EREWHON

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

The Author wishes it to be understood that Erewhon is pronounced as a word of
three syllables, all short—thus, Ĕ-rĕ-whŏn.

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

Having been enabled by the kindness of the public to get through an unusually
large edition of “Erewhon” in a very short time, I have taken the
opportunity of a second edition to make some necessary corrections, and to add
a few passages where it struck me that they would be appropriately introduced;
the passages are few, and it is my fixed intention never to touch the work
again.

I may perhaps be allowed to say a word or two here in reference to “The
Coming Race,” to the success of which book “Erewhon” has been
very generally set down as due. This is a mistake, though a perfectly natural
one. The fact is that “Erewhon” was finished, with the exception of
the last twenty pages and a sentence or two inserted from time to time here and
there throughout the book, before the first advertisement of “The Coming
Race” appeared. A friend having called my attention to one of the first
of these advertisements, and suggesting that it probably referred to a work of
similar character to my own, I took “Erewhon” to a well-known firm
of publishers on the 1st of May 1871, and left it in their hands for
consideration. I then went abroad, and on learning that the publishers alluded
to declined the MS., I let it alone for six or seven months, and, being in an
out-of-the-way part of Italy, never saw a single review of “The Coming
Race,” nor a copy of the work. On my return, I purposely avoided looking
into it until I had sent back my last revises to the printer. Then I had much
pleasure in reading it, but was indeed surprised at the many little points of
similarity between the two books, in spite of their entire independence to one
another.

I regret that reviewers have in some cases been inclined to treat the chapters
on Machines as an attempt to reduce Mr. Darwin’s theory to an absurdity.
Nothing could be further from my intention, and few things would be more
distasteful to me than any attempt to laugh at Mr. Darwin; but I must own that
I have myself to thank for the misconception, for I felt sure that my intention
would be missed, but preferred not to weaken the chapters by explanation, and
knew very well that Mr. Darwin’s theory would take no harm. The only
question in my mind was how far I could afford to be misrepresented as laughing
at that for which I have the most profound admiration. I am surprised, however,
that the book at which such an example of the specious misuse of analogy would
seem most naturally levelled should have occurred to no reviewer; neither shall
I mention the name of the book here, though I should fancy that the hint given
will suffice.

I have been held by some whose opinions I respect to have denied men’s
responsibility for their actions. He who does this is an enemy who deserves no
quarter. I should have imagined that I had been sufficiently explicit, but have
made a few additions to the chapter on Malcontents, which will, I think, serve
to render further mistake impossible.

An anonymous correspondent (by the hand-writing presumably a clergyman) tells
me that in quoting from the Latin grammar I should at any rate have done so
correctly, and that I should have written “agricolas” instead of
“agricolae”. He added something about any boy in the fourth form,
&c., &c., which I shall not quote, but which made me very
uncomfortable. It may be said that I must have misquoted from design, from
ignorance, or by a slip of the pen; but surely in these days it will be
recognised as harsh to assign limits to the all-embracing boundlessness of
truth, and it will be more reasonably assumed that each of the three possible
causes of misquotation must have had its share in the apparent blunder. The art
of writing things that shall sound right and yet be wrong has made so many
reputations, and affords comfort to such a large number of readers, that I
could not venture to neglect it; the Latin grammar, however, is a subject on
which some of the younger members of the community feel strongly, so I have now
written “agricolas”. I have also parted with the word
“infortuniam” (though not without regret), but have not dared to
meddle with other similar inaccuracies.

For the inconsistencies in the book, and I am aware that there are not a few, I
must ask the indulgence of the reader. The blame, however, lies chiefly with
the Erewhonians themselves, for they were really a very difficult people to
understand. The most glaring anomalies seemed to afford them no intellectual
inconvenience; neither, provided they did not actually see the money dropping
out of their pockets, nor suffer immediate physical pain, would they listen to
any arguments as to the waste of money and happiness which their folly caused
them. But this had an effect of which I have little reason to complain, for I
was allowed almost to call them life-long self-deceivers to their faces, and
they said it was quite true, but that it did not matter.

I must not conclude without expressing my most sincere thanks to my critics and
to the public for the leniency and consideration with which they have treated
my adventures.

June 9, 1872

PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION

My publisher wishes me to say a few words about the genesis of the work, a
revised and enlarged edition of which he is herewith laying before the public.
I therefore place on record as much as I can remember on this head after a
lapse of more than thirty years.

The first part of “Erewhon” written was an article headed
“Darwin among the Machines,” and signed Cellarius. It was written
in the Upper Rangitata district of the Canterbury Province (as it then was) of
New Zealand, and appeared at Christchurch in the Press Newspaper, June 13,
1863. A copy of this article is indexed under my books in the British Museum
catalogue. In passing, I may say that the opening chapters of
“Erewhon” were also drawn from the Upper Rangitata district, with
such modifications as I found convenient.

A second article on the same subject as the one just referred to appeared in
the Press shortly after the first, but I have no copy. It treated Machines from
a different point of view, and was the basis of pp. 270-274 of the present
edition of “Erewhon.”^[1] This view ultimately led me to the theory I put
forward in “Life and Habit,” published in November 1877. I have put
a bare outline of this theory (which I believe to be quite sound) into the
mouth of an Erewhonian philosopher in Chapter XXVII. of this book.

In 1865 I rewrote and enlarged “Darwin among the Machines” for the
Reasoner, a paper published in London by Mr. G. J. Holyoake. It appeared July
1, 1865, under the heading, “The Mechanical Creation,” and can be
seen in the British Museum. I again rewrote and enlarged it, till it assumed
the form in which it appeared in the first edition of “Erewhon.”

The next part of “Erewhon” that I wrote was the “World of the
Unborn,” a preliminary form of which was sent to Mr. Holyoake’s
paper, but as I cannot find it among those copies of the Reasoner that are in
the British Museum, I conclude that it was not accepted. I have, however,
rather a strong fancy that it appeared in some London paper of the same
character as the Reasoner, not very long after July 1, 1865, but I have no
copy.

I also wrote about this time the substance of what ultimately became the
Musical Banks, and the trial of a man for being in a consumption. These four
detached papers were, I believe, all that was written of “Erewhon”
before 1870. Between 1865 and 1870 I wrote hardly anything, being hopeful of
attaining that success as a painter which it has not been vouchsafed me to
attain, but in the autumn of 1870, just as I was beginning to get occasionally
hung at Royal Academy exhibitions, my friend, the late Sir F. N. (then Mr.)
Broome, suggested to me that I should add somewhat to the articles I had
already written, and string them together into a book. I was rather fired by
the idea, but as I only worked at the MS. on Sundays it was some months before
I had completed it.

I see from my second Preface that I took the book to Messrs. Chapman & Hall
May 1, 1871, and on their rejection of it, under the advice of one who has
attained the highest rank among living writers, I let it sleep, till I took it
to Mr. Trübner early in 1872. As regards its rejection by Messrs. Chapman
& Hall, I believe their reader advised them quite wisely. They told me he
reported that it was a philosophical work, little likely to be popular with a
large circle of readers. I hope that if I had been their reader, and the book
had been submitted to myself, I should have advised them to the same effect.

“Erewhon” appeared with the last day or two of March 1872. I
attribute its unlooked-for success mainly to two early favourable
reviews—the first in the Pall Mall Gazette of April 12, and the second in
the Spectator of April 20. There was also another cause. I was complaining once
to a friend that though “Erewhon” had met with such a warm
reception, my subsequent books had been all of them practically still-born. He
said, “You forget one charm that ‘Erewhon’ had, but which
none of your other books can have.” I asked what? and was answered,
“The sound of a new voice, and of an unknown voice.”

The first edition of “Erewhon” sold in about three weeks; I had not
taken moulds, and as the demand was strong, it was set up again immediately. I
made a few unimportant alterations and additions, and added a Preface, of which
I cannot say that I am particularly proud, but an inexperienced writer with a
head somewhat turned by unexpected success is not to be trusted with a preface.
I made a few further very trifling alterations before moulds were taken, but
since the summer of 1872, as new editions were from time to time wanted, they
have been printed from stereos then made.

Having now, I fear, at too great length done what I was asked to do, I should
like to add a few words on my own account. I am still fairly well satisfied
with those parts of “Erewhon” that were repeatedly rewritten, but
from those that had only a single writing I would gladly cut out some forty or
fifty pages if I could.

This, however, may not be, for the copyright will probably expire in a little
over twelve years. It was necessary, therefore, to revise the book throughout
for literary inelegancies—of which I found many more than I had
expected—and also to make such substantial additions as should secure a
new lease of life—at any rate for the copyright. If, then, instead of
cutting out, say fifty pages, I have been compelled to add about sixty
invitâ Minervâ—the blame rests neither with my publisher nor
with me, but with the copyright laws. Nevertheless I can assure the reader
that, though I have found it an irksome task to take up work which I thought I
had got rid of thirty years ago, and much of which I am ashamed of, I have done
my best to make the new matter savour so much of the better portions of the
old, that none but the best critics shall perceive at what places the gaps of
between thirty and forty years occur.

Lastly, if my readers note a considerable difference between the literary
technique of “Erewhon” and that of “Erewhon Revisited,”
I would remind them that, as I have just shown, “Erewhon” took
something like ten years in writing, and even so was written with great
difficulty, while “Erewhon Revisited” was written easily between
November 1900 and the end of April 1901. There is no central idea underlying
“Erewhon,” whereas the attempt to realise the effect of a single
supposed great miracle dominates the whole of its successor. In
“Erewhon” there was hardly any story, and little attempt to give
life and individuality to the characters; I hope that in “Erewhon
Revisited” both these defects have been in great measure avoided.
“Erewhon” was not an organic whole, “Erewhon Revisited”
may fairly claim to be one. Nevertheless, though in literary workmanship I do
not doubt that this last-named book is an improvement on the first, I shall be
agreeably surprised if I am not told that “Erewhon,” with all its
faults, is the better reading of the two.

SAMUEL BUTLER.
August 7, 1901

CHAPTER I.
WASTE LANDS

If the reader will excuse me, I will say nothing of my antecedents, nor of the
circumstances which led me to leave my native country; the narrative would be
tedious to him and painful to myself. Suffice it, that when I left home it was
with the intention of going to some new colony, and either finding, or even
perhaps purchasing, waste crown land suitable for cattle or sheep farming, by
which means I thought that I could better my fortunes more rapidly than in
England.

It will be seen that I did not succeed in my design, and that however much I
may have met with that was new and strange, I have been unable to reap any
pecuniary advantage.

It is true, I imagine myself to have made a discovery which, if I can be the
first to profit by it, will bring me a recompense beyond all money computation,
and secure me a position such as has not been attained by more than some
fifteen or sixteen persons, since the creation of the universe. But to this end
I must possess myself of a considerable sum of money: neither do I know how to
get it, except by interesting the public in my story, and inducing the
charitable to come forward and assist me. With this hope I now publish my
adventures; but I do so with great reluctance, for I fear that my story will be
doubted unless I tell the whole of it; and yet I dare not do so, lest others
with more means than mine should get the start of me. I prefer the risk of
being doubted to that of being anticipated, and have therefore concealed my
destination on leaving England, as also the point from which I began my more
serious and difficult journey.

My chief consolation lies in the fact that truth bears its own impress, and
that my story will carry conviction by reason of the internal evidences for its
accuracy. No one who is himself honest will doubt my being so.

I reached my destination in one of the last months of 1868, but I dare not
mention the season, lest the reader should gather in which hemisphere I was.
The colony was one which had not been opened up even to the most adventurous
settlers for more than eight or nine years, having been previously uninhabited,
save by a few tribes of savages who frequented the seaboard. The part known to
Europeans consisted of a coast-line about eight hundred miles in length
(affording three or four good harbours), and a tract of country extending
inland for a space varying from two to three hundred miles, until it a reached
the offshoots of an exceedingly lofty range of mountains, which could be seen
from far out upon the plains, and were covered with perpetual snow. The coast
was perfectly well known both north and south of the tract to which I have
alluded, but in neither direction was there a single harbour for five hundred
miles, and the mountains, which descended almost into the sea, were covered
with thick timber, so that none would think of settling.

With this bay of land, however, the case was different. The harbours were
sufficient; the country was timbered, but not too heavily; it was admirably
suited for agriculture; it also contained millions on millions of acres of the
most beautifully grassed country in the world, and of the best suited for all
manner of sheep and cattle. The climate was temperate, and very healthy; there
were no wild animals, nor were the natives dangerous, being few in number and
of an intelligent tractable disposition.

It may be readily understood that when once Europeans set foot upon this
territory they were not slow to take advantage of its capabilities. Sheep and
cattle were introduced, and bred with extreme rapidity; men took up their
50,000 or 100,000 acres of country, going inland one behind the other, till in
a few years there was not an acre between the sea and the front ranges which
was not taken up, and stations either for sheep or cattle were spotted about at
intervals of some twenty or thirty miles over the whole country. The front
ranges stopped the tide of squatters for some little time; it was thought that
there was too much snow upon them for too many months in the year,—that
the sheep would get lost, the ground being too difficult for
shepherding,—that the expense of getting wool down to the ship’s
side would eat up the farmer’s profits,—and that the grass was too
rough and sour for sheep to thrive upon; but one after another determined to
try the experiment, and it was wonderful how successfully it turned out. Men
pushed farther and farther into the mountains, and found a very considerable
tract inside the front range, between it and another which was loftier still,
though even this was not the highest, the great snowy one which could be seen
from out upon the plains. This second range, however, seemed to mark the
extreme limits of pastoral country; and it was here, at a small and newly
founded station, that I was received as a cadet, and soon regularly employed. I
was then just twenty-two years old.

I was delighted with the country and the manner of life. It was my daily
business to go up to the top of a certain high mountain, and down one of its
spurs on to the flat, in order to make sure that no sheep had crossed their
boundaries. I was to see the sheep, not necessarily close at hand, nor to get
them in a single mob, but to see enough of them here and there to feel easy
that nothing had gone wrong; this was no difficult matter, for there were not
above eight hundred of them; and, being all breeding ewes, they were pretty
quiet.

There were a good many sheep which I knew, as two or three black ewes, and a
black lamb or two, and several others which had some distinguishing mark
whereby I could tell them. I would try and see all these, and if they were all
there, and the mob looked large enough, I might rest assured that all was well.
It is surprising how soon the eye becomes accustomed to missing twenty sheep
out of two or three hundred. I had a telescope and a dog, and would take bread
and meat and tobacco with me. Starting with early dawn, it would be night
before I could complete my round; for the mountain over which I had to go was
very high. In winter it was covered with snow, and the sheep needed no watching
from above. If I were to see sheep dung or tracks going down on to the other
side of the mountain (where there was a valley with a stream—a mere
cul de sac), I was to follow them, and look out for sheep; but I never
saw any, the sheep always descending on to their own side, partly from habit,
and partly because there was abundance of good sweet feed, which had been burnt
in the early spring, just before I came, and was now deliciously green and
rich, while that on the other side had never been burnt, and was rank and
coarse.

It was a monotonous life, but it was very healthy and one does not much mind
anything when one is well. The country was the grandest that can be imagined.
How often have I sat on the mountain side and watched the waving downs, with
the two white specks of huts in the distance, and the little square of garden
behind them; the paddock with a patch of bright green oats above the huts, and
the yards and wool-sheds down on the flat below; all seen as through the wrong
end of a telescope, so clear and brilliant was the air, or as upon a colossal
model or map spread out beneath me. Beyond the downs was a plain, going down to
a river of great size, on the farther side of which there were other high
mountains, with the winter’s snow still not quite melted; up the river,
which ran winding in many streams over a bed some two miles broad, I looked
upon the second great chain, and could see a narrow gorge where the river
retired and was lost. I knew that there was a range still farther back; but
except from one place near the very top of my own mountain, no part of it was
visible: from this point, however, I saw, whenever there were no clouds, a
single snow-clad peak, many miles away, and I should think about as high as any
mountain in the world. Never shall I forget the utter loneliness of the
prospect—only the little far-away homestead giving sign of human
handiwork;—the vastness of mountain and plain, of river and sky; the
marvellous atmospheric effects—sometimes black mountains against a white
sky, and then again, after cold weather, white mountains against a black
sky—sometimes seen through breaks and swirls of cloud—and
sometimes, which was best of all, I went up my mountain in a fog, and then got
above the mist; going higher and higher, I would look down upon a sea of
whiteness, through which would be thrust innumerable mountain tops that looked
like islands.

