The Darkest Hours - 18 Chilling Dystopias in One Edition. Samuel Butler
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be warmer than the experts think is necessary. Yes; that is probably the explanation.”
“And for the rest,” I said. “Have you no occupation? How do you spend the time?”
“In trying to preserve the last remains of my sanity,” he answered.
“And by what means?” I asked gently.
“Chiefly by prayer and meditation,” he replied after a short pause.
He used the old-fashioned expressions which I had not heard from the lips of any Meccanian before. “But it is difficult,” he went on, “to keep one’s faith, cut off from one’s fellow-believers.”
“But they allow you to attend religious services surely?” I said.
“The Meccanian State Church keeps a chaplain here, and holds a service every day which is attended by all the officials and a few of the patients; but you have heard the maxim Cujus regio ejus religio, have you not?” I nodded. “It has acquired a new significance during the last fifty years. I have not attended any of the services since they ceased to be compulsory about ten years ago.”
“That sounds very remarkable,” I said.
“What does?”
“It is the first time I have heard of anything ceasing to be compulsory in Meccania,” I said.
“The fact was that they discovered it had a very bad effect upon the disease. My chief relief now is reading, which is permitted for three hours a day.”
“And you are allowed to choose your own books?”
“As a concession to our mental infirmity,” he said, “we have been granted the privilege of reading some of the old authors. It came about in this way. Dr. Weakling, who is in charge of this hospital, is the son of one of my oldest friends—a man who spent several years in this place as a patient. He came in about the same time as I did, but his health gave way and he ‘recanted,’ or, as they say, he ‘recovered.’ But while he was here he begged to have a few of the old books to save him from going mad. The authorities refused to let him have any books except those specially provided, and I believe it was this that made him give way. Anyhow he used his influence with his son afterwards, for his son had become one of the leading medical specialists, to obtain for the older patients at any rate a number of the books of the old literature which nobody else wanted to read. He only got the concession through on the ground that it was a psychological experiment. He has had to write a report on the experiment every year since its introduction. That is our greatest positive privilege, but we have a few negative privileges.”
“What do you mean exactly?” I said.
“We have no compulsory attendances; we have no forms to fill up; we are not required to keep a diary; we are not required to read the Monthly Gazette of Instructions, nor play any part in State ceremonies. Indeed, if I could talk to my friends who are here I should have little to complain of on the score of personal comfort.”
“Then why do you speak of the difficulty of preserving your sanity?” I said, rather thoughtlessly, I am afraid.
“Why do you think I am here at all?” he replied, for the first time speaking fiercely. “I could have my liberty to-day if I chose, could I not?” Then he went on, not angrily but more bitterly, “Did I say I could have my liberty? No; that is not true. I could go out of here tomorrow, but I should not be at liberty. I stay here, because here I am only a prisoner—outside I should be a slave. How long have you been in Meccania did you say?”
“About five months,” I said.
“And you are free to go back to your own country?”
“Certainly,” I said—“at least, I hope so.”
“Then go as soon as you can. This is no fit place for human beings. It is a community of slaves, who do not even know they are slaves because they have never tasted liberty, ruled over by a caste of super-criminals who have turned crime into a science.”
“I have not heard the ruling classes called criminals before,” I said. “I am not sure that I understand what you mean.”
“Then you must have been woefully taken in by all this hocus-pocus of law and constitution and patriotism. The whole place is one gigantic prison, and either the people themselves are criminals, or those who put them there must be. There is such a thing as legalised crime. Crime is not merely the breaking of a statute. Murder and rape are crimes, statute or no statute.”
“But what are the crimes these rulers of Meccania have committed?” I said.
“In all civilised countries,” he replied passionately, “if you steal from a man, if you violate his wife or his daughters, if you kidnap his children, you are a criminal and outlawed from all decent society. These rulers of ours have done worse than that. They have robbed us of everything; we have nothing of our own. They feed us, clothe us, house us—oh no, there is no poverty—every beast of burden in the country is provided with stall and fodder—ay, and harness too; they measure us, weigh us, doctor us, instruct us, drill us, breed from us, experiment on us, protect us, pension us and bury us. Nay, that is not the end; they dissect us and analyse us and use our carcasses for the benefit of Science and the Super-State. I called them a nation. They are not a nation; they are an ‘organism.’ You have been here five months, you say. You have seen a lot of spectacles, no doubt. You have seen buildings, institutions, organisations, systems, machinery for this and machinery for that, but you have not seen a single human being—unless you have visited our prisons and asylums. You have not been allowed to talk to anybody except ‘authorised persons.’ You have been instructed by officials. You have read books selected by the Super-State, and written by the Super-State. You have seen plays selected by the Super-State, and heard music selected by the Super-State, and seen pictures selected by the Super-State, and no doubt heard sermons preached by the Super-State.”
“Your friend tells me other nations are still free. What drives me to the verge of madness is to think that we, who once were free, are enslaved by bonds of our own making. Can you wonder, after what you have seen—a whole nation consenting to be slaves if only they may make other nations slaves too—that I ask myself sometimes whether this is a real lunatic asylum; whether I am here because I have these terrible hallucinations; whether all that I think has happened this last fifty years is just a figment of my brain, and that really, if I could only see it, the world is just as it used to be when I was a boy?”
Presently he became calmer and began to tell me something of his life story.
“Until I was about twelve,” he said, “I lived with my parents in one of the old-fashioned parts of Meccania. My father was a well-to-do merchant who had travelled a good deal. He was something of a scholar too, and took interest in art and archæology, and as I, who was his youngest son, gave signs of similar tastes, he took me abroad with him several times. This made a break in my schooling, and although I probably learnt more from these travels, especially as I had the companionship of my father, it was not easy to fit me into the regular system again. So my father decided to send me to some relatives who had settled in Luniland, and a few years after, when I was ready to go to the University of Bridgeford, he and my mother came to live for a few years in Luniland.”
“Up to that time I had taken no interest in politics, but I can distinctly recall now how my father used to lament over the way things were tending. He said it was becoming almost impossible to remain a good citizen. He had always thought himself a sane and sober person, not given to quarrelling, but he found it impossible to attach himself to any of the political parties or cliques in Meccania. He was not a follower of Spotts, who, he said, was a kind of inverted Bludiron, but he disliked still more the politicians and so-called statesmen who were preaching the Meccanian spirit as a new gospel. I think it was his growing uneasiness with politics that caused him to drift gradually into the position of a voluntary exile. But we were very happy. Every year or so I used to go over to Meccania, and in spite of my cosmopolitan education I retained a strong affection for the land of my birth. I was full of its old traditions, and not