The history of the newts was characterised from the first by good and rational organisation and that is primarily, although not solely, thanks to the Newt Syndicate; it should be acknowledged that science, philanthropy, education, the press and other factors played a substantial part in the astonishing expansion and progress of the newts, but it’s still true to say that it was the Newt Syndicate that conquered new continents and coastlines for them, virtually day by day, even when they had to overcome many obstacles to their expansion. 4 The syndicate’s quarterly statements show that the newts were gradually settled in the ports of India and China; how colonies of newts overwhelmed the coasts of Africa and jumped over to America where a new and modern hatchery soon appeared on the Gulf of Mexico; how, as well as the broad waves of colonisations, smaller, pioneering groups of newts were sent out to establish new places for migration. The Newt Syndicate sent, for instance, a thousand top quality newts as a present to Waterstaat in Holland, six hundred were given to the city of Marseilles to clean out the old harbour, and similar presents were made elsewhere. The dispersion and settlement of the newts around the world was, unlike the expansion of mankind, simply well planned and enormous; left to Nature it would certainly have taken thousands of years; but that is merely hypothetical. Nature has never been so enterprising and targeted as man’s industry and commerce. It seemed that the lively demand for them had its influence on the newts’ own reproductive abilities; the number of tadpoles produced by any one female rose to as much as a hundred and fifty per year. Loses to sharks and other predatory fish were reduced almost to zero after the newts had been equipped with underwater pistols and dumdum bullets to protect themselves. 5
The expansion of the newt population did not run smoothly everywhere, of course; in some places conservative groups took severe protective measures against the introduction of new workforces, seeing the newts as competition with human workers; 6 Others expressed the fear that the newts, living on small marine animals, posed a threat to fishing, there were those who argued that the newts would undermine coastlines and islands with their underwater tunnels and passageways. There were certainly many people who warned against the introduction of the newts; but whenever any innovation or any progress has been made it has always met with resistance and mistrust; that was the case with industrial machinery and it was the case with the newts. In other places misunderstandings of other sorts appeared, 7 but the news media all round the world, who understood the enormous commercial possibilities offered by the newts, provided a great deal of help in these matters and with the help of effective and large scale advertising campaigns the salamanders became established all around the globe and were welcomed with lively interest and even enthusiasm. 8 Trading in newts was mostly in the hands of the Newt Syndicate, which carried it out with its own specially made tanker ships; the centre of trading was the Salamander Building in Singapore which functioned as a kind of newt stock exchange. 9 As the turnover in newts rose, trading, of course, became very wild; the Newt Syndicate was no longer able to observe and control all the hatcheries established by the late Captain van Toch in many places and especially around the small and remote islands of Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia; many of the bays inhabited by newts were left to their own devices. As a result, while the cultivation of salamanders was well organised and controlled in some areas, in others there was extensive hunting of wild newts, similar in many ways to the seal hunting expeditions that used to take place; the hunting expeditions were to some extent illegal, but as there were no laws protecting the newts no-one was ever brought to account for anything more serious than setting foot on the territory of a sovereign state without permission; as the newts on these islands multiplied at an astonishing rate and now and then caused damage to the local people’s fields and orchards, these uncontrolled newt hunts were tacitly regarded as a natural way of regulating the newt population. 10
Trading in newts was well organised, and there was an extensive advertising campaign in the press, but the biggest influence in the expansion of the newt population was the enormous wave of technological idealism which inundated the entire world at that time. G.H. Bondy rightly foresaw that from then on the human spirit would be working with whole new continents and new Atlantisses. The whole of the Newt Age was dominated by a lively and fertile dispute among the technically minded as to whether firm land should be constructed with shores of reinforced concrete or merely light land laid down as deposits of marine sand. New and gigantic projects appeared almost every day: there were some Italian engineers who suggested the construction of a Great Italy taking in most of the Mediterranean Sea as far as Tripoli, the Balearic Islands and the Dodecanese, and others who wanted to establish a new continent to be called ‘Lemuria’ to the east of Italian Somalia which would take in the entire Indian Ocean in one move. With the help of armies of newts, new islands covering thirteen and a half acres were indeed laid down near the Somalian port of Mogadishu. Japan planned and partly realised a new great island to cover the former Marian Archipelago and made preparations to combine the Caroline and Marshall Islands into two big islands, provisionally named ‘New Nippon’; each of the two islands was to be created by means of an artificial volcano which would remind their prospective inhabitants of the famous Mount Fuji. It was also rumoured that German engineers were secretly building a durable, concrete landmass in the Sargasso Sea which was to be the new Atlantis and, it was said, would be a threat to French East Africa; but it seems that this went no further than laying the foundations. In Holland, Zeeland was reclaimed; France combined Guadeloupe, Grande Terre, Basse Terre and La Désirade into one big island; the United States began to build the first airfield-island on the 37th. meridian (two storeys high with an enormous hotel, sport stadium, funfair and a cinema for five thousand people). It simply seemed that the last limits imposed on human expansion imposed by the sea had now fallen; a new and radiant age of amazing technical plans began; man realised that now, at last, he was becoming the Lord of the World, and that was thanks to the newts who had stepped onto the world stage at the right moment and, as it were, with the force of history. There is no doubt that the newts would never have burgeoned the way they did if our own technical age had not prepared so many jobs for them and so many places of long-term employment. The future of the Workers of the Sea now seemed to be guaranteed for centuries to come.
