Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles

by Godfrey Sweven

As for the royal roads to education which Garrulesi would descant on by the day, they amounted to imitative skill in picking up the tricks of a conjurer and thief. The education that the royal roads led to was about as much as would exist amongst a community of monkeys or magpies. They had no arts, no learning, no literature; for these had, when they existed amongst them, stirred envy and jealousy, and they were voted by the majority to be disturbers of peace and of true socialistic civilisation. How could anyone have what others could not share in without breeding uneasiness and strife? So there was nothing then to learn except the supreme art of the whole nation—skill in pilfering. Their education in this proceeded every moment of their lives, unless during a famine, when no strangers approached the island, and there was food only for the strong who could seize it and keep it. Then force alone was able to sustain life by clutching the coarse remains of the summer’s produce. A famine was often prayed for by those who had the best interests of the nation at heart, for it checked the overflow of the people and strengthened the generations by leaving only vigorous survivors to propagate the race. Every ten or a dozen years the numbers became too great for what unaided nature within the limits of the island could supply, in spite of the ravages of neglect amongst the children and the effectual obliteration of so many by quarrels over treasure-trove, thefts, and amours; and then, even without the aid of a hurricane, or an epidemic or blight, the shortage of food made brief work of the surplus population. Amongst the survivors the skeleton frames soon swelled with fat; for after a famine year, nature, having lain fallow for a season, lavished all her powers in superabundance of fruits, like a mother after the punishment of her child, exhibiting her treasures of love to it.

If there were anything worth ruling in the island, it would be the easiest thing in the world with a few faithful troops and a few cart-loads of luxuries to master it in a day or two, the whole people were so lazy and such kleptomaniacs. All the conqueror would have to do would be to pretend to conceal a cart-load of goods in one part of the forest and another in another part. Within half an hour after the concealment the whole population would be busy over them as flies over pots of treacle; a few dozen men would trap them clogged with spoil, or absorbed in hiding it or pilfering it when hidden. Their fingers were always itching for goods to steal; it was the only channel for their great talents. But what would be the use of them after being trapped unless you could distribute them through some wealthy community like Aleofane, and be sure that you could make them disgorge their plunder? They had nothing to rule, nothing to steal, nothing to divide.

Yes, yes, they had once had lofty purposes and ideals. They were going to recreate the world when they settled here. But there were perpetual oscillations for many ages from despotism to revolution. The chiefs had little thanks for their work. Their distribution of labour and its products was a continual source of discontent that rose recurrently into emeute. They had to apply the strong hand and suppress the journals and journalists that encouraged the rebellion. Reign of terror followed reign of terror, for the people were never satisfied; whatever arrangements were made, some large section of them found them unjust, whilst some other section cunningly learned to make more than their due share out of them. Money had been abolished, but everything that was substituted for it—labour ticket, token, bread, fruit—came to suffer the abuses of money; professions that traded in the substitute sprang up, and attempts to suppress them only made them secret and virulent. None would take to the offensive trades that had to do with stenches and corrupt matter. The burying of the dead, the shifting of refuse and manure, the obliteration of filth, the uncleaner domestic services, were left to themselves, and plagues became common till the advisers of the people kidnapped men from outlying islands, put them in chains, and set them to these foul employments.

And at this point he began to whisper mysteriously in my ear. “I shall take you some night, when all in our temple are asleep, to see how they respect liberty and equality. They have slaves who never leave the crater of Klimarol except under the whip. You have seen its glow on the sky of night. It comes from the burning of the dead and of the refuse of the temples and huts of Tirralaria. During the night a detachment of slaves descends the mountain under the lash of the whip; a section of the council superintends the work by turns; they gather the débris of the previous day’s Tirralarian civilisation, and by the morning they have drawn it on sleds up the snow-cone; and during the next day and night it is thrown into the boiling lake of lava. The stench is past endurance for any who have not been brought up in it. Within the crater are raised and made the produce and the articles that those below are too idle or too refined in senses to have anything to do with. If it were not for the great slave factory within Klimarol the country would soon be without an inhabitant, for they have always been too proud to keep themselves or their land clean, and now they are too indolent to do it if it were needed; and plagues of the most virulent intensity would sweep the island.

