valuable life. I have heard that my excellent grandfather, one of the least
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irregular of his unhappy Isosceles class, who indeed obtained shortly before his decease four
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out of seven votes from the Sanitary and Social Board for passing him into the
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class of the equal sided, often deplored with a tear in his venerable eye,
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A miscarriage of this kind which had occurred to his great great great grandfather,
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a respectable working man with an angle or brain of fifty nine degrees thirty
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minutes. According to his account, my unfortunate ancestor, being afflicted with rheumatism,
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and in the act of being felt by a polygon, by one sudden
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start, accidentally transfixed the great man through the diagonal, and thereby, partly
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in consequence of his long imprisonment and degradation, and partly because of the moral
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shock which pervaded the whole of my ancestors relations, throw back our family a
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degree and a half in their ascent towards better things. The result was that
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in the next generation the family brain was registered at only fifty eight degrees,
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and not till the lapse of five generations was the lost ground recovered, the
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full sixty degrees attained, and the ascent from the Isosceles finally achieved. And
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all this series of calamities from one little accident in the process of feeling.
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At this point, I think I hear some of my better educated readers exclaim,
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how could you in flatland know anything about angles and degrees or minutes.
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We can see an angle, because we in the region of space can see
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two straight lines inclined to one another. But you, who can see nothing
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but one straight line at a time, or at all events, only a
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number of bits of straight lines, all in one straight line. How can
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you ever discern any angle, and much less register angles of different sizes.
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I answer that though we cannot see angles, we can infer them, and
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this with great precision. Our sense of touch, stimulated by necessity and developed
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by long training, enables us to distinguish angles far more accurately than your sense
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of sight when unaided by rule or measure of angles. Nor must I omit
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to explain that we have great natural helps. It is with us a law
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of nature that the brain of the Isosceles class shall begin at half a degree
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or thirty minutes, and shall increase, if it increases at all, by
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half a degree, in every generation, until the goal of sixty degrees is
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reached, when the condition of serfdom is quitted, and the freeman enters the
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class of regulars. Consequently, Nature herself supplies us with an ascending scale or
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alphabet of angles for half a degree up to sixty degrees, specimens of which
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are placed in every elementary school throughout the land. Owing to occasional retrogressions to
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still more frequent moral and intellectual stagnation, and to the extraordinary fecundity of the
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criminal and vagabond classes. There is always a vast superfluity of individuals of the
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half degree and single degree class, and a fair abundance of specimens up to
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ten degrees. These are absolutely destitute of civic rights, and a great number
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of them, not having even intelligence enough for the purposes of warfare, are
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devoted by the state to the service of education, fettered immovably so as to
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remove all possibility of danger. They are placed in the class rooms of our
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infant schools, and there they are utilized by the Board of Education for the
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purpose of imparting to the offspring of the middle classes that tact and intelligence of
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which these wretched creatures themselves are utterly devoid. In some states the specimens are
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occasionally fed and suffered to exist for several years, but in the more temperate
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and better regulated regions, it is found, in the long run more advantageous
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for the educational interests of the young to dispense with food and to renew the
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specimens every month, which is about the average duration of the foodless existence of
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the criminal class. In the cheaper schools. What is gained by the longer
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existence of the specimens is lost, partly in the expenditure for food, and
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partly in the diminished accuracy of the angles, which are impaired after a few
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weeks of constant feeling. Nor must we forget to add, in enumerting the
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advantages of the more expensive system, that it tends, though slightly yet perceptibly,
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to the diminution of the redundant isosceles population, an object which every statesman
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in Flatland constantly keeps in view. On the whole. Therefore, although I
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am not ignorant that in many popularly elected school boards there is a reaction in
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favor of the cheap system, as it is called, I am myself disposed
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to think that this is one of the many cases in which expense is the
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truest economy. But I must not allow questions of school board politics to divert
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me from my subject. Enough has been said, I trust to show that
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recognition by feeling is not so tedious or indecisive a process as might have been
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supposed, and it is obviously more trustworthy than recognition by hearing. Still,
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there remain, as has been pointed out above, the injection that this method
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is not without danger. For this reason, many in the middle and lower
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classes, and all without exception in the polygonal and circular orders, prefer a
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third method, the description of which shall be reserved for the next section.
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End of Part one, Section five