I am there now, as I write; I fancy that I can see the downs, the huts, the
plain, and the river-bed—that torrent pathway of desolation, with its
distant roar of waters. Oh, wonderful! wonderful! so lonely and so solemn, with
the sad grey clouds above, and no sound save a lost lamb bleating upon the
mountain side, as though its little heart were breaking. Then there comes some
lean and withered old ewe, with deep gruff voice and unlovely aspect, trotting
back from the seductive pasture; now she examines this gully, and now that, and
now she stands listening with uplifted head, that she may hear the distant
wailing and obey it. Aha! they see, and rush towards each other. Alas! they are
both mistaken; the ewe is not the lamb’s ewe, they are neither kin nor
kind to one another, and part in coldness. Each must cry louder, and wander
farther yet; may luck be with them both that they may find their own at
nightfall. But this is mere dreaming, and I must proceed.

I could not help speculating upon what might lie farther up the river and
behind the second range. I had no money, but if I could only find workable
country, I might stock it with borrowed capital, and consider myself a made
man. True, the range looked so vast, that there seemed little chance of getting
a sufficient road through it or over it; but no one had yet explored it, and it
is wonderful how one finds that one can make a path into all sorts of places
(and even get a road for pack-horses), which from a distance appear
inaccessible; the river was so great that it must drain an inner tract—at
least I thought so; and though every one said it would be madness to attempt
taking sheep farther inland, I knew that only three years ago the same cry had
been raised against the country which my master’s flock was now
overrunning. I could not keep these thoughts out of my head as I would rest
myself upon the mountain side; they haunted me as I went my daily rounds, and
grew upon me from hour to hour, till I resolved that after shearing I would
remain in doubt no longer, but saddle my horse, take as much provision with me
as I could, and go and see for myself.

But over and above these thoughts came that of the great range itself. What was
beyond it? Ah! who could say? There was no one in the whole world who had the
smallest idea, save those who were themselves on the other side of it—if,
indeed, there was any one at all. Could I hope to cross it? This would be the
highest triumph that I could wish for; but it was too much to think of yet. I
would try the nearer range, and see how far I could go. Even if I did not find
country, might I not find gold, or diamonds, or copper, or silver? I would
sometimes lie flat down to drink out of a stream, and could see little yellow
specks among the sand; were these gold? People said no; but then people always
said there was no gold until it was found to be abundant: there was plenty of
slate and granite, which I had always understood to accompany gold; and even
though it was not found in paying quantities here, it might be abundant in the
main ranges. These thoughts filled my head, and I could not banish them.

CHAPTER II.
IN THE WOOL-SHED

At last shearing came; and with the shearers there was an old native, whom they
had nicknamed Chowbok—though, I believe, his real name was Kahabuka. He
was a sort of chief of the natives, could speak a little English, and was a
great favourite with the missionaries. He did not do any regular work with the
shearers, but pretended to help in the yards, his real aim being to get the
grog, which is always more freely circulated at shearing-time: he did not get
much, for he was apt to be dangerous when drunk; and very little would make him
so: still he did get it occasionally, and if one wanted to get anything out of
him, it was the best bribe to offer him. I resolved to question him, and get as
much information from him as I could. I did so. As long as I kept to questions
about the nearer ranges, he was easy to get on with—he had never been
there, but there were traditions among his tribe to the effect that there was
no sheep-country, nothing, in fact, but stunted timber and a few river-bed
flats. It was very difficult to reach; still there were passes: one of them up
our own river, though not directly along the river-bed, the gorge of which was
not practicable; he had never seen any one who had been there: was there not
enough on this side? But when I came to the main range, his manner changed at
once. He became uneasy, and began to prevaricate and shuffle. In a very few
minutes I could see that of this too there existed traditions in his tribe; but
no efforts or coaxing could get a word from him about them. At last I hinted
about grog, and presently he feigned consent: I gave it him; but as soon as he
had drunk it he began shamming intoxication, and then went to sleep, or
pretended to do so, letting me kick him pretty hard and never budging.

I was angry, for I had to go without my own grog and had got nothing out of
him; so the next day I determined that he should tell me before I gave him any,
or get none at all.

Accordingly, when night came and the shearers had knocked off work and had
their supper, I got my share of rum in a tin pannikin and made a sign to
Chowbok to follow me to the wool-shed, which he willingly did, slipping out
after me, and no one taking any notice of either of us. When we got down to the
wool-shed we lit a tallow candle, and having stuck it in an old bottle we sat
down upon the wool bales and began to smoke. A wool-shed is a roomy place,
built somewhat on the same plan as a cathedral, with aisles on either side full
of pens for the sheep, a great nave, at the upper end of which the shearers
work, and a further space for wool sorters and packers. It always refreshed me
with a semblance of antiquity (precious in a new country), though I very well
knew that the oldest wool-shed in the settlement was not more than seven years
old, while this was only two. Chowbok pretended to expect his grog at once,
though we both of us knew very well what the other was after, and that we were
each playing against the other, the one for grog the other for information.

We had a hard fight: for more than two hours he had tried to put me off with
lies but had carried no conviction; during the whole time we had been morally
wrestling with one another and had neither of us apparently gained the least
advantage; at length, however, I had become sure that he would give in
ultimately, and that with a little further patience I should get his story out
of him. As upon a cold day in winter, when one has churned (as I had often had
to do), and churned in vain, and the butter makes no sign of coming, at last
one tells by the sound that the cream has gone to sleep, and then upon a sudden
the butter comes, so I had churned at Chowbok until I perceived that he had
arrived, as it were, at the sleepy stage, and that with a continuance of steady
quiet pressure the day was mine. On a sudden, without a word of warning, he
rolled two bales of wool (his strength was very great) into the middle of the
floor, and on the top of these he placed another crosswise; he snatched up an
empty wool-pack, threw it like a mantle over his shoulders, jumped upon the
uppermost bale, and sat upon it. In a moment his whole form was changed. His
high shoulders dropped; he set his feet close together, heel to heel and toe to
toe; he laid his arms and hands close alongside of his body, the palms
following his thighs; he held his head high but quite straight, and his eyes
stared right in front of him; but he frowned horribly, and assumed an
expression of face that was positively fiendish. At the best of times Chowbok
was very ugly, but he now exceeded all conceivable limits of the hideous. His
mouth extended almost from ear to ear, grinning horribly and showing all his
teeth; his eyes glared, though they remained quite fixed, and his forehead was
contracted with a most malevolent scowl.

I am afraid my description will have conveyed only the ridiculous side of his
appearance; but the ridiculous and the sublime are near, and the grotesque
fiendishness of Chowbok’s face approached this last, if it did not reach
it. I tried to be amused, but I felt a sort of creeping at the roots of my hair
and over my whole body, as I looked and wondered what he could possibly be
intending to signify. He continued thus for about a minute, sitting bolt
upright, as stiff as a stone, and making this fearful face. Then there came
from his lips a low moaning like the wind, rising and falling by infinitely
small gradations till it became almost a shriek, from which it descended and
died away; after that, he jumped down from the bale and held up the extended
fingers of both his hands, as one who should say “Ten,” though I
did not then understand him.

For myself I was open-mouthed with astonishment. Chowbok rolled the bales
rapidly into their place, and stood before me shuddering as in great fear;
horror was written upon his face—this time quite involuntarily—as
though the natural panic of one who had committed an awful crime against
unknown and superhuman agencies. He nodded his head and gibbered, and pointed
repeatedly to the mountains. He would not touch the grog, but, after a few
seconds he made a run through the wool-shed door into the moonlight; nor did he
reappear till next day at dinner-time, when he turned up, looking very sheepish
and abject in his civility towards myself.

Of his meaning I had no conception. How could I? All I could feel sure of was,
that he had a meaning which was true and awful to himself. It was enough for me
that I believed him to have given me the best he had and all he had. This
kindled my imagination more than if he had told me intelligible stories by the
hour together. I knew not what the great snowy ranges might conceal, but I
could no longer doubt that it would be something well worth discovering.

I kept aloof from Chowbok for the next few days, and showed no desire to
question him further; when I spoke to him I called him Kahabuka, which
gratified him greatly: he seemed to have become afraid of me, and acted as one
who was in my power. Having therefore made up my mind that I would begin
exploring as soon as shearing was over, I thought it would be a good thing to
take Chowbok with me; so I told him that I meant going to the nearer ranges for
a few days’ prospecting, and that he was to come too. I made him promises
of nightly grog, and held out the chances of finding gold. I said nothing about
the main range, for I knew it would frighten him. I would get him as far up our
own river as I could, and trace it if possible to its source. I would then
either go on by myself, if I felt my courage equal to the attempt, or return
with Chowbok. So, as soon as ever shearing was over and the wool sent off, I
asked leave of absence, and obtained it. Also, I bought an old pack-horse and
pack-saddle, so that I might take plenty of provisions, and blankets, and a
small tent. I was to ride and find fords over the river; Chowbok was to follow
and lead the pack-horse, which would also carry him over the fords. My master
let me have tea and sugar, ship’s biscuits, tobacco, and salt mutton,
with two or three bottles of good brandy; for, as the wool was now sent down,
abundance of provisions would come up with the empty drays.

Everything being now ready, all the hands on the station turned out to see us
off, and we started on our journey, not very long after the summer solstice of
1870.

CHAPTER III.
UP THE RIVER

The first day we had an easy time, following up the great flats by the river
side, which had already been twice burned, so that there was no dense
undergrowth to check us, though the ground was often rough, and we had to go a
good deal upon the riverbed. Towards nightfall we had made a matter of some
five-and-twenty miles, and camped at the point where the river entered upon the
gorge.

The weather was delightfully warm, considering that the valley in which we were
encamped must have been at least two thousand feet above the level of the sea.
The river-bed was here about a mile and a half broad and entirely covered with
shingle over which the river ran in many winding channels, looking, when seen
from above, like a tangled skein of ribbon, and glistening in the sun. We knew
that it was liable to very sudden and heavy freshets; but even had we not known
it, we could have seen it by the snags of trees, which must have been carried
long distances, and by the mass of vegetable and mineral débris
which was banked against their lower side, showing that at times the whole
river-bed must be covered with a roaring torrent many feet in depth and of
ungovernable fury. At present the river was low, there being but five or six
streams, too deep and rapid for even a strong man to ford on foot, but to be
crossed safely on horseback. On either side of it there were still a few acres
of flat, which grew wider and wider down the river, till they became the large
plains on which we looked from my master’s hut. Behind us rose the lowest
spurs of the second range, leading abruptly to the range itself; and at a
distance of half a mile began the gorge, where the river narrowed and became
boisterous and terrible. The beauty of the scene cannot be conveyed in
language. The one side of the valley was blue with evening shadow, through
which loomed forest and precipice, hillside and mountain top; and the other was
still brilliant with the sunset gold. The wide and wasteful river with its
ceaseless rushing—the beautiful water-birds too, which abounded upon the
islets and were so tame that we could come close up to them—the ineffable
purity of the air—the solemn peacefulness of the untrodden
region—could there be a more delightful and exhilarating combination?

We set about making our camp, close to some large bush which came down from the
mountains on to the flat, and tethered out our horses upon ground as free as we
could find it from anything round which they might wind the rope and get
themselves tied up. We dared not let them run loose, lest they might stray down
the river home again. We then gathered wood and lit the fire. We filled a tin
pannikin with water and set it against the hot ashes to boil. When the water
boiled we threw in two or three large pinches of tea and let them brew.

We had caught half a dozen young ducks in the course of the day—an easy
matter, for the old birds made such a fuss in attempting to decoy us away from
them—pretending to be badly hurt as they say the plover does—that
we could always find them by going about in the opposite direction to the old
bird till we heard the young ones crying: then we ran them down, for they could
not fly though they were nearly full grown. Chowbok plucked them a little and
singed them a good deal. Then we cut them up and boiled them in another
pannikin, and this completed our preparations.

When we had done supper it was quite dark. The silence and freshness of the
night, the occasional sharp cry of the wood-hen, the ruddy glow of the fire,
the subdued rushing of the river, the sombre forest, and the immediate
foreground of our saddles packs and blankets, made a picture worthy of a
Salvator Rosa or a Nicolas Poussin. I call it to mind and delight in it now,
but I did not notice it at the time. We next to never know when we are well
off: but this cuts two ways,—for if we did, we should perhaps know better
when we are ill off also; and I have sometimes thought that there are as many
ignorant of the one as of the other. He who wrote, “O fortunatos nimium
sua si bona nôrint agricolas,” might have written quite as truly,
“O infortunatos nimium sua si mala nôrint”; and there are few
of us who are not protected from the keenest pain by our inability to see what
it is that we have done, what we are suffering, and what we truly are. Let us
be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.

We found as soft a piece of ground as we could—though it was all
stony—and having collected grass and so disposed of ourselves that we had
a little hollow for our hip-bones, we strapped our blankets around us and went
to sleep. Waking in the night I saw the stars overhead and the moonlight bright
upon the mountains. The river was ever rushing; I heard one of our horses neigh
to its companion, and was assured that they were still at hand; I had no care
of mind or body, save that I had doubtless many difficulties to overcome; there
came upon me a delicious sense of peace, a fulness of contentment which I do
not believe can be felt by any but those who have spent days consecutively on
horseback, or at any rate in the open air.

Next morning we found our last night’s tea-leaves frozen at the bottom of
the pannikins, though it was not nearly the beginning of autumn; we breakfasted
as we had supped, and were on our way by six o’clock. In half an hour we
had entered the gorge, and turning round a corner we bade farewell to the last
sight of my master’s country.

The gorge was narrow and precipitous; the river was now only a few yards wide,
and roared and thundered against rocks of many tons in weight; the sound was
deafening, for there was a great volume of water. We were two hours in making
less than a mile, and that with danger, sometimes in the river and sometimes on
the rock. There was that damp black smell of rocks covered with slimy
vegetation, as near some huge waterfall where spray is ever rising. The air was
clammy and cold. I cannot conceive how our horses managed to keep their
footing, especially the one with the pack, and I dreaded the having to return
almost as much as going forward. I suppose this lasted three miles, but it was
well midday when the gorge got a little wider, and a small stream came into it
from a tributary valley. Farther progress up the main river was impossible, for
the cliffs descended like walls; so we went up the side stream, Chowbok seeming
to think that here must be the pass of which reports existed among his people.
We now incurred less of actual danger but more fatigue, and it was only after
infinite trouble, owing to the rocks and tangled vegetation, that we got
ourselves and our horses upon the saddle from which this small stream
descended; by that time clouds had descended upon us, and it was raining
heavily. Moreover, it was six o’clock and we were tired out, having made
perhaps six miles in twelve hours.

On the saddle there was some coarse grass which was in full seed, and therefore
very nourishing for the horses; also abundance of anise and sow-thistle, of
which they are extravagantly fond, so we turned them loose and prepared to
camp. Everything was soaking wet and we were half-perished with cold; indeed we
were very uncomfortable. There was brushwood about, but we could get no fire
till we had shaved off the wet outside of some dead branches and filled our
pockets with the dry inside chips. Having done this we managed to start a fire,
nor did we allow it to go out when we had once started it; we pitched the tent
and by nine o’clock were comparatively warm and dry. Next morning it was
fine; we broke camp, and after advancing a short distance we found that, by
descending over ground less difficult than yesterday’s, we should come
again upon the river-bed, which had opened out above the gorge; but it was
plain at a glance that there was no available sheep country, nothing but a few
flats covered with scrub on either side the river, and mountains which were
perfectly worthless. But we could see the main range. There was no mistake
about this. The glaciers were tumbling down the mountain sides like cataracts,
and seemed actually to descend upon the river-bed; there could be no serious
difficulty in reaching them by following up the river, which was wide and open;
but it seemed rather an objectless thing to do, for the main range looked
hopeless, and my curiosity about the nature of the country above the gorge was
now quite satisfied; there was no money in it whatever, unless there should be
minerals, of which I saw no more signs than lower down.

However, I resolved that I would follow the river up, and not return until I
was compelled to do so. I would go up every branch as far as I could, and wash
well for gold. Chowbok liked seeing me do this, but it never came to anything,
for we did not even find the colour. His dislike of the main range appeared to
have worn off, and he made no objections to approaching it. I think he thought
there was no danger of my trying to cross it, and he was not afraid of anything
on this side; besides, we might find gold. But the fact was that he had made up
his mind what to do if he saw me getting too near it.

We passed three weeks in exploring, and never did I find time go more quickly.
The weather was fine, though the nights got very cold. We followed every stream
but one, and always found it lead us to a glacier which was plainly impassable,
at any rate without a larger party and ropes. One stream remained, which I
should have followed up already, had not Chowbok said that he had risen early
one morning while I was yet asleep, and after going up it for three or four
miles, had seen that it was impossible to go farther. I had long ago discovered
that he was a great liar, so I was bent on going up myself: in brief, I did so:
so far from being impossible, it was quite easy travelling; and after five or
six miles I saw a saddle at the end of it, which, though covered deep in snow,
was not glaciered, and which did verily appear to be part of the main range
itself. No words can express the intensity of my delight. My blood was all on
fire with hope and elation; but on looking round for Chowbok, who was behind
me, I saw to my surprise and anger that he had turned back, and was going down
the valley as hard as he could. He had left me.

