Of Our Methods of Recognizing One Another

You, who are blessed with shade as well as light, you, who are gifted
with two eyes, endowed with a knowledge of perspective, and charmed with
the enjoyment of various colours, you, who can actually see an angle,
and contemplate the complete circumference of a circle in the happy
region of the Three Dimensions⁠---how shall I make clear to you the
extreme difficulty which we in Flatland experience in recognizing one
another's configuration?

Recall what I told you above. All beings in Flatland, animate or
inanimate, no matter what their form, present to our view the same, or
nearly the same, appearance, viz. that of
a straight Line. How then can one be distinguished from another, where
all appear the same?

The answer is threefold. The first means of recognition is the sense of
hearing; which with us is far more highly developed than with you, and
which enables us not only to distinguish by the voice our personal
friends, but even to discriminate between different classes, at least so
far as concerns the three lowest orders, the Equilateral, the Square,
and the Pentagon⁠---for of the Isosceles I take no account. But as we
ascend in the social scale, the process of discriminating and being
discriminated by hearing increases in difficulty, partly because voices
are assimilated, partly because the faculty of voice-discrimination is a
plebeian virtue not much developed among the aristocracy. And wherever
there is any danger of imposture we cannot trust to this method. Amongst
our lowest orders, the vocal organs are developed to a degree more than
correspondent with those of hearing, so that an Isosceles can easily
feign the voice of a Polygon, and, with some training, that of a Circle
himself. A second method is therefore more commonly resorted to.

Feeling is, among our women and lower classes⁠---about our upper
classes I shall speak presently⁠---the principal test of recognition, at
all events between strangers, and when the question is, not as to the
individual, but as to the class. What therefore "introduction" is among
the higher classes in Spaceland, that the process of "feeling" is with
us. "Permit me to ask you to feel and be felt by my friend
Mr. So-and-so"⁠---is
still, among the more old-fashioned of our country gentlemen in
districts remote from towns, the customary formula for a Flatland
introduction. But in the towns, and among men of business, the words "be
felt by" are omitted and the sentence is abbreviated to, "Let me ask you
to feel
Mr. So-and-so";
although it is assumed, of course, that the "feeling" is to be
reciprocal. Among our still more modern and dashing young
gentlemen⁠---who are extremely averse to superfluous effort and supremely
indifferent to the purity of their native language⁠---the formula is
still further curtailed by the use of "to feel" in a technical sense,
meaning, "to recommend-for-the-purposes-of-feeling-and-being-felt"; and
at this moment the "slang" of polite or fast society in the upper
classes sanctions such a barbarism as
"Mr. Smith,
permit me to feel
Mr. Jones."

Let not my reader however suppose that "feeling" is with us the tedious
process that it would be with you, or that we find it necessary to feel
right round all the sides of every individual before we determine the
class to which he belongs. Long practice and training, begun in the
schools and continued in the experience of daily life, enable us to
discriminate at once by the sense of touch, between the angles of an
equal-sided Triangle, Square, and Pentagon; and I need not say that the
brainless vertex of an acute-angled Isosceles is obvious to the dullest
touch. It is therefore not necessary, as a rule, to do more than feel a
single angle of an individual; and this, once ascertained, tells us the
class of the person whom we are addressing, unless indeed he belongs to
the higher sections of the nobility. There the difficulty is much
greater. Even a Master of Arts in our University of Wentbridge has been
known to confuse a ten-sided with a twelve-sided Polygon; and there is
hardly a Doctor of Science in or out of that famous University who could
pretend to decide promptly and unhesitatingly between a twenty-sided and
a twenty-four sided member of the aristocracy.

Those of my readers who recall the extracts I gave above from the
legislative code concerning women, will readily perceive that the
process of introduction by contact requires some care and discretion.
Otherwise the angles might inflict on the unwary Feeler irreparable
injury. It is essential for the safety of the Feeler that the Felt
should stand perfectly still. A start, a fidgety shifting of the
position, yes, even a violent sneeze, has been known before now to prove
fatal to the incautious, and to nip in the bud many a promising
friendship. Especially is this true among the lower classes of the
Triangles. With them, the eye is situated so far from their vertex that
they can scarcely take cognizance of what goes on at that extremity of
their frame. They are, moreover, of a rough coarse nature, not sensitive
to the delicate touch of the highly organized Polygon. What wonder then
if an involuntary toss of the head has ere now deprived the State of a
valuable life!