Science, too, played an important part in the development of newt commerce, and quickly turned its attention to investigating both the newts’ physiology and their psychology. 11 Because of this scientific research people stopped regarding the newts as some kind of miracle; in the cold light of science the salamanders lost much of their aura of primordial strangeness and uniqueness; once they had become the subject of psychological tests they began to seem very average and uninteresting; their enormous talents were dismissed by the scientists to the realm of myth. The common or garden salamander was identified, and it turned out to be something entirely dull and quite limited in its abilities; only the newspapers would now and then display a Miracle Newt that could multiply five figure numbers in its head, but people soon got tired of that, especially when it had been shown that even a mere human could perform the same trick given the right training. People simply began to consider the newts as much a matter of course as an adding machine or other device; they now no longer saw anything mysterious about them, the newts no longer seemed to have emerged from the unknown depths of the sea with who knows what purpose. And people never do regard something as mysterious if it serves and benefits them, only if it’s something harmful or threatening; and as the newts, as has been shown, were highly versatile and useful, 12 they were simply accepted as a basic part of a rational and ordinary life.
In short, it was entirely natural that the newts stopped being a sensation, even though there were now as many as a hundred million of them; the public interest they had excited had been the interest of a novelty. They still appeared now and then in films (Sally and Andy, the Two Good Salamanders) and on the cabaret stage where singers endowed with an especially bad voice came on in the role of newts with rasping voices and atrocious grammar, but as soon as the newts had become a familiar and large-scale phenomenon the problems they presented, so to speak, were of a different character. 13 Although the great newt sensation quickly evaporated it was replaced with something that was somewhat more solid - the Newt Question. Not for the first time in the history of mankind, the most vigorous activist in the Newt Question was of course a woman. This was Mme. Louise Zimmermann, the manager of a guest house for girls in Lausanne, who, with exceptional and boundless energy, propagated this noble maxim around the world: Give the newts a proper education! She would tirelessly draw attention both to the newts’ natural abilities and to the danger that might arise for human civilisation if the salamanders weren’t carefully taught to reason and to understand morals, but it was long before she met with anything but incomprehension from the public. 14 “Just as the Roman culture disappeared under the onslaught of the barbarians our own educated civilisation will disappear if it is allowed to become no more than an island in a sea of beings that are spiritually enslaved, our noble ideals cannot be allowed to become dependent on them,” she prophesied at six thousand three hundred and fifty seven lectures that she delivered at women’s institutes all over Europe, America, Japan, China, Turkey and elsewhere. “If our culture is to survive there must be education for all. We cannot have any peace to enjoy the gifts of our civilisation nor the fruits of our culture while all around us there are millions and millions of wretched and inferior beings artificially held down in the state of animals. Just as the slogan of the nineteenth century was ‘Freedom for Women’, so the slogan of our own age must be ‘GIVE THE NEWTS A PROPER EDUCATION!’” And on she went. Thanks to her eloquence and her incredible persistence, Mme. Louise Zimmermann mobilised women all round the world and gathered sufficient funds to enable her to found the First Newt Lyceum at Beaulieu (near Nice), where the tadpoles of salamanders working in Marseilles and Toulon were instructed in French language and literature, rhetoric, public behaviour, mathematics and cultural history. 15 The Girls’ School for Newts in Menton was slightly less successful, as the staple courses in music, diet and cookery and fine handwork (which Mme. Zimmermann insisted on for primarily pedagogical reasons) met with a remarkable lack of enthusiasm, if not with a stubborn hostility among its young students. In contrast with this, though, the first public examinations for young newts was such an instant and startling success that they were quickly followed by the establishment of the Marine Polytechnic for Newts at Cannes and the Newts’ University at Marseilles with the support of the society for the care and protection of animals; it was at this university that the first newt was awarded a doctorate of law.
