a Regular Figure,
that is to say of regular construction. By this I mean that a Woman
must not only be a line, but a straight line; that an Artisan or
Soldier must have two of his sides equal; that Tradesmen must have
three sides equal; Lawyers (of which class I am a humble member), four
sides equal, and, generally, that in every Polygon, all the sides must
be equal.

The sizes of the sides would of course depend upon the age of the
individual. A Female at birth would be about an inch long, while a
tall adult Woman might extend to a foot. As to the Males of every
class, it may be roughly said that the length of an adult's size, when
added together, is two feet or a little more. But the size of our
sides is not under consideration. I am speaking of the EQUALITY of
sides, and it does not need much reflection to see that the whole of
the social life in Flatland rests upon the fundamental fact that Nature
wills all Figures to have their sides equal.

If our sides were unequal our angles might be unequal. Instead of its
being sufficient to feel, or estimate by sight, a single angle in order
to determine the form of an individual, it would be necessary to
ascertain each angle by the experiment of Feeling. But life would be
too short for such a tedious groping. The whole science and art of
Sight Recognition would at once perish; Feeling, so far as it is an
art, would not long survive; intercourse would become perilous or
impossible; there would be an end to all confidence, all forethought;
no one would be safe in making the most simple social arrangements; in
a word, civilization might relapse into barbarism.

Am I going too fast to carry my Readers with me to these obvious
conclusions? Surely a moment's reflection, and a single instance from
common life, must convince every one that our social system is based
upon Regularity, or Equality of Angles. You meet, for example, two or
three Tradesmen in the street, whom your recognize at once to be
Tradesman by a glance at their angles and rapidly bedimmed sides, and
you ask them to step into your house to lunch. This you do at present
with perfect confidence, because everyone knows to an inch or two the
area occupied by an adult Triangle: but imagine that your Tradesman
drags behind his regular and respectable vertex, a parallelogram of
twelve or thirteen inches in diagonal:--what are you to do with such a
monster sticking fast in your house door?

But I am insulti