CHAPTER IV.
THE SADDLE

I cooeyed to him, but he would not hear. I ran after him, but he had got too
good a start. Then I sat down on a stone and thought the matter carefully over.
It was plain that Chowbok had designedly attempted to keep me from going up
this valley, yet he had shown no unwillingness to follow me anywhere else. What
could this mean, unless that I was now upon the route by which alone the
mysteries of the great ranges could be revealed? What then should I do? Go back
at the very moment when it had become plain that I was on the right scent?
Hardly; yet to proceed alone would be both difficult and dangerous. It would be
bad enough to return to my master’s run, and pass through the rocky
gorges, with no chance of help from another should I get into a difficulty; but
to advance for any considerable distance without a companion would be next door
to madness. Accidents which are slight when there is another at hand (as the
spraining of an ankle, or the falling into some place whence escape would be
easy by means of an outstretched hand and a bit of rope) may be fatal to one
who is alone. The more I pondered the less I liked it; and yet, the less could
I make up my mind to return when I looked at the saddle at the head of the
valley, and noted the comparative ease with which its smooth sweep of snow
might be surmounted: I seemed to see my way almost from my present position to
the very top. After much thought, I resolved to go forward until I should come
to some place which was really dangerous, but then to return. I should thus, I
hoped, at any rate reach the top of the saddle, and satisfy myself as to what
might be on the other side.

I had no time to lose, for it was now between ten and eleven in the morning.
Fortunately I was well equipped, for on leaving the camp and the horses at the
lower end of the valley I had provided myself (according to my custom) with
everything that I was likely to want for four or five days. Chowbok had carried
half, but had dropped his whole swag—I suppose, at the moment of his
taking flight—for I came upon it when I ran after him. I had, therefore,
his provisions as well as my own. Accordingly, I took as many biscuits as I
thought I could carry, and also some tobacco, tea, and a few matches. I rolled
all these things (together with a flask nearly full of brandy, which I had kept
in my pocket for fear lest Chowbok should get hold of it) inside my blankets,
and strapped them very tightly, making the whole into a long roll of some seven
feet in length and six inches in diameter. Then I tied the two ends together,
and put the whole round my neck and over one shoulder. This is the easiest way
of carrying a heavy swag, for one can rest one’s self by shifting the
burden from one shoulder to the other. I strapped my pannikin and a small axe
about my waist, and thus equipped began to ascend the valley, angry at having
been misled by Chowbok, but determined not to return till I was compelled to do
so.

I crossed and recrossed the stream several times without difficulty, for there
were many good fords. At one o’clock I was at the foot of the saddle; for
four hours I mounted, the last two on the snow, where the going was easier; by
five, I was within ten minutes of the top, in a state of excitement greater, I
think, than I had ever known before. Ten minutes more, and the cold air from
the other side came rushing upon me.

A glance. I was not on the main range.

Another glance. There was an awful river, muddy and horribly angry, roaring
over an immense riverbed, thousands of feet below me.

It went round to the westward, and I could see no farther up the valley, save
that there were enormous glaciers which must extend round the source of the
river, and from which it must spring.

Another glance, and then I remained motionless.

There was an easy pass in the mountains directly opposite to me, through which
I caught a glimpse of an immeasurable extent of blue and distant plains.

Easy? Yes, perfectly easy; grassed nearly to the summit, which was, as it were,
an open path between two glaciers, from which an inconsiderable stream came
tumbling down over rough but very possible hillsides, till it got down to the
level of the great river, and formed a flat where there was grass and a small
bush of stunted timber.

Almost before I could believe my eyes, a cloud had come up from the valley on
the other side, and the plains were hidden. What wonderful luck was mine! Had I
arrived five minutes later, the cloud would have been over the pass, and I
should not have known of its existence. Now that the cloud was there, I began
to doubt my memory, and to be uncertain whether it had been more than a blue
line of distant vapour that had filled up the opening. I could only be certain
of this much, namely, that the river in the valley below must be the one next
to the northward of that which flowed past my master’s station; of this
there could be no doubt. Could I, however, imagine that my luck should have led
me up a wrong river in search of a pass, and yet brought me to the spot where I
could detect the one weak place in the fortifications of a more northern basin?
This was too improbable. But even as I doubted there came a rent in the cloud
opposite, and a second time I saw blue lines of heaving downs, growing
gradually fainter, and retiring into a far space of plain. It was substantial;
there had been no mistake whatsoever. I had hardly made myself perfectly sure
of this, ere the rent in the clouds joined up again and I could see nothing
more.

What, then, should I do? The night would be upon me shortly, and I was already
chilled with standing still after the exertion of climbing. To stay where I was
would be impossible; I must either go backwards or forwards. I found a rock
which gave me shelter from the evening wind, and took a good pull at the brandy
flask, which immediately warmed and encouraged me.

I asked myself, Could I descend upon the river-bed beneath me? It was
impossible to say what precipices might prevent my doing so. If I were on the
river-bed, dare I cross the river? I am an excellent swimmer, yet, once in that
frightful rush of waters, I should be hurled whithersoever it willed,
absolutely powerless. Moreover, there was my swag; I should perish of cold and
hunger if I left it, but I should certainly be drowned if I attempted to carry
it across the river. These were serious considerations, but the hope of finding
an immense tract of available sheep country (which I was determined that I
would monopolise as far as I possibly could) sufficed to outweigh them; and, in
a few minutes, I felt resolved that, having made so important a discovery as a
pass into a country which was probably as valuable as that on our own side of
the ranges, I would follow it up and ascertain its value, even though I should
pay the penalty of failure with life itself. The more I thought, the more
determined I became either to win fame and perhaps fortune, by entering upon
this unknown world, or give up life in the attempt. In fact, I felt that life
would be no longer valuable if I were to have seen so great a prize and refused
to grasp at the possible profits therefrom.

I had still an hour of good daylight during which I might begin my descent on
to some suitable camping-ground, but there was not a moment to be lost. At
first I got along rapidly, for I was on the snow, and sank into it enough to
save me from falling, though I went forward straight down the mountain side as
fast as I could; but there was less snow on this side than on the other, and I
had soon done with it, getting on to a coomb of dangerous and very stony
ground, where a slip might have given me a disastrous fall. But I was careful
with all my speed, and got safely to the bottom, where there were patches of
coarse grass, and an attempt here and there at brushwood: what was below this I
could not see. I advanced a few hundred yards farther, and found that I was on
the brink of a frightful precipice, which no one in his senses would attempt
descending. I bethought me, however, to try the creek which drained the coomb,
and see whether it might not have made itself a smoother way. In a few minutes
I found myself at the upper end of a chasm in the rocks, something like Twll
Dhu, only on a greatly larger scale; the creek had found its way into it, and
had worn a deep channel through a material which appeared softer than that upon
the other side of the mountain. I believe it must have been a different
geological formation, though I regret to say that I cannot tell what it was.

I looked at this rift in great doubt; then I went a little way on either side
of it, and found myself looking over the edge of horrible precipices on to the
river, which roared some four or five thousand feet below me. I dared not think
of getting down at all, unless I committed myself to the rift, of which I was
hopeful when I reflected that the rock was soft, and that the water might have
worn its channel tolerably evenly through the whole extent. The darkness was
increasing with every minute, but I should have twilight for another half-hour,
so I went into the chasm (though by no means without fear), and resolved to
return and camp, and try some other path next day, should I come to any serious
difficulty. In about five minutes I had completely lost my head; the side of
the rift became hundreds of feet in height, and overhung so that I could not
see the sky. It was full of rocks, and I had many falls and bruises. I was wet
through from falling into the water, of which there was no great volume, but it
had such force that I could do nothing against it; once I had to leap down a
not inconsiderable waterfall into a deep pool below, and my swag was so heavy
that I was very nearly drowned. I had indeed a hair’s-breadth escape;
but, as luck would have it, Providence was on my side. Shortly afterwards I
began to fancy that the rift was getting wider, and that there was more
brushwood. Presently I found myself on an open grassy slope, and feeling my way
a little farther along the stream, I came upon a flat place with wood, where I
could camp comfortably; which was well, for it was now quite dark.

My first care was for my matches; were they dry? The outside of my swag had got
completely wet; but, on undoing the blankets, I found things warm and dry
within. How thankful I was! I lit a fire, and was grateful for its warmth and
company. I made myself some tea and ate two of my biscuits: my brandy I did not
touch, for I had little left, and might want it when my courage failed me. All
that I did, I did almost mechanically, for I could not realise my situation to
myself, beyond knowing that I was alone, and that return through the chasm
which I had just descended would be impossible. It is a dreadful feeling that
of being cut off from all one’s kind. I was still full of hope, and built
golden castles for myself as soon as I was warmed with food and fire; but I do
not believe that any man could long retain his reason in such solitude, unless
he had the companionship of animals. One begins doubting one’s own
identity.

I remember deriving comfort even from the sight of my blankets, and the sound
of my watch ticking—things which seemed to link me to other people; but
the screaming of the wood-hens frightened me, as also a chattering bird which I
had never heard before, and which seemed to laugh at me; though I soon got used
to it, and before long could fancy that it was many years since I had first
heard it.

I took off my clothes, and wrapped my inside blanket about me, till my things
were dry. The night was very still, and I made a roaring fire; so I soon got
warm, and at last could put my clothes on again. Then I strapped my blanket
round me, and went to sleep as near the fire as I could.

I dreamed that there was an organ placed in my master’s wool-shed: the
wool-shed faded away, and the organ seemed to grow and grow amid a blaze of
brilliant light, till it became like a golden city upon the side of a mountain,
with rows upon rows of pipes set in cliffs and precipices, one above the other,
and in mysterious caverns, like that of Fingal, within whose depths I could see
the burnished pillars gleaming. In the front there was a flight of lofty
terraces, at the top of which I could see a man with his head buried forward
towards a key-board, and his body swaying from side to side amid the storm of
huge arpeggioed harmonies that came crashing overhead and round. Then there was
one who touched me on the shoulder, and said, “Do you not see? it is
Handel”;—but I had hardly apprehended, and was trying to scale the
terraces, and get near him, when I awoke, dazzled with the vividness and
distinctness of the dream.

A piece of wood had burned through, and the ends had fallen into the ashes with
a blaze: this, I supposed, had both given me my dream and robbed me of it. I
was bitterly disappointed, and sitting up on my elbow, came back to reality and
my strange surroundings as best I could.

I was thoroughly aroused—moreover, I felt a foreshadowing as though my
attention were arrested by something more than the dream, although no sense in
particular was as yet appealed to. I held my breath and waited, and then I
heard—was it fancy? Nay; I listened again and again, and I did
hear a faint and extremely distant sound of music, like that of an AEolian
harp, borne upon the wind which was blowing fresh and chill from the opposite
mountains.

The roots of my hair thrilled. I listened, but the wind had died; and, fancying
that it must have been the wind itself—no; on a sudden I remembered the
noise which Chowbok had made in the wool-shed. Yes; it was that.

Thank Heaven, whatever it was, it was over now. I reasoned with myself, and
recovered my firmness. I became convinced that I had only been dreaming more
vividly than usual. Soon I began even to laugh, and think what a fool I was to
be frightened at nothing, reminding myself that even if I were to come to a bad
end it would be no such dreadful matter after all. I said my prayers, a duty
which I had too often neglected, and in a little time fell into a really
refreshing sleep, which lasted till broad daylight, and restored me. I rose,
and searching among the embers of my fire, I found a few live coals and soon
had a blaze again. I got breakfast, and was delighted to have the company of
several small birds, which hopped about me and perched on my boots and hands. I
felt comparatively happy, but I can assure the reader that I had had a far
worse time of it than I have told him; and I strongly recommend him to remain
in Europe if he can; or, at any rate, in some country which has been explored
and settled, rather than go into places where others have not been before him.
Exploring is delightful to look forward to and back upon, but it is not
comfortable at the time, unless it be of such an easy nature as not to deserve
the name.

CHAPTER V.
THE RIVER AND THE RANGE

My next business was to descend upon the river. I had lost sight of the pass
which I had seen from the saddle, but had made such notes of it that I could
not fail to find it. I was bruised and stiff, and my boots had begun to give,
for I had been going on rough ground for more than three weeks; but, as the day
wore on, and I found myself descending without serious difficulty, I became
easier. In a couple of hours I got among pine forests where there was little
undergrowth, and descended quickly till I reached the edge of another
precipice, which gave me a great deal of trouble, though I eventually managed
to avoid it. By about three or four o’clock I found myself on the
river-bed.

From calculations which I made as to the height of the valley on the other side
the saddle over which I had come, I concluded that the saddle itself could not
be less than nine thousand feet high; and I should think that the river-bed, on
to which I now descended, was three thousand feet above the sea-level. The
water had a terrific current, with a fall of not less than forty to fifty feet
per mile. It was certainly the river next to the northward of that which flowed
past my master’s run, and would have to go through an impassable gorge
(as is commonly the case with the rivers of that country) before it came upon
known parts. It was reckoned to be nearly two thousand feet above the sea-level
where it came out of the gorge on to the plains.

As soon as I got to the river side I liked it even less than I thought I
should. It was muddy, being near its parent glaciers. The stream was wide,
rapid, and rough, and I could hear the smaller stones knocking against each
other under the rage of the waters, as upon a seashore. Fording was out of the
question. I could not swim and carry my swag, and I dared not leave my swag
behind me. My only chance was to make a small raft; and that would be difficult
to make, and not at all safe when it was made,—not for one man in such a
current.

As it was too late to do much that afternoon, I spent the rest of it in going
up and down the river side, and seeing where I should find the most favourable
crossing. Then I camped early, and had a quiet comfortable night with no more
music, for which I was thankful, as it had haunted me all day, although I
perfectly well knew that it had been nothing but my own fancy, brought on by
the reminiscence of what I had heard from Chowbok and by the over-excitement of
the preceding evening.

Next day I began gathering the dry bloom stalks of a kind of flag or
iris-looking plant, which was abundant, and whose leaves, when torn into
strips, were as strong as the strongest string. I brought them to the
waterside, and fell to making myself a kind of rough platform, which should
suffice for myself and my swag if I could only stick to it. The stalks were ten
or twelve feet long, and very strong, but light and hollow. I made my raft
entirely of them, binding bundles of them at right angles to each other, neatly
and strongly, with strips from the leaves of the same plant, and tying other
rods across. It took me all day till nearly four o’clock to finish the
raft, but I had still enough daylight for crossing, and resolved on doing so at
once.

I had selected a place where the river was broad and comparatively still, some
seventy or eighty yards above a furious rapid. At this spot I had built my
raft. I now launched it, made my swag fast to the middle, and got on to it
myself, keeping in my hand one of the longest blossom stalks, so that I might
punt myself across as long as the water was shallow enough to let me do so. I
got on pretty well for twenty or thirty yards from the shore, but even in this
short space I nearly upset my raft by shifting too rapidly from one side to the
other. The water then became much deeper, and I leaned over so far in order to
get the bloom rod to the bottom that I had to stay still, leaning on the rod
for a few seconds. Then, when I lifted up the rod from the ground, the current
was too much for me and I found myself being carried down the rapid. Everything
in a second flew past me, and I had no more control over the raft; neither can
I remember anything except hurry, and noise, and waters which in the end upset
me. But it all came right, and I found myself near the shore, not more than up
to my knees in water and pulling my raft to land, fortunately upon the left
bank of the river, which was the one I wanted. When I had landed I found that I
was about a mile, or perhaps a little less, below the point from which I
started. My swag was wet upon the outside, and I was myself dripping; but I had
gained my point, and knew that my difficulties were for a time over. I then lit
my fire and dried myself; having done so I caught some of the young ducks and
sea-gulls, which were abundant on and near the river-bed, so that I had not
only a good meal, of which I was in great want, having had an insufficient diet
from the time that Chowbok left me, but was also well provided for the morrow.

I thought of Chowbok, and felt how useful he had been to me, and in how many
ways I was the loser by his absence, having now to do all sorts of things for
myself which he had hitherto done for me, and could do infinitely better than I
could. Moreover, I had set my heart upon making him a real convert to the
Christian religion, which he had already embraced outwardly, though I cannot
think that it had taken deep root in his impenetrably stupid nature. I used to
catechise him by our camp fire, and explain to him the mysteries of the Trinity
and of original sin, with which I was myself familiar, having been the grandson
of an archdeacon by my mother’s side, to say nothing of the fact that my
father was a clergyman of the English Church. I was therefore sufficiently
qualified for the task, and was the more inclined to it, over and above my real
desire to save the unhappy creature from an eternity of torture, by
recollecting the promise of St. James, that if any one converted a sinner
(which Chowbok surely was) he should hide a multitude of sins. I reflected,
therefore, that the conversion of Chowbok might in some degree compensate for
irregularities and short-comings in my own previous life, the remembrance of
which had been more than once unpleasant to me during my recent experiences.