“Not long after they landed here and abolished differentiation of reward for labour, except a slight one for special employments and professions and for special skill, medicine was deserted. The night work and the offensive or cruel tasks of surgery and the constant intercourse with the weakly and sick and dying were not sufficiently rewarded to be attractive. The chiefs attempted to coerce the clever young men and women into the profession. But their cleverness always enabled them to evade the order; they were perpetually feigning sickness or paralysis of the arms and hands. At first they thought of teaching their Klimarol slaves the secret of the art, but they shrank from putting the lives of themselves and their fellow-citizens into such hands. So the cure and care of the sick and dying have been left to chance, which means nobody.

“This page of their history has been torn out and a fiction substituted for it. So, too, is the introduction of slavery hidden under the pall of night, for it is an outrage on the foundation of their community, the dignity of man’s nature. They count it treason for any stranger to meddle with or inquire into these secrets of their prison-house.

“They are keenly sensitive to any mention of their gradual lapse from the great ideals with which they began. All were to work voluntarily for the whole community; there was abundance of everything to be produced for the use of every citizen. It soon turned out that no one was to work; for it is always more pleasant for average human nature to play or idle than to work. The talking professions were flooded; orators and logicians and lecturers and preachers and writers soon came to form more than one half of the population. The other half began to feel themselves slaves, and threw up their spades and mattocks and the tools of their trades. Nothing was produced but what nature and the slaves of Klimarol gave them. And as soon as any compulsion is applied the cry of tyranny arises, and threatened rebellion puts an end to the reform. Where there is no force, no stimulus, no motives, it is not difficult to see what human nature will do. To work for the community is too shadowy to be effective; it implies the almost perfect humanity to begin with, which all human social systems set up as their aim and goal.

“At the beginning there were many who were willing to toil for the sake of the ideal, especially the cultured and artistic. They could live on imagination and its products. And it was they who erected these marvellous temples that are now the abode of the bat and the owl and the Tirralarian. The real difficulty came when the measure of remuneration had to be fixed. How were the various trades and professions to have their relative values estimated? That was the first rock on which the new socialistic community split. At first a rough time-standard was adopted, the number of hours of work per day, with some little differentiation for the various trades and professions, according as they were more or less offensive or more or less intellectual. But this attempt at comparison of kinds of work was only arbitrary and could never be based on any principle. It had to be readjusted every year. And as there was a continual outcry against an aristocracy of mind and one of stench, the intellectual and offensive employments being fixed at a smaller number of hours per day, the whole system was at last abolished, and all had to work the same number of hours. It soon became apparent that this was as unjust a standard as the differentiation of kinds of work. Some dawdled away their hours of labour, whilst others wore out their energies and shortened their lives at their toil. For a time they discussed a true and scientific standard of measurement. A few of the thinkers saw that the only possible approach to it would be to gauge the amount of tissue used up in the act of labour. Some scientists thought that they might discover a method of doing this; but the shadow of the old difficulty fell over them again. Tissues differed in delicacy and in the value and refinement of the nutriment they each required. How could they weigh brain tissue against muscular tissue? And it took geological ages to make an infinitesimal advance in the organisation or amount of the one, whilst the other would palpably change in a few days or weeks. Here crept in another of the prime difficulties in measuring remuneration or punishment—the contribution of ancestry either negative or positive. The whole attempt was felt to be doctrinaire and impossible. And it was only those who argued for it that gave any prominence to the only true and fundamental standard of wages—payment according to the real results, that is, the advance secured for the race, or for humanity at large, by the act of labour.

“The final interpretation of their maxim, ‘To every man according to his works,’ was ‘To every man according to his hours of work.’ A fixed amount of food and clothing was to be doled out to each, and every citizen was to work so many hours a day, whatever might be the nature of the employment.

“When this was secured, the amount produced for the state and by the community grew less and less, till it became utterly inadequate for anything but the barest subsistence in rags. One by one the citizens fell into the feeblest way of filling up the required tale of hours; and at last nature had to produce unaided what was necessary for life. All but the artists were idler during the supposed hours of work than during the hours of leisure. And the cry against an aristocracy of art and culture grew to be the daily occupation of the unoccupied national tongue, and at last swelled into a revolution that destroyed art and educated employments. The whole nation became an aristocracy of lazzaroni.”