BOOKS.
"THE FIXED PERIOD." *
The Fixed Period is a humorous sketch of life towards the end of the twentieth century, as it might be affected by an attempt to reconstruct the conditions of human existence so as to cat off altogether from it the period of dwindling and de- caying powers, and fix an inevitable limit to the age of men. Mr. Trollope supposes that one of the Pacific Colonies of Great Britain, which he calls Britannula, has thrown off her connection with the mother-country, established a Re- public, and passed a law that the age of her citizens shall never exceed sixty-eight years,—and that the last year between sixty-seven and sixty-eight is to be passed meditatively in a kind of honourable seclusion, in a College established for that purpose, where the old shall be " deposited" at sixty-seven, and receive euthanasia a year afterwards. The law has, it is supposed, been passed by large majorities, but majorities of the young only, for the island, which had been peopled from New Zealand, was peopled almost wholly by the young, while the few who were really old at the time of the settlement were exempted from its operation. The idea of the tale is to show the difficulties, not to say impossibilities, with which any attempt to remodel human nature by legislative enactment in a sense unfavourable to natural old age, would have to con- tend, and how genuinely such an independent Republic would be relieved by the peremptory determination of the old world to redress, by its interference, the theoretic caprices of the new. Mr. Trollope works out his grim joke with a good deal of humour. Nobody in this story goes so far as to deny that if by the arrangements of Providence man never did pass the age of sixty-eight, a great mass of trouble, misery, and decay would thereby be spared to the community thus specially pro- tected against the evils of mental and physical decrepitude. The difficulties which the new law has to encounter, do not consist in any general belief that the evening of life brings with it a positive benefit to the community, but only in the intolerable repulsion which arrangements for the voluntary removal of the old and weak, whether they have been loved and reverenced, or neither loved nor reverenced, by their fellow-citizens, must excite in almost all minds, so soon as it became necessary to think of enforcing them. The difficulty is, of course, increased by the very dismal proposal for the passing of the last year in a life of pompous meditation at the public expense. The year of preliminary meditation is regarded by everybody as a penal year, a year for enhancing the horrors of death by concentrating the mind, amidst a gloomy solitude, on the idea of death. The victim to whose lot it falls to be first " deposited" in the College by way of preparation for euthanasia, is a handsome, prosperous, and ac- tive old man, with every gift for the business of the world, with a very beautiful daughter, and with a mind that shrinks, in spite of itself, from all meditation on the life beyond. The Pre- sident of the little republic, who is the most enthusiastic of all the advocates of "the Fixed Period," and who is one of the warmest of the personal friends of the first victim, has promised himself to conduct that victim to his temporary home in the college, to deposit him there, and to keep him company, if he will have him, during the year of preparation for the sacrifice. Whether this programme could in any case have been carried out, Mr. Trollope does not allow his supposed hero to inform us, but he shows us that all the circumstances which might have • The Fixed Period. A Novel. By Anthony Trollope. 2 vols. London : W. Blackwood and Sons.
favoured the scheme, had the first victim, Gabriel Crasweller, been eager, or even willing for it,—namely, his wealth, his popu- larity, his own former attachment to the policy itself,—actually operate most powerfully to make the scheme more intolerable than ever. He himself revolts against it ; his daughter revolts against it ; her lover, who is the President's own son, revolts against it ; all the other victims, whose turn is coming next, revolt violently against it ; while the President's own wife uni- formly treats the new law as moonshine, and professes to regard her husband's infatuation on the subject as the result of indi- gestion and unwholesome habits of living. The year of pre- paration which was intended to break the shock to human nature, is discovered to be a great aggravation of it, which might well turn the brain before the moment came to take the life. And altogether, the unfortunate statesman who had per- suaded Britannula, amidst general rejoicings, to accept the nes law while the moment of euthanasia was still distant for all„ finds everything turning against him, and discovers the worst of all foes in those of his own household, so soon as the moment. approaches for translating the theory into practice.
At last, England sends out Sir Ferdinando Brown to reclaim, the little island as a Crown colony, and to put an end at once to the law of " the Fixed Period," and she enforces her claim with a gunboat and a 250-ton swivel gun, which is to destroy Gladstono- polis rather than allow its inhabitants to deposit weak old men and women in the college in which they are to be prepared for their end. The attempts of the unhappy President to persuade his fellow-men, when the moment for practical action arrives, that it is a highly honourable destiny to be " deposited " in the college which shall prepare them for death, are, of course, ludicrous failures. The first victim begins the break-down by trying to persuade his friends that he is a year younger than the truth, and then, when he abandons that fiction, steadily treats the law for which he had enthusiastically voted as a thoroughly cruel one, the real significance of which no one had adequately understood. In the end, even the President himself, who had persuaded an enthusiastic legislature to abolish old age and curtail human life of its melancholy and fruitless decline, has to admit to himself that he can only hope at best to secure the hearty consent of one generation to such a principle, by ex- cluding not only it, but its children, from the operation of the plan, and that a consent so secured is not very likely so to- impress the imaginations of the children reared in the belief that death at a " Fixed Period " is the true ideal, that any subse- quent generation would ever begin to apply such an ideal to actual life. An enthusiast may, perhaps, obtain a theoretical adhesion to the principle while it is all in the vague distance, but the moment it begins to suggest the rupture of actual ties, human nature revolts against even its own theories. A com- pulsory euthanasia for the weak and old cannot be enforced by all the armies in the world. But the interference to prevent a compulsory euthanasia can be backed by armies, because then the physical power comes in aid of the outraged sentiment of humanity.
