“No, and yes. Such attempts used to be frequent in bygone days, but the punishment for smuggling is so severe, and immunity from detection so problematical, that the vice is almost stamped out.”
“And what is the punishment meted to offenders in this direction?”
“Foreigners are publicly whipped and expelled, minus their goods. New Amazonians are deprived of civil rights and relegated to inferior duties.”
“Bad enough,” I soliloquised. “And, now, there is another thing which puzzles me somewhat. What with war, seafaring, and a thousand accidents to which men are more exposed than women, so many male lives are lost in my country, that the feminine element predominates everywhere, just as it seems to have done in Teuto-Scotland, when the project of re-colonising Ireland was first mooted. Is there a tendency in this direction with you now? And, if so, do you take steps to counteract it?”
“We have devoted much thought to the subject; and have come to the conclusion that even where all the causes of masculine extinction which you have named are absent, then is still a tendency for women to outnumber men. This is easily accounted for. Very few children die with us in infancy, but it is a fact that boys succumb more easily to infantile disorders than girls. We desire to preserve an equality of the sexes, nevertheless, and perfect physiological knowledge enables us to solve this problem, as we have done many others which the Ancients deemed unsolvable.”
“I notice that all your people are magnificently formed, but you must be subject to certain ailments. Toothache, for instance, which is a perfect scourge with us.”
“That is a phenomenon to which we are here quite strange, I am glad to say. We would as soon expect our skulls to become diseased, as to see our teeth decay. We know the exact chemical constituents of bone, and are careful to supply the constitution with perfect bone-forming food. We also avoid everything that has been proved to be an injurious article of diet.”
“But individual temptation must sometimes break through this rule of abstinence?”
“It cannot. No sooner is anything condemned by the Mother, than its importation or manufacture is strictly forbidden, and that particular article is soon unobtainable in the country.”
“I suppose malformed or crippled children are occasionally brought into the world, even here. What becomes of them?”