Indeed, on one occasion I had even gone so far as to baptize him, as well as I
could, having ascertained that he had certainly not been both christened and
baptized, and gathering (from his telling me that he had received the name
William from the missionary) that it was probably the first-mentioned rite to
which he had been subjected. I thought it great carelessness on the part of the
missionary to have omitted the second, and certainly more important, ceremony
which I have always understood precedes christening both in the case of infants
and of adult converts; and when I thought of the risks we were both incurring I
determined that there should be no further delay. Fortunately it was not yet
twelve o’clock, so I baptized him at once from one of the pannikins (the
only vessels I had) reverently, and, I trust, efficiently. I then set myself to
work to instruct him in the deeper mysteries of our belief, and to make him,
not only in name, but in heart a Christian.

It is true that I might not have succeeded, for Chowbok was very hard to teach.
Indeed, on the evening of the same day that I baptized him he tried for the
twentieth time to steal the brandy, which made me rather unhappy as to whether
I could have baptized him rightly. He had a prayer-book—more than twenty
years old—which had been given him by the missionaries, but the only
thing in it which had taken any living hold upon him was the title of Adelaide
the Queen Dowager, which he would repeat whenever strongly moved or touched,
and which did really seem to have some deep spiritual significance to him,
though he could never completely separate her individuality from that of Mary
Magdalene, whose name had also fascinated him, though in a less degree.

He was indeed stony ground, but by digging about him I might have at any rate
deprived him of all faith in the religion of his tribe, which would have been
half way towards making him a sincere Christian; and now all this was cut off
from me, and I could neither be of further spiritual assistance to him nor he
of bodily profit to myself: besides, any company was better than being quite
alone.

I got very melancholy as these reflections crossed me, but when I had boiled
the ducks and eaten them I was much better. I had a little tea left and about a
pound of tobacco, which should last me for another fortnight with moderate
smoking. I had also eight ship biscuits, and, most precious of all, about six
ounces of brandy, which I presently reduced to four, for the night was cold.

I rose with early dawn, and in an hour I was on my way, feeling strange, not to
say weak, from the burden of solitude, but full of hope when I considered how
many dangers I had overcome, and that this day should see me at the summit of
the dividing range.

After a slow but steady climb of between three and four hours, during which I
met with no serious hindrance, I found myself upon a tableland, and close to a
glacier which I recognised as marking the summit of the pass. Above it towered
a succession of rugged precipices and snowy mountain sides. The solitude was
greater than I could bear; the mountain upon my master’s sheep-run was a
crowded thoroughfare in comparison with this sombre sullen place. The air,
moreover, was dark and heavy, which made the loneliness even more oppressive.
There was an inky gloom over all that was not covered with snow and ice. Grass
there was none.

Each moment I felt increasing upon me that dreadful doubt as to my own
identity—as to the continuity of my past and present
existence—which is the first sign of that distraction which comes on
those who have lost themselves in the bush. I had fought against this feeling
hitherto, and had conquered it; but the intense silence and gloom of this rocky
wilderness were too much for me, and I felt that my power of collecting myself
was beginning to be impaired.

I rested for a little while, and then advanced over very rough ground, until I
reached the lower end of the glacier. Then I saw another glacier, descending
from the eastern side into a small lake. I passed along the western side of the
lake, where the ground was easier, and when I had got about half way I expected
that I should see the plains which I had already seen from the opposite
mountains; but it was not to be so, for the clouds rolled up to the very summit
of the pass, though they did not overlip it on to the side from which I had
come. I therefore soon found myself enshrouded by a cold thin vapour, which
prevented my seeing more than a very few yards in front of me. Then I came upon
a large patch of old snow, in which I could distinctly trace the half-melted
tracks of goats—and in one place, as it seemed to me, there had been a
dog following them. Had I lighted upon a land of shepherds? The ground, where
not covered with snow, was so poor and stony, and there was so little herbage,
that I could see no sign of a path or regular sheep-track. But I could not help
feeling rather uneasy as I wondered what sort of a reception I might meet with
if I were to come suddenly upon inhabitants. I was thinking of this, and
proceeding cautiously through the mist, when I began to fancy that I saw some
objects darker than the cloud looming in front of me. A few steps brought me
nearer, and a shudder of unutterable horror ran through me when I saw a circle
of gigantic forms, many times higher than myself, upstanding grim and grey
through the veil of cloud before me.

I suppose I must have fainted, for I found myself some time afterwards sitting
upon the ground, sick and deadly cold. There were the figures, quite still and
silent, seen vaguely through the thick gloom, but in human shape indisputably.

A sudden thought occurred to me, which would have doubtless struck me at once
had I not been prepossessed with forebodings at the time that I first saw the
figures, and had not the cloud concealed them from me—I mean that they
were not living beings, but statues. I determined that I would count fifty
slowly, and was sure that the objects were not alive if during that time I
could detect no sign of motion.

How thankful was I when I came to the end of my fifty and there had been no
movement!

I counted a second time—but again all was still.

I then advanced timidly forward, and in another moment I saw that my surmise
was correct. I had come upon a sort of Stonehenge of rude and barbaric figures,
seated as Chowbok had sat when I questioned him in the wool-shed, and with the
same superhumanly malevolent expression upon their faces. They had been all
seated, but two had fallen. They were barbarous—neither Egyptian, nor
Assyrian, nor Japanese—different from any of these, and yet akin to all.
They were six or seven times larger than life, of great antiquity, worn and
lichen grown. They were ten in number. There was snow upon their heads and
wherever snow could lodge. Each statue had been built of four or five enormous
blocks, but how these had been raised and put together is known to those alone
who raised them. Each was terrible after a different kind. One was raging
furiously, as in pain and great despair; another was lean and cadaverous with
famine; another cruel and idiotic, but with the silliest simper that can be
conceived—this one had fallen, and looked exquisitely ludicrous in his
fall—the mouths of all were more or less open, and as I looked at them
from behind, I saw that their heads had been hollowed.

I was sick and shivering with cold. Solitude had unmanned me already, and I was
utterly unfit to have come upon such an assembly of fiends in such a dreadful
wilderness and without preparation. I would have given everything I had in the
world to have been back at my master’s station; but that was not to be
thought of: my head was failing, and I felt sure that I could never get back
alive.

Then came a gust of howling wind, accompanied with a moan from one of the
statues above me. I clasped my hands in fear. I felt like a rat caught in a
trap, as though I would have turned and bitten at whatever thing was nearest
me. The wildness of the wind increased, the moans grew shriller, coming from
several statues, and swelling into a chorus. I almost immediately knew what it
was, but the sound was so unearthly that this was but little consolation. The
inhuman beings into whose hearts the Evil One had put it to conceive these
statues, had made their heads into a sort of organ-pipe, so that their mouths
should catch the wind and sound with its blowing. It was horrible. However
brave a man might be, he could never stand such a concert, from such lips, and
in such a place. I heaped every invective upon them that my tongue could utter
as I rushed away from them into the mist, and even after I had lost sight of
them, and turning my head round could see nothing but the storm-wraiths driving
behind me, I heard their ghostly chanting, and felt as though one of them would
rush after me and grip me in his hand and throttle me.

I may say here that, since my return to England, I heard a friend playing some
chords upon the organ which put me very forcibly in mind of the Erewhonian
statues (for Erewhon is the name of the country upon which I was now entering).
They rose most vividly to my recollection the moment my friend began. They are
as follows, and are by the greatest of all musicians:—^[2]

CHAPTER VI.
INTO EREWHON

And now I found myself on a narrow path which followed a small watercourse. I
was too glad to have an easy track for my flight, to lay hold of the full
significance of its existence. The thought, however, soon presented itself to
me that I must be in an inhabited country, but one which was yet unknown. What,
then, was to be my fate at the hands of its inhabitants? Should I be taken and
offered up as a burnt-offering to those hideous guardians of the pass? It might
be so. I shuddered at the thought, yet the horrors of solitude had now fairly
possessed me; and so dazed was I, and chilled, and woebegone, that I could lay
hold of no idea firmly amid the crowd of fancies that kept wandering in upon my
brain.

I hurried onward—down, down, down. More streams came in; then there was a
bridge, a few pine logs thrown over the water; but they gave me comfort, for
savages do not make bridges. Then I had a treat such as I can never convey on
paper—a moment, perhaps, the most striking and unexpected in my whole
life—the one I think that, with some three or four exceptions, I would
most gladly have again, were I able to recall it. I got below the level of the
clouds, into a burst of brilliant evening sunshine, I was facing the
north-west, and the sun was full upon me. Oh, how its light cheered me! But
what I saw! It was such an expanse as was revealed to Moses when he stood upon
the summit of Mount Sinai, and beheld that promised land which it was not to be
his to enter. The beautiful sunset sky was crimson and gold; blue, silver, and
purple; exquisite and tranquillising; fading away therein were plains, on which
I could see many a town and city, with buildings that had lofty steeples and
rounded domes. Nearer beneath me lay ridge behind ridge, outline behind
outline, sunlight behind shadow, and shadow behind sunlight, gully and serrated
ravine. I saw large pine forests, and the glitter of a noble river winding its
way upon the plains; also many villages and hamlets, some of them quite near at
hand; and it was on these that I pondered most. I sank upon the ground at the
foot of a large tree and thought what I had best do; but I could not collect
myself. I was quite tired out; and presently, feeling warmed by the sun, and
quieted, I fell off into a profound sleep.

I was awoke by the sound of tinkling bells, and looking up, I saw four or five
goats feeding near me. As soon as I moved, the creatures turned their heads
towards me with an expression of infinite wonder. They did not run away, but
stood stock still, and looked at me from every side, as I at them. Then came
the sound of chattering and laughter, and there approached two lovely girls, of
about seventeen or eighteen years old, dressed each in a sort of linen
gaberdine, with a girdle round the waist. They saw me. I sat quite still and
looked at them, dazzled with their extreme beauty. For a moment they looked at
me and at each other in great amazement; then they gave a little frightened cry
and ran off as hard as they could.

“So that’s that,” said I to myself, as I watched them
scampering. I knew that I had better stay where I was and meet my fate,
whatever it was to be, and even if there were a better course, I had no
strength left to take it. I must come into contact with the inhabitants sooner
or later, and it might as well be sooner. Better not to seem afraid of them, as
I should do by running away and being caught with a hue and cry to-morrow or
next day. So I remained quite still and waited. In about an hour I heard
distant voices talking excitedly, and in a few minutes I saw the two girls
bringing up a party of six or seven men, well armed with bows and arrows and
pikes. There was nothing for it, so I remained sitting quite still, even after
they had seen me, until they came close up. Then we all had a good look at one
another.

Both the girls and the men were very dark in colour, but not more so than the
South Italians or Spaniards. The men wore no trousers, but were dressed nearly
the same as the Arabs whom I have seen in Algeria. They were of the most
magnificent presence, being no less strong and handsome than the women were
beautiful; and not only this, but their expression was courteous and benign. I
think they would have killed me at once if I had made the slightest show of
violence; but they gave me no impression of their being likely to hurt me so
long as I was quiet. I am not much given to liking anybody at first sight, but
these people impressed me much more favourably than I should have thought
possible, so that I could not fear them as I scanned their faces one after
another. They were all powerful men. I might have been a match for any one of
them singly, for I have been told that I have more to glory in the flesh than
in any other respect, being over six feet and proportionately strong; but any
two could have soon mastered me, even were I not so bereft of energy by my
recent adventures. My colour seemed to surprise them most, for I have light
hair, blue eyes, and a fresh complexion. They could not understand how these
things could be; my clothes also seemed quite beyond them. Their eyes kept
wandering all over me, and the more they looked the less they seemed able to
make me out.

At last I raised myself upon my feet, and leaning upon my stick, I spoke
whatever came into my head to the man who seemed foremost among them. I spoke
in English, though I was very sure that he would not understand. I said that I
had no idea what country I was in; that I had stumbled upon it almost by
accident, after a series of hairbreadth escapes; and that I trusted they would
not allow any evil to overtake me now that I was completely at their mercy. All
this I said quietly and firmly, with hardly any change of expression. They
could not understand me, but they looked approvingly to one another, and seemed
pleased (so I thought) that I showed no fear nor acknowledgment of
inferiority—the fact being that I was exhausted beyond the sense of fear.
Then one of them pointed to the mountain, in the direction of the statues, and
made a grimace in imitation of one of them. I laughed and shuddered
expressively, whereon they all burst out laughing too, and chattered hard to
one another. I could make out nothing of what they said, but I think they
thought it rather a good joke that I had come past the statues. Then one among
them came forward and motioned me to follow, which I did without hesitation,
for I dared not thwart them; moreover, I liked them well enough, and felt
tolerably sure that they had no intention of hurting me.

In about a quarter of an hour we got to a small hamlet built on the side of a
hill, with a narrow street and houses huddled up together. The roofs were large
and overhanging. Some few windows were glazed, but not many. Altogether the
village was exceedingly like one of those that one comes upon in descending the
less known passes over the Alps on to Lombardy. I will pass over the excitement
which my arrival caused. Suffice it, that though there was abundance of
curiosity, there was no rudeness. I was taken to the principal house, which
seemed to belong to the people who had captured me. There I was hospitably
entertained, and a supper of milk and goat’s flesh with a kind of oatcake
was set before me, of which I ate heartily. But all the time I was eating I
could not help turning my eyes upon the two beautiful girls whom I had first
seen, and who seemed to consider me as their lawful prize—which indeed I
was, for I would have gone through fire and water for either of them.

Then came the inevitable surprise at seeing me smoke, which I will spare the
reader; but I noticed that when they saw me strike a match, there was a hubbub
of excitement which, it struck me, was not altogether unmixed with disapproval:
why, I could not guess. Then the women retired, and I was left alone with the
men, who tried to talk to me in every conceivable way; but we could come to no
understanding, except that I was quite alone, and had come from a long way over
the mountains. In the course of time they grew tired, and I very sleepy. I made
signs as though I would sleep on the floor in my blankets, but they gave me one
of their bunks with plenty of dried fern and grass, on to which I had no sooner
laid myself than I fell fast asleep; nor did I awake till well into the
following day, when I found myself in the hut with two men keeping guard over
me and an old woman cooking. When I woke the men seemed pleased, and spoke to
me as though bidding me good morning in a pleasant tone.

I went out of doors to wash in a creek which ran a few yards from the house. My
hosts were as engrossed with me as ever; they never took their eyes off me,
following every action that I did, no matter how trifling, and each looking
towards the other for his opinion at every touch and turn. They took great
interest in my ablutions, for they seemed to have doubted whether I was in all
respects human like themselves. They even laid hold of my arms and overhauled
them, and expressed approval when they saw that they were strong and muscular.
They now examined my legs, and especially my feet. When they desisted they
nodded approvingly to each other; and when I had combed and brushed my hair,
and generally made myself as neat and well arranged as circumstances would
allow, I could see that their respect for me increased greatly, and that they
were by no means sure that they had treated me with sufficient
deference—a matter on which I am not competent to decide. All I know is
that they were very good to me, for which I thanked them heartily, as it might
well have been otherwise.

For my own part, I liked them and admired them, for their quiet self-possession
and dignified ease impressed me pleasurably at once. Neither did their manner
make me feel as though I were personally distasteful to them—only that I
was a thing utterly new and unlooked for, which they could not comprehend.
Their type was more that of the most robust Italians than any other; their
manners also were eminently Italian, in their entire unconsciousness of self.
Having travelled a good deal in Italy, I was struck with little gestures of the
hand and shoulders, which constantly reminded me of that country. My feeling
was that my wisest plan would be to go on as I had begun, and be simply myself
for better or worse, such as I was, and take my chance accordingly.

