Of the Universal Colour Bill

But meanwhile the intellectual arts were fast decaying.

The Art of Sight Recognition, being no longer needed, was no longer
practised; and the studies of geometry, statics, kinetics, and other
kindred subjects, came soon to be considered superfluous, and fell into
disrespect and neglect even at our University. The inferior Art of
Feeling speedily experienced the same fate at our elementary schools.
Then the Isosceles classes, asserting that the specimens were no longer
used nor needed, and refusing to pay the customary tribute from the
criminal classes to the service of education, waxed daily more numerous
and more insolent on the strength of their immunity from the old burden
which had formerly exercised the twofold wholesome effect of at once
taming their brutal nature and thinning their excessive numbers.

Year by year the soldiers and artisans began more vehemently to
assert⁠---and with increasing truth⁠---that there was no great difference
between them and the very highest class of Polygons, now that they were
raised to an equality with the latter, and enabled to grapple with all
the difficulties and solve all the problems of life, whether statical or
kinetical, by the simple process of Colour Recognition. Not content with
the natural neglect into which Sight Recognition was falling, they began
boldly to demand the legal prohibition of all "monopolizing and
aristocratic arts" and the consequent abolition of all endowments for
the studies of Sight Recognition, mathematics, and Feeling. Soon, they
began to insist that inasmuch as Colour, which was a second Nature, had
destroyed the need of aristocratic distinctions, the law should follow
in the same path, and that henceforth all individuals and all classes
should be recognized as absolutely equal and entitled to equal rights.

Finding the higher orders wavering and undecided, the leaders of the
Revolution advanced still further in their requirements, and at last
demanded that all classes alike, the Priests and the women not excepted,
should do homage to colour by submitting to be painted. When it was
objected that Priests and women had no sides, they retorted that Nature
and Expediency concurred in dictating that the front half of every human
being (that is to say, the half containing his eye and mouth) should be
distinguishable from his hinder half. They therefore brought before a
general and extraordinary Assembly of all the States of Flatland a bill
proposing that in every woman the half containing the eye and mouth
should be coloured red, and the other half green. The Priests were to be
painted in the same way, red being applied to that semicircle in which
the eye and mouth formed the middle point; while the other or hinder
semicircle was to be coloured green.

There was no little cunning in this proposal, which indeed emanated not
from any Isosceles⁠---for no being so degraded would have had angularity
enough to appreciate, much less to devise, such a model of
statecraft⁠---but from an Irregular Circle who, instead of being
destroyed in his childhood, was reserved by a foolish indulgence to
bring desolation on his country and destruction on myriads of his
followers.

On the one hand the proposition was calculated to bring the women in all
classes over to the side of the Chromatic Innovation. For by assigning
to the women the same two colours as were assigned to the Priests, the
Revolutionists thereby ensured that, in certain positions, every woman
would appear like a Priest, and be treated with corresponding respect
and deference⁠---a prospect that could not fail to attract the female sex
in a mass.

But by some of my readers the possibility of the identical appearance of
Priests and women, under the new legislation, may not be recognized; if
so, a word or two will make it obvious.

Imagine a woman duly decorated, according to the new code; with the
front half
(i.e. the
half containing eye and mouth) red, and with the hinder half green. Look
at her from one side. Obviously you will see a straight line, half red,
half green.

Now imagine a Priest, whose mouth is at M, and whose front
semicircle (AMB) is consequently coloured red, while his
hinder semicircle is green; so that the diameter AB divides
the green from the red. If you contemplate the great man so as to have
your eye in the same straight line as his dividing diameter
(AB), what you will see will be a straight line
(CBD), of which one half (CB) will be red,
and the other (BD) green. The whole line
(CD) will be rather shorter perhaps than that of a
full-sized woman, and will shade off more rapidly towards its
extremities; but the identity of the colours would give you an immediate
impression of identity of class, making you neglectful of other details.
Bear in mind the decay of Sight Recognition which threatened society at
the time of the Colour Revolt; add too the certainty that women would
speedily learn to shade off their extremities so as to imitate the
Circles; it must then be surely obvious to you, my dear reader, that the
Colour Bill placed us under a great danger of confounding a Priest with
a young woman.

How attractive this prospect must have been to the frail sex may readily
be imagined. They anticipated with delight the confusion that would
ensue. At home they might hear political and ecclesiastical secrets
intended not for them but for their husbands and brothers, and might
even issue commands in the name of a priestly Circle; out of doors the
striking combination of red and green, without addition of any other
colours, would be sure to lead the common people into endless mistakes,
and the women would gain whatever the Circles lost, in the deference of
the passers by. As for the scandal that would befall the Circular class
if the frivolous and unseemly conduct of the women were imputed to them,
and as to the consequent subversion of the Constitution, the female sex
could not be expected to give a thought to these considerations. Even in
the households of the Circles, the women were all in favour of the
Universal Colour Bill.

The second object aimed at by the bill was the gradual demoralization of
the Circles themselves. In the general intellectual decay they still
preserved their pristine clearness and strength of understanding. From
their earliest childhood, familiarized in their Circular households with
the total absence of colour, the Nobles alone preserved the sacred art
of Sight Recognition, with all the advantages that result from that
admirable training of the intellect. Hence, up to the date of the
introduction of the Universal Colour Bill, the Circles had not only held
their own, but even increased their lead of the other classes by
abstinence from the popular fashion.

Now therefore the artful Irregular whom I described above as the real
author of this diabolical bill, determined at one blow to lower the
status of the hierarchy by forcing them to submit to the pollution of
colour, and at the same time to destroy their domestic opportunities of
training in the Art of Sight Recognition, so as to enfeeble their
intellects by depriving them of their pure and colourless homes. Once
subjected to the chromatic taint, every parental and every childish
Circle would demoralize each other. Only in discerning between the
father and the mother would the Circular infant find problems for the
exercise of its understanding⁠---problems too often likely to be
corrupted by maternal impostures with the result of shaking the child's
faith in all logical conclusions. Thus by degrees the intellectual
lustre of the Priestly Order would wane, and the road would then lie
open for a total destruction of all aristocratic legislature and for the
subversion of our privileged classes.