Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles

by Godfrey Sweven

We were led to the door, and one examined the contents of my pockets and handed them over to an official within. Another took his place and examined my hat and grubbed in my hair. A third stepped forward and ransacked the inner places of my garments. And so on the investigation proceeded over the whole of my person till every crevice and opening was examined. Then marched up another group, and through Sneekape made sundry inquiries as to our origin, past history, means of subsistence, ultimate destination, race, religion, political tenets, attitude towards the existing government, views on the exciting questions of the island and the day, and endless details that were of no consequence to any but ourselves and of little consequence to ourselves. A third set pursued an investigation into our health; and a fourth into the health of the island we had last visited. In fact our examination continued all through the day; and my belief is that it would have gone on for weeks till we had dropped from emaciation and fatigue, but that the leading politician had been disturbed in his attempt at sleeping inside, and had rushed out in a frenzy and dispersed the crowd.

Left to our own resources, Sneekape and I foraged about till we found a few scraps to eat; for we were famishing; and from sheer fatigue we lay down under the shelter of a tree, and without troubling to find an elevation or even a stone for a pillow we were dead asleep at once. We awoke in broad daylight to find ourselves again the centre of a tattered and inquisitive crowd. I heard Sneekape mutter under his breath: “God help us! another plague of inspectors!” Then I realised what we had gone through and what we might have still to go through. Every person in that mob which had shepherded us up from our boat was a government inspector of immigration and importation, and had to show his zeal for administration whenever a stranger landed. They had several thousand acts relating to aliens who approached their shores, and every act had necessitated the appointment of so many officials to see its provisions carried out. There had been in former ages considerable commerce centring in the island; but the minute regulations for its conduct had frightened every merchant and sailor from its shores. There was nothing left of its olden trade but the countless laws passed for its administration and development and the mob of inspectors to see them enforced. There were inspectors of tides, of harbours, of fore-shores, of weather, of clouds, of shoals, of rocks, of captains, of crews, of native sailors, of foreign sailors, of native passengers, of aliens, of goods, of native and foreign clothing, of native and alien epidermis, of native and alien vermin, of native and alien diseases; the list proceeds through a whole encyclopedia of detail. Yet all the imports they were able to inspect were the planks and nails and bolts of an occasional shipwreck, and all the human beings were strangers driven by stress of weather or current on to their inhospitable beaches. Our arrival was an era in the existence of this host of inspectors.

But the legislators were as eager to have a foreign audience, and rescued us from the tender mercies of the inspectorate. A special act was passed relieving us from the jurisdiction of the thousand alien laws that were to be found on the statute-book and of the ten thousand inspectors who were to enforce them. We were fêted and banquetted and made so much of that we could not get a moment to ourselves or sufficient hours for sleep. The worst of it was that all their feasts were of the Barmecide order. We were urged to help ourselves; but there was never anything to help ourselves to. The speeches were most grandiloquent, and often laudatory; but we should have been better satisfied with a crust of bread. Nor dared we hint that we were starving; for that would have reflected on their hospitality, and perhaps led to unpleasant consequences. Now and again we tried to get away from our eulogists amongst the fruit trees that Nature provided on the island; but on our escapades we generally found every branch rifled; and we were generally captured before we went far, they were so eager to induce foreigners to settle on their island or traffic with them. If only we would return and bring others with us, they would pass innumerable laws for our benefit. They had not yet realised that it was too much legislation that had isolated them; for it was now the only thing they had to lavish. But Sneekape saw his opportunity and seized it. He promised that he would flood their shores with merchants and traders; and he effected his purpose. We were allowed to depart before emaciation made us incapable of leaving; and we were accorded on the beach the most fervent of farewells.

When we had drawn out of sight of the land, the wind favouring us, Sneekape pulled from underneath the planking of the boat some of the fruits we were familiar with on these islands. Without my stopping to inquire how he had got them, we ravenously ate them. Feeling appeased, I tried to find out what ingenuity of his had extracted food from an island that seemed to be without it. He had managed to get into one of their households and to flatter the women and they had provided him. I suspected from his look and his reluctance that there was some baseness or intrigue that even his mean spirit had become ashamed of, and I pressed him no further.

He was quick to recover from such an unusual emotion; and after a few hours’ sleep in the bottom of the boat, his vanity came uppermost. He awoke in the best of humour with himself and his achievements and discernment, and I had a full account of his past knowledge of the island and his immediate observations on it.