The matter of newt education now began to develop quickly and along its normal path. Exemplary though the écoles Zimmermann were, the most progressive teachers raised a number of serious objections to them; in particular they insisted that the established humanistic schooling for young humans was not suitable for young newts; they certainly recommended the teaching of literature and history but they also recommended that as much time and facilities as possible should be devoted to modern practical subjects such as the natural sciences, craftwork, technical understanding, physical education and so on. These Reform Schools, or Schools for Practical Life, as they were known were, in their turn, passionately opposed by those who supported a classical education and declared that newts could only come to approach the lofty cultural level of human beings on the basis of Latin, and that there was no point in teaching them to speak if they weren’t also taught to recite poetry and perform oratory with the eloquence of Cicero. There was a long and rather heated debate which was finally settled when the schools for salamanders were taken over by the state and schools for human children were reformed so that they came as close as possible to the ideals of the Reform Schools for newts.
It was now a matter of course that other countries would also declare their belief in making the newts have a proper, state supervised education. One by one, all the seafaring nations declared themselves for it (with the exception of Great Britain, of course); and because these schools for newts were not burdened with the classical traditions of schools for human children, and were able to make use of all the latest methods in psychotechnology, technical education, pre-military exercises and other educational innovations, these schools quickly evolved into the most modern and scientifically advanced educational system in the world, envied by teachers and students everywhere.
As soon as there are schools there needs to be a language, and that raised the question of which of the world’s languages would be the best for the salamanders to learn. The first newts in the Pacific islands spoke, of course, in the Pidgin English they had picked up from natives and sailors; many of them spoke Malay or other local dialects. Newts bred for the market in Singapore were taught to speak Basic English, the scientifically simplified English that gets by with a few hundred expressions without the encumbrance of outdated grammar; and as a result this modified version of standard English began to be called Salamander English. In the exemplary écoles Zimmermann the newts expressed themselves in the language of Corneille; not, of course, for any chauvinistic reason but because that is simply part of any good education; at the reform schools, on the other hand, Esperanto was learned so that it would serve as a lingua franca. There were five or six other new Universal Languages which emerged around this time with the intention of replacing the Babylonian confusion of human languages with a single, common mother-tongue for the whole world of newts and men; needless to say that there were countless disputes about which of these international languages is the most useful, most euphonious and the most universal. The final result, of course, was that there was a different universal language propagated in every nation. 16
All this became simpler when the education of newts was nationalised: the newts in every state were to be brought up in the appropriate local language. Although the salamanders found it relatively easy to learn foreign languages and were keen to do so there were found to be some peculiar difficulties, partly to do with adapting their speech organs to human language and partly to do with mainly psychological reasons; they had difficulty, for instance, in pronouncing long words with many syllables and would try to reduce them to a single syllable which they would bark out in a rather nasal voice; they would say L instead of R and lisp on their sibilants; they would leave off grammatical endings, they never did learn to distinguish between ‘I’ and ‘we’ and the question of whether a noun was masculine or feminine was matter of complete indifference for them (this may have been manifestation of their indifference to sex outside the breeding season). In short, every language they learned took on new and characteristic forms in their mouths, reorganising it into something simpler and more rudimentary. It is worth nothing that their neologisms, pronounciations and simplified grammar was quickly adopted by both the simplest people in the ports and by the so-called best people; and from the ports this way of speaking spread out into the newspapers and was soon in general use. Even many humans stopped attending to grammatical gender, word endings were dropped, declinations disappeared; our golden youth neglected to say r properly and learned to lisp; few educated people were any longer certain what was meant by ‘indeterminism’ or ‘transcendent’, simply because these words, even for human beings, were too long and too hard to pronounce.
