Concerning Irregular Figures

Throughout the previous pages I have been assuming⁠---what perhaps should
have been laid down at the beginning as a distinct and fundamental
proposition⁠---that every human being in Flatland is a Regular Figure,
that is to say of regular construction. By this I mean that a woman must
not only be a line, but a straight line; that an artisan or soldier must
have two of his sides equal; that tradesmen must have three sides equal;
Lawyers (of which class I am a humble member), four sides equal, and
generally, that in every Polygon, all the sides must be equal.

The size of the sides would of course depend upon the age of the
individual. A female at birth would be about an inch long, while a tall
adult woman might extend to a foot. As to the males of every class, it
may be roughly said that the length of an adult's sides, when added
together, is two feet or a little more. But the size of our sides is not
under consideration. I am speaking of the equality of sides, and it
does not need much reflection to see that the whole of the social life
in Flatland rests upon the fundamental fact that Nature wills all
Figures to have their sides equal.

If our sides were unequal our angles might be unequal. Instead of its
being sufficient to feel, or estimate by sight, a single angle in order
to determine the form of an individual, it would be necessary to
ascertain each angle by the experiment of Feeling. But life would be too
short for such a tedious grouping. The whole science and art of Sight
Recognition would at once perish; Feeling, so far as it is an art, would
not long survive; intercourse would become perilous or impossible; there
would be an end to all confidence, all forethought; no one would be safe
in making the most simple social arrangements; in a word, civilization
would relapse into barbarism.

Am I going too fast to carry my readers with me to these obvious
conclusions? Surely a moment's reflection, and a single instance from
common life, must convince everyone that our whole social system is
based upon Regularity, or Equality of Angles. You meet, for example, two
or three tradesmen in the street, whom you recognize at once to be
tradesmen by a glance at their angles and rapidly bedimmed sides, and
you ask them to step into your house to lunch. This you do at present
with perfect confidence, because everyone knows to an inch or two the
area occupied by an adult Triangle: but imagine that your tradesman
drags behind his regular and respectable vertex, a parallelogram of
twelve or thirteen inches in diagonal:⁠---what are you to do with such a
monster sticking fast in your house door?

But I am insulting the intelligence of my readers by accumulating
details which must be patent to everyone who enjoys the advantages of a
residence in Spaceland. Obviously the measurements of a single angle
would no longer be sufficient under such portentous circumstances; one's
whole life would be taken up in feeling or surveying the perimeter of
one's acquaintances. Already the difficulties of avoiding a collision in
a crowd are enough to tax the sagacity of even a well-educated Square;
but if no one could calculate the Regularity of a single Figure in the
company, all would be chaos and confusion, and the slightest panic would
cause serious injuries, or⁠---if there happened to be any women or
soldiers present⁠---perhaps considerable loss of life.

Expediency therefore concurs with Nature in stamping the seal of its
approval upon Regularity of conformation: nor has the law been backward
in seconding their efforts. "Irregularity of Figure" means with us the
same as, or more than, a combination of moral obliquity and criminality
with you, and is treated accordingly. There are not wanting, it is true,
some promulgators of paradoxes who maintain that there is no necessary
connection between geometrical and moral Irregularity. "The Irregular,"
they say, "is from his birth scouted by his own parents, derided by his
brothers and sisters, neglected by the domestics, scorned and suspected
by society, and excluded from all posts of responsibility, trust, and
useful activity. 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, or else immured in a Government Office as a clerk of the
seventh class; prevented from marriage; forced to drudge 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.

Not that I should be disposed to recommend (at present) the extreme
measures adopted by some States, where an infant whose angle deviates by
half a degree from the correct angularity is summarily destroyed at
birth. Some of our highest and ablest men, men of real genius, have
during their earliest days laboured under deviations as great as, or
even greater than, forty-five minutes: and the loss of their precious
lives would have been an irreparable injury to the State. The art of
healing also has achieved some of its most glorious triumphs in the
compressions, extensions, trepannings, colligations, and other surgical
or diaetetic operations by which Irregularity has been partly or wholly
cured. Advocating therefore a [via media]{lang="la"}, I would lay down
no fixed or absolute line of demarcation; but at the period when the
frame is just beginning to set, and when the Medical Board has reported
that recovery is improbable, I would suggest that the Irregular
offspring be painlessly and mercifully consumed.