Herland - Charlotte Perkins Gilman (best english novels to read .TXT) 📗

“No⁠—why should she? The child has its own.”

“Why for⁠—for identification⁠—so people will know whose child she is.”

“We keep the most careful records,” said Somel. “Each one of us has our exact line of descent all the way back to our dear First Mother. There are many reasons for doing that. But as to everyone knowing which child belongs to which mother⁠—why should she?”

Here, as in so many other instances, we were led to feel the difference between the purely maternal and the paternal attitude of mind. The element of personal pride seemed strangely lacking.

“How about your other works?” asked Jeff. “Don’t you sign your names to them⁠—books and statues and so on?”

“Yes, surely, we are all glad and proud to. Not only books and statues, but all kinds of work. You will find little names on the houses, on the furniture, on the dishes sometimes. Because otherwise one is likely to forget, and we want to know to whom to be grateful.”

“You speak as if it were done for the convenience of the consumer⁠—not the pride of the producer,” I suggested.

“It’s both,” said Somel. “We have pride enough in our work.”

“Then why not in your children?” urged Jeff.

“But we have! We’re magnificently proud of them,” she insisted.

“Then why not sign ’em?” said Terry triumphantly.

Moadine turned to him with her slightly quizzical smile. “Because the finished product is not a private one. When they are babies, we do speak of them, at times, as ‘Essa’s Lato,’ or ‘Novine’s Amel’; but that is merely descriptive and conversational. In the records, of course, the child stands in her own line of mothers; but in dealing with it personally it is Lato, or Amel, without dragging in its ancestors.”

“But have you names enough to give a new one to each child?”

“Assuredly we have, for each living generation.”

Then they asked about our methods, and found first that “we” did so-and-so, and then that other nations did differently. Upon which they wanted to know which method has been proved best⁠—and we had to admit that so far as we knew there had been no attempt at comparison, each people pursuing its own custom in the fond conviction of superiority, and either despising or quite ignoring the others.

With these women the most salient quality in all their institutions was reasonableness. When I dug into the records to follow out any line of development, that was the most astonishing thing⁠—the conscious effort to make it better.

They had early observed the value of certain improvements, had easily inferred that there was room for more, and took the greatest pains to develop two kinds of minds⁠—the critic and inventor. Those who showed an early tendency to observe, to discriminate, to suggest, were given special training for that function; and some of their highest officials spent their time in the most careful study of one or another branch of work, with a view to its further improvement.

In each generation there was sure to arrive some new mind to detect faults and show need of alterations; and the whole corps of inventors was at hand to apply their special faculty at the point criticized, and offer suggestions.

We had learned by this time not to open a discussion on any of their characteristics without first priming ourselves to answer questions about our own methods; so I kept rather quiet on this matter of conscious improvement. We were not prepared to show our way was better.

There was growing in our minds, at least in Jeff’s and mine, a keen appreciation of the advantages of this strange country and its management. Terry remained critical. We laid most of it to his nerves. He certainly was irritable.

The most conspicuous feature of the whole land was the perfection of its food supply. We had begun to notice from that very first walk in the forest, the first partial view from our plane. Now we were taken to see this mighty garden, and shown its methods of culture.

The country was about the size of Holland, some ten or twelve thousand square miles. One could lose a good many Hollands along the forest-smothered flanks of those mighty mountains. They had a population of about three million⁠—not a large one, but quality is something. Three million is quite enough to allow for considerable variation, and these people varied more widely than we could at first account for.

Terry had insisted that if they were parthenogenetic they’d be as alike as so many ants or aphids; he urged their visible differences as proof that there must be men⁠—somewhere.

But when we asked them, in our later, more intimate conversations, how they accounted for so much divergence without cross-fertilization, they attributed it partly to the careful education, which followed each slight tendency to differ, and partly to the law of mutation. This they had found in their work with plants, and fully proven in their own case.

Physically they were more alike than we, as they lacked all morbid or excessive types. They were tall, strong, healthy, and beautiful as a race, but differed individually in a wide range of feature, coloring, and expression.

“But surely the most important growth is in mind⁠—and in the things we make,” urged Somel. “Do you find your physical variation accompanied by a proportionate variation in ideas, feelings, and products? Or, among people who look more alike, do you find their internal life and their work as similar?”

We were rather doubtful on this point, and inclined to hold that there was more chance of improvement in greater physical variation.

“It certainly should be,” Zava admitted. “We have always thought it a grave initial misfortune to have lost half our little world. Perhaps that is one reason why we have so striven for conscious improvement.”

“But acquired traits are not transmissible,” Terry declared. “Weissman has proved that.”

They never disputed our absolute statements, only made notes of them.

“If that is so, then our improvement must be due either to mutation, or solely to education,” she gravely pursued. “We certainly have improved. It