In short, for good or for ill, the newts became able to speak almost every language of the world according to what coast they lived on. About this time, some of the Czech national newspapers began to complain bitterly, no doubt with good reason, that none of the newts could speak their language. If there were salamanders who could speak Portuguese, Dutch and the languages of other small nations why were there none that could speak Czech? It was true, they conceded in regretful and learned terms, that Czechoslovakia had no sea coasts, and that means there will be no marine newts here, but that does not mean that Czechs should not play the same part in the culture of the world as many of the other nations whose language was being taught to thousands of newts, or perhaps even a greater part. It was only right and proper that the newts should also have some knowledge of Czech culture; but how were they to be informed about it if none of them knew the Czech language? It was not likely that someone somewhere in the world would acknowledge this cultural debt and found a chair in Czech and Czechoslovak literature at one of the newt universities. As the poet puts it, ‘Trust no-one in the whole wide world, we have no friends out there’. And so one of the newspaper articles declared that Czechs themselves would have to do something to rectify the matter. Whatever we’ve done in the world, it asserted, we’ve done by our own efforts! We have a duty and the right to try to recruit friends even among newts; but it seems that the foreign ministry does not have much interest in spreading the good name of our country and our products among newts, even though other, smaller nations devote millions to opening their cultural treasures to them as well as generating interest in their industrial products. - This article attracted a great deal of interest from the confederation of industry, and one result was that a brief handbook of Czech for newts was published, complete with illustrations of Czechoslovak handwriting styles. It may seem hard to believe, but this little book was remarkably successful and sold more than seven hundred copies. 17
Matters of education and language were, of course, only one aspect of the great newt problem which grew up, as it were, under people’s feet. The question quickly arose, for instance, of how people were to behave towards the newts in, so to speak, the social sphere. At first, in the almost prehistoric period of the Newt Age, there were, of course, societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals which passionately ensured that the newts were not treated in ways that were cruel or inhumane; and it was thanks to their continuous efforts that government offices almost everywhere saw to it that the regulations set out by police and veterinary inspectors for the conditions of other livestock applied also to newts. Opponents of vivisection signed many protests and petitions calling for a ban on scientific experiments on live newts; and many countries did indeed pass laws to that effect. 18 But as the newts became more educated it became less clear whether newts should simply be included under animal protection legislation; for some reason, not entirely clear, it seemed rather inappropriate. And so the Salamander Protection League was founded under the patronage of the Duchess of Huddersfield. This league, numbering more than two hundred members, mostly in England, achieved many effective and praiseworthy improvements for the newts; in particular, they succeeded in establishing special newt playgrounds on the coast where, undisturbed by inquisitive human eyes, their meetings and sporting celebrations took place (by which they probably meant their secret dances once a month); they ensured that all places of education (even including the University of Oxford) persuaded their students not to throw stones at newts; to some extent they ensured that young tadpoles at school weren’t over-burdened with work; and they even saw to it that places where newts lived or worked were surrounded by a high wooden fence that would protect them from various intrusions and, most importantly, would form an adequate barrier between the world of men and the world of newts. 19
However it was not long before these commendable private initiatives, intended to establish a fair and humane relationship between human society and that of newts, were found not to be enough. It was relatively easy to include salamanders into industrial processes, but it was much harder and more complicated to include them in any way into the existing precepts of society. People who were more conservative asserted that there was no question to be solved, there were no legal or social problems; the newts, they said, were simply the property of their employers and the employers were responsible for them and any damage they might cause; despite their undoubted intelligence the salamanders were legally no more than property, an object or an estate, and any legal measure concerning the newts would, they said, be a violation of the holy rights of private property. In response, others objected that as the newts were a kind of intelligent being and to a large extent responsible for their actions they might freely find various ways of violating existing laws. How could a newt owner be expected to bear the responsibility for any offences committed by his salamanders? A risk of that sort would certainly destroy any private initiative where the employment of newts was concerned. There are no fences in the sea, they said, newts cannot be closed in and kept under supervision. For this reason, it would be necessary to pass laws directed at the newts themselves; in this way they would respect the human legal order and conduct themselves in accordance with the regulations laid down for them. 20
As far as is known, the first laws governing salamanders were passed in France. The first paragraph set out the newts’ obligations in the event of mobilisation for war; the second (known as the Lex Deval) instructed the newts that they were allowed to settle only on those parts of the coast indicated by their owners or an appropriate office of local government; the third stipulated that newts were required, under any circumstances, to obey any order given them by a member of the police; any failure to obey a police order would entitle police authorities to punish them by means of incarceration in a place that was dry and brightly lit, or even to deny them the right to work for long periods of time. The left-wing parties responded by putting a motion to parliament that a legal social system for newts should be worked out. These social measures would limit the amount of work required from them and place certain obligations on anyone employing newts (eg. fourteen days leave at mating time in the spring); the extreme left objected that the newts should be designated as enemies of the working class because they work too hard in the service of capitalism, work for almost nothing, and thus they endanger the working man’s standard of living; this demand was followed up with a strike by harbour workers in Brest and large demonstrations in Paris; many people were injured and Deval was forced to resign his job as minister. In Italy the salamanders were placed under the authority of a special Newt Corporation made up of employers and public officials, in Holland they were governed by the ministry supervising coastal constructions, in short every state solved the newt problem in its own different way; but most of the public decisions governing public responsibility, and largely limiting the animal freedom enjoyed by the newts, were roughly the same anywhere you looked.
