Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles

by Godfrey Sweven

They had the greatest contempt for the inhabitants of Simiola, and hated them even more heartily than they hated each other. The very sight of them on their distant shore drove them into a violent passion. Yet a Simiolan would as naturally contradict a Polarian as if he had been a Polarian himself. The two were too much alike in their principles of action to have any chance of common sympathy.

Farther away in the direction of Tirralaria, but nearer Wotnekst on the side of Feneralia, lay another group of islets inhabited by those who were crazy on the subject of thrift. The Grabawlians were the misers of the archipelago; they had developed such a faculty for the concealment of money and possessions that you would have thought them as stricken with poverty as their greatest enemies and nearest neighbours, the Iconoclasts. These last counted capital the unpardonable sin. They refused to cultivate the soil lest they should have to harvest its fruits and store them up. Thrift they considered the greatest of vices. Trade and commerce they abhorred, and money, wherever they found it, they threw into the sea; it was their devil. Tools and houses they eschewed as the outcome of providence, and a form of capital. The only accumulation that they looked on with tolerance was that of filth and the refuse of Nature and man. Clothing they would have none of; it was the result of industry and the sign and symbol of hated forethought; they ignored and tolerated the kindly services of Nature in trying by means of her winds and dust and various forms of decay to mould them a substitute; for they refused to assist her in her ablutional attempts to undo her work.

No one ever saw them eat; but this was no proof that they never ate. The fruits disappeared off the trees; and there were many holes in the earth to show where roots had been dug. If ever they felt the pangs of hunger or thirst they vanished from the neighbourhood of their fellow-men; they would rather die than acknowledge to either; for to satisfy it meant the indulgence in industry; and industry was the sure sign of a nature degenerating into thrift and capital. Their meals were, everybody knew, nocturnal; they kept up the farce to each other of professing to be above both meat and drink.

If they were ever seen to bustle about, you might be sure that they were exterminating a nest of ants or chasing a bee off the island; these were in their view the criminals of the animal kingdom, the economisers and capitalists. One of their favourite maxims was this: “Go to the ant, thou thriftling and idiot; consider her ways and be wise; see how she toils and stores unceasingly from birth to death, enslaved to a despotic instinct, brutally fettered to the future.”

The wonder was that they did not follow out the logic of their creed and crusade against thrift in Nature’s own camp. There was she treasuring up the carbon of the falling leaves to make the fruits of the coming summer. There was she storing up sap during her idle months that she might make her trees and plants blossom in spring. Nay, in their own systems was she at work from infancy onwards carefully providing for later periods of life. They did their best, it is true, to defeat her in her providence and thrift; for they were walking skeletons and hospitals. But after all their efforts they failed to eradicate her thrift from their own systems. It was their unhappiness that every new turn in their lives revealed to them some form of it in themselves, that they had either to attempt to get rid of or pretend to each other that they had not got. They refused to see that the only avoidance of thrift was suicide, and that even that was a form of thrift. Nature, their foe, had perhaps generously blinded them.

A singular group of islets was situated beyond these and collectively called Paranomia. Their inhabitants had all been exiled for some craze they had developed on the subject of law. They respected it either too much or too little. Some were so devoted to it that they spent their time in litigation and missed approach to the spirit of equity; others reached the same goal by snapping their fingers at all law.

One of the group, called Palindicia, was colonised by justitiomaniacs, who were not happy unless engaged in dealing out justice. They did not object to acting the part of prosecutor or counsel; but their especial passion was judicial; they would have risen in rebellion, had not their administrators given them daily employment on the bench or in the jury-box.

How to supply the people with cases and criminals was the difficulty that beset the government, and drove them to their wits’ ends. Once they had proposed to put in the dock a dummy or automatic criminal; but they nearly lost their lives in the brawl that resulted. It was an unpardonable insult to the humanity of the Palindicians to make them play at toy trials. They would not suffer such an outrage and caricature on the justice they so adored. They must have real flesh-and-blood criminals to try, cases with a vein of tragedy running through them, to whet their judicial skill upon. They would soon produce a good supply, if the government did not look out; the administrators would last a good while, if placed one after another in the dock.

In fact, they rather preferred an innocent man for their experiments in justice; for, they often said, where lay the talent or ability in sheeting a crime home to one who was guilty? There was something of true genius in convicting an innocent man, and in making his friends feel that there was something wrong about him. His defence was so earnest that his prosecution and trial had to be exhibitions of the greatest judicial talent in order to secure his condemnation. A real criminal was clogged and handicapped by the consciousness of his crime, and after a little struggle succumbed. The guiltless or his friends kept up the judicial battle for years, and the whole nation was drawn into the case, so that every citizen revelled in the exercise of his sense of justice.

One of the most successful methods for employing all the people in a trial for a long period was, when a crime actually occurred, to get the wronged in the dock and make the guilty try him. It relieved the government for years and years of anxiety about the supply of subjects for the judicial scalpel. The bench of criminals so enmeshed their victim in the toils that there was no escape for him, and yet there was the most exquisite exercise for the national passion. The labyrinth became almost too intricate for their sense of justice. Yet they were thankful for it; it was exactly what they wanted; for it meant appeal from court to court, and trial after trial with all the evidence and the details over again. In fact, they had manufactured so many tribunals, one above another in even gradation, that the simplest case might last them years, and every member of the community have his judicial skill whetted every day. The result was that, however guiltless the accused might seem when he first entered the dock, he was driven into false witness, or perjury, or treason before he had gone far, and by the close every Palindician was convinced that he only got his deserts, when condemned; their sense of justice was fully satisfied, as well as their passion for judgment; and those who had brought him into the meshes were panegyrised as true patriots. They were always deeply grieved at the condemnation of an accused by the last court of appeal; for the case was then finally disposed of, and ceased to afford an arena for their judicial talents. The only consolation in the misfortune was that the defence and its failure might possibly supply a new crop of traitors, whose cases might last for years.