A document, received by each of the divorcees, legally entitled them to marry again, provided they fulfilled every other necessary condition. A medical certificate of soundness had to be procured before anyone was allowed to marry, as, above all, the State was determined to secure none but healthy subjects.
Sometimes very painful scenes were witnessed, for each new-born child was subjected to examination, and no crippled or malformed infants were permitted to live.
As all children were considered the property of the State, neither wife nor husband was responsible for their maintenance and education, and when a divorce was in prospect it was not necessary to take the offspring of the temporary union into consideration at all, though no divorces were permitted until after the birth of any expected result of such union. Nursing mothers were always welcomed with their children, and were maintained by the State, so long as the latter required their attendance.
There was, however, a determination on the part of the Government to guard against the evils of over-population in the future, and Malthusian doctrines were stringently enforced. Any woman or man becoming the parent of more than four children was punished for such recklessness by being treated as a criminal, and deprived of many very valuable civil rights.
It had often been the objection of legislators in the old country that Woman’s Suffrage would, in some never satisfactorily explained manner, cause an access of immorality in the land, seeing that immoral women would have as much right to vote as their more virtuous sisters. The stupidity and selfishness of such an argument is easily deducible from the fact that a large number of the male members themselves were men who led anything but moral lives.
Health of body, the highest technical and intellectual knowledge, and purity of morals has ever been the goal aimed at in New Amazonia, and it can to-day boast of being the most perfect, the most prosperous, and the most moral community in existence.
CHAPTER VII.
There existed many places of worship in the country, which were at first used indiscriminately by Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Wesleyans, Presbyterians, Quakers, and a host of other sects whose varied religious beliefs were so perplexing and confusing, and provocative of so many quarrels and discussions, that sectarianism was soon recognized as the rock upon which the nation was likely to founder, unless prompt legislation was brought to bear upon the situation.
Some believed in a Trinity of Gods, some in a Unity. Others looked forward to the coming of a Redeemer, others worshipped Jesus Christ, as the Redeemer of souls. Some denied a God altogether, and asserted that all the higher forms of life were the outcome of evolution. Others, again, worshipped a goddess called Humanity, and all were more or less in fear of a mythical Being to whom all the untold millions born into the world were supposed to be turned over for everlasting punishment in the event of their not having been fortunate enough to meet with all the requirements of creeds formulated by men.
Thus, one portion of the community had been taught that tiny babes, dying before they had been sprinkled with water by a priest, and had a certain formula of words uttered over them, would be consigned to everlasting perdition, and debarred from all the joys of a future life. Others would have been brought up to believe that all the untold millions of people who had, by force of circumstances, over which they had not the slightest control, never had Christianity preached to them, would also be delivered into the hands of Satan!