It should be understood that as soon as the first laws for newts were passed there were people who, in the name of jurisdicial logic, reasoned that if human society places certain obligations on the salamanders it would have to grant them certain rights. Any state that lays down laws for newts acknowledges, ipso facto, that they are beings capable of acting freely and responsibly, as legal subjects, or even as members of the state in which case their status as citizens would need to be adjusted in whatever legislation they lived under. It would, of course, have been possible to designate the newts as foreign immigrants; but in that case the state would be unable to exact certain services and duties from them in the event of mobilisation for war, which every country in the civilised world did do (with the exception of England). In the event of armed conflict we would certainly want the newts to protect our shorelines; but in that case we could not deny them certain civil rights such as the right to vote, the right of assembly, the right to participate in various public offices and so on. 21 It was even suggested that the newts had a kind of independent state of their own under the water; but these considerations and others like them remained purely academic; they never resulted in any practical solution, mainly because the newts themselves never asked for any civil rights from anyone.
There was another lively debate about the newts which took place without their direct interest or participation, and that was around the question of whether they could be baptised. The Catholic church took a firm stand from the start and said they certainly could not; as the newts were not the descendants of Adam they were not affected by Original Sin, the sacrament of baptism could not be used to cleanse them of it. The Holy Church had no wish to decide the question as to whether the newts had an immortal soul or any other share of God’s love and salvation; their good wishes towards the newts could only be shown by a special prayer for them, to be read on certain days at the same time as prayers for souls in Purgatory and intercessions for unbelievers. 22 For the Protestant church it was not so simple; they acknowledged that the newts had reason and could therefore understand Christian teaching, but they hesitated to make them members of the church and therefore brothers in Christ. So they restricted themselves to issuing an abridged form of the Holy Gospel for Newts on waterproof paper and distributed many million copies of it; they also considered whether they should work out some kind of Basic Christian for them, a rudimentary and simplified version of Christianity analogous to Basic English; but all attempts in this direction created so many theological disputes that in the end they had to give up on the idea. 23 Some of the religious sects, especially those from America, had fewer scruples in the matter; they sent their missionaries out to the newts to teach them the True Faith and baptised them according to the words of Scripture: Go out into the world and teach all nations. But very few missionaries succeeded in getting past the wooden fences that divided the newts from people; employers would not let them have access to the newts because their preaching might keep them away from work. So every so often you would see a preacher standing beside a tarred fence, zealously propounding the word of God, while the dogs fiercely barked at their enemy from the other side.
As far as is known, monism was spread quite widely among the newts, with some of the newts believing in materialism and some of them in the gold standard or some other scientific doctrine. One popular philosopher called Georg Sequenz even compiled a special set of religious teachings for the newts centred around a belief in something called the Great Salamander. This system of faith met with no success whatsoever among the newts but found many converts among human beings, especially in the major cities where almost overnight a large number of secret temples for the salamander cult appeared. 24 Most of the newts themselves, somewhat later on, adopted a different faith, although it is not known how they came to it; this was the worship of Moloch, whom they imagined as an enormous newt with a human head; it was said they had gigantic metal idols of this god under the water which they had had made by Armstrong or Krupp. However, no more details about this cult or its rituals were ever learned - despite their reputation for exceptional cruelty and secrecy - because they took place under water. It seems that this faith spread among them because the name ‘Moloch’ reminded them of the Latin and German words for newts (‘Molche’).