I thought of these things while they were waiting for me to have done washing,
and on my way back. Then they gave me breakfast—hot bread and milk, and
fried flesh of something between mutton and venison. Their ways of cooking and
eating were European, though they had only a skewer for a fork, and a sort of
butcher’s knife to cut with. The more I looked at everything in the
house, the more I was struck with its quasi-European character; and had the
walls only been pasted over with extracts from the Illustrated London
News and Punch, I could have almost fancied myself in a
shepherd’s hut upon my master’s sheep-run. And yet everything was
slightly different. It was much the same with the birds and flowers on the
other side, as compared with the English ones. On my arrival I had been pleased
at noticing that nearly all the plants and birds were very like common English
ones: thus, there was a robin, and a lark, and a wren, and daisies, and
dandelions; not quite the same as the English, but still very like
them—quite like enough to be called by the same name; so now, here, the
ways of these two men, and the things they had in the house, were all very
nearly the same as in Europe. It was not at all like going to China or Japan,
where everything that one sees is strange. I was, indeed, at once struck with
the primitive character of their appliances, for they seemed to be some five or
six hundred years behind Europe in their inventions; but this is the case in
many an Italian village.

All the time that I was eating my breakfast I kept speculating as to what
family of mankind they could belong to; and shortly there came an idea into my
head, which brought the blood into my cheeks with excitement as I thought of
it. Was it possible that they might be the lost ten tribes of Israel, of whom I
had heard both my grandfather and my father make mention as existing in an
unknown country, and awaiting a final return to Palestine? Was it possible that
I might have been designed by Providence as the instrument of their conversion?
Oh, what a thought was this! I laid down my skewer and gave them a hasty
survey. There was nothing of a Jewish type about them: their noses were
distinctly Grecian, and their lips, though full, were not Jewish.

How could I settle this question? I knew neither Greek nor Hebrew, and even if
I should get to understand the language here spoken, I should be unable to
detect the roots of either of these tongues. I had not been long enough among
them to ascertain their habits, but they did not give me the impression of
being a religious people. This too was natural: the ten tribes had been always
lamentably irreligious. But could I not make them change? To restore the lost
ten tribes of Israel to a knowledge of the only truth: here would be indeed an
immortal crown of glory! My heart beat fast and furious as I entertained the
thought. What a position would it not ensure me in the next world; or perhaps
even in this! What folly it would be to throw such a chance away! I should rank
next to the Apostles, if not as high as they—certainly above the minor
prophets, and possibly above any Old Testament writer except Moses and Isaiah.
For such a future as this I would sacrifice all that I have without a
moment’s hesitation, could I be reasonably assured of it. I had always
cordially approved of missionary efforts, and had at times contributed my mite
towards their support and extension; but I had never hitherto felt drawn
towards becoming a missionary myself; and indeed had always admired, and
envied, and respected them, more than I had exactly liked them. But if these
people were the lost ten tribes of Israel, the case would be widely different:
the opening was too excellent to be lost, and I resolved that should I see
indications which appeared to confirm my impression that I had indeed come upon
the missing tribes, I would certainly convert them.

I may here mention that this discovery is the one to which I alluded in the
opening pages of my story. Time strengthened the impression made upon me at
first; and, though I remained in doubt for several months, I feel now no longer
uncertain.

When I had done eating, my hosts approached, and pointed down the valley
leading to their own country, as though wanting to show that I must go with
them; at the same time they laid hold of my arms, and made as though they would
take me, but used no violence. I laughed, and motioned my hand across my
throat, pointing down the valley as though I was afraid lest I should be killed
when I got there. But they divined me at once, and shook their heads with much
decision, to show that I was in no danger. Their manner quite reassured me; and
in half an hour or so I had packed up my swag, and was eager for the forward
journey, feeling wonderfully strengthened and refreshed by good food and sleep,
while my hope and curiosity were aroused to their very utmost by the
extraordinary position in which I found myself.

But already my excitement had begun to cool and I reflected that these people
might not be the ten tribes after all; in which case I could not but regret
that my hopes of making money, which had led me into so much trouble and
danger, were almost annihilated by the fact that the country was full to
overflowing, with a people who had probably already developed its more
available resources. Moreover, how was I to get back? For there was something
about my hosts which told me that they had got me, and meant to keep me, in
spite of all their goodness.

CHAPTER VII.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS

We followed an Alpine path for some four miles, now hundreds of feet above a
brawling stream which descended from the glaciers, and now nearly alongside it.
The morning was cold and somewhat foggy, for the autumn had made great strides
latterly. Sometimes we went through forests of pine, or rather yew trees,
though they looked like pine; and I remember that now and again we passed a
little wayside shrine, wherein there would be a statue of great beauty,
representing some figure, male or female, in the very heyday of youth,
strength, and beauty, or of the most dignified maturity and old age. My hosts
always bowed their heads as they passed one of these shrines, and it shocked me
to see statues that had no apparent object, beyond the chronicling of some
unusual individual excellence or beauty, receive so serious a homage. However,
I showed no sign of wonder or disapproval; for I remembered that to be all
things to all men was one of the injunctions of the Gentile Apostle, which for
the present I should do well to heed. Shortly after passing one of these
chapels we came suddenly upon a village which started up out of the mist; and I
was alarmed lest I should be made an object of curiosity or dislike. But it was
not so. My guides spoke to many in passing, and those spoken to showed much
amazement. My guides, however, were well known, and the natural politeness of
the people prevented them from putting me to any inconvenience; but they could
not help eyeing me, nor I them. I may as well say at once what my
after-experience taught me—namely, that with all their faults and
extraordinary obliquity of mental vision upon many subjects, they are the very
best-bred people that I ever fell in with.

The village was just like the one we had left, only rather larger. The streets
were narrow and unpaved, but very fairly clean. The vine grew outside many of
the houses; and there were some with sign-boards, on which was painted a bottle
and a glass, that made me feel much at home. Even on this ledge of human
society there was a stunted growth of shoplets, which had taken root and
vegetated somehow, though as in an air mercantile of the bleakest. It was here
as hitherto: all things were generically the same as in Europe, the differences
being of species only; and I was amused at seeing in a window some bottles with
barley-sugar and sweetmeats for children, as at home; but the barley-sugar was
in plates, not in twisted sticks, and was coloured blue. Glass was plentiful in
the better houses.

Lastly, I should say that the people were of a physical beauty which was simply
amazing. I never saw anything in the least comparable to them. The women were
vigorous, and had a most majestic gait, their heads being set upon their
shoulders with a grace beyond all power of expression. Each feature was
finished, eyelids, eyelashes, and ears being almost invariably perfect. Their
colour was equal to that of the finest Italian paintings; being of the clearest
olive, and yet ruddy with a glow of perfect health. Their expression was
divine; and as they glanced at me timidly but with parted lips in great
bewilderment, I forgot all thoughts of their conversion in feelings that were
far more earthly. I was dazzled as I saw one after the other, of whom I could
only feel that each was the loveliest I had ever seen. Even in middle age they
were still comely, and the old grey-haired women at their cottage doors had a
dignity, not to say majesty, of their own.

The men were as handsome as the women beautiful. I have always delighted in and
reverenced beauty; but I felt simply abashed in the presence of such a splendid
type—a compound of all that is best in Egyptian, Greek and Italian. The
children were infinite in number, and exceedingly merry; I need hardly say that
they came in for their full share of the prevailing beauty. I expressed by
signs my admiration and pleasure to my guides, and they were greatly pleased. I
should add that all seemed to take a pride in their personal appearance, and
that even the poorest (and none seemed rich) were well kempt and tidy. I could
fill many pages with a description of their dress and the ornaments which they
wore, and a hundred details which struck me with all the force of novelty; but
I must not stay to do so.

When we had got past the village the fog rose, and revealed magnificent views
of the snowy mountains and their nearer abutments, while in front I could now
and again catch glimpses of the great plains which I had surveyed on the
preceding evening. The country was highly cultivated, every ledge being planted
with chestnuts, walnuts, and apple-trees from which the apples were now
gathering. Goats were abundant; also a kind of small black cattle, in the
marshes near the river, which was now fast widening, and running between larger
flats from which the hills receded more and more. I saw a few sheep with
rounded noses and enormous tails. Dogs were there in plenty, and very English;
but I saw no cats, nor indeed are these creatures known, their place being
supplied by a sort of small terrier.

In about four hours of walking from the time we started, and after passing two
or three more villages, we came upon a considerable town, and my guides made
many attempts to make me understand something, but I gathered no inkling of
their meaning, except that I need be under no apprehension of danger. I will
spare the reader any description of the town, and would only bid him think of
Domodossola or Faido. Suffice it that I found myself taken before the chief
magistrate, and by his orders was placed in an apartment with two other people,
who were the first I had seen looking anything but well and handsome. In fact,
one of them was plainly very much out of health, and coughed violently from
time to time in spite of manifest efforts to suppress it. The other looked pale
and ill but he was marvellously self-contained, and it was impossible to say
what was the matter with him. Both of them appeared astonished at seeing one
who was evidently a stranger, but they were too ill to come up to me, and form
conclusions concerning me. These two were first called out; and in about a
quarter of an hour I was made to follow them, which I did in some fear, and
with much curiosity.

The chief magistrate was a venerable-looking man, with white hair and beard and
a face of great sagacity. He looked me all over for about five minutes, letting
his eyes wander from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, up and down,
and down and up; neither did his mind seem in the least clearer when he had
done looking than when he began. He at length asked me a single short question,
which I supposed meant “Who are you?” I answered in English quite
composedly as though he would understand me, and endeavoured to be my very most
natural self as well as I could. He appeared more and more puzzled, and then
retired, returning with two others much like himself. Then they took me into an
inner room, and the two fresh arrivals stripped me, while the chief looked on.
They felt my pulse, they looked at my tongue, they listened at my chest, they
felt all my muscles; and at the end of each operation they looked at the chief
and nodded, and said something in a tone quite pleasant, as though I were all
right. They even pulled down my eyelids, and looked, I suppose, to see if they
were bloodshot; but it was not so. At length they gave up; and I think that all
were satisfied of my being in the most perfect health, and very robust to boot.
At last the old magistrate made me a speech of about five minutes long, which
the other two appeared to think greatly to the point, but from which I gathered
nothing. As soon as it was ended, they proceeded to overhaul my swag and the
contents of my pockets. This gave me little uneasiness, for I had no money with
me, nor anything which they were at all likely to want, or which I cared about
losing. At least I fancied so, but I soon found my mistake.

They got on comfortably at first, though they were much puzzled with my
tobacco-pipe and insisted on seeing me use it. When I had shown them what I did
with it, they were astonished but not displeased, and seemed to like the smell.
But by and by they came to my watch, which I had hidden away in the inmost
pocket that I had, and had forgotten when they began their search. They seemed
concerned and uneasy as soon as they got hold of it. They then made me open it
and show the works; and when I had done so they gave signs of very grave
displeasure, which disturbed me all the more because I could not conceive
wherein it could have offended them.

I remember that when they first found it I had thought of Paley, and how he
tells us that a savage on seeing a watch would at once conclude that it was
designed. True, these people were not savages, but I none the less felt sure
that this was the conclusion they would arrive at; and I was thinking what a
wonderfully wise man Archbishop Paley must have been, when I was aroused by a
look of horror and dismay upon the face of the magistrate, a look which
conveyed to me the impression that he regarded my watch not as having been
designed, but rather as the designer of himself and of the universe; or as at
any rate one of the great first causes of all things.

Then it struck me that this view was quite as likely to be taken as the other
by a people who had no experience of European civilisation, and I was a little
piqued with Paley for having led me so much astray; but I soon discovered that
I had misinterpreted the expression on the magistrate’s face, and that it
was one not of fear, but hatred. He spoke to me solemnly and sternly for two or
three minutes. Then, reflecting that this was of no use, he caused me to be
conducted through several passages into a large room, which I afterwards found
was the museum of the town, and wherein I beheld a sight which astonished me
more than anything that I had yet seen.

It was filled with cases containing all manner of curiosities—such as
skeletons, stuffed birds and animals, carvings in stone (whereof I saw several
that were like those on the saddle, only smaller), but the greater part of the
room was occupied by broken machinery of all descriptions. The larger specimens
had a case to themselves, and tickets with writing on them in a character which
I could not understand. There were fragments of steam engines, all broken and
rusted; among them I saw a cylinder and piston, a broken fly-wheel, and part of
a crank, which was laid on the ground by their side. Again, there was a very
old carriage whose wheels in spite of rust and decay, I could see, had been
designed originally for iron rails. Indeed, there were fragments of a great
many of our own most advanced inventions; but they seemed all to be several
hundred years old, and to be placed where they were, not for instruction, but
curiosity. As I said before, all were marred and broken.

We passed many cases, and at last came to one in which there were several
clocks and two or three old watches. Here the magistrate stopped, and opening
the case began comparing my watch with the others. The design was different,
but the thing was clearly the same. On this he turned to me and made me a
speech in a severe and injured tone of voice, pointing repeatedly to the
watches in the case, and to my own; neither did he seem in the least appeased
until I made signs to him that he had better take my watch and put it with the
others. This had some effect in calming him. I said in English (trusting to
tone and manner to convey my meaning) that I was exceedingly sorry if I had
been found to have anything contraband in my possession; that I had had no
intention of evading the ordinary tolls, and that I would gladly forfeit the
watch if my doing so would atone for an unintentional violation of the law. He
began presently to relent, and spoke to me in a kinder manner. I think he saw
that I had offended without knowledge; but I believe the chief thing that
brought him round was my not seeming to be afraid of him, although I was quite
respectful; this, and my having light hair and complexion, on which he had
remarked previously by signs, as every one else had done.

I afterwards found that it was reckoned a very great merit to have fair hair,
this being a thing of the rarest possible occurrence, and greatly admired and
envied in all who were possessed of it. However that might be, my watch was
taken from me; but our peace was made, and I was conducted back to the room
where I had been examined. The magistrate then made me another speech, whereon
I was taken to a building hard by, which I soon discovered to be the common
prison of the town, but in which an apartment was assigned me separate from the
other prisoners. The room contained a bed, table, and chairs, also a fireplace
and a washing-stand. There was another door, which opened on to a balcony, with
a flight of steps descending into a walled garden of some size. The man who
conducted me into this room made signs to me that I might go down and walk in
the garden whenever I pleased, and intimated that I should shortly have
something brought me to eat. I was allowed to retain my blankets, and the few
things which I had wrapped inside them, but it was plain that I was to consider
myself a prisoner—for how long a period I could not by any means
determine. He then left me alone.

CHAPTER VIII.
IN PRISON

And now for the first time my courage completely failed me. It is enough to say
that I was penniless, and a prisoner in a foreign country, where I had no
friend, nor any knowledge of the customs or language of the people. I was at
the mercy of men with whom I had little in common. And yet, engrossed as I was
with my extremely difficult and doubtful position, I could not help feeling
deeply interested in the people among whom I had fallen. What was the meaning
of that room full of old machinery which I had just seen, and of the
displeasure with which the magistrate had regarded my watch? The people had
very little machinery now. I had been struck with this over and over again,
though I had not been more than four-and-twenty hours in the country. They were
about as far advanced as Europeans of the twelfth or thirteenth century;
certainly not more so. And yet they must have had at one time the fullest
knowledge of our own most recent inventions. How could it have happened that
having been once so far in advance they were now as much behind us? It was
evident that it was not from ignorance. They knew my watch as a watch when they
saw it; and the care with which the broken machines were preserved and
ticketed, proved that they had not lost the recollection of their former
civilisation. The more I thought, the less I could understand it; but at last I
concluded that they must have worked out their mines of coal and iron, till
either none were left, or so few, that the use of these metals was restricted
to the very highest nobility. This was the only solution I could think of; and,
though I afterwards found how entirely mistaken it was, I felt quite sure then
that it must be the right one.

I had hardly arrived at this opinion for above four or five minutes, when the
door opened, and a young woman made her appearance with a tray, and a very
appetising smell of dinner. I gazed upon her with admiration as she laid a
cloth and set a savoury-looking dish upon the table. As I beheld her I felt as
though my position was already much ameliorated, for the very sight of her
carried great comfort. She was not more than twenty, rather above the middle
height, active and strong, but yet most delicately featured; her lips were full
and sweet; her eyes were of a deep hazel, and fringed with long and springing
eyelashes; her hair was neatly braided from off her forehead; her complexion
was simply exquisite; her figure as robust as was consistent with the most
perfect female beauty, yet not more so; her hands and feet might have served as
models to a sculptor. Having set the stew upon the table, she retired with a
glance of pity, whereon (remembering pity’s kinsman) I decided that she
should pity me a little more. She returned with a bottle and a glass, and found
me sitting on the bed with my hands over my face, looking the very picture of
abject misery, and, like all pictures, rather untruthful. As I watched her,
through my fingers, out of the room again, I felt sure that she was exceedingly
sorry for me. Her back being turned, I set to work and ate my dinner, which was
excellent.

