Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles

by Godfrey Sweven

It reduced the revenues of the physicians by more than half; and they could make no outcry against it, for it was more powerful than they. At last one great financial minister of public worship organised the new departure; he had all the auricular stalls of all the churches of the nation connected directly with his central office; and in his presence all the spiritual advisers sat and received confessions and gave consolations. He had an army of clerks to insert in the secret doomsday-book opposite the name of each citizen anything in his or her confession that seemed of importance, whilst every morning he gave out the general policy and tone of the advices to be communicated; on exceptional cases he had always to be consulted at once.

He also offered a percentage on the legacies left by any worshipper to the church; this was given to the criminal on whose advice it was left. The department of public worship was coming to be the wealthiest in the state; for he fitted up the auricular boxes of the church as the most luxurious boudoirs, where a lady could lounge in the midst of the sweetest perfumes and music and the most beautiful paintings and statuary. He even allowed at a large rental auricular stalls to be let by the month or year to single individuals or families. Hither could the invalid or convalescent come in her moods of despair or depression and pour her sorrows into the ear of the soft-voiced comforter who shed, by his casuistries and gentle persuasiveness, balm upon her spiritual wounds. At last he permitted auricular tubes to be laid to the private chambers of confirmed invalids and of the dying, at a large premium. And this added such enormous sums to the revenue in the shape of legacies that he reduced the rate. Yet he left it as a policy of the office that it should never be so far lowered as to bring the privilege within the reach of those who had but moderate incomes.

Never had such a powerful engine come into the hands of the state; and every precaution was taken that it should not be abused and that no secret of this great confession bureau should leak out. But, whenever any citizen grew restive or obstreperous, an appeal was made to the pages of the doomsday-book, and some secret found there was applied to him with the effect that he curled up into unobtrusive silence. The convict-confessors were, of course, all locked up at night in a well-sentried building, and by day every action of theirs was under unseen surveillance.

They still continued their medical studies and duties, and were able to prescribe through the auditory tubes to whatever patient could give a clear account of his symptoms. If anyone had symptoms that did not permit of a clear diagnosis of his disease, he was encouraged to come into the consulting-room of the office of public worship, and there the various convict-physicians questioned him and examined him unseen; the diseased organ or part was placed under powerful microscopes into which they looked; then the whole staff consulted on his case and gave him advice accordingly. But these were rare instances; as a rule, the patients were satisfied with the impersonal advice and acted upon it. Half the diseases had their source in the mind and only needed spiritual advice; and most were both mental and physical; none but felt great benefit from unburdening their spirits and receiving sympathy and consolation.

Half the confessor-physicians were on duty by night and half by day; and the former section consisted of the ablest and the most subtle and persuasive; for it was found that night patients and worshippers needed more spiritual consolation than day clients. It was during the sleepless hours of the dark that the soul sank into the abyss of morbid weakness and often into the paralysis of terror. It was then that it seemed to absorb the functions of the body and infect them with its own diseases. It was then that most succumbed to the assaults of sickness, the life ebbed farthest away and left the sensitive nerves naked to the irritations of thought and passion. It was then that the great harvest of bequests was reaped; seized by superstitious fears, by the terrors of the darkness around and to come, the spirit was ready to abandon the mere dross of life for a little support on the threshold of the grave, for a little religion. And the office of public worship never hesitated to promise all they asked for beyond the final darkness, provided they paid well for the boon. It was then that the most hideous secrets of life were whispered into the ear of the church, then that terror drove the soul into the refuge of complete disburthenment. Even when death was years off, the feebleness of the morbid or invalid or convalescent spirit during hours when sleep would not approach laid it open to assault; for the footfall of the awful destroyer seemed to be heard in the dread silence. It was then that it sought the consolations of the auditory tube and opened the flood-gates of repentance into the ear of the confessor-physician. The morning brought regret for the rash candour, but the secret was recorded; the office of public worship had undying power over the fate of the unburthened soul.

By the time I arrived in the island, the physicians felt that their profession was doomed, that the wily statesman had outwitted them; and doubtless before many generations most of them would plead to be admitted into the service of the state. When that occurred they would have to resign themselves body and soul to it; it would receive none but those who were completely in its power. Of course there was still much scope for them in families that would not trust mere impersonal advice or feared to resign their independence of spirit into the power of an office of state. They were also much employed in seeing the treatment recommended by the convict-physicians carried out; and in this they often retaliated upon the state by contradicting the advice and sowing doubt of its soundness in the minds of the patients. Doubtless the next move of the department of public worship would be to blow through pneumatic tubes into the auricular stalls of the churches, or into the chambers of the sick the drugs and medical requisites that were recommended.

By means of these three uses of the talents of convicts the state church had become a reality and was far more powerful than the press. Journalism poured suggestion into the public mind; but it was into the healthy, wide-awake, often recoiling public mind; its reasonings, eloquence, or imaginative schemes and suggestions were not always accepted; they had often to lie ungerminated in the soil of the national spirit for years, till they were forgotten and some new occasion laid them bare and made them seem to spring up spontaneously. The personality of the writers though not unfelt was unseen, and so far had the potence of that which is mysterious; but they could not, like the ecclesiastical convicts, use the shadowy distance of the world to come in the way of threats and promises; they could not stir the soil of the present to immediate harvest with the plough of the future. They had to depend on the weapons and tools of the average man; they had to reason and persuade, explain, or appeal to the emotions, as neighbour to neighbour, except that they had the impersonality and anonymity of confessors and could gag their opponents in any attempt at reply.

Their power would have seemed enormous, had it not been put into comparison with the complete state organisation of the church and been overshadowed by it. They were used as the dogs of war, gathering as they did into the hands of a minister the loose fangs of irresponsible gossip, leashed as they were to one purpose and one spirit or policy. They knew that they had but one master to please, one master who had their liberty and still more their luxury in his power; and him they served with all their faculties and especially their faculties of invention, personal venom, and vituperation. They had no principle, no scruple except towards him and the government he embodied. If they entertained the majority, they did not care who suffered. Their first object was to strengthen the roots of the state, and especially of the minister of the department; their next was to make the largest number possible read their articles and paragraphs. If any one of their victims turned upon them and denied the news about him as a slander, they were at once made by the head of the department to apologise and explain that by some mistake the paragraph had slipped out of the pure fiction column into that of news, and that the name of the citizen had strayed out of the column of eulogies in transferring type. Where this was impossible as an explanation, the minister could easily appease the wrath of his victim by showing him how an especially unscrupulous convict had been introduced new into the office and had acted on his own responsibility and ignorance of the rules of revision.

I wondered at so great and virtuous a people enduring such an institution in their midst. They marvelled at my wonder, and thought of it as based on the very laws of nature. How could any marble citizen indulge in such work and retain his self-respect, and how could a state be accountable for the vagaries of irresponsible writers, whose dignity and self-respect were lost? The only means of producing a united and vigorous literature was to make the writers bond to the state. The only means of keeping it pure and free from attacks on the nation and the national spirit was to put the journalists body and soul into the hands of a department, and to make the department responsible for their productions. This was a provision of nature as soon as such an institution arose.