It is clear from the preceding paragraphs that the Newt Question started out, and for a long time remained, centred around whether and to what extent the newts had reason and whether, as clearly civilised beings, they would be capable of making use of certain human rights, even though only on the edge of the ordered society in which human beings lived; in other words it was an internal question for individual states and it was settled in the context of citizen’s rights. It was many years before it occurred to anyone that the Newt Question could have wide ranging international importance, or that it might become necessary to deal with the salamanders not only as intelligent beings but also as a newt collective or nation of newts. In truth, it should be said that the first step towards this conception of the Newt Problem was taken by some of the more eccentric Christian sects who tried to baptise the newts as instructed by Holy Scripture: Go out into the entire world and teach every nation. In this way it was made explicit that the newts were a sort of nation. 25 But the first international and significant acknowledgement of the newts as a nation was in the famous speech given at the Communist Internationals, signed by Comrade Molokov and addressed to “all the repressed and revolutionary newts throughout the world”. 26 This call seems to have had no direct effect on the newts themselves, but it was widely discussed in the press around the world and had great influence, at least, in that a rain of fervent invitations from every side began to fall on the newts, exhorting them, as the nation of greater newtdom, they should align themselves with this or that idealist, political or social program of human society. 27
Now the International Bureau of Employment in Geneva began to concern itself with the Newt Problem. Here there were two views in opposition to each other; one side acknowledged the newts as a new working class and strove to have all social legislation extended to them, regulating length of working day, paid holidays, insurance for invalidity and old age and so on; the other view, in contrast, declared that the newts were a growing danger as competition for human manpower and working newts were anti-social and should simply be banned. Not only employers’ representatives objected to this idea but also delegates from the working people, pointing out that the newts were not just a new army of workers but also a major and growing market. As has been said, in recent times the numbers employed in metal working (working tools, equipment, metal idols for the newts), weapon manufacture, chemical industry (underwater explosives), paper industry (schoolbooks for the newts), cement manufacture, forestry, artificial foodstuffs (Salamander food) and many other areas had all risen at a rate unprecedented in peace time; there was a rise of 27% in shipping tonnage compared with the period before the newts, coal production increased by 18.6%. The rise in employment and prosperity for people indirectly caused a rise in turnover in other branches of industry too. Most recently, the newts had been ordering more engineering parts according to their own designs, using them to assemble pneumatic drills, hammers, underwater motors, printing machinery, underwater radio equipment and other machinery, all to their own plans and all done underwater. These machine parts were paid for by higher productivity; by now a fifth of all world production in heavy industry and in fine mechanics were dependent on orders from the newts. If you put an end to the newts you can put an end to one factory in five; instead of modern prosperity there would be millions unemployed. The International Bureau of Employment could not, of course, simply ignore this objection, and in the end, and after long discussion, it arrived at this compromise solution, that “the above named group of employees, S (amphibians), may be employed only on water or underwater, and on the shore only as far as ten meters above the high water line; they may not extract coal or oil from beneath the seabed; they may not produce paper, textiles, or artificial leather made from seaweed to be marketed on land” and so on; these restrictions on newt manufacturing were set out in nineteen legal paragraphs which we will not cite in more detail, mainly because, needless to say, nobody paid them any attention; but as a magnanimous and truly international solution to the Newt Problem in the fields of commerce and society it was held up as a useful and imposing achievement.
