Freeland: A Social Anticipation

by Theodor Hertzka

This did not please me. I assure you I had not formed the intention of becoming a Freelander for the sake of my beloved; but I could not think of her either in a ducal diadem or in the state rooms of our castles. Nevertheless, I was fain to submit for a while to the will of my father; and I did not really know whether Bertha and her relatives would show themselves so insensible to the attractions of a title and of princely wealth as would be necessary in order that I might have them as confederates against my father. In short, my father pleaded my case with Mr. Ney, and in the presence of Bertha and myself asked her parents for the hand of their daughter for his son, the Prince Carlo Falieri, adding that immediately after the wedding he would hand over to me his estates in the Romagna, Tuscany, and Venice, as well as the palaces at Rome, Florence, Milan, Verona, and Venice; and would retain for himself merely our Sicilian possessions--as a reserve property, he jestingly said. The elder Neys received these grandiose proposals with a chill reserve that gave me little hope. After a silence of some minutes, and after having thrown at me a searching and reproachful glance, Mr. Ney said, 'We Freelanders are not the despots, but simply the counsellors, of our daughters; but in this case our child does not need counsel: if Bertha is willing to go with you to Italy as the Princess Falieri, we will not prevent her.'

With a proud and indignant mien Bertha turned--not to me, but--to my father: 'Never, never!' she cried with quivering lips. 'I love your son more than my life; I should die if your son discarded me in obedience to you; but leave Freeland--leave it as princess!--never, never! Better die a thousand times!'

'But, unhappy child,' replied my father, quite horrified at the unexpected effect of his proposal, 'you utter the word "princess" as if it were to you the quintessence of all that is dreadful. Yes, you should be princess, one of the richest, proudest of the princesses of Europe--that is, you should have no wish which thousands should not vie with each other in fulfilling; you should have opportunities of making thousands happy; you should be envied by millions--' 'And cursed and hated,' interposed Bertha with quivering lips. 'What! You have lived among us six weeks, and you have not learned what a free daughter of Freeland must feel at the mere suggestion of leaving these happy fields, this home of justice and human affection, in order, afar off in your miserable country, not to wipe away, but to extort the tears of the downtrodden--not to alleviate the horrors of your slavery, but to become one of the slave-holders! I love Carlo so much above all measure that I should be ready by his side to exchange the land of happiness for that of misery if any imperative duty called him thither; but only on condition that his hands and mine remained free from foreign property, that we ourselves earned by honest labour what we needed for our daily life. But to become princess; to have thousands of serfs using up their flesh and blood in order that I might revel in superfluity; to have thousands of curses of men tortured to death clinging to the food I eat and the raiment I wear!' As she uttered these words she shuddered and hid her face in her hands; then, mastering herself with an effort, she continued: 'But reflect--if you had a daughter, and some one asked you to let her go to be queen among the cannibal Njam-Njam, and the father of her bridegroom promised that a great number of fat slaves should be slaughtered for her--what would she say, the poor child who had drunk in with her mother's milk an invincible disgust at the eating of human flesh? Now, see: we in Freeland feel disgust at human flesh, even though the sacrifice be slowly slaughtered inch by inch, limb by limb, without the shedding of blood; to us the gradual destruction of a fellow-man is not less abhorrent than the literal devouring of a man is to you; and it is as impossible for us to exist upon the exploitation of our enslaved fellows as it is for you to share in the feasts of cannibals. I cannot become a princess--I cannot! Do not separate me from Carlo--if you do we shall both die, and--I have not learnt it to-day for the first time--you love not only him, but me also.'

This appeal, enforced by the most touching glances and a tender grasping of his hands, was more than my father could resist. 'You have verily made me disgusted with myself. So you think we are cannibals, and the only difference between us and your amiable Njam-Njam is that we do not slay our sacrifices with one vigorous blow and then devour them forthwith, but we delight in doing it bit by bit, inch by inch? You are not far wrong; at any rate, I will not force upon you the privileges of a position as to which you entertain such views. And my son appears in this point to share your tastes rather than those which have hitherto been mine. Take each other, and be happy in your own fashion. For myself, I will consider how I may to some extent free myself from the odour of cannibalism in my new daughter's eyes.'

