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Page 31
"I spent many hours in trying to draw from Peters facts which I might
put together and so become competent to explain the perfection, physical
and mental--for they possessed both of these charms--of the Hili-lites.
And after combining what Peters could describe, and what he could recall
of Pym's sayings, with a statement or two of the natives that clings in
the old man's memory, I formed what I am able to assure you is a
reliable opinion of the origin of the Hili-lite race:
"At about the most trying period of the barbarian invasion of Southern
Europe--certainly preceding the foundation of Venice, and I think in the
fourth century--when the enlightened peoples of the Mediterranean were
fleeing hither and thither like rats in a burning house from which but
few escape--during this fearful time, a number of men with their
families and a few slaves, took advantage of a momentary lull in the
terrors of the period, to save themselves. They purchased a number of
vessels, and loading each with tools, seeds, animals, valued
manuscripts, and all that they possessed worth moving, started to seek a
land in which they might colonize, there in time to found a new empire
beyond the reach of all barbarians. They passed out of the Mediterranean
and down the west coast of Africa. Fortunately they had thoroughly
anticipated storms and wrecks, and each vessel was loaded in such a
manner as to be independent of the others. When well on their way, one
of those rare, prolonged storms from the north came on, and the vessels
were soon driven far from land, and separated, each from all the others.
One of these vessels managed to outlive the terrific storm, which lasted
for thirty days; and when the winds abated, the hundred or more men,
women, children, and slaves, found themselves among the islands of what
now is named Hili-liland. There they settled--there, where nature
furnishes, without labor, light and heat the year round, and vegetation
is literally perpetual. They met with none of the initial difficulties
of primitive peoples. They were educated, and they possessed the
treasures of knowledge born of a thousand years of Roman supremacy; from
the beginning they had that other priceless treasure, leisure--that real
essential of perfect culture; they had for the first five hundred years
no human enemy to contend with, and even then with the merest
weaklings--weaklings in the hands of a people at that period very
strong; for by that time the Hili-lites must have numbered a million
souls, or almost as many as they now are. But of all that they
possessed, the rest would have been comparatively little had they not
retained in lasting memory the lesson of Rome's downfall--the price a
people is compelled to pay for prolonged and unbroken luxurious
indolence. This lesson of the downfall of Rome they never forgot; and
to-day, with all their beauty and refinement, physical and mental
effeminacy is left solely to the women. True, it requires from each
inhabitant but a few hours of labor in the year to supply all purely
physical material wants; but, beginning with the year of the settlement
of Hili-li, up to the present time, the wealthiest in the land has
performed his share of physical labor quite as conscientiously as has
the poorest. Then with them, a man or woman is educated up to the time
of death. The children are taught as with us, and the young men, and the
young women, too, take a college course. But after the college course,
they go on with their study. A great jurist at forty, or for that matter
at seventy, concludes to make an exhaustive study of astronomy--or, if
earlier in life he has exhausted all desire to know the facts of
astronomy, he perhaps begins a study of anatomy--or whatever it may
happen to please his fancy to investigate. The Hili-lites claim that in
this way those who live to seventy or eighty acquire a fairly good
general education, but of this I have my doubts. After the age of
twenty, a man does not devote more than two hours a day to new branches
of learning; but two hours a day is sufficient time, if well employed,
to keep his mind always young and vigorous; and it has been shown by
this people that a person under such a system retains more of the
buoyancy and freshness of youth at eighty than do we in Europe and
America at the age of fifty.
"In Hili-liland the people have gone much farther than we in the
development of the purely reasoning faculties--in fact, they have gone
so far that they now ignore reason almost completely, having carried its
development to a finality, and found it comparatively worthless in the
practical affairs of life. They claim--and seem by their lives to
prove--that, practically, society is happier and more moral when it
exists without any pretence that it is controlled by anything else than
by feeling--that is, as a matter of course, by properly educated
feeling. Hili-li is a kingdom, but its people must, from what I can
learn, have as pure and perfect a constitutional liberty as it is
possible for mankind to enjoy--not liberty as the accident of a royal
whim, but such a perfect liberty as the people of England are
approaching, and in which by another century they will be able to
indulge themselves. They claim that as liberty does not mean license, so
government of self by feeling and not by reason need not mean
license--and never will mean license when correctly understood and
properly directed--and yet that such government alone brings complete
happiness. This putting aside and dwarfing of the reasoning faculty
seems to have resulted in an intuitional state of mind. Peters says that
the Hili-lites always seemed to know what he was thinking about, and
were always able to anticipate and thwart his acts when they so desired.
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