In other respects, international recognition of the newts was somewhat slower, especially where cultural contact was concerned. When the much quoted article, “The Geological Structure of the Seabed around the Islands of the Bahamas”, was published in the specialist press and the name ‘John Seaman’ given as the author, then of course nobody realised that this was the scientific work of an educated salamander; but when newt-researchers appeared at scientific congresses or addressed various academic or learned societies to report on their studies in oceanography, geography, hydrobiology, higher mathematics or other precise sciences in it caused much consternation and indignation, expressed by the great Dr. Martel in the following words: “Do these vermin think they’ve got something to teach us?” The learned Dr. Onoshita from Japan, who dared to quite from a report by a newt (something to do with the development of the yoke sac of the fry of the deep sea fish, Argyropelecus Hemigymnus Cocco), he was ostracised by the scientific community and committed harakiri; it was a matter of honour and professional pride among university scientists that they don’t take into account any of the scientific work done by a newt. This increased the attention (if not outrage) given to the Centre Universitaire de Nice when it invited Dr. Charles Mercier, a highly learned newt from the harbour at Toulon, to give a celebratory lecture on the theme of conic sections in non-Euclidean geometry which was met with remarkable success. 28 Those attending the event included a delegate from Geneva, Mme. Maria Dimineanu; this outstanding and generous lady was so impressed by Dr. Mercier’s modesty and erudition (“Pauvre petit,” she is said to have sighed, “il est tellement laid!”) that she made it a part of her tirelessly active life to have the newts accepted as a member of the United Nations. Politicians tried in vain to explain to this eloquent and energetic lady that the salamanders could not be a member of the United Nations because they were not a sovereign state and did not have any territory. Mme. Dimineanu began to propagate the idea that the newts should have their own free territory somewhere on the planet and their own underwater state. This idea was of course rather unwelcome if not directly dangerous; eventually a happy solution was found in that the United Nations would set up a special Commission for the Study of the Newt Question, which was to include two delegates from the newt world; the first to be called on, under pressure from Mme. Dimineanu, was Dr. Charles Mercier of Toulon, and the second was a certain Don Mario, a fat and learned newt from Cuba carrying out scientific work in the field of plankton and neritic pelagial. In this way the newts reached the highest ever international acknowledgement of their existence. 29
So we see the salamanders achieving a steep and continuous rise. Their population is now estimated at seven thousand million, although with increasing civilisation their fertility shows a marked decline (to twenty or thirty tadpoles per female per year). They have occupied more than sixty percent of the world’s coastlines; coasts around the polar regions are still not habitable, but newts from Canada have begun to colonise the coast of Greenland, even succeeding in pushing the Eskimos back inland and taking the fishing industry and the trade in fish oils into their own hands. The upsurge in their material well-being went hand in hand with their progress in civilisation; they join the ranks of educated nations with compulsory schooling and can boast of many hundred of their own underwater newspapers distributed in millions of copies, scientific institutions whose buildings were an example to all, and so on. It should be understood that this cultural ascent was not always smooth and without internal disagreements; we know remarkably little about the internal affairs of the newts, but there are some indications (such as newts found dead with cuts to their noses and heads) that, under the ocean, there was a long, protracted and passionate dispute under the ocean between the young newts and the old. The young newts seem clearly to have been in favour of progress without exception or reserve, and declared that even under the water they should pursue all the educations known on the dry land with all their efforts, even including football, flirting, fascism and sexual perversions; whereas the old newts, it seemed, were more conservative to the nature of newtdom, were unwilling to give up the good old animal habits and instincts; they left no doubt about their condemnation of the young newts’ lust for novelty and saw therein a decline and a betrayal of traditional newt ideals; they were certainly also opposed to the foreign influences so blindly followed by the corrupted youth of today, and they asked whether it was worthy of the dignity of proud and self-conscious newts to ape everything done by humans. 30 We can imagine that slogans such as ‘Back to the Miocene!’, ‘Down with all Humanising Influences!’, ‘Fight for the Right for Newts to be Undisturbed!’ and so on were coined. Without a doubt, there were all the preconditions for a lively generational conflict of views, and for a profound revolution in the newts’ spiritual development; unfortunately, we are not able to give any more precise details, but we hope that the newts made what they could out of this conflict.
So now we see the newts on the way to their greatest flowering; but the world of human beings, too, was enjoying unprecedented prosperity. New continents were planned out with great enthusiasm, shallow waters were converted to dry land, and artificial islands for aeroplanes appeared in the middle of the oceans; but compared with the enormous technical projects which would entirely reconstruct the globe these were as nothing, and the projects awaited nothing but someone to finance them. The newts worked tirelessly in all the seas and on the edge of all the continents for as long as the night lasted; they seemed contented and asked for nothing for themselves but something to do and a piece of coastline where they could drill their holes and build the paths to their dark homes. They had their cities under the water and under the land, their subterranean metropoles, their Essens and their Birminghams twenty to fifty meters down at the bottom of the sea; they have their overcrowded industrial zones, ports, transport lines and cities of a million inhabitants; in short, they had their more or less 31 unknown but, it seems, highly technically developed world. Although they did not have their own kilns and foundries they were given metals by human beings in exchange for work. They did not have their own explosives but they bought them from human beings. Their fuel for transport was the sea with its tides and its currents, with its undertows and differences in temperature; they had to obtain their turbines from human beings but they were well able to make use of them; and what is civilisation if not the ability to make use of things invented by others? Even if the newts, let us say, had no thoughts of their own they were well able to have their own science. They had no music or literature but got by perfectly well without them; and people began to see that thanks to the newts everything was fantastically modern. People could even learn something from the newts - and no wonder: were the newts not amazingly successful and what should people take their example from if not from success? Never in the history of mankind had so much been manufactured, constructed and earned as in this great age. With the newts came enormous progress and the ideal known as Quantity. The phrase, “We people of the Newt Age”, became widely used, and used with justified pride; where could we have got in the old-fashioned Human Age with the slow, petty and useless fiddling known as culture, art, pure science or suchlike. The self aware people of the Newt Age declared that they would no longer waste their time delving into the Questions of the Universe; they would have enough to do just with the quantity of things being manufactured. the whole future of the world would consist in constantly raising production and consumption; and for that there would need to be still more newts so that they could produce even more and consume even more. The newts were a simply a matter of quantity; they had achieved their epoch-making changes because there were so many of them. Only now could man’s ingenuity work at full effectiveness, because it was working on a huge scale with extremely high manufacturing capacity and a record financial turnover; in short, this was a great age. And what was now still missing for universal prosperity and contentment to make this a true Happy New Age? What was preventing the creation of the Utopia we all longed for, where all these technical triumphs and magnificent possibilities would be harvested, where human happiness would combine with newts’ industry to open new horizons further and further to beyond what anyone could imagine?
