CHAPTER XII
FREEDOM 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.