the arts of life? Are
the houses and doors and churches in Flatland to be altered in order to
accommodate such monsters? Are our ticket-collectors to be required to
measure every man's perimeter before they allow him to enter a theatre,
or to take his place in a lecture room? Is an Irregular to be exempted
from the militia? And if not, how is he to be prevented from carrying
desolation into the ranks of his comrades? Again, what irresistible
temptations to fraudulent impostures must needs beset such a creature!
How easy for him to enter a shop with his polygonal front foremost, and
to order goods to any extent from a confiding tradesman! Let the
advocates of a falsely called Philanthropy plead as they may for the
abrogation of the Irregular Penal Laws, I for my part have never known
an Irregular who was not also what Nature evidently intended him to
be--a hypocrite, a misanthropist, and, up to the limits of his power, a
perpetrator of all manner of mischief.

Not that I should be disposed to recommend (at present) the extreme
measures adopted by some States, where an infant whose angle deviates
by half a degree from the correct angularity is summarily destroyed at
birth. Some of our highest and ablest men, men of real genius, have
during their earliest days laboured under deviations as great as, or
even greater than forty-five minutes: and the loss of their precious
lives would have been an irreparable injury to the State. The art of
healing also has achieved some of its most glorious triumphs in the
compressions, extensions, trepannings, colligations, and other surgical
or diaetetic operations by which Irregularity has been partly or wholly
cured. Advocating therefore a VIA MEDIA, I would lay down no fixed or
absolute line of demarcation; but at the period when the frame is just
beginning to set, and when the Medical Board has reported that recovery
is improbably, I would suggest that the Irregular offspring be
painlessly and mercifully consumed.

SECTION 8 Of the Ancient Practice of Painting

If my Readers have followed me with any attention up to this point,
they will not be surprised to hear that life is somewhat dull in
Flatland. I do not, of course, mean that there are not battles,
conspiracies, tumults, factions, and all those other phenomena which
are supposed to make History interesting; nor would I deny that the
strange mixture of the problems of life and the problems of
Mathematics, conti