But a general view of the Code may be obtained
from the following summary:--

1.  Every house shall have one entrance on the Eastern side,
for the use of Females only; by which all females shall enter
"in a becoming and respectful manner" (footnote 1) and not
by the Men's or Western door.

2.  No Female shall walk in any public place without continually
keeping up her Peace-cry, under penalty of death.

3.  Any Female, duly certified to be suffering from
St. Vitus's Dance, fits, chronic cold accompanied
by violent sneezing, or any disease necessitating
involuntary motions, shall be instantly destroyed.

In some of the States there is an additional Law
forbidding Females, under penalty of death,
from walking or standing in any public place
without moving their backs constantly from
right to left so as to indicate their presence
to those behind them; other oblige a Woman,
when travelling, to be followed by one of her sons,
or servants, or by her husband; others confine
Women altogether in their houses except during
the religious festivals.  But it has been found
by the wisest of our Circles or Statesmen
that the multiplication of restrictions on Females
tends not only to the debilitation and diminution
of the race, but also to the increase of domestic
murders to such an extent that a State loses
more than it gains by a too prohibitive Code.

For whenever the temper of the Women is thus exasperated
by confinement at home or hampering regulations abroad,
they are apt to vent their spleen upon their husbands and children;
and in the less temperate climates the whole male population
of a village has been sometimes destroyed in one or two hours
of a simultaneous female outbreak.  Hence the Three Laws,
mentioned above, suffice for the better regulated States,
and may be accepted as a rough exemplification of our Female Code.

After all, our principal safeguard is found, not in Legislature,
but in the interests of the Women themselves.  For, although they
can inflict instantaneous death by a retrograde movement,
yet unless they can at once disengage their stinging extremity
from the struggling body of their victim, their own frail bodies
are liable to be shattered.

The power of Fashion is also on our side.  I pointed out that
in some less civilized States no female is suffered to stand
in any public place without swaying her back from right to left.
This practice has been universal among ladies of any pretensions
to breeding in all well-governed States, as far back as the memory
of Figures can reach.  It is considered a disgrace to any state
that legislation should have to enforce what ought to be,
and is in every respectable female, a natural instinct.
The rhythmical and, if I may so say, well-modulated undulation
of the back in our ladies of Circular rank is envied and imitated
by the wife of a common Equilateral, who can achieve nothing beyond
a mere monotonous swing, like the ticking of a pendulum;
and the regular tick of the Equilateral is no less admired
and copied by the wife of the progressive and aspiring Isosceles,
in the females of whose family no "back-motion" of any kind
has become as yet a necessity of life.  Hence, in every family
of position and consideration, "back motion" is as prevalent
as time itself; and the husbands and sons in these households
enjoy immunity at least from invisible attacks.

Not that it must be for a moment supposed that our Women are
destitute of affection.  But unfortunately the passion of the
moment predominates, in the Frail Sex, over every other consideration.
This is, of course, a necessity arising from their unfortunate
conformation.  For as they have no pretensions to an angle,
being inferior in this respect to the very lowest of the Isosceles,
they are consequently wholly devoid of brainpower, and have
neither reflection, judgment nor forethought, and hardly any memory.
Hence, in their fits of fury, they remember no claims and recognize
no distinctions.  I have actually known a case where a Woman
has exterminated her whole household, and half an hour afterwards,
when her rage was over and the fragments swept away,
has asked what has become of her husband and children.

Obviously then a Woman is not to be irritated as long as she
is in a position where she can turn round.  When you have them
in their apartments--which are constructed with a view
to denying them that power--you can say and do what you like;
for they are then wholly impotent for mischief, and will
not remember a few minutes hence the incident for which
they may be at this moment threatening you with death,
nor the promises which you may have found it necessary
to make in order to pacify their fury.

On the whole we got on pretty smoothly in our domestic relations,
except in the lower strata of the Military Classes.  There the want
of tact and discretion on the part of the husbands produces at times
indescribable disasters.  Relying too much on the offensive weapons
of their acute angles instead of the defensive organs of good sense
and seasonable simulations, these reckless creatures too often neglect
the prescribed construction of the women's apartments, or irritate
their wives by ill-advised expressions out of doors, which they
refuse immediately to retract.  Moreover a blunt and stolid regard
for literal truth indisposes them to make those lavish promises
by which the more judicious Circle can in a moment pacify his consort.
The result is massacre; not, however, without its advantages,
as it eliminates the more brutal and troublesome of the Isosceles;
and by many of our Circles the destructiveness of the Thinner Sex
is regarded as one among many providential arrangements for suppressing
redundant population, and nipping Revolution in the bud.

