What would you say to such a
visitor? Would not you have him locked up? Well, that is my fate: and
it is as natural for us Flatlanders to lock up a Square for preaching
the Third Dimension, as it is for you Spacelanders to lock up a Cube
for preaching the Fourth. Alas, how strong a family likeness runs
through blind and persecuting humanity in all Dimensions! Points,
Lines, Squares, Cubes, Extra-Cubes--we are all liable to the same
errors, all alike the Slaves of our respective Dimensional prejudices,
as one of your Spaceland poets has said--

'One touch of Nature makes all worlds akin'."

[Note: The Author desires me to add, that the misconception of some of
his critics on this matter has induced him to insert in his dialogue
with the Sphere, certain remarks which have a bearing on the point in
question, and which he had previously omitted as being tedious and
unnecessary.]

On this point the defence of the Square seems to me to be impregnable.
I wish I could say that his answer to the second (or moral) objection
was equally clear and cogent. It has been objected that he is a
woman-hater; and as this objection has been vehemently urged by those
whom Nature's decree has constituted the somewhat larger half of the
Spaceland race, I should like to remove it, so far as I can honestly do
so. But the Square is so unaccustomed to the use of the moral
terminology of Spaceland that I should be doing him an injustice if I
were literally to transcribe his defence against this charge. Acting,
therefore, as his interpreter and summarizer, I gather that in the
course of an imprisonment of seven years he has himself modified his
own personal views, both as regards Women and as regards the Isosceles
or Lower Classes. Personally, he now inclines to the opinion of the
Sphere that the Straight Lines are in many important respects superior
to the Circles. But, writing as a Historian, he has identified himself
(perhaps too closely) with the views generally adopted by Flatland, and
(as he has been informed) even by Spaceland, Historians; in whose pages
(until very recent times) the destinies of Women and of the masses of
mankind have seldom been deemed worthy of mention and never of careful
consideration.

In a still more obscure passage he now desires to disavow the Circular
or aristocratic tendencies with which some critics have naturally
credited him. While doing justice to the intellectual power with which
a few C