The Darkest Hours - 18 Chilling Dystopias in One Edition. Samuel Butler
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he said. “You never heard, for instance, of the great Emancipation Act, Regulation 19 of the Marital Law?”
“No,” I replied; “what is it?”
“No Meccanian woman is obliged to submit to the embraces of her lawful husband.”
“But how did the men ever consent to such a law?” I asked; “for in this country it is the men who make the laws.”
“It is rather a queer story,” he replied. “It is quite a long time ago, forty years or more, since a movement arose among the women, influenced no doubt by the women’s movement in Europe, which had for its object, or one of its objects, greater freedom from the domestic tyranny of the Meccanian husband. Some of them, of course, thought that the way to secure everything they wanted was to get the right to vote for the National Council; but the wiser among them saw that the vote was merely a bad joke. Anybody could have the vote, because it was worth nothing; seeing that the powers of the representatives were being reduced to nothing. All the same, this women’s movement, such as it was, was the nearest approach to a revolutionary movement that the Meccanians have ever shown themselves capable of. Once more our dear old Prince Mechow came to the rescue. He was a real genius.”
“But I thought you did not admire the Mechow reforms?” I interrupted.
“I do not; but I recognise a genius when I see him. Believe me, Prince Mechow was the first Meccanian to understand his countrymen. He knew exactly what they wanted, what they would stand, what they could do, what they could be made to believe. He was absorbed in his early reforms when this women’s movement broke out, and some people were afraid of it. He attacked the problem in his characteristic fashion. He knew the women didn’t want political power; he knew also that there was not the slightest danger of them getting it; but he saw immense possibilities in having the women as his allies in certain of his reforms, especially his Eugenic reforms. He hit upon a really brilliant idea. I don’t suppose you can guess what it was?”
“How can I?” I said. “All this is quite new to me.”
“Well, if you had read Meccanian literature, or even the writings of the old travellers in Meccania—your predecessors as Foreign Observers—you would know that the Meccanian women are the most primitive in Europe. They have one ideal as regards men. They have a superstitious admiration for physical strength. If a Meccanian woman were really free to choose her mate, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred she would choose the strongest man. They have always been like that. Probably many primitive peoples have had that characteristic, but the Meccanians have preserved that trait longest. You think I am joking or spinning a theory?”
“I was thinking that as they have had the same marriage laws as the rest of Europe for many centuries, the fact, if it is a fact, cannot be of much practical importance,” I said.
“The fact itself is vouched for by dozens of writers among the Meccanians. They pride themselves on having preserved these primitive characteristics; they glory in never having been influenced by Latin culture. The marriage laws you speak of have been adopted by the men, in self-defence, so to speak. In very early times the Meccanian marriage laws were essentially the same as they have been for two thousand years, and the penalties on the women for infractions of the marriage laws were more severe in practice than in any other country. Notice the facts: breaches of the ‘moral code’ before marriage are regarded very lightly: illegitimacy in Meccania, as is proved by statistics, was more prevalent than in most countries; but the men took care that breaches after marriage should be severely dealt with. I told you it was a long story, and I have not yet come to the point. For twenty or thirty years before Prince Mechow got into the saddle all the young hot-headed Meccanian patriots got Eugenics on the brain, but none of them knew how to put their ideas into practice. Mechow himself was a Eugenist of the most brutal type. He believed that if he could once utilise this primitive instinct of the Meccanian women, he could do something much more effective than eliminating certain feeble types, which was all that the Eugenist theorists had so far aimed at. He proposed to give every woman the right to choose, within limits, the father of her children. He knew that all the Meccanian women were obsessed with a frantic admiration for the Military Class—in the old days it was the ambition of every woman to marry an officer, and that was why the officers who were not well-to-do never had any difficulty in getting a rich partie. Well, he actually made a law to the effect that any woman could claim a sort of exemption from the marital rights of her husband, upon the recommendation of an authorised medical man.”
“But why on earth did the men consent to such a law?” I asked once more.
“That was easily done. You had only to invoke the Meccanian spirit, devotion to the supreme interests of the State, the opinion of the experts and all the rest of it. The opposition was stifled. The three highest classes were all for it; the women supported it, and although they had no political power they made opposition impossible.”
“And what effect has this law had? I am afraid I do not see how it would effect the purpose Prince Mechow had in view,” I said.
“The consequences have been enormous. I do not mean that the law by itself effected much, but taken as part of a system it solved the whole problem from Mechow’s point of view.”
“But how?” I asked, somewhat puzzled.
“You understand, I suppose, the system of medical inspection and medical supervision and medical treatment?”
“To a certain extent,” I replied.
“Well, you realise perhaps that, in the hands of a patriotic medical staff, the system can be so worked that every woman who is ‘approved’ can be provided with a ‘eugenic’ mate from an approved panel, drawn chiefly from the Military Class, eh?”
“Is this one of Mr. Villele’s jokes at the expense of the Meccanians?” I asked Mr. Johnson.
“He is telling the story in his own way,” answered Johnson, “but in substance it is quite true.”
“But it sounds incredible,” I said. “What do the husbands say to it?”
“Oh, the business is done very quietly. A woman is ordered a ‘cure’ by the ‘medical authority,’ and she goes away for a little time. The men on the panel are kept in training, like pugilists used to be. As for the husbands—did you ever attend any lectures in the Universities on Meccanian ethics? Of course you have not been in the country very long. Jealousy is regarded as an obsolete virtue, or vice, whichever you like. Besides, you must not imagine the custom affects large numbers. Probably not more than 10 per cent of the women, chiefly in the Fifth and Sixth, and to some extent in the Fourth, Class, are affected.”
“But I should have thought that social caste would be an insuperable obstacle,” I said.
“Surely not! When did you hear that women were chosen for such purposes from any particular class? It is not a question of marriage.”
“There is one circumstance,” interposed Mr. Johnson, “that has some bearing on this subject. Domestic life in Meccania for generations past has been based on quite a different ideal from that prevalent in other parts of Europe. A Meccanian in the old days used to choose a wife very much as he would choose a horse. She was thought of as the mother of children; in fact, the Meccanian sociologists used to maintain that this was one of the marks of their superiority over other European nations. Conjugal affection was recognised only as a sort of by-product of marriage. Of course they always pretended to cultivate a kind of Romanticism because they wrote a lot of verse about the spring, and moonlight and kisses and love-longing, but their Romanticism never went beyond that. As the object of Meccanian sentiment, one person would do just as well as another.”
“Our friend seems very much surprised at many things he finds in Meccania,” remarked Mr. Villele, “and my own countrymen, and more especially my own countrywomen, only half believe the accounts they read about this country, simply because they think human nature is the same everywhere; but then they are ignorant of history. Civilisations just as extraordinary have existed in ancient times, created through the influence of a few dominant ideas. The Meccanians