Universal Colour Bill

Use in the book

The Bill follows an established custom of painting differentiated sides. Its innovation is to reach two classes whose supposed lack of sides has exempted them: straight-line Women and the socially designated Circles. The reformers replace counting sides with a distinction common to both, front and hinder halves. Red marks the half containing eye and mouth; green marks the other half. The scheme redefines the relevant common property instead of accepting the inherited criterion of difference.

That shift produces the narrator's alarming comparison. Viewed side-on, a Woman appears as a line divided between red and green. Viewed along the diameter separating his coloured halves, a Priest also presents a divided line. The resemblance is conditional, not complete identity from every viewpoint. The Circle's line may be shorter and fade more quickly towards its ends. The narrator fears that observers accustomed to colour will neglect such details and that women will imitate the fading. His argument depends on the social training of attention as much as on geometry.

The political implications are correspondingly precise. Women might receive the respect habitually given to Priests, overhear restricted information, or issue commands in a privileged name. These imagined abuses reveal that deference is attached to recognized appearance rather than to independently tested wisdom. The same sensory uncertainty already protects Circles from close examination; extending uncertainty downwards suddenly becomes a constitutional emergency.

The second alleged purpose is the weakening of Circular training. Painted priestly homes would no longer give children uninterrupted practice in colourless sight recognition. The narrator calls the resulting intellectual loss demoralization, joining cognitive and moral decline. His anxiety also admits that elite intelligence depends partly on an environment and a curriculum, rather than solely on inherited sides.

The Bill is defeated, but its specificity remains important. It is neither simply “everyone may use colour” nor merely a metaphor for equal rights. It is a compulsory public coding of bodies embedded in a larger reform movement. By following its actual clauses and visual consequences, readers can see how an everyday identifying convention becomes constitutional law, how equality can demand a changed criterion of recognition, and how a threatened monopoly can present the instability of its signs as the collapse of society itself.

Places to read

1. §923“the Priests and the Women not excepted”
2. §923“the front half of every human being”
3. §923“half red, half green”
4. §923“an immediate impression of identity of Class”
5. §923“their pure and colourless homes”

In this edition

The figure in §923 belongs to Abbott's illustrated argument, here reproduced through a modern redrawing. Modern note 95 explains its labelled lines and the fading distinction; note 93 supplies the Reform context. The drawing demonstrates a particular visual alignment, not an unrestricted equivalence between straight lines and circles.

Deference

Respectful yielding or attention accorded to someone’s supposed superiority. The narrator fears that painted women will receive the deference ordinarily directed to Priests. Printed form: deference (§ 923). See Universal Colour Bill.

Demoralize

To degrade or corrupt, here in intellectual as well as moral capacity. The narrator predicts that painted Circular households will weaken one another’s trained powers of recognition. Printed form: demoralize (§ 923). See Universal Colour Bill.

Semicircle

Half a circle or its circumference. The Bill uses front and hinder semicircles as the two coloured regions of a priestly body. Printed form: semicircle (§ 923). See Universal Colour Bill.

Universal Colour Bill

The proposed law extending compulsory painting to all classes. It assigns red and green halves to Women and Priests, threatening their established visual distinction. Printed form: Universal Colour Bill (§ 923). See Universal Colour Bill.

pure from the pollution of paint (contextual phrase)

Exact wording: “pure from the pollution of paint” (§82).

The repetition of p makes the verdict memorable, almost proverbial. Pure turns the absence of pigment into moral cleanliness, while pollution makes an applied colour sound like contamination. The narrator assigns this purity to Women and Priests together, even though their shared exemption arises from very different social positions. What the Women confess as deficiency, the Priests proclaim as perfection: neither is conventionally credited with distinct sides requiring distinct colours. The phrase therefore exposes how the same visual condition can carry opposite social values before receiving one convenient moral name. It also jars with the narrator’s delight in the lost painted world. His evaluative vocabulary condemns what his description makes desirable.

Related: Colour; Painting; Universal Colour Bill.