New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future

by Mrs. George Corbett

If found to be innocent of offences against morality, the book was taken in hand, and published under State authority, the author paying the whole of the cost, and receiving the whole of the future emoluments, subject to the five per cent. tax accruing to the State. There was no arbitrary range of charges, but a scale of payment for work done which was sufficient to repay the State outlay, plus a slight percentage of profit. Writers could, by studying the printed tariff, know exactly what style and quality of material and workmanship to choose, and would also know to a fraction what their expenses would be. Nor did present lack of funds stand in the way of success, for the State helped capable, industrious authors by a judicious system of credit, just as it helped any other of its people who had done nothing to forfeit the supposition that they were deserving of such assistance. As already pointed out, State aid within certain limits was unattended with any risk to the Government, as it had means of repaying itself.

The law of copyright was simplicity itself. For one hundred years the copyright was the inalienable property of the author, or the author’s nominees. At the end of that time the State succeeded to all copyrights as were still of value. No grasping publisher was allowed to step in and reap the profits of an author’s brain toil, and there was no gall mixed with the thought that a work was being written which might possibly survive to become a valuable property of the nation, even as Gibbons’ “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” is still a gold mine to enterprising and speculative publishers in England.

There was no sort of hesitation on the part of anyone to claim of the “Mother” the help and protection to which, as her veritable children, they were justly entitled. Pauperism and workhouses did not exist, simply because the State saw the wisdom of preventing squalor and destitution by its system of claiming the care of its people from their infancy, and being generous in its mode of launching them in life.

When we reflect upon the enormous sums which are collected for poor rates in England, it is easy to conceive the vast social improvement the same amount of money and labour could produce, if spent in the education and fair start in life of our thousands of miserable and squalid gutter-birds, who, instead of being all their life-long a continual source of expense to the nation, would grow up respectable and respected units of society, abhorring the life of shame and degradation which they and only too many others look upon at present as their natural birthright.

“Prevention is better than cure,” is just as trite and useful a maxim for the State as it is for the subject, as is also the warning against being “penny-wise and pound-foolish.” It would cost much less for our country to feed, clothe, educate, and train to useful avocations half-a-million youngsters taken from the slums, than it would cost to meet one-half of the expenses that same half-million of juveniles will provide for their compatriots before they have run the course of drunkenness, pauperism, misery, and crime which the laws of cause and effect have only too surely marked out for them in the unhappy future.

When comparing New Amazonia with England, another idea suggests itself. How much of the national prosperity I saw around me was owing to the fact that New Amazonia was free from the incubus of having to provide vast sums for the support of a monarchy which with us is exceedingly limited in its beneficent effects, but which possesses an unlimited capacity for appropriating huge emoluments which would be more sensibly spent in liquidating the National Debt, or in alleviating some of the national misery! If saddled with the incalculable burdens which England has to bear, even New Amazonian rulers would find it a difficult task to present a satisfactory budget at the end of their term of office.

There is also another way in which our poor are deprived of a great deal of help they would otherwise receive. Many of our churches and chapels are simply begging houses, in which their frequenters are persuaded to part with every penny they can be induced to spare. And this, if the donors are satisfied, is perfectly right in its way. But is it right that while countless poor souls, old and young, are rotting, body and soul, in our own land, it should be the boast of our Missionary Societies that they give hundreds of thousands of pounds every year to strangers who do not need the gospel preached practically to them half so much as the miserable denizens of the back slums of our own parishes?

The zeal of the advocates of Foreign missions is commendable, but I respectfully submit that it is misdirected, and if some of them had half an idea of what only too often ultimately becomes of their money, they would be very chary about subscribing in future.

But when even those whose office and mission it is to seek and succour their poor and needy neighbours, find their time and attention taken up with more distant and less pressing duties, how is it likely that our legislators, occupied so intensely as they are in trying to prove each other unfit for office, will ever find time to take the cause of the social improvement of the people into consideration? It is hopeless to think of it at present, for a true and tender interest will never be felt in the units of the nation until our Constitution becomes less that of rulers and ruled, and more like that of mother and children.

To this devoutly-to-be-hoped-for consummation there is another obstacle. The truly maternal instinct has no equivalent in the breast of man, and so long as none but men are the people’s representatives, even so long will that people be deprived of a thousand rights which a just, earnest, womanly co-government would give them. It is monstrous to speak of women as being even incapable of voting wisely, when they have already proved themselves capable of governing much more judiciously than men, many of whom seem to recognise no other legitimate result of taking office than squabbling and banqueting.