eriority of lustre, or because of the charms of a low
voice--which, with us, even more than with you, is thought "an
excellent thing in a Woman."

Such ill-judged marriages are, as might be expected, barren, if they do
not result in positive Irregularity or in diminution of sides; but none
of these evils have hitherto provided sufficiently deterrent. The loss
of a few sides in a highly-developed Polygon is not easily noticed, and
is sometimes compensated by a successful operation in the
Neo-Therapeutic Gymnasium, as I have described above; and the Circles
are too much disposed to acquiesce in infecundity as a law of the
superior development. Yet, if this evil be not arrested, the gradual
diminution of the Circular class may soon become more rapid, and the
time may not be far distant when, the race being no longer able to
produce a Chief Circle, the Constitution of Flatland must fall.

One other word of warning suggest itself to me, though I cannot so
easily mention a remedy; and this also refers to our relations with
Women. About three hundred years ago, it was decreed by the Chief
Circle that, since women are deficient in Reason but abundant in
Emotion, they ought no longer to be treated as rational, nor receive
any mental education. The consequence was that they were no longer
taught to read, nor even to master Arithmetic enough to enable them to
count the angles of their husband or children; and hence they sensibly
declined during each generation in intellectual power. And this system
of female non-education or quietism still prevails.

My fear is that, with the best intentions, this policy has been carried
so far as to react injuriously on the Male Sex.

For the consequence is that, as things now are, we Males have to lead a
kind of bi-lingual, and I may almost say bimental, existence. With
Women, we speak of "love," "duty," "right," "wrong," "pity," "hope,"
and other irrational and emotional conceptions, which have no
existence, and the fiction of which has no object except to control
feminine exuberances; but among ourselves, and in our books, we have an
entirely different vocabulary and I may also say, idiom. "Love" them
becomes "the anticipation of benefits"; "duty" becomes "necessity" or
"fitness"; and other words are correspondingly transmuted. Moreover,
among Women, we use language implying the utmost deference for their
Sex; and they fully believe that the Chief Circle Himself is not more
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