But meanwhile the intellectual Arts were fast decaying.
The Art of Sight Recognition, being no longer needed, was no longer practised; and the
studies of Geometry, Statics, Kinetics, and other kindred subjects, came soon to be
considered superfluous, and fell into disrespect and neglect even at our University. The
inferior Art of Feeling speedily experienced the same fate at our Elementary Schools.
Then the Isosceles classes, asserting that the Specimens were no longer used nor needed,
and refusing to pay the customary tribute from the Criminal classes to the service of
Education, waxed daily more numerous and more insolent on the strength of their
immunity from the old burden which had formerly exercised the twofold wholesome
effect of at once taming their brutal nature and thinning their excessive numbers.
Year by year the Soldiers and Artisans began more vehemently to assert -- and with
increasing truth -- that there was no great difference between them and the very highest
class of Polygons, now that they were raised to an equality with the latter, and enabled to
grapple with all the difficulties and solve all the problems of life, whether Statical or
Kinetical, by the simple process of Colour Recognition. Not content with the natural
neglect into which Sight Recognition was falling, they began boldly to demand the legal
prohibition of all "monopolizing and aristocratic Arts" and the consequent abolition of all
endowments for the studies of Sight Recognition, Mathematics, and Feeling. Soon, they
began to insist that inasmuch as Colour, which was a second Nature, had destroyed the
need of aristocratic distinctions, the Law should follow in the same path, and that
henceforth all individuals and all classes should be recognized as absolutely equal and
entitled to equal rights.
Finding the higher Orders wavering and undecided, the leaders of the Revolution
advanced still further in their requirements, and at last demanded that all classes alike, the
Priests and the Women not excepted, should do homage to Colour by submitting to be
painted. When it was objected that Priests and Women had no sides, they retorted that
Nature and Expediency concurred in dictating that the front half of every human being
(that is to say, the half containing his eye and mouth) should be distinguishable from his
hinder half. They therefore brought before a general and extraordinary Assembly of all
the States of Flatland a Bill proposing that in every Woman the half containing the eye
and mouth should be coloured red, and the other half green. The Priests were to be
painted in the same way, red being applied to that semicircle in which the eye and mouth
formed the middle point; while the other or hinder semicircle was to be coloured green.
There was no little cunning in this proposal, which indeed emanated not from any
Isosceles -- for no being so degraded would have had angularity enough to appreciate,
much less to devise, such a model of state-craft -- but from an Irregular Circle who,
instead of being destroyed in his childhood, was reserved by a foolish indulgence to bring
desolation on his country and destruction on myriads of his followers.
