Doubtless, the life of an Irregular is hard; but the interests of
the Greater Number require that it shall be hard. If a man with
a triangular front and a polygonal back were allowed to exist
and to propagate a still more Irregular posterity, what would become
of the arts of life? Are the houses and doors and churches
in Flatland to be altered in order to accommodate such monsters?
Are our ticket-collectors to be required to measure every man's
perimeter before they allow him to enter a theatre or to take
his place in a lecture room? Is an Irregular to be exempted
from the militia? And if not, how is he to be prevented from
carrying desolation into the ranks of his comrades? Again,
what irresistible temptations to fraudulent impostures must
needs beset such a creature! How easy for him to enter a shop
with his polygonal front foremost, and to order goods
to any extent from a confiding tradesman! Let the advocates of
a falsely called Philanthropy plead as they may for the abrogation
of the Irregular Penal Laws, I for my part have never known
an Irregular who was not also what Nature evidently intended him to be
-- a hypocrite, a misanthropist, and, up to the limits of his power,
a perpetrator of all manner of mischief.
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