She returned in about an hour to take away; and there came with her a man who
had a great bunch of keys at his waist, and whose manner convinced me that he
was the jailor. I afterwards found that he was father to the beautiful creature
who had brought me my dinner. I am not a much greater hypocrite than other
people, and do what I would, I could not look so very miserable. I had already
recovered from my dejection, and felt in a most genial humour both with my
jailor and his daughter. I thanked them for their attention towards me; and,
though they could not understand, they looked at one another and laughed and
chattered till the old man said something or other which I suppose was a joke;
for the girl laughed merrily and ran away, leaving her father to take away the
dinner things. Then I had another visitor, who was not so prepossessing, and
who seemed to have a great idea of himself and a small one of me. He brought a
book with him, and pens and paper—all very English; and yet, neither
paper, nor printing, nor binding, nor pen, nor ink, were quite the same as
ours.

He gave me to understand that he was to teach me the language and that we were
to begin at once. This delighted me, both because I should be more comfortable
when I could understand and make myself understood, and because I supposed that
the authorities would hardly teach me the language if they intended any cruel
usage towards me afterwards. We began at once, and I learnt the names of
everything in the room, and also the numerals and personal pronouns. I found to
my sorrow that the resemblance to European things, which I had so frequently
observed hitherto, did not hold good in the matter of language; for I could
detect no analogy whatever between this and any tongue of which I have the
slightest knowledge,—a thing which made me think it possible that I might
be learning Hebrew.

I must detail no longer; from this time my days were spent with a monotony
which would have been tedious but for the society of Yram, the jailor’s
daughter, who had taken a great fancy for me and treated me with the utmost
kindness. The man came every day to teach me the language, but my real
dictionary and grammar were Yram; and I consulted them to such purpose that I
made the most extraordinary progress, being able at the end of a month to
understand a great deal of the conversation which I overheard between Yram and
her father. My teacher professed himself well satisfied, and said he should
make a favourable report of me to the authorities. I then questioned him as to
what would probably be done with me. He told me that my arrival had caused
great excitement throughout the country, and that I was to be detained a close
prisoner until the receipt of advices from the Government. My having had a
watch, he said, was the only damaging feature in the case. And then, in answer
to my asking why this should be so, he gave me a long story of which with my
imperfect knowledge of the language I could make nothing whatever, except that
it was a very heinous offence, almost as bad (at least, so I thought I
understood him) as having typhus fever. But he said he thought my light hair
would save me.

I was allowed to walk in the garden; there was a high wall so that I managed to
play a sort of hand fives, which prevented my feeling the bad effects of my
confinement, though it was stupid work playing alone. In the course of time
people from the town and neighbourhood began to pester the jailor to be allowed
to see me, and on receiving handsome fees he let them do so. The people were
good to me; almost too good, for they were inclined to make a lion of me, which
I hated—at least the women were; only they had to beware of Yram, who was
a young lady of a jealous temperament, and kept a sharp eye both on me and on
my lady visitors. However, I felt so kindly towards her, and was so entirely
dependent upon her for almost all that made my life a blessing and a comfort to
me, that I took good care not to vex her, and we remained excellent friends.
The men were far less inquisitive, and would not, I believe, have come near me
of their own accord; but the women made them come as escorts. I was delighted
with their handsome mien, and pleasant genial manners.

My food was plain, but always varied and wholesome, and the good red wine was
admirable. I had found a sort of wort in the garden, which I sweated in heaps
and then dried, obtaining thus a substitute for tobacco; so that what with
Yram, the language, visitors, fives in the garden, smoking, and bed, my time
slipped by more rapidly and pleasantly than might have been expected. I also
made myself a small flute; and being a tolerable player, amused myself at times
with playing snatches from operas, and airs such as “O where and oh
where,” and “Home, sweet home.” This was of great advantage
to me, for the people of the country were ignorant of the diatonic scale and
could hardly believe their ears on hearing some of our most common melodies.
Often, too, they would make me sing; and I could at any time make Yram’s
eyes swim with tears by singing “Wilkins and his Dinah,”
“Billy Taylor,” “The Ratcatcher’s Daughter,” or
as much of them as I could remember.

I had one or two discussions with them because I never would sing on Sunday (of
which I kept count in my pocket-book), except chants and hymn tunes; of these I
regret to say that I had forgotten the words, so that I could only sing the
tune. They appeared to have little or no religious feeling, and to have never
so much as heard of the divine institution of the Sabbath, so they ascribed my
observance of it to a fit of sulkiness, which they remarked as coming over me
upon every seventh day. But they were very tolerant, and one of them said to me
quite kindly that she knew how impossible it was to help being sulky at times,
only she thought I ought to see some one if it became more serious—a
piece of advice which I then failed to understand, though I pretended to take
it quite as a matter of course.

Once only did Yram treat me in a way that was unkind and unreasonable,—at
least so I thought it at the time. It happened thus. I had been playing fives
in the garden and got much heated. Although the day was cold, for autumn was
now advancing, and Cold Harbour (as the name of the town in which my prison was
should be translated) stood fully 3000 feet above the sea, I had played without
my coat and waistcoat, and took a sharp chill on resting myself too long in the
open air without protection. The next day I had a severe cold and felt really
poorly. Being little used even to the lightest ailments, and thinking that it
would be rather nice to be petted and cossetted by Yram, I certainly did not
make myself out to be any better than I was; in fact, I remember that I made
the worst of things, and took it into my head to consider myself upon the sick
list. When Yram brought me my breakfast I complained somewhat dolefully of my
indisposition, expecting the sympathy and humouring which I should have
received from my mother and sisters at home. Not a bit of it. She fired up in
an instant, and asked me what I meant by it, and how I dared to presume to
mention such a thing, especially when I considered in what place I was. She had
the best mind to tell her father, only that she was afraid the consequences
would be so very serious for me. Her manner was so injured and decided, and her
anger so evidently unfeigned, that I forgot my cold upon the spot, begging her
by all means to tell her father if she wished to do so, and telling her that I
had no idea of being shielded by her from anything whatever; presently
mollifying, after having said as many biting things as I could, I asked her
what it was that I had done amiss, and promised amendment as soon as ever I
became aware of it. She saw that I was really ignorant, and had had no
intention of being rude to her; whereon it came out that illness of any sort
was considered in Erewhon to be highly criminal and immoral; and that I was
liable, even for catching cold, to be had up before the magistrates and
imprisoned for a considerable period—an announcement which struck me dumb
with astonishment.

I followed up the conversation as well as my imperfect knowledge of the
language would allow, and caught a glimmering of her position with regard to
ill-health; but I did not even then fully comprehend it, nor had I as yet any
idea of the other extraordinary perversions of thought which existed among the
Erewhonians, but with which I was soon to become familiar. I propose,
therefore, to make no mention of what passed between us on this occasion, save
that we were reconciled, and that she brought me surreptitiously a hot glass of
spirits and water before I went to bed, as also a pile of extra blankets, and
that next morning I was quite well. I never remember to have lost a cold so
rapidly.

This little affair explained much which had hitherto puzzled me. It seemed that
the two men who were examined before the magistrates on the day of my arrival
in the country, had been given in charge on account of ill health, and were
both condemned to a long term of imprisonment with hard labour; they were now
expiating their offence in this very prison, and their exercise ground was a
yard separated by my fives wall from the garden in which I walked. This
accounted for the sounds of coughing and groaning which I had often noticed as
coming from the other side of the wall: it was high, and I had not dared to
climb it for fear the jailor should see me and think that I was trying to
escape; but I had often wondered what sort of people they could be on the other
side, and had resolved on asking the jailor; but I seldom saw him, and Yram and
I generally found other things to talk about.

Another month flew by, during which I made such progress in the language that I
could understand all that was said to me, and express myself with tolerable
fluency. My instructor professed to be astonished with the progress I had made;
I was careful to attribute it to the pains he had taken with me and to his
admirable method of explaining my difficulties, so we became excellent friends.

My visitors became more and more frequent. Among them there were some, both men
and women, who delighted me entirely by their simplicity, unconsciousness of
self, kindly genial manners, and last, but not least, by their exquisite
beauty; there came others less well-bred, but still comely and agreeable
people, while some were snobs pure and simple.

At the end of the third month the jailor and my instructor came together to
visit me and told me that communications had been received from the Government
to the effect that if I had behaved well and seemed generally reasonable, and
if there could be no suspicion at all about my bodily health and vigour, and if
my hair was really light, and my eyes blue and complexion fresh, I was to be
sent up at once to the metropolis in order that the King and Queen might see me
and converse with me; but that when I arrived there I should be set at liberty,
and a suitable allowance would be made me. My teacher also told me that one of
the leading merchants had sent me an invitation to repair to his house and to
consider myself his guest for as long a time as I chose. “He is a
delightful man,” continued the interpreter, “but has suffered
terribly from” (here there came a long word which I could not quite
catch, only it was much longer than kleptomania), “and has but lately
recovered from embezzling a large sum of money under singularly distressing
circumstances; but he has quite got over it, and the straighteners say that he
has made a really wonderful recovery; you are sure to like him.”

CHAPTER IX.
TO THE METROPOLIS

With the above words the good man left the room before I had time to express my
astonishment at hearing such extraordinary language from the lips of one who
seemed to be a reputable member of society. “Embezzle a large sum of
money under singularly distressing circumstances!” I exclaimed to myself,
“and ask me to go and stay with him! I shall do nothing of the
sort—compromise myself at the very outset in the eyes of all decent
people, and give the death-blow to my chances of either converting them if they
are the lost tribes of Israel, or making money out of them if they are not! No.
I will do anything rather than that.” And when I next saw my teacher I
told him that I did not at all like the sound of what had been proposed for me,
and that I would have nothing to do with it. For by my education and the
example of my own parents, and I trust also in some degree from inborn
instinct, I have a very genuine dislike for all unhandsome dealings in money
matters, though none can have a greater regard for money than I have, if it be
got fairly.

The interpreter was much surprised by my answer, and said that I should be very
foolish if I persisted in my refusal.

Mr. Nosnibor, he continued, “is a man of at least 500,000
horse-power” (for their way of reckoning and classifying men is by the
number of foot pounds which they have money enough to raise, or more roughly by
their horse-power), “and keeps a capital table; besides, his two
daughters are among the most beautiful women in Erewhon.”

When I heard all this, I confess that I was much shaken, and inquired whether
he was favourably considered in the best society.

“Certainly,” was the answer; “no man in the country stands
higher.”

He then went on to say that one would have thought from my manner that my
proposed host had had jaundice or pleurisy or been generally unfortunate, and
that I was in fear of infection.

“I am not much afraid of infection,” said I, impatiently,
“but I have some regard for my character; and if I know a man to be an
embezzler of other people’s money, be sure of it, I will give him as wide
a berth as I can. If he were ill or poor—”

“Ill or poor!” interrupted the interpreter, with a face of great
alarm. “So that’s your notion of propriety! You would consort with
the basest criminals, and yet deem simple embezzlement a bar to friendly
intercourse. I cannot understand you.”

“But I am poor myself,” cried I.

“You were,” said he; “and you were liable to be severely
punished for it,—indeed, at the council which was held concerning you,
this fact was very nearly consigning you to what I should myself consider a
well-deserved chastisement” (for he was getting angry, and so was I);
“but the Queen was so inquisitive, and wanted so much to see you, that
she petitioned the King and made him give you his pardon, and assign you a
pension in consideration of your meritorious complexion. It is lucky for you
that he has not heard what you have been saying now, or he would be sure to
cancel it.”

As I heard these words my heart sank within me. I felt the extreme difficulty
of my position, and how wicked I should be in running counter to established
usage. I remained silent for several minutes, and then said that I should be
happy to accept the embezzler’s invitation,—on which my instructor
brightened and said I was a sensible fellow. But I felt very uncomfortable.
When he had left the room, I mused over the conversation which had just taken
place between us, but I could make nothing out of it, except that it argued an
even greater perversity of mental vision than I had been yet prepared for. And
this made me wretched; for I cannot bear having much to do with people who
think differently from myself. All sorts of wandering thoughts kept coming into
my head. I thought of my master’s hut, and my seat upon the mountain
side, where I had first conceived the insane idea of exploring. What years and
years seemed to have passed since I had begun my journey!

I thought of my adventures in the gorge, and on the journey hither, and of
Chowbok. I wondered what Chowbok told them about me when he got back,—he
had done well in going back, Chowbok had. He was not handsome—nay, he was
hideous; and it would have gone hardly with him. Twilight drew on, and rain
pattered against the windows. Never yet had I felt so unhappy, except during
three days of sea-sickness at the beginning of my voyage from England. I sat
musing and in great melancholy, until Yram made her appearance with light and
supper. She too, poor girl, was miserable; for she had heard that I was to
leave them. She had made up her mind that I was to remain always in the town,
even after my imprisonment was over; and I fancy had resolved to marry me
though I had never so much as hinted at her doing so. So what with the
distressingly strange conversation with my teacher, my own friendless
condition, and Yram’s melancholy, I felt more unhappy than I can
describe, and remained so till I got to bed, and sleep sealed my eyelids.

On awaking next morning I was much better. It was settled that I was to make my
start in a conveyance which was to be in waiting for me at about eleven
o’clock; and the anticipation of change put me in good spirits, which
even the tearful face of Yram could hardly altogether derange. I kissed her
again and again, assured her that we should meet hereafter, and that in the
meanwhile I should be ever mindful of her kindness. I gave her two of the
buttons off my coat and a lock of my hair as a keepsake, taking a goodly curl
from her own beautiful head in return: and so, having said good-bye a hundred
times, till I was fairly overcome with her great sweetness and her sorrow, I
tore myself away from her and got down-stairs to the calèche which was
in waiting. How thankful I was when it was all over, and I was driven away and
out of sight. Would that I could have felt that it was out of mind also! Pray
heaven that it is so now, and that she is married happily among her own people,
and has forgotten me!

And now began a long and tedious journey with which I should hardly trouble the
reader if I could. He is safe, however, for the simple reason that I was
blindfolded during the greater part of the time. A bandage was put upon my eyes
every morning, and was only removed at night when I reached the inn at which we
were to pass the night. We travelled slowly, although the roads were good. We
drove but one horse, which took us our day’s journey from morning till
evening, about six hours, exclusive of two hours’ rest in the middle of
the day. I do not suppose we made above thirty or thirty-five miles on an
average. Each day we had a fresh horse. As I have said already, I could see
nothing of the country. I only know that it was level, and that several times
we had to cross large rivers in ferry-boats. The inns were clean and
comfortable. In one or two of the larger towns they were quite sumptuous, and
the food was good and well cooked. The same wonderful health and grace and
beauty prevailed everywhere.

I found myself an object of great interest; so much so, that the driver told me
he had to keep our route secret, and at times to go to places that were not
directly on our road, in order to avoid the press that would otherwise have
awaited us. Every evening I had a reception, and grew heartily tired of having
to say the same things over and over again in answer to the same questions, but
it was impossible to be angry with people whose manners were so delightful.
They never once asked after my health, or even whether I was fatigued with my
journey; but their first question was almost invariably an inquiry after my
temper, the naiveté of which astonished me till I became used to
it. One day, being tired and cold, and weary of saying the same thing over and
over again, I turned a little brusquely on my questioner and said that I was
exceedingly cross, and that I could hardly feel in a worse humour with myself
and every one else than at that moment. To my surprise, I was met with the
kindest expressions of condolence, and heard it buzzed about the room that I
was in an ill temper; whereon people began to give me nice things to smell and
to eat, which really did seem to have some temper-mending quality about them,
for I soon felt pleased and was at once congratulated upon being better. The
next morning two or three people sent their servants to the hotel with
sweetmeats, and inquiries whether I had quite recovered from my ill humour. On
receiving the good things I felt in half a mind to be ill-tempered every
evening; but I disliked the condolences and the inquiries, and found it most
comfortable to keep my natural temper, which is smooth enough generally.

Among those who came to visit me were some who had received a liberal education
at the Colleges of Unreason, and taken the highest degrees in hypothetics,
which are their principal study. These gentlemen had now settled down to
various employments in the country, as straighteners, managers and cashiers of
the Musical Banks, priests of religion, or what not, and carrying their
education with them they diffused a leaven of culture throughout the country. I
naturally questioned them about many of the things which had puzzled me since
my arrival. I inquired what was the object and meaning of the statues which I
had seen upon the plateau of the pass. I was told that they dated from a very
remote period, and that there were several other such groups in the country,
but none so remarkable as the one which I had seen. They had a religious
origin, having been designed to propitiate the gods of deformity and disease.
In former times it had been the custom to make expeditions over the ranges, and
capture the ugliest of Chowbok’s ancestors whom they could find, in order
to sacrifice them in the presence of these deities, and thus avert ugliness and
disease from the Erewhonians themselves. It had been whispered (but my
informant assured me untruly) that centuries ago they had even offered up some
of their own people who were ugly or out of health, in order to make examples
of them; these detestable customs, however, had been long discontinued; neither
was there any present observance of the statues.