Bertha flew first to me, then to my father, then in succession to her parents and brothers and sisters, and then again fell upon my father's neck. Her embrace of her father-in law was so affectionate that I was almost inclined to be jealous. My father became at once so eager for our wedding that he asked the Neys forthwith to make all the necessary arrangements for this event. He expected to be obliged to return to Europe, provisionally, in about a month, and he should be pleased if we could be married before he went. Mrs. Ney, however, asked what further preliminaries were necessary? We had mutually confessed our love, the blessing of the parents on both sides was not lacking; we might, if agreeable to ourselves, start off somewhere that very day, by one of the evening trains, on our wedding-tour--perhaps to the Victoria Nyanza, on whose shores she knew of a small delightfully situated country house.

I myself was somewhat surprised at these words, though they were evidently anticipated by my bride. But my father was utterly at a loss to know what to make of them. Of course his delicacy of feeling would not have allowed him to declare plainly that he thought it scandalous in the highest degree for a couple of lovers to start off on a journey together only a few hours after their betrothal, and that he could not conceive how a respectable lady could suggest what would bring such disgrace upon her house. There was a painful pause, until Mr. Ney explained to us that in Freeland the reciprocal declaration by two lovers that they wished to become husband and wife was all that was required to the conclusion of a marriage-contract. The young people had nothing further to do than to make such an express declaration, and they would be married.

'That is, indeed, extremely simple and charming,' said my father, shaking his head. 'But if the State or the commonwealth here has nothing to do with the marriage-contract, how does it know that such a contract has been entered into, and how can it give its protection to it?'

'Of course the marriage-contract is communicated to the Statistical Department as quickly as possible, but this enrolment has nothing to do with the validity of the contract; and as to the protection of the marriage-bond, we know of no other here than that which is to be found in the reciprocal affection of the married pair,' said Mrs. Ney.

My father thereupon began to ventilate the question whether it was not advisable on many grounds to attach to the marriage-contract some more permanent guarantee; but this suggestion was met, particularly on the part of Bertha, with such an evident and--to him--quite inexplicable resentment that he dropped the subject. Later, when we men were by ourselves, he inquired what the ladies found so offensive in the idea of giving to marriage some kind of protection against the changing fancies of the wedded pair? It was easy to see that the conversation had left upon him the impression that the women of Freeland held views upon this subject which were altogether too 'free.' But Mr. Ney gradually succeeded in convincing him--I had understood the matter from the beginning--that the reverse was the case; that the horror at the thought of being compelled to belong to a man who was not loved was not merely quite compatible with inviolable conjugal fidelity, but was a logical outcome of the highest and purest conception of marriage. At first he held out. He would not deny the ethical justness of the Freeland principle that marriage without love was objectionable; only he questioned whether this principle could be strictly applied to practical life without opening the door to licentiousness. The fact that in Freeland divorces were quite unknown did not at once suffice to convince him. Mrs. Ney, who surprised us in the midst of this discussion, gave the finishing touch.

'If you take a comprehensive view of the whole complex of our economic and social institutions,' said she to my father, 'you will see why in Freeland man and wife must regard each other with different eyes than is the case in Europe or America. All your scruples will vanish, for the logical connection of economic justice with conjugal fidelity and honour lies as plain and open as does its connection with honour in questions of meum and tuum. That well-to-do intelligent men do not steal and rob, that in a highly cultivated society which guarantees to everyone the undiminished product of his own labour no one touches the fruits of another man's industry--this is not more self-evident than it is that the same principle of economic justice must smother in the germ all longing for the wife or the husband of another. For man is by nature a monogamous and monandrous being; polygamy and polyandry are inconsistent with the fundamental characteristics of his nature; they are diseases of civilisation which would vanish spontaneously with a return to the healthy conditions of existence. Sexual honour and fidelity, like honesty in matters of property, are rare "virtues" only where they impose upon the individual the exercise of a self-denial which is not reconcilable with the instinct of self-preservation; where, as among us, a harmony of interests is established even in this domain, where everyone gets the whole of what is his own, and no one is expected to forego in the common interest of the community what belongs to himself--here even this virtue is transformed into a rational self-interest which every accountable person exhibits spontaneously and without any compulsion from without, as something that he owes to himself. We are all faithful because faithfulness does not impose upon any one of us the renunciation of his individuality.'