New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future

by Mrs. George Corbett

All railways, water companies, and similar great undertakings are in the hands of the State, which receives all surplus profits, and pays its employés more liberally than private companies ever did in former days. A fixed percentage is always taken by the State. Should the proceeds be more than the State percentage, the surplus becomes the perquisite of the working staff, who thus receive a graduated addition to their income. Should bad work or bad management reduce the profits, the State still takes its fixed percentage, and it is thus made the individual interest of all persons employed by the State to do their best to promote the success of whatever department of State labour is entrusted to them.

The Teuto-Scots were guilty of many practices which are rigorously prohibited in New Amazonia. One of these was the use of the dried leaves of a plant called tobacco; by some it was put in the mouth, and the juice masticated out of it. By the majority of users it was slowly burnt, and the resulting smoke allowed to pass into the mouth, to be emitted immediately after in clouds of an unpleasant, choking nature. The practice is in many old works described as dirty and offensive; yet it is an undoubted fact that the discontinuance of the use of tobacco was so rebelled against, and so distasteful to many New Amazonian women, that frequent expulsions from the country took place before the custom was stamped out.

In all times there have been many vices attributed to the habit of imbibing fluids, which were so remarkable in their effects, that the users of them were deprived of both sense and motion, besides suffering bodily illness. It is the boast of New Amazonia that an intoxicant cannot be procured in the island, and that all existing establishments for the manufacture of these dangerous compounds were devoted to more noble uses.

The majority of Teuto-Scots were carnivorous, like dogs, cats, and birds of prey. Flesh eating is a habit which induces coarseness of mind and body, and robs both of the true beauty, and vigour furnished by a vegetable diet. That Life-Giver never intended the human animal to be carnivorous is proved by the anatomy of the human frame.

It is, however, probable that New Amazonia became a vegetarian nation in consequence of the repugnance or inability of the first women who came over from Teuto-Scotland to kill the animals from whose carcases the beef, pork, and mutton they had hitherto consumed was obtained. They probably found it a great deprivation to subsist without a large proportion of animal food at first, and it was for a time extensively imported. Vegetarian and Humanitarian doctrines were extensively preached, and in course of time, as the art of cookery was more carefully cultivated, the trade in meat carcases ceased entirely, to the ultimate permanent advantage of the nation, than which no finer race exists in the world at this moment.

It is on record that the ancients paid great attention to the diet and housing of the animals intended either for slaughter, for beasts of burden, or for the chase, and that they knew exactly what food would produce the most coveted results. Thus they would subject their animals to one kind of treatment calculated to produce fat, while a change of diet would be productive of lean flesh. Any other results aimed at would be treated with corresponding acumen.

They even were able to produce a cruel disease in geese, whereby their livers were inordinately enlarged. These diseased livers were used in the construction of certain pies called pâtés-de-fois-gras, which were consumed in large quantities by those who could afford the high prices charged for them.

And yet, incredible as it may seem, these people had scarcely the most elementary knowledge of the necessary means of preserving the lives of their children, and rearing them in a methodical or scientific manner. No restraints were placed upon the people relative to the number of their offspring, for thousands of children died daily through the ignorance and incapacity of those who were entrusted with the rearing of them, thus partially counteracting one evil by the infliction of another, incalculable suffering being the invariable accompaniment of such mal-administration of mundane affairs.

If the offspring of the Teuto-Scots attained maturity, they were the subjects of such miseries as make New Amazonians often wonder how they supported life’s burden. Their social pleasures were perpetually ruined by their inability to understand the signs of the weather until a tempest was upon them. Such a thing as altering the direction of a steady wind, and thereby producing either wet or fine weather, by means of a huge artificially created vacuum, had never been thought of. Neither had they attained the scientific knowledge which enables us to prevent disastrous thunderstorms by utilising all superfluous electricity, that would otherwise accumulate and work mischief.

So much was the life of the ancients dominated by the perpetual changes of weather in the British Islands, that it is said that no conversation ever took place in their day without some allusion to the weather being made in it.