anything Circular as containing any element of
weakness--appears to me to be found in their relations with Women.

As it is of the utmost importance for Society that Irregular births
should be discouraged, it follows that no Woman who has any
Irregularities in her ancestry is a fit partner for one who desires
that his posterity should rise by regular degrees in the social scale.

Now the Irregularity of a Male is a matter of measurement; but as all
Women are straight, and therefore visibly Regular so to speak, one has
to devise some other means of ascertaining what I may call their
invisible Irregularity, that is to say their potential Irregularities
as regards possible offspring. This is effected by carefully-kept
pedigrees, which are preserved and supervised by the State; and without
a certified pedigree no Woman is allowed to marry.

Now it might have been supposed that a Circle--proud of his ancestry
and regardful for a posterity which might possibly issue hereafter in a
Chief Circle--would be more careful than any other to choose a wife who
had no blot on her escutcheon. But it is not so. The care in choosing
a Regular wife appears to diminish as one rises in the social scale.
Nothing would induce an aspiring Isosceles, who had hopes of generating
an Equilateral Son, to take a wife who reckoned a single Irregularity
among her Ancestors; a Square or Pentagon, who is confident that his
family is steadily on the rise, does not inquire above the
five-hundredth generation; a Hexagon or Dodecagon is even more careless
of the wife's pedigree; but a Circle has been known deliberately to
take a wife who has had an Irregular Great-Grandfather, and all because
of some slight superiority of lustre, or because of the charms of a low
voice--which, with us, even more than you, is thought "an excellent
thing in 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 proved 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