"Then," said Zimmern, "you should spend more time in pleasure on the Free Level. Two days ago I conferred with the Emperor's Advisory Staff, and I learned that grave changes are threatened. That is one reason I am so interested in this protium on which you chemists are working. If you do not solve this problem and replenish the food supply, the Emperor has decided that the whole Free Level with its five million women must be abolished. His Majesty will have no half-way measures. He is afraid to take part of these women away, lest the intellectual workers rebel like the labourers did in the last century when their women were taken away piecemeal."
"But what will His Majesty do with these five million women?" I inquired, eagerly desirous to learn more.
"Do? What can he do with the women?" exclaimed Dr. Zimmern in a low pitched but vibrant voice. "He thinks he will make workers of them. He does not seem to appreciate how specialized they are for pleasure. He will make machine tenders of them to relieve the workmen, who are to be made soldiers. He would make surface soldiers out of these blind moles of the earth, put amber glasses on them and train them to run on the open ground and carry the war again into the sunlight. It is folly, sheer folly, and madness. His Majesty, I fear, reads too much of old books. He always was historically inclined."
On a later occasion Zimmern gave me the broad outlines of the history of German Eugenics.
"Our science of applied Eugenics," he said, "began during the Second World War. Our scientists had long known that the same laws of heredity by which plants and animals had been bred held true with man, but they had been afraid to apply those laws to man because the religion of that day taught that men had souls and that human life was something too sacred to be supervised by science. But William III was a very fearless man, and he called the scientists together and asked them to outline a plan for the perfection of the German race.
"At first all they advocated was that paternity be restricted to the superior men. This broke up the old-fashioned family where every man chose his own wife and sired as many children as he liked. There were great mutterings about that, and if we had not been at war, there would have been rebellion. The Emperor told the people it was a military necessity. The death toll of war then was great and there was urgent need to increase the birth rate, so the people submitted and women soon ceased to complain because they could no longer have individual husbands. The children were supported by the state, and if they had legitimate fathers of the approved class they were left in the mothers' care. As all women who were normal and healthy were encouraged to bear children, there was a great increase in the birth rate, which came near resulting in the destruction of the race by starvation.
"As soon as a sufficient number of the older generation that had believed in the religious significance of the family and marriage system had died out, the ambitious eugenists set about to make other reforms. The birth rate was cut down by restricting the privilege of motherhood to a selected class of women. The other women were instructed in the arts of pleasing man and avoiding maternity, and that is where we have the origin of our free women. In those days they were free to associate with men of all classes. Indeed any other plan would at first have been impossible.
"A second fault was that the superior men for whom paternity was permitted were selected from the official and intellectual classes. The result was that the quality of the labourers deteriorated. So two strains were established, the one for the production of the intellectual workers, and the other for producing manual workers. From time to time this specialization has increased until now we have as many strains of inheritance as there are groups of useful characteristics known to be hereditary.
"We have produced some effects," mused Zimmern, "which were not anticipated, and which have been calling forth considerable criticism. His Majesty sends me memorandums nearly every year, after he reviews the maternity levels, insisting that the feminine beauty of the race is, as a whole, deteriorating. And yet this is logical enough. With the exception of our small actor-model strain, the characteristics for which we breed have only the most incidental relation to feminine beauty. The type of the labour female is, as you have seen, a buxom, fleshly beauty; youth and full nutrition are essential to its display, and it soon fades. In the scientific strains it seems that the power of original thought correlates with a feminine type that is certainly not beautiful. Doubtless not understanding this you may have felt that you were discriminated against in your assignment. But the clerical mind with its passion for monotonous repetition of petty mental processes seems to correlate with the most exquisite and refined feminine features. Those scintillating beauties on the Free Level who have ever at their beck our wisest men are from our clerical strain,--but of course they are only the rejects. It is unfortunate that you cannot see the more privileged specimens in the clerical maternity level.
"But I digress to that which is of no consequence. The beauty of women is unimportant but the number of women is very important. When some women were specialized for motherhood then there were surplus women. At first they made workers of them. The war was then conducted on a larger scale than now. We had not yet fully specialized the soldier class. All the young men went to war; and, when they came back and went to work, they became bitterly jealous of the women workers and made an outcry that those who could not fight should not work. The men workers drove the women from industry, hoping thereby each to possess a mistress. As a result the great number of unproductive women was a drain upon the state. All sorts of schemes were proposed to reduce the number of female births but most of these were unscientific. In studying the records it was found that the offspring of certain men were predominantly males. By applying this principle of selection we have, with successive generations, been able to reduce the proportion of female births to less than half the old rate.