I have heard that my excellent grandfather⁠---one of the least irregular
of his unhappy Isosceles class, who indeed obtained, shortly before his
decease, four out of seven votes from the Sanitary and Social Board for
passing him into the class of the Equal-sided⁠---often deplored, with a
tear in his venerable eye, a miscarriage of this kind, which had occured
to his great-great-great-grandfather, a respectable working man with an
angle or brain of 59° 30′. According to his account, my unfortunate
ancestor, being afflicted with rheumatism, and in the act of being felt
by a Polygon, by one sudden start accidentally transfixed the great man
through the diagonal; and thereby, partly in consequence of his long
imprisonment and degradation, and partly because of the moral shock
which pervaded the whole of my ancestor's relations, threw back our
family a degree and a half in their ascent towards better things. The
result was that in the next generation the family brain was registered
at only 58°, and not till the lapse of five generations was the lost
ground recovered, the full 60° attained, and the Ascent from the
Isosceles finally achieved. And all this series of calamities from one
little accident in the process of Feeling.

At this point I think I hear some of my better educated readers exclaim,
"How could you in Flatland know anything about angles and degrees, or
minutes? We can see an angle, because we, in the region of Space, can
see two straight lines inclined to one another; but you, who can see
nothing but one straight line at a time, or at all events only a number
of bits of straight lines all in one straight line⁠---how can you ever
discern any angle, and much less register angles of different sizes?"

I answer that though we cannot see angles, we can infer them, and
this with great precision. Our sense of touch, stimulated by necessity,
and developed by long training, enables us to distinguish angles far
more accurately than your sense of sight, when unaided by a rule or
measure of angles. Nor must I omit to explain that we have great natural
helps. It is with us a law of Nature that the brain of the Isosceles
class shall begin at half a degree, or thirty minutes, and shall
increase (if it increases at all) by half a degree in every generation;
until the goal of 60° is reached, when the condition of serfdom is
quitted, and the freeman enters the class of Regulars.

Consequently, Nature herself supplies us with an ascending scale or
alphabet of angles for half a degree up to 60°, specimens of which are
placed in every elementary school throughout the land. Owing to
occasional retrogressions, to still more frequent moral and intellectual
stagnation, and to the extraordinary fecundity of the criminal and
vagabond classes, there is always a vast superfluity of individuals of
the half degree and single degree class, and a fair abundance of
specimens up to 10°. These are absolutely destitute of civic rights; and
a great number of them, not having even intelligence enough for the
purposes of warfare, are devoted by the States to the service of
education. Fettered immovably so as to remove all possibility of danger,
they are placed in the class rooms of our infant schools, and there they
are utilized by the Board of Education for the purpose of imparting to
the offspring of the middle classes that tact and intelligence of which
these wretched creatures themselves are utterly devoid.

In some States the specimens are occasionally fed and suffered to exist
for several years; but in the more temperate and better regulated
regions, it is found in the long run more advantageous for the
educational interests of the young, to dispense with food, and to renew
the specimens every month⁠---which is about the average duration of the
foodless existence of the criminal class. In the cheaper schools, what
is gained by the longer existence of the specimen is lost, partly in the
expenditure for food, and partly in the diminished accuracy of the
angles, which are impaired after a few weeks of constant "feeling." Nor
must we forget to add, in enumerating the advantages of the more
expensive system, that it tends, though slightly yet perceptibly, to the
diminution of the redundant Isosceles population⁠---an object which every
statesman in Flatland constantly keeps in view. On the whole
therefore⁠---although I am not ignorant that, in many popularly elected
School Boards, there is a reaction in favour of "the cheap system" as it
is called⁠---I am myself disposed to think that this is one of the many
cases in which expense is the truest economy.

But I must not allow questions of School Board politics to divert me
from my subject. Enough has been said, I trust, to show that Recognition
by Feeling is not so tedious or indecisive a process as might have been
supposed; and it is obviously more trustworthy than Recognition by
hearing. Still there remains, as has been pointed out above, the
objection that this method is not without danger. For this reason many
in the middle and lower classes, and all without exception in the
Polygonal and Circular orders, prefer a third method, the description of
which shall be reserved for the next section.