I had the curiosity to inquire what would be done to any of Chowbok’s
tribe if they crossed over into Erewhon. I was told that nobody knew, inasmuch
as such a thing had not happened for ages. They would be too ugly to be allowed
to go at large, but not so much so as to be criminally liable. Their offence in
having come would be a moral one; but they would be beyond the
straightener’s art. Possibly they would be consigned to the Hospital for
Incurable Bores, and made to work at being bored for so many hours a day by the
Erewhonian inhabitants of the hospital, who are extremely impatient of one
another’s boredom, but would soon die if they had no one whom they might
bore—in fact, that they would be kept as professional borees. When I
heard this, it occurred to me that some rumours of its substance might perhaps
have become current among Chowbok’s people; for the agony of his fear had
been too great to have been inspired by the mere dread of being burnt alive
before the statues.

I also questioned them about the museum of old machines, and the cause of the
apparent retrogression in all arts, sciences, and inventions. I learnt that
about four hundred years previously, the state of mechanical knowledge was far
beyond our own, and was advancing with prodigious rapidity, until one of the
most learned professors of hypothetics wrote an extraordinary book (from which
I propose to give extracts later on), proving that the machines were ultimately
destined to supplant the race of man, and to become instinct with a vitality as
different from, and superior to, that of animals, as animal to vegetable life.
So convincing was his reasoning, or unreasoning, to this effect, that he
carried the country with him; and they made a clean sweep of all machinery that
had not been in use for more than two hundred and seventy-one years (which
period was arrived at after a series of compromises), and strictly forbade all
further improvements and inventions under pain of being considered in the eye
of the law to be labouring under typhus fever, which they regard as one of the
worst of all crimes.

This is the only case in which they have confounded mental and physical
diseases, and they do it even here as by an avowed legal fiction. I became
uneasy when I remembered about my watch; but they comforted me with the
assurance that transgression in this matter was now so unheard of, that the law
could afford to be lenient towards an utter stranger, especially towards one
who had such a good character (they meant physique), and such beautiful light
hair. Moreover the watch was a real curiosity, and would be a welcome addition
to the metropolitan collection; so they did not think I need let it trouble me
seriously.

I will write, however, more fully upon this subject when I deal with the
Colleges of Unreason, and the Book of the Machines.

In about a month from the time of our starting I was told that our journey was
nearly over. The bandage was now dispensed with, for it seemed impossible that
I should ever be able to find my way back without being captured. Then we
rolled merrily along through the streets of a handsome town, and got on to a
long, broad, and level road, with poplar trees on either side. The road was
raised slightly above the surrounding country, and had formerly been a railway;
the fields on either side were in the highest conceivable cultivation, but the
harvest and also the vintage had been already gathered. The weather had got
cooler more rapidly than could be quite accounted for by the progress of the
season; so I rather thought that we must have been making away from the sun,
and were some degrees farther from the equator than when we started. Even here
the vegetation showed that the climate was a hot one, yet there was no lack of
vigour among the people; on the contrary, they were a very hardy race, and
capable of great endurance. For the hundredth time I thought that, take them
all round, I had never seen their equals in respect of physique, and they
looked as good-natured as they were robust. The flowers were for the most part
over, but their absence was in some measure compensated for by a profusion of
delicious fruit, closely resembling the figs, peaches, and pears of Italy and
France. I saw no wild animals, but birds were plentiful and much as in Europe,
but not tame as they had been on the other side the ranges. They were shot at
with the cross-bow and with arrows, gunpowder being unknown, or at any rate not
in use.

We were now nearing the metropolis and I could see great towers and
fortifications, and lofty buildings that looked like palaces. I began to be
nervous as to my reception; but I had got on very well so far, and resolved to
continue upon the same plan as hitherto—namely, to behave just as though
I were in England until I saw that I was making a blunder, and then to say
nothing till I could gather how the land lay. We drew nearer and nearer. The
news of my approach had got abroad, and there was a great crowd collected on
either side the road, who greeted me with marks of most respectful curiosity,
keeping me bowing constantly in acknowledgement from side to side.

When we were about a mile off, we were met by the Mayor and several
Councillors, among whom was a venerable old man, who was introduced to me by
the Mayor (for so I suppose I should call him) as the gentleman who had invited
me to his house. I bowed deeply and told him how grateful I felt to him, and
how gladly I would accept his hospitality. He forbade me to say more, and
pointing to his carriage, which was close at hand, he motioned me to a seat
therein. I again bowed profoundly to the Mayor and Councillors, and drove off
with my entertainer, whose name was Senoj Nosnibor. After about half a mile the
carriage turned off the main road, and we drove under the walls of the town
till we reached a palazzo on a slight eminence, and just on the
outskirts of the city. This was Senoj Nosnibor’s house, and nothing can
be imagined finer. It was situated near the magnificent and venerable ruins of
the old railway station, which formed an imposing feature from the gardens of
the house. The grounds, some ten or a dozen acres in extent, were laid out in
terraced gardens, one above the other, with flights of broad steps ascending
and descending the declivity of the garden. On these steps there were statues
of most exquisite workmanship. Besides the statues there were vases filled with
various shrubs that were new to me; and on either side the flights of steps
there were rows of old cypresses and cedars, with grassy alleys between them.
Then came choice vineyards and orchards of fruit-trees in full bearing.

The house itself was approached by a court-yard, and round it was a corridor on
to which rooms opened, as at Pompeii. In the middle of the court there was a
bath and a fountain. Having passed the court we came to the main body of the
house, which was two stories in height. The rooms were large and lofty; perhaps
at first they looked rather bare of furniture, but in hot climates people
generally keep their rooms more bare than they do in colder ones. I missed also
the sight of a grand piano or some similar instrument, there being no means of
producing music in any of the rooms save the larger drawing-room, where there
were half a dozen large bronze gongs, which the ladies used occasionally to
beat about at random. It was not pleasant to hear them, but I have heard quite
as unpleasant music both before and since.

Mr. Nosnibor took me through several spacious rooms till we reached a boudoir
where were his wife and daughters, of whom I had heard from the interpreter.
Mrs. Nosnibor was about forty years old, and still handsome, but she had grown
very stout: her daughters were in the prime of youth and exquisitely beautiful.
I gave the preference almost at once to the younger, whose name was Arowhena;
for the elder sister was haughty, while the younger had a very winning manner.
Mrs. Nosnibor received me with the perfection of courtesy, so that I must have
indeed been shy and nervous if I had not at once felt welcome. Scarcely was the
ceremony of my introduction well completed before a servant announced that
dinner was ready in the next room. I was exceedingly hungry, and the dinner was
beyond all praise. Can the reader wonder that I began to consider myself in
excellent quarters? “That man embezzle money?” thought I to myself;
“impossible.”

But I noticed that my host was uneasy during the whole meal, and that he ate
nothing but a little bread and milk; towards the end of dinner there came a
tall lean man with a black beard, to whom Mr. Nosnibor and the whole family
paid great attention: he was the family straightener. With this gentleman Mr.
Nosnibor retired into another room, from which there presently proceeded a
sound of weeping and wailing. I could hardly believe my ears, but in a few
minutes I got to know for a certainty that they came from Mr. Nosnibor himself.

“Poor papa,” said Arowhena, as she helped herself composedly to the
salt, “how terribly he has suffered.”

“Yes,” answered her mother; “but I think he is quite out of
danger now.”

Then they went on to explain to me the circumstances of the case, and the
treatment which the straightener had prescribed, and how successful he had
been—all which I will reserve for another chapter, and put rather in the
form of a general summary of the opinions current upon these subjects than in
the exact words in which the facts were delivered to me; the reader, however,
is earnestly requested to believe that both in this next chapter and in those
that follow it I have endeavoured to adhere most conscientiously to the
strictest accuracy, and that I have never willingly misrepresented, though I
may have sometimes failed to understand all the bearings of an opinion or
custom.

CHAPTER X.
CURRENT OPINIONS

This is what I gathered. That in that country if a man falls into ill health,
or catches any disorder, or fails bodily in any way before he is seventy years
old, he is tried before a jury of his countrymen, and if convicted is held up
to public scorn and sentenced more or less severely as the case may be. There
are subdivisions of illnesses into crimes and misdemeanours as with offences
amongst ourselves—a man being punished very heavily for serious illness,
while failure of eyes or hearing in one over sixty-five, who has had good
health hitherto, is dealt with by fine only, or imprisonment in default of
payment. But if a man forges a cheque, or sets his house on fire, or robs with
violence from the person, or does any other such things as are criminal in our
own country, he is either taken to a hospital and most carefully tended at the
public expense, or if he is in good circumstances, he lets it be known to all
his friends that he is suffering from a severe fit of immorality, just as we do
when we are ill, and they come and visit him with great solicitude, and inquire
with interest how it all came about, what symptoms first showed themselves, and
so forth,—questions which he will answer with perfect unreserve; for bad
conduct, though considered no less deplorable than illness with ourselves, and
as unquestionably indicating something seriously wrong with the individual who
misbehaves, is nevertheless held to be the result of either pre-natal or
post-natal misfortune.

The strange part of the story, however, is that though they ascribe moral
defects to the effect of misfortune either in character or surroundings, they
will not listen to the plea of misfortune in cases that in England meet with
sympathy and commiseration only. Ill luck of any kind, or even ill treatment at
the hands of others, is considered an offence against society, inasmuch as it
makes people uncomfortable to hear of it. Loss of fortune, therefore, or loss
of some dear friend on whom another was much dependent, is punished hardly less
severely than physical delinquency.

Foreign, indeed, as such ideas are to our own, traces of somewhat similar
opinions can be found even in nineteenth-century England. If a person has an
abscess, the medical man will say that it contains “peccant”
matter, and people say that they have a “bad” arm or finger, or
that they are very “bad” all over, when they only mean
“diseased.” Among foreign nations Erewhonian opinions may be still
more clearly noted. The Mahommedans, for example, to this day, send their
female prisoners to hospitals, and the New Zealand Maories visit any misfortune
with forcible entry into the house of the offender, and the breaking up and
burning of all his goods. The Italians, again, use the same word for
“disgrace” and “misfortune.” I once heard an Italian
lady speak of a young friend whom she described as endowed with every virtue
under heaven, “ma,” she exclaimed, “povero disgraziato, ha
ammazzato suo zio.” (“Poor unfortunate fellow, he has murdered his
uncle.”)

On mentioning this, which I heard when taken to Italy as a boy by my father,
the person to whom I told it showed no surprise. He said that he had been
driven for two or three years in a certain city by a young Sicilian cabdriver
of prepossessing manners and appearance, but then lost sight of him. On asking
what had become of him, he was told that he was in prison for having shot at
his father with intent to kill him—happily without serious result. Some
years later my informant again found himself warmly accosted by the
prepossessing young cabdriver. “Ah, caro signore,” he exclaimed,
“sono cinque anni che non lo vedo—tre anni di militare, e due anni
di disgrazia,” &c. (“My dear sir, it is five years since I saw
you—three years of military service, and two of
misfortune”)—during which last the poor fellow had been in prison.
Of moral sense he showed not so much as a trace. He and his father were now on
excellent terms, and were likely to remain so unless either of them should
again have the misfortune mortally to offend the other.

In the following chapter I will give a few examples of the way in which what we
should call misfortune, hardship, or disease are dealt with by the Erewhonians,
but for the moment will return to their treatment of cases that with us are
criminal. As I have already said, these, though not judicially punishable, are
recognised as requiring correction. Accordingly, there exists a class of men
trained in soul-craft, whom they call straighteners, as nearly as I can
translate a word which literally means “one who bends back the
crooked.” These men practise much as medical men in England, and receive
a quasi-surreptitious fee on every visit. They are treated with the same
unreserve, and obeyed as readily, as our own doctors—that is to say, on
the whole sufficiently—because people know that it is their interest to
get well as soon as they can, and that they will not be scouted as they would
be if their bodies were out of order, even though they may have to undergo a
very painful course of treatment.

When I say that they will not be scouted, I do not mean that an Erewhonian will
suffer no social inconvenience in consequence, we will say, of having committed
fraud. Friends will fall away from him because of his being less pleasant
company, just as we ourselves are disinclined to make companions of those who
are either poor or poorly. No one with any sense of self-respect will place
himself on an equality in the matter of affection with those who are less lucky
than himself in birth, health, money, good looks, capacity, or anything else.
Indeed, that dislike and even disgust should be felt by the fortunate for the
unfortunate, or at any rate for those who have been discovered to have met with
any of the more serious and less familiar misfortunes, is not only natural, but
desirable for any society, whether of man or brute.

The fact, therefore, that the Erewhonians attach none of that guilt to crime
which they do to physical ailments, does not prevent the more selfish among
them from neglecting a friend who has robbed a bank, for instance, till he has
fully recovered; but it does prevent them from even thinking of treating
criminals with that contemptuous tone which would seem to say, “I, if I
were you, should be a better man than you are,” a tone which is held
quite reasonable in regard to physical ailment. Hence, though they conceal ill
health by every cunning and hypocrisy and artifice which they can devise, they
are quite open about the most flagrant mental diseases, should they happen to
exist, which to do the people justice is not often. Indeed, there are some who
are, so to speak, spiritual valetudinarians, and who make themselves
exceedingly ridiculous by their nervous supposition that they are wicked, while
they are very tolerable people all the time. This however is exceptional; and
on the whole they use much the same reserve or unreserve about the state of
their moral welfare as we do about our health.

Hence all the ordinary greetings among ourselves, such as, How do you do? and
the like, are considered signs of gross ill-breeding; nor do the politer
classes tolerate even such a common complimentary remark as telling a man that
he is looking well. They salute each other with, “I hope you are good
this morning;” or “I hope you have recovered from the snappishness
from which you were suffering when I last saw you;” and if the person
saluted has not been good, or is still snappish, he says so at once and is
condoled with accordingly. Indeed, the straighteners have gone so far as to
give names from the hypothetical language (as taught at the Colleges of
Unreason), to all known forms of mental indisposition, and to classify them
according to a system of their own, which, though I could not understand it,
seemed to work well in practice; for they are always able to tell a man what is
the matter with him as soon as they have heard his story, and their familiarity
with the long names assures him that they thoroughly understand his case.

The reader will have no difficulty in believing that the laws regarding ill
health were frequently evaded by the help of recognised fictions, which every
one understood, but which it would be considered gross ill-breeding to even
seem to understand. Thus, a day or two after my arrival at the
Nosnibors’, one of the many ladies who called on me made excuses for her
husband’s only sending his card, on the ground that when going through
the public market-place that morning he had stolen a pair of socks. I had
already been warned that I should never show surprise, so I merely expressed my
sympathy, and said that though I had only been in the capital so short a time,
I had already had a very narrow escape from stealing a clothes-brush, and that
though I had resisted temptation so far, I was sadly afraid that if I saw any
object of special interest that was neither too hot nor too heavy, I should
have to put myself in the straightener’s hands.

Mrs. Nosnibor, who had been keeping an ear on all that I had been saying,
praised me when the lady had gone. Nothing, she said, could have been more
polite according to Erewhonian etiquette. She then explained that to have
stolen a pair of socks, or “to have the socks” (in more colloquial
language), was a recognised way of saying that the person in question was
slightly indisposed.

In spite of all this they have a keen sense of the enjoyment consequent upon
what they call being “well.” They admire mental health and love it
in other people, and take all the pains they can (consistently with their other
duties) to secure it for themselves. They have an extreme dislike to marrying
into what they consider unhealthy families. They send for the straightener at
once whenever they have been guilty of anything seriously
flagitious—often even if they think that they are on the point of
committing it; and though his remedies are sometimes exceedingly painful,
involving close confinement for weeks, and in some cases the most cruel
physical tortures, I never heard of a reasonable Erewhonian refusing to do what
his straightener told him, any more than of a reasonable Englishman refusing to
undergo even the most frightful operation, if his doctors told him it was
necessary.

We in England never shrink from telling our doctor what is the matter with us
merely through the fear that he will hurt us. We let him do his worst upon us,
and stand it without a murmur, because we are not scouted for being ill, and
because we know that the doctor is doing his best to cure us, and that he can
judge of our case better than we can; but we should conceal all illness if we
were treated as the Erewhonians are when they have anything the matter with
them; we should do the same as with moral and intellectual diseases,—we
should feign health with the most consummate art, till we were found out, and
should hate a single flogging given in the way of mere punishment more than the
amputation of a limb, if it were kindly and courteously performed from a wish
to help us out of our difficulty, and with the full consciousness on the part
of the doctor that it was only by an accident of constitution that he was not
in the like plight himself. So the Erewhonians take a flogging once a week, and
a diet of bread and water for two or three months together, whenever their
straightener recommends it.

