New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future

by Mrs. George Corbett

As the trade of the country, stimulated by the energy and determination of its new inhabitants, steadily increased, the revenues derived by the State were enormous, and no other method of taxation was deemed necessary. We thus have, for the first time, the spectacle of a highly civilised country in which the tax-collector is non-existent.

As every sort of employment which presented itself had to be done by women, the question of a convenient working attire, which should at the same time be suitable, healthy, warm, and becoming, was soon brought up for discussion.

After much debate and strenuous opposition on the part of some advocates of changeable fashions, it was decided to adopt a national distinctive dress, the wearing of which should be compulsory. Latter day New Amazonians find it difficult to believe that the barbarous mode of dressing which had prevailed among the English, and later among the Teuto-Scots, was reluctantly abandoned by thousands of women, and that the New Amazonian National dress should have been strenuously objected to at first.

There is in the museum, at Garrettville, an instrument of torture on exhibition called a corset. Its extreme width is eighteen inches, and it is an almost incredible fact that this instrument once spanned the waist of a woman, who was only following one of the maddest and silliest fashions ever instituted, when she deliberately forced her ribs out of their proper places, and prepared an early grave for herself, in order that she might meet with the favour of some idiot of the other sex, who preferred fashion and doctor’s bills to health and happiness.

The children who came with their mothers to New Amazonia were housed in existing large buildings, until suitable erections for their reception could be designed and built. Their supervision and education was for a time entrusted to the mothers, subject to the directions of a trained staff of teachers.

Physical education was all that was aimed at until the child’s tenth birthday had been passed. The most careful attention was paid to diet, the necessary proportions of heat, flesh, and starch-formers being supplied to them, all cooked in such palatably scientific methods as conduced to build up a perfect system.

Swimming, running, dancing, drill, gymnastics, and every physical health-giving game in vogue constituted the curriculum of youngsters under ten. In the old country, thousands of little ones were pining from bodily lassitude and decay engendered by the brain work necessitated by a senseless system of cramming and examining. In New Amazonia the children entering school at the age of ten were splendidly robust; had a healthy, strong mind in a healthy, strong body, and were capable, without fatigue, of learning more in two years than their Teuto-Scottish contemporaries learned in all the seven years they had been compelled to attend school.

For six years the school course had to be pursued, then a choice of trade or profession adapted to the abilities of the student was made. The next four years were devoted to the learning of this trade, and the earnings of the next five years were appropriated by the State, which thus remunerated itself for the heavy expense of maintaining and educating each of its subjects under twenty years of age.

At the age of twenty-five each subject was at liberty to appropriate her earnings as she liked, but was also expected to provide her own board and residence henceforth.

As no men were admitted to any of the chief offices, some of them emigrated, but others were glad to remain, and adopted various trades which rendered them acceptable and useful members of the community. In course of time, a desire was manifested on the part of several couples to cast in their lot together, and it became necessary to pay some attention to the marriage laws, which, as they had existed in Teuto-Scotland, were totally rejected by New Amazonians as altogether obsolete, and stupidly conducive to crime and immorality. The marriage contract, under the new code of laws, became a purely civil one, dissolvable almost without cost, upon one or other of the parties to it proving incompatibility or unfaithfulness on the part of the other.