Actually, there was nothing to prevent it; as now trade with the newts would be crowned with the wisdom of the world’s most competent administrators, who would also ensure in advance that the machinery of the New Age would run smoothly. In London a conference took place, attended by seafaring nations, where the International Convention on Salamanders was worked out and approved. The high officials who signed the convention agreed to bind themselves not to send their newts into the sovereign waters of other states; not to allow their newts, in any way, to violate the territorial integrity or acknowledged sphere of interest of any other state; that they would not, in any way, interfere in matters affecting the newts belonging to any other seafaring power; that any dispute between its salamanders and those of another state would be settled by the Court of Arbitration at The Hague; that newts would not be armed with any weapons of a calibre exceeding that which is normal for underwater shark guns; that they would not allow their newts to establish close contact with the salamanders of other sovereign states; that they would not assist their newts in the construction of new land or extending their territory without previous permission from the Standing Marine Commission in Geneva, and so on. (There were thirty-seven paragraphs in all) On the other hand, the British suggestion that marine powers should bind themselves not to oblige their newts to carry out any military exercises was rejected; the French suggestion that the salamanders should be internationalised and subjected to the authority of an international newt commission for regulating world waters was rejected; the German suggestion that every newt should have the symbol of the state to which it belonged branded into its skin was rejected; another German suggestion that every marine state be allowed only a certain number of newts so that the numbers in each state would be in proportion to each other was rejected; the Italian suggestion that states with an excess of salamanders be allocated new shores or areas of the sea bed for colonisation was rejected; the Japanese suggestion that they be given an international mandate to govern the newts as representatives of the coloured races (the newts were by nature black) was rejected. 32 Most of these suggestions were deferred for the next conference of marine powers which, for various reasons, did not take place.
“By this international action,” wrote Monsieur Jules Sauerstoff in ‘Le Temps’, “the future of the newts is assured, along with peaceful development for people for many decades to come. We congratulate the London conference for its successful conclusions on some difficult questions; and we also congratulate the newts that by this statute they come under the protection of the court at The Hague; they will henceforth be able to devote themselves to their work and their underwater progress with a sense of peace and trust. It should be emphasised that the removal of the Newt Problem from the field of politics, which is what the London conference has achieved, is one of the most important assurances we have of world peace; the disarming of the salamanders, in particular, will do a great deal to reduce the likelihood of underwater conflicts between individual states. The fact is that - even though many border disputes and power struggles continue between states on almost every continent - there is no current threat to world peace, at least not from the direction of the sea. But on dry land, too, we seem to have a better assurance of peace than ever before; the seafaring nations are fully occupied with the construction of new shores and will be able to increase their territory by reclaiming land from the sea instead of trying to extend their frontiers on dry land. There will no longer be any need to fight with iron and gas for every tiny piece of land; all that is needed will be the picks and shovels wielded by the newts for every state to build as much territory as it needs; and it is the London Convention which ensures that the peaceful labour of the newts will bring peace and prosperity for all the nations of the world. The world has never before been so close to a lasting peace and a quiet but glorious efflorescence than now. Instead of the Newt Problem about which so much has been written and said, we will now have good reason to talk of The Golden Age of the Newt’.”
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