It was the most fertile in the archipelago and the richest in the precious metals and the common minerals; and it had at one time bidden fair to be the most opulent. The people, though too fond of politics, had been industrious and thrifty. There were several large cities in the island full of splendid buildings public and private. The coast was studded with excellent harbours constantly filled with ships loading for other parts of the archipelago. They kept a strong fleet for the protection of themselves and their commerce. Wotnekst was the envy of the other islands.

What had brought most of its population together was the belief that if only they could each get his pet political theory put into practice, the world would be saved and the millennium would be here. Every leisure moment they had they spent in discussion with each other on their favourite topic. They had started as a republic with complete freedom of meeting and speech; and so there was no bridle to their dominant passion. Politics was talked of every hour of the day and dreamed of every hour of the night; and their dreams were perhaps less mad than their daylight projects. Every man tried to outvie his neighbour in the eccentricity of his theories and suggestions; and they were gauged and promoted not in proportion to their wisdom and practicability, but in proportion to their departure from the beaten paths of tradition. Every one was, of course, intended to order the world as it ought to be ordered; it professed universal prosperity and happiness as the certain goal. There would be no more poverty, no more evil, no more misery in the universe, if only it were adopted; and the electors, feeling the annoyances and woes pointed out to be real enough, and recognising the objects aimed at as excellent and quite in harmony with their own yearnings, eagerly adopted every such proposal. They did not stop to inquire whether the means were adequate to the ends, or whether they would not introduce evils greater than those to be remedied. The actual existence of the woes and the magnanimous motive were enough to secure their sympathy, and anyone who offered to criticise was howled down as the enemy of mankind and of all progress.

And, as always happens, there arose a set of politicians who pandered to this passion with a view to their own advantage and glory. If a scheme, however utopian, seemed likely to be acceptable to the majority they would trick it out with one or two special features of their own and proclaim it as their own discovery; and all their energies would be bent towards having it put in the form of a law on the statute-book. Statesman after statesman rose on such stepping-stones to power and fame; and at last it was recognised that the only way to success in Wotnekst was a brand-new project for the cure of all human ills.

The first stage of those panaceas was based on the idea, natural to a republic, that the suffrage was the noblest thing a man could wish for. What floods of eloquence were turned on to the theme! What pictures of the happy state that would ensue on each new expansion of the electorate proposed! How cruel and inhuman those who opposed it! The toughest struggle was the first for the removal of the most irrational of all the political disabilities and anomalies that had grown up with the growth of the community. If any human system remains untouched for a generation or two without any automatic power of self-adaptation, it becomes a caricature of justice and wisdom through the growth of the commonweal to which it is intended to apply. The Wotnekstians suddenly awoke to find the electorate, consecrated by long tradition, a nest of absurdities and wrongs; but it took the eloquence and ridicule of two generations of reformers to put it right and to get the franchise extended to all holders of a certain amount of property. The abolition of the property qualification was a struggle only second to this in its violence. Then the flood came. Every new statesman had to rise to power on some new suffrage scheme. From residence for a year it was brought down to residence for a month in the community. How irrational it seemed to place any time limit to the acquisition of political interest and insight and wisdom! Every limit, indeed, could be proved to be arbitrary and illogical; and the final step was easily taken to manhood suffrage.

Then they waited to see the effect; and there grew upon the people, first surprise, and then indignation that all human ills had not vanished from the island. There were poverty and crime and disease with them still in all their virulence. Who could be at the bottom of this failure? It could not be the patriots at home. It must be the foreigner who frequented their shores and marts. Then the second stage of panacea legislation began. This was occupied with taxing the foreign commerce of the island. Tariff after tariff was passed for the purpose of drawing as much blood as possible from the alien who came to their harbours, without actually killing him. He was getting fat on the trade with their island. Increase the revenues out of him, was ever the cry. For more and more was needed for the army of guardians and inspectors of the trade and for the statesmen who passed the tariffs and their followers; all the needy and the indolent amongst the middle classes looked to the new services for their sustenance. As commerce dwindled under the burden of inspectors and tariffs and regulations, the demand for revenue increased; till at last the harbours were empty, and the marts inhabited only by the government officers. No politician, however, dared to propose the reduction of this army of idle inspectors.