Yet even in our best regulated and most approximately Circular
families I cannot say that the ideal of family life is so high
as with you in Spaceland.  There is peace, in so far as the absence
of slaughter may be called by that name, but there is necessarily
little harmony of tastes or pursuits; and the cautious wisdom
of the Circles has ensured safety at the cost of domestic comfort.
In every Circular or Polygonal household it has been a habit
from time immemorial--and now has become a kind of instinct
among the women of our higher classes--that the mothers and daughters
should constantly keep their eyes and mouths towards their husband
and his male friends; and for a lady in a family of distinction
to turn her back upon her husband would be regarded as a kind of portent,
involving loss of STATUS.  But, as I shall soon shew, this custom,
though it has the advantage of safety, is not without disadvantages.

In the house of the Working Man or respectable Tradesman--where the
wife is allowed to turn her back upon her husband, while pursuing
her household avocations--there are at least intervals of quiet,
when the wife is neither seen nor heard, except for the humming sound
of the continuous Peace-cry; but in the homes of the upper classes
there is too often no peace.  There the voluble mouth and bright
penetrating eye are ever directed toward the Master of the household;
and light itself is not more persistent than the stream of Feminine
discourse.  The tact and skill which suffice to avert a Woman's sting
are unequal to the task of stopping a Woman's mouth; and as the wife
has absolutely nothing to say, and absolutely no constraint of wit,
sense, or conscience to prevent her from saying it, not a few cynics
have been found to aver that they prefer the danger of the death-dealing
but inaudible sting to the safe sonorousness of a Woman's other end.

To my readers in Spaceland the condition of our Women may seen
truly deplorable, and so indeed it is.  A Male of the lowest type
of the Isosceles may look forward to some improvement of his angle,
and to the ultimate elevation of the whole of his degraded caste;
but no Woman can entertain such hopes for her sex.  "Once a Woman,
always a Woman" is a Decree of Nature; and the very Laws of Evolution
seem suspended in her disfavour.  Yet at least we can admire the wise
Prearrangement which has ordained that, as they have no hopes, so they
shall have no memory to recall, and no forethought to anticipate,
the miseries and humiliations which are at once a necessity of their
existence and the basis of the constitution of Flatland.

SECTION 5  Of our Methods of Recognizing one another

You, who are blessed with shade as well as light, you, who are
gifted with two eyes, endowed with a knowledge of perspective,
and charmed with the enjoyment of various colours, you, who can
actually SEE an angle, and contemplate the complete circumference
of a Circle in the happy region of the Three Dimensions--
how shall I make it clear to you the extreme difficulty which we
in Flatland experience in recognizing one another's configuration?

Recall what I told you above.  All beings in Flatland, animate and
inanimate, no matter what their form, present TO OUR VIEW the same,
or nearly the same, appearance, viz. that of a straight Line.  How then
can one be distinguished from another, where all appear the same?

The answer is threefold.  The first means of recognition is the sense
of hearing; which with us is far more highly developed than with you,
and which enables us not only to distinguish by the voice of our
personal friends, but even to discriminate between different classes,
at least so far as concerns the three lowest orders, the Equilateral,
the Square, and the Pentagon--for the Isosceles I take no account.
But as we ascend the social scale, the process of discriminating
and being discriminated by hearing increases in difficulty, partly because
voices are assimilated, partly because the faculty of voice-discrimination
is a plebeian virtue not much developed among the Aristocracy.  And wherever
there is any danger of imposture we cannot trust to this method.
Amongst our lowest orders, the vocal organs are developed to a degree
more than correspondent with those of hearing, so that an Isosceles
can easily feign the voice of a Polygon, and, with some training,
that of a Circle himself.  A second method is therefore more
commonly resorted to.

FEELING is, among our Women and lower classes--about our upper
classes I shall speak presently--the principal test of recognition,
at all events between strangers, and when the question is, not as to
the individual, but as to the class.  What therefore "introduction"
is among the higher classes in Spaceland, that the process of "feeling"
is with us.  "Permit me to ask you to feel and be felt by my friend
Mr. So-and-so"--is still, among the more old-fashioned of our
country gentlemen in districts remote from towns, the customary
formula for a Flatland introduction.  But in the towns, and among men
of business, the words "be felt by" are omitted and the sentence is
abbreviated to, "Let me ask you to feel Mr. So-and-so"; although it is
assumed, of course, that the "feeling" is to be reciprocal.  Among our
still more modern and dashing young gentlemen--who are extremely
averse to superfluous effort and supremely indifferent to the
purity of their native language--the formula is still further
curtailed by the use of "to feel" in a technical sense, meaning,