His every
movement is jealously watched by the police till he comes
of age and presents himself for inspection; then he is either destroyed,
if he is found to exceed the fixed margin of deviation, at an uninteresting
occupation for a miserable stipend; obliged to live and board at the office,
and to take even his vacation under close supervision; what wonder that
human nature, even in the best and purest, is embittered and perverted
by such surroundings!"
All this very plausible reasoning does not convince me, as it has not
convinced the wisest of our Statesmen, that our ancestors erred in laying
it down as an axiom of policy that the toleration of Irregularity
is incompatible with the safety of the State. Doubtless, the life
of an Irregular is hard; but the interests of the Greater Number
require that it shall be hard. If a man with a triangular front
and a polygonal back were allowed to exist and to propagate a still
more Irregular posterity, what would become of the arts of life?
Are the houses and doors and churches in Flatland to be altered
in order to accommodate such monsters? Are our ticket-collectors
to be required to measure every man's perimeter before they allow
him to enter a theatre, or to take his place in a lecture room?
Is an Irregular to be exempted from the militia? And if not,
how is he to be prevented from carrying desolation into the ranks
of his comrades? Again, what irresistible temptations to fraudulent
impostures must needs beset such a creature! How easy for him to enter
a shop with his polygonal front foremost, and to order goods to any extent
from a confiding tradesman! Let the advocates of a falsely called
Philanthropy plead as they may for the abrogation of the Irregular Penal Laws,
I for my part have never known an Irregular who was not also what Nature
evidently intended him to be--a hypocrite, a misanthropist, and,
up to the limits of his power, a perpetrator of all manner of mischief.
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