The joke is a somewhat grim one, but we need hardly say that Mr. Trollope treats it from the laughing rather than the grim point of view. He does not attempt to touch the tragic side of the situation, except in the mildest possible way. What he does care for is to show how absurdly a man flounders about who finds that he has persuaded any large number of people to believe that human nature can be essentially changed by any legislative proceeding, so soon as he finds that it cannot be so, changed, and that he is attempting the impossible. The hopeless scrape into which the innovator has got himself, the ludicrous- ness of the convulsions with which aged men struggle against the determination of a Fixed Period for their death, the con- tempt of the women for the new law, the ease with which youth and beauty turn the scales against the provisions of a regular sta- tute, the plausibility of the new Governor sent out by England to resume sway over the capricious colony, and the sinking of the enthusiast's heart when he comes to contemplate preaching his gospel in England, are all touched off with a very light andlaughing manner, as by one who cares more to show us how easy it is to theorise ourselves into a very dismal sort of blind alley, rather than as by one who cares to show us that the weakness in• which life ordinarily ends is an essential part of its whole mean- ing. This little story is rather an amusing exposure of doctrinaire audacity and folly, than a serious apology for the time an thought and care devoted to weakness, helplessness, and decay.
The following passage will show the general character of this.
rather grim little jeu d'esprit. It is the passage in which the ex-President, fighting against the teaching of his own experience, states the arguments by which he had persuaded the Assembly to pass the law of "the Fixed Period" and the anticipations which he had indulged of its beneficent operation:— "It was put forward by some who opposed the movement, that the old themselves would not like it. I never felt sure of that, nor do I now. When the colony had become used to the Fixed-Period system, the old would become accustomed, as well as the young. It is to be understood that a euthanasia was to be prepared for them,—and how many, as men now are, does a euthanasia await ? And they would depart with the full respect of all their fellow-citizens. To how many does that lot now fall ? During the last years of their lives they were to be saved from any of the horrors of poverty. How many now lack the comforts they cannot earn for themselves ? And to them there would be no degraded feeling that they were the recipients of charity. They would be prepared for their departure, for the benefit of their country, surrounded by all the comforts to which, at their time of life, they would be susceptible, in a college maintained at the public expense ; and each, as he drew nearer to the happy day, would be treated with still increasing honour. I myself bad gone most closely into the question of expense, and had found that by the use of machinery the college could almost be made self.supporting. But we should save on an average £50 for each man and woman who had departed. When our population should have become a million, presuming that one only in fifty would have reached the desired age, the sum actually saved to the colony would amount to £1,000,000 a year. It would keep us out of debt, make for us our railways, render all our rivers navigable, construct our bridges, and leave us shortly the richest people on God's earth ! And this would be effected by a measure doing more good to the aged than to any other class of the community ! Many arguments were used against us, but were vain and futile in their conception. In it religion was brought to bear ; and in talking of this, the terrible word `murder' was brought into common use. I remember start- ling the House by forbidding any member to use a phrase so revolt- ing to the majesty of the people. Murder ! Did any one who at- tempted to deter us by the use of foul language bethink himself that murder, to be murder, must be opposed to the law ? This thing was to be done by the law. There can be no other murder. If a murderer be hanged,—in England, I mean, for in Britannula we have no capital punishment,—is that murder ? It is not so, only because the law enacts it. I and a few others did succeed at last in stopping the use of that word My readers will perceive that I am an enthusiast. But there are reforms so great that a man can- not but be enthusiastic when he has received into bis very soul the truth of any human improvement. Alas me ! I shall never live to see carried out the glory of this measure, to which I have devoted the best years of my existence. The college, which has been built under my auspices as a preparation for the happy departure, is to be made a Chamber of Commerce. Those aged men who were awaiting, as I verily believe, in impatience, the coming day of their perfected dignity, have been turned loose in the world, and allowed to grovel again with mundane thoughts amidst the idleness of years that are useless. Our bridges, our railways, our Government are not provided for. Our young men are again becoming torpid beneath the weight imposed upon them. I was, in truth, wrong to think that so great a reform could be brought to perfection within the days of the first reformers. A divine idea has to be made com- mon to men's minds by frequent ventilation, before it will be seen to be fit for humanity. Did not the first Christians all suffer affliction, poverty, and martyrdom ? How many centuries has it taken in the history of the world to induce it to denounce the not yet abolished theory of slavery ? A throne, a lord, and a bishop still remain to encumber the earth ! What right had I, then, as the first of the Fixed-Periodists, to hope that I might live to see my scheme carried out, or that I might be allowed to depart as among the first glorious recipients of its advantages ?"
The "aged men who were awaiting, as I verily believe, in impa- tience, the coming day of their perfected dignity " are certainly not mentioned in the story. Mr. Trollope here makes his hero deviate not a little from the truth, to which in other cases he adheres fairly enough. But it is not, perhaps, very easy to pre- vent the satire of the situation, from occasionally passing into extravagance. Nor in a jeu d'esprit like this ought we to object to it. The only fault we have to find with the story is that the subject is somewhat too grim for light treatment, and that, in consequence, genuinely religious creeds are occasionally very lightly handled. A novel the book hardly is, unless Erewhon and Lord Lytton's story, called The Coming Race, are novels also. But a clever, if not altogether agreeable, flight of fancy it certainly is.
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