But the Square is so unaccustomed to the use
of the moral terminology of Spaceland that I should be doing him
an injustice if I were literally to transcribe his defence against
this charge. Acting, therefore, as his interpreter and summarizer,
I gather that in the course of an imprisonment of seven years
he has himself modified his own personal views, both as regards Women
and as regards the Isosceles or Lower Classes. Personally,
he now inclines to the opinion of the Sphere that the Straight Lines
are in many important respects superior to the Circles.
But, writing as a Historian, he has identified himself
(perhaps too closely) with the views generally adopted by Flatland,
and (as he has been informed) even by Spaceland, Historians;
in whose pages (until very recent times) the destinies of Women
and of the masses of mankind have seldom been deemed worthy of mention
and never of careful consideration.
In a still more obscure passage he now desires to disavow the Circular
or aristocratic tendencies with which some critics have naturally
credited him. While doing justice to the intellectual power
with which a few Circles have for many generations maintained
their supremacy over immense multitudes of their countrymen,
he believes that the facts of Flatland, speaking for themselves
without comment on his part, declare that Revolutions cannot always
be suppressed by slaughter, and that Nature, in sentencing the Circles
to infecundity, has condemned them to ultimate failure --
"and herein," he says, "I see a fulfilment of the great Law
of all worlds, that while the wisdom of Man thinks it is working
one thing, the wisdom of Nature constrains it to work another,
and quite a different and far better thing.
Pages:
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27