The Pact of Reason

Five signed. One chair stayed empty.

Reason without Nature is hollow. Nature without Reason is brutal.

The Pact of Reason is two things that share a name: a philosophy about how reason and the Natural Order complete each other, and a practical treaty among five city-states that ended a war. The philosophy gave the treaty its preamble; the treaty gave the philosophy its scars.

The philosophy

Reason is the tool by which the world is understood. It advances medicine, method, and measure, and lets the Natural Order be seen accurately rather than guessed at. Without nature there is nothing to reason about; without reason, nature cannot be understood.

But reason tells a person what is and what can be done; it does not decide what is owed. It can deduce a man's strength, not what that strength is due. Every attempt to derive obligation from measurement alone has failed, and that gap is where the Natural Order lives.

Nature alone is worse. A world governed only by nature is a tyranny where the strong take what they want and the many suffer. That is the arrangement of The Iron Coves, which the other cities regard not as an alternative to the Pact but as the absence of one. Reason is what makes a hierarchy something to be followed rather than merely obeyed — the difference between a master who leads and a tyrant who oppresses.

The war

A free person of Shining Reach was taken on the Frontier and sold in Stormharbor. The claiming was lawful — it always has been on the Frontier. The question was whose law governed her afterward. Shining Reach held that free status travels with the person and no other city's claim could change it. Stormharbor held that she was taken outside the walls, and a city's law stops at its gates. Both positions were honest, and there was no law between the cities to decide between them. The quarrel became a war.

Forgegate, lying between the two, had its farms burned by two cities that bore it no anger. Clearhold, with the roads closed, went hungry within a season; its valley cannot feed itself.

The treaty

The Pact as written is not a philosophy but an agreement born of a war that began with a Frontier claiming and ended with two cities' crops burned and four cities starving. Its clauses are practical:

• Disputes between cities go to arbitration, not to arms.
• Each city governs its own affairs and does not extend its law beyond its gates.
• The mark and manumission of one city are honored in all.
• An unmarked person is free in all cities.
• A Frontier claiming remains lawful, the Frontier being beyond any city's walls.
• Weights, measures, and dealings are to remain honest.

Every clause is a scar. Arbitration, because there had been no forum. Free status, because that is what the war began over. The extent of a city's law, because no one could agree where it ended. Portable marks, so that the same war could not start again. Honest measure, because the dishonest had seen famine as a way to profit.

What the settlement established

Status is single and travels with the person. An unmarked person is free in every city. A person bearing a completed circle is free in every city. A person bearing a broken circle is a slave in every city, including the city of their birth. Shining Reach carried its point — a free person is free everywhere — and Stormharbor carried hers — a lawfully marked slave is a slave everywhere. Both went home able to say they had won. The Frontier remains lawful ground for claiming; what the Pact settles is that once marked there, there is no place left where the taken can be free. See Slavery.

Signatories

Stormharbor and Shining Reach signed as belligerents. Forgegate convened the Pact, having lost more to a quarrel it had no part in than either party fighting it. Clearhold pressed for the meeting. Eldershore signed as the oldest settlement in the world, its elders to hold the memory of the signing for generations. The Iron Coves did not sign; the closing of the overland roads had been the most prosperous moment in their history.

What the Pact does not provide

It has no enforcing body. It trusts the signers to keep its clauses of their own accord, and offers arbitration for cities to invoke when they choose. A single person is not a dispute among cities unless someone at home notices the absence, cares to raise a petition, and has the means to do so. What protection the Pact gives a person rests entirely on how well established they were in family, station, and city.

What the Pact rejects

Two tyrannies that had joined into one: the tyranny of rulers and unchecked machines, and the tyranny of conformity, which presses every person into one mold against their nature under the guise of kindness.

The preamble

The preamble is the most debated and most quoted part of the Pact. It speaks of Reason, Nature, and the ordered liberty of the free, and names the tyrannies these stand against. It names no person, claim, or war. Scholars know a Frontier claiming started the war; who the claimed was is lost and much argued. The preamble is among the most repeated pieces of literature in the Known World, and the clauses that follow it are usually left out of the reading.

See also

• The Natural Order · True Mastery · The Contested Ground
• Why City-State Wars Are Rare · Historical Timeline