The Darkest Hours - 18 Chilling Dystopias in One Edition. Samuel Butler
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of improving the mathematical stock. He railed very bitterly against a member of the Eugenics Board who had tried to get authority to improve the supply of artists. Happily the Board had turned down his proposals. Count Hardflogg, who wore the Mechow whisker and an eyeglass, and frowned fiercely at everything one said to him, was full of a recent report by the experts in the Industrial Psychology section of the Department of Industry and Commerce. It seems they had recommended a shortening of hours for the members of the Sixth and Fifth Classes in a number of provincial towns, to bring them more on a level with the same class of workers in Mecco itself. He said it was the thin end of the wedge; that they ought not to have reported until experiments had been made with a different diet: he blamed the Eugenics Section, too, for not being able to produce a tougher strain of workers. Reduction of working hours should not be resorted to, he maintained, until every other expedient had been tried: it was so very difficult to increase them afterwards. Besides, in the Strenuous Month, it had been proved over and over again that the men could easily stand a longer working day without physical injury.
“And what is the Strenuous Month?” I asked.
“Oh, of course,” he said, “you have not studied our industrial system as a factor of military organisation. There is a very good account of it in Mr. Kwang’s Triumphs of Meccanian Culture. Briefly it is this. Every year, but not always in the same month, the signal is given for the Strenuous Month to begin. The workmen then work at top speed, and for as many hours a day as the Industrial Psychologists determine, for thirty days consecutively. It is excellent training, and incidentally has a very good effect on the output for the other months of the year. The men are so glad when it is over that, unconsciously, they work better for the rest of the year.”
“But I should have thought they would be so fatigued that you would lose as much as you gain, or more perhaps,” I said.
“Oh no,” he answered; “they are allowed one day’s complete rest, which they must spend in bed; their diet is arranged, both during the time and for a month after. They must go to bed for two hours extra every night for the following month. The effect is most beneficial. They like it too, on the whole, for they get paid for all the extra product—that is to say, it is added to their pension fund.”
“But I thought the pension fund was so calculated,” I said, “that it tallies exactly with what is required for the support of each man from the time he ceases to be able to work.”
“Certainly,” he replied. “After fifty-five most of our men work an hour a day less every two years, with variations according to their capacity, as tested by the medical examinations.”
“Then how do they benefit,” I asked, “by the product of the strenuous month, if it is only added to their pension and not paid at the time?”
“If it is added to the pension fund,” he replied, “it is obvious that they must benefit.”
I did not pursue the matter further. He asked me if I had been to the Annual Medical Exhibition. I said I had not heard of it, and did not suppose I should receive permission to see it, as I was not altogether well qualified to understand it. He said it was most interesting. He was not a medical man himself, of course; but as an officer in the army he had had to get some acquaintance with physiology.
“The medical menagerie gets more interesting every year,” he said.
“The medical menagerie!” I exclaimed. “Whatever is that?”
“It is a wonderful collection of animals, not only domestic but wild animals too, upon which experiments have been carried out. There are goats with sheep’s legs. There are cows with horses’ hearts, and dogs with only hind-legs, and pigs without livers—oh, all sorts of things. The funniest is a pig with a tiger’s skin.”
“And what is the object of it all?” I said.
“Oh, just a regular part of medical research. The most valuable experiments are those with bacilli, of course; but only the experts can understand these, as a rule.”
“But it is not safe to infer that the results of experiments on animals will be applicable to human beings,” I said.
“Of course not, without further verification; but the Special Medical Board have ample powers to carry out research.”
“What, upon human beings?” I exclaimed.
“People do not always know when they are being experimented upon,” he remarked significantly. “Besides, if a man is already suffering from an incurable disease, what does it matter? Of course, we use anæsthetics, wherever possible at least; that goes without saying.”
After dinner we drank wine for a little time, seated in little groups after the manner of a custom in some of the colleges in Luniland. Here, instead of being placed with the two gentlemen who had been my neighbours at table, I was one of a group of four, the others being two professors and a high official in the Sociological Department. One of the professors was Secret Councillor Sikofantis-Sauer, an Economist; the other was Church Councillor Muhgubb-Slimey, a Theologian. We talked of indifferent matters for some time until the High Official left us, when the idea occurred to me to try whether the Economist would enlighten me upon the subject of the ultimate destination of the phenomenal production of the Meccanian economic organisation.
I remarked that I had never seen in any country so few signs of discontent as in Meccania, and I asked if this was due to the great wealth that must necessarily be produced by the efficiency of the methods of production. Professor Sikofantis-Sauer, the Economist, said that my question betrayed that I was not acquainted with the Meccanian System of Ethics. I wondered why the Professor of Economics should begin talking of Ethics. He went on, “Social discontent was never really due to lack of wealth. Properly speaking, it has no relation to material wealth at all. This has been proved up to the hilt—if it needed any proof—by our researches in Economic and Social History. In a nutshell the proof is this. What was called poverty in the early nineteenth century would have been considered affluence in, let us say, the fifth or even the tenth century. The whole idea of wealth is subjective. Now anyone knows that, where wealth is allowed to become the main objective of the social activities of the people, the desire for individual wealth is insatiable. The notion that you can ever reach a state of contentment, by increasing the wealth of the people, is one of the greatest fallacies that even the economists of Luniland ever entertained—and that is saying a good deal. Consequently, if we have succeeded in eradicating discontent, it has not been by pursuing the mirage of a popular El Dorado. No, you must replace the insane desire for the gratification of individual indulgence by a conception of a truer kind of well-being. If the individual once grasps the fact that in himself, and by himself, he is little better than an arboreal ape, and that all he possesses, all he can possess, is the gift of the State—which gives him nourishment, language, ideas, knowledge; which trains him to use his powers, such as they are—he will assume an entirely different attitude. Our system of education, far more than our system of production, is responsible for the eradication of social and of every other kind of discontent.”
“Then I suppose,” I said, “the lower classes, as we sometimes call them abroad—your Fifth and Sixth and Seventh Classes, for example—never inquire whether they receive what they consider a fair share of the national product?”
Professor Sauer laughed aloud. “Pardon me,” he said, “but you remind me of a story I used to hear when I was a boy, of a man who had slept in some cave or den for fifty years, or was it a century, and woke up to find a different world. Such a question belongs to the buried fossils of economic theory. Who can say what is a fair share? You might as well ask whether one musical composition is more just than another.”
“Well, perhaps you can tell me this,” I said. “Considering the superiority of your methods of production, I should have expected to find a much higher standard of individual wealth, or comfort, or leisure—you know what I mean—among not only the lower classes, but all classes. I cannot help wondering what becomes of all the surplus.”
“We have all enough for our needs,” he said, “and the requirements of the State are of far more importance than the gratification of