I do not suppose that even my host, on having swindled a confiding widow out of
the whole of her property, was put to more actual suffering than a man will
readily undergo at the hands of an English doctor. And yet he must have had a
very bad time of it. The sounds I heard were sufficient to show that his pain
was exquisite, but he never shrank from undergoing it. He was quite sure that
it did him good; and I think he was right. I cannot believe that that man will
ever embezzle money again. He may—but it will be a long time before he
does so.

During my confinement in prison, and on my journey, I had already discovered a
great deal of the above; but it still seemed surpassingly strange, and I was in
constant fear of committing some piece of rudeness, through my inability to
look at things from the same stand-point as my neighbours; but after a few
weeks’ stay with the Nosnibors, I got to understand things better,
especially on having heard all about my host’s illness, of which he told
me fully and repeatedly.

It seemed that he had been on the Stock Exchange of the city for many years and
had amassed enormous wealth, without exceeding the limits of what was generally
considered justifiable, or at any rate, permissible dealing; but at length on
several occasions he had become aware of a desire to make money by fraudulent
representations, and had actually dealt with two or three sums in a way which
had made him rather uncomfortable. He had unfortunately made light of it and
pooh-poohed the ailment, until circumstances eventually presented themselves
which enabled him to cheat upon a very considerable scale;—he told me
what they were, and they were about as bad as anything could be, but I need not
detail them;—he seized the opportunity, and became aware, when it was too
late, that he must be seriously out of order. He had neglected himself too
long.

He drove home at once, broke the news to his wife and daughters as gently as he
could, and sent off for one of the most celebrated straighteners of the kingdom
to a consultation with the family practitioner, for the case was plainly
serious. On the arrival of the straightener he told his story, and expressed
his fear that his morals must be permanently impaired.

The eminent man reassured him with a few cheering words, and then proceeded to
make a more careful diagnosis of the case. He inquired concerning Mr.
Nosnibor’s parents—had their moral health been good? He was
answered that there had not been anything seriously amiss with them, but that
his maternal grandfather, whom he was supposed to resemble somewhat in person,
had been a consummate scoundrel and had ended his days in a
hospital,—while a brother of his father’s, after having led a most
flagitious life for many years, had been at last cured by a philosopher of a
new school, which as far as I could understand it bore much the same relation
to the old as homoeopathy to allopathy. The straightener shook his head at
this, and laughingly replied that the cure must have been due to nature. After
a few more questions he wrote a prescription and departed.

I saw the prescription. It ordered a fine to the State of double the money
embezzled; no food but bread and milk for six months, and a severe flogging
once a month for twelve. I was surprised to see that no part of the fine was to
be paid to the poor woman whose money had been embezzled, but on inquiry I
learned that she would have been prosecuted in the Misplaced Confidence Court,
if she had not escaped its clutches by dying shortly after she had discovered
her loss.

As for Mr. Nosnibor, he had received his eleventh flogging on the day of my
arrival. I saw him later on the same afternoon, and he was still twinged; but
there had been no escape from following out the straightener’s
prescription, for the so-called sanitary laws of Erewhon are very rigorous, and
unless the straightener was satisfied that his orders had been obeyed, the
patient would have been taken to a hospital (as the poor are), and would have
been much worse off. Such at least is the law, but it is never necessary to
enforce it.

On a subsequent occasion I was present at an interview between Mr. Nosnibor and
the family straightener, who was considered competent to watch the completion
of the cure. I was struck with the delicacy with which he avoided even the
remotest semblance of inquiry after the physical well-being of his patient,
though there was a certain yellowness about my host’s eyes which argued a
bilious habit of body. To have taken notice of this would have been a gross
breach of professional etiquette. I was told, however, that a straightener
sometimes thinks it right to glance at the possibility of some slight physical
disorder if he finds it important in order to assist him in his diagnosis; but
the answers which he gets are generally untrue or evasive, and he forms his own
conclusions upon the matter as well as he can. Sensible men have been known to
say that the straightener should in strict confidence be told of every physical
ailment that is likely to bear upon the case; but people are naturally shy of
doing this, for they do not like lowering themselves in the opinion of the
straightener, and his ignorance of medical science is supreme. I heard of one
lady, indeed, who had the hardihood to confess that a furious outbreak of
ill-humour and extravagant fancies for which she was seeking advice was
possibly the result of indisposition. “You should resist that,”
said the straightener, in a kind, but grave voice; “we can do nothing for
the bodies of our patients; such matters are beyond our province, and I desire
that I may hear no further particulars.” The lady burst into tears, and
promised faithfully that she would never be unwell again.

But to return to Mr. Nosnibor. As the afternoon wore on many carriages drove up
with callers to inquire how he had stood his flogging. It had been very severe,
but the kind inquiries upon every side gave him great pleasure, and he assured
me that he felt almost tempted to do wrong again by the solicitude with which
his friends had treated him during his recovery: in this I need hardly say that
he was not serious.

During the remainder of my stay in the country Mr. Nosnibor was constantly
attentive to his business, and largely increased his already great possessions;
but I never heard a whisper to the effect of his having been indisposed a
second time, or made money by other than the most strictly honourable means. I
did hear afterwards in confidence that there had been reason to believe that
his health had been not a little affected by the straightener’s
treatment, but his friends did not choose to be over-curious upon the subject,
and on his return to his affairs it was by common consent passed over as hardly
criminal in one who was otherwise so much afflicted. For they regard bodily
ailments as the more venial in proportion as they have been produced by causes
independent of the constitution. Thus if a person ruin his health by excessive
indulgence at the table or by drinking, they count it to be almost a part of
the mental disease which brought it about, and so it goes for little, but they
have no mercy on such illnesses as fevers or catarrhs or lung diseases, which
to us appear to be beyond the control of the individual. They are only more
lenient towards the diseases of the young—such as measles, which they
think to be like sowing one’s wild oats—and look over them as
pardonable indiscretions if they have not been too serious, and if they are
atoned for by complete subsequent recovery.

It is hardly necessary to say that the office of straightener is one which
requires long and special training. It stands to reason that he who would cure
a moral ailment must be practically acquainted with it in all its bearings. The
student for the profession of straightener is required to set apart certain
seasons for the practice of each vice in turn, as a religious duty. These
seasons are called “fasts,” and are continued by the student until
he finds that he really can subdue all the more usual vices in his own person,
and hence can advise his patients from the results of his own experience.

Those who intend to be specialists, rather than general practitioners, devote
themselves more particularly to the branch in which their practice will mainly
lie. Some students have been obliged to continue their exercises during their
whole lives, and some devoted men have actually died as martyrs to the drink,
or gluttony, or whatever branch of vice they may have chosen for their especial
study. The greater number, however, take no harm by the excursions into the
various departments of vice which it is incumbent upon them to study.

For the Erewhonians hold that unalloyed virtue is not a thing to be
immoderately indulged in. I was shown more than one case in which the real or
supposed virtues of parents were visited upon the children to the third and
fourth generation. The straighteners say that the most that can be truly said
for virtue is that there is a considerable balance in its favour, and that it
is on the whole a good deal better to be on its side than against it; but they
urge that there is much pseudo-virtue going about, which is apt to let people
in very badly before they find it out. Those men, they say, are best who are
not remarkable either for vice or virtue. I told them about Hogarth’s
idle and industrious apprentices, but they did not seem to think that the
industrious apprentice was a very nice person.

CHAPTER XI.
SOME EREWHONIAN TRIALS

In Erewhon as in other countries there are some courts of justice that deal
with special subjects. Misfortune generally, as I have above explained, is
considered more or less criminal, but it admits of classification, and a court
is assigned to each of the main heads under which it can be supposed to fall.
Not very long after I had reached the capital I strolled into the Personal
Bereavement Court, and was much both interested and pained by listening to the
trial of a man who was accused of having just lost a wife to whom he had been
tenderly attached, and who had left him with three little children, of whom the
eldest was only three years old.

The defence which the prisoner’s counsel endeavoured to establish was,
that the prisoner had never really loved his wife; but it broke down
completely, for the public prosecutor called witness after witness who deposed
to the fact that the couple had been devoted to one another, and the prisoner
repeatedly wept as incidents were put in evidence that reminded him of the
irreparable nature of the loss he had sustained. The jury returned a verdict of
guilty after very little deliberation, but recommended the prisoner to mercy on
the ground that he had but recently insured his wife’s life for a
considerable sum, and might be deemed lucky inasmuch as he had received the
money without demur from the insurance company, though he had only paid two
premiums.

I have just said that the jury found the prisoner guilty. When the judge passed
sentence, I was struck with the way in which the prisoner’s counsel was
rebuked for having referred to a work in which the guilt of such misfortunes as
the prisoner’s was extenuated to a degree that roused the indignation of
the court.

“We shall have,” said the judge, “these crude and
subversionary books from time to time until it is recognised as an axiom of
morality that luck is the only fit object of human veneration. How far a man
has any right to be more lucky and hence more venerable than his neighbours, is
a point that always has been, and always will be, settled proximately by a kind
of higgling and haggling of the market, and ultimately by brute force; but
however this may be, it stands to reason that no man should be allowed to be
unlucky to more than a very moderate extent.”

Then, turning to the prisoner, the judge continued:—“You have
suffered a great loss. Nature attaches a severe penalty to such offences, and
human law must emphasise the decrees of nature. But for the recommendation of
the jury I should have given you six months’ hard labour. I will,
however, commute your sentence to one of three months, with the option of a
fine of twenty-five per cent. of the money you have received from the insurance
company.”

The prisoner thanked the judge, and said that as he had no one to look after
his children if he was sent to prison, he would embrace the option mercifully
permitted him by his lordship, and pay the sum he had named. He was then
removed from the dock.

The next case was that of a youth barely arrived at man’s estate, who was
charged with having been swindled out of large property during his minority by
his guardian, who was also one of his nearest relations. His father had been
long dead, and it was for this reason that his offence came on for trial in the
Personal Bereavement Court. The lad, who was undefended, pleaded that he was
young, inexperienced, greatly in awe of his guardian, and without independent
professional advice. “Young man,” said the judge sternly, “do
not talk nonsense. People have no right to be young, inexperienced, greatly in
awe of their guardians, and without independent professional advice. If by such
indiscretions they outrage the moral sense of their friends, they must expect
to suffer accordingly.” He then ordered the prisoner to apologise to his
guardian, and to receive twelve strokes with a cat-of-nine-tails.

But I shall perhaps best convey to the reader an idea of the entire perversion
of thought which exists among this extraordinary people, by describing the
public trial of a man who was accused of pulmonary consumption—an offence
which was punished with death until quite recently. It did not occur till I had
been some months in the country, and I am deviating from chronological order in
giving it here; but I had perhaps better do so in order that I may exhaust this
subject before proceeding to others. Moreover I should never come to an end
were I to keep to a strictly narrative form, and detail the infinite
absurdities with which I daily came in contact.

The prisoner was placed in the dock, and the jury were sworn much as in Europe;
almost all our own modes of procedure were reproduced, even to the requiring
the prisoner to plead guilty or not guilty. He pleaded not guilty, and the case
proceeded. The evidence for the prosecution was very strong; but I must do the
court the justice to observe that the trial was absolutely impartial. Counsel
for the prisoner was allowed to urge everything that could be said in his
defence: the line taken was that the prisoner was simulating consumption in
order to defraud an insurance company, from which he was about to buy an
annuity, and that he hoped thus to obtain it on more advantageous terms. If
this could have been shown to be the case he would have escaped a criminal
prosecution, and been sent to a hospital as for a moral ailment. The view,
however, was one which could not be reasonably sustained, in spite of all the
ingenuity and eloquence of one of the most celebrated advocates of the country.
The case was only too clear, for the prisoner was almost at the point of death,
and it was astonishing that he had not been tried and convicted long
previously. His coughing was incessant during the whole trial, and it was all
that the two jailors in charge of him could do to keep him on his legs until it
was over.

The summing up of the judge was admirable. He dwelt upon every point that could
be construed in favour of the prisoner, but as he proceeded it became clear
that the evidence was too convincing to admit of doubt, and there was but one
opinion in the court as to the impending verdict when the jury retired from the
box. They were absent for about ten minutes, and on their return the foreman
pronounced the prisoner guilty. There was a faint murmur of applause, but it
was instantly repressed. The judge then proceeded to pronounce sentence in
words which I can never forget, and which I copied out into a note-book next
day from the report that was published in the leading newspaper. I must
condense it somewhat, and nothing which I could say would give more than a
faint idea of the solemn, not to say majestic, severity with which it was
delivered. The sentence was as follows:-

“Prisoner at the bar, you have been accused of the great crime of
labouring under pulmonary consumption, and after an impartial trial before a
jury of your countrymen, you have been found guilty. Against the justice of the
verdict I can say nothing: the evidence against you was conclusive, and it only
remains for me to pass such a sentence upon you, as shall satisfy the ends of
the law. That sentence must be a very severe one. It pains me much to see one
who is yet so young, and whose prospects in life were otherwise so excellent,
brought to this distressing condition by a constitution which I can only regard
as radically vicious; but yours is no case for compassion: this is not your
first offence: you have led a career of crime, and have only profited by the
leniency shown you upon past occasions, to offend yet more seriously against
the laws and institutions of your country. You were convicted of aggravated
bronchitis last year: and I find that though you are now only twenty-three
years old, you have been imprisoned on no less than fourteen occasions for
illnesses of a more or less hateful character; in fact, it is not too much to
say that you have spent the greater part of your life in a jail.

“It is all very well for you to say that you came of unhealthy parents,
and had a severe accident in your childhood which permanently undermined your
constitution; excuses such as these are the ordinary refuge of the criminal;
but they cannot for one moment be listened to by the ear of justice. I am not
here to enter upon curious metaphysical questions as to the origin of this or
that—questions to which there would be no end were their introduction
once tolerated, and which would result in throwing the only guilt on the
tissues of the primordial cell, or on the elementary gases. There is no
question of how you came to be wicked, but only this—namely, are you
wicked or not? This has been decided in the affirmative, neither can I hesitate
for a single moment to say that it has been decided justly. You are a bad and
dangerous person, and stand branded in the eyes of your fellow-countrymen with
one of the most heinous known offences.

“It is not my business to justify the law: the law may in some cases have
its inevitable hardships, and I may feel regret at times that I have not the
option of passing a less severe sentence than I am compelled to do. But yours
is no such case; on the contrary, had not the capital punishment for
consumption been abolished, I should certainly inflict it now.

“It is intolerable that an example of such terrible enormity should be
allowed to go at large unpunished. Your presence in the society of respectable
people would lead the less able-bodied to think more lightly of all forms of
illness; neither can it be permitted that you should have the chance of
corrupting unborn beings who might hereafter pester you. The unborn must not be
allowed to come near you: and this not so much for their protection (for they
are our natural enemies), as for our own; for since they will not be utterly
gainsaid, it must be seen to that they shall be quartered upon those who are
least likely to corrupt them.

“But independently of this consideration, and independently of the
physical guilt which attaches itself to a crime so great as yours, there is yet
another reason why we should be unable to show you mercy, even if we were
inclined to do so. I refer to the existence of a class of men who lie hidden
among us, and who are called physicians. Were the severity of the law or the
current feeling of the country to be relaxed never so slightly, these abandoned
persons, who are now compelled to practise secretly and who can be consulted
only at the greatest risk, would become frequent visitors in every household;
their organisation and their intimate acquaintance with all family secrets
would give them a power, both social and political, which nothing could resist.
The head of the household would become subordinate to the family doctor, who
would interfere between man and wife, between master and servant, until the
doctors should be the only depositaries of power in the nation, and have all
that we hold precious at their mercy. A time of universal dephysicalisation
would ensue; medicine-vendors of all kinds would abound in our streets and
advertise in all our newspapers. There is one remedy for this, and one only. It
is that which the laws of this country have long received and acted upon, and
consists in the sternest repression of all diseases whatsoever, as soon as
their existence is made manifest to the eye of the law. Would that that eye
were far more piercing than it is.

“But I will enlarge no further upon things that are themselves so
obvious. You may say that it is not your fault. The answer is ready enough at
hand, and it amounts to this—that if you had been born of healthy and
well-to-do parents, and been well taken care of when you were a child, you
would never have offended against the laws of your country, nor found yourself
in your present disgraceful position. If you tell me that you had no hand in
your parentage and education, and that it is therefore unjust to lay these
things to your charge, I answer that whether your being in a consumption is
your fault or no, it is a fault in you, and it is my duty to see that against
such faults as this the commonwealth shall be protected. You may say that it is
your misfortune to be criminal; I answer that it is your crime to be
unfortunate.

“Lastly, I should point out that even though the jury had acquitted
you—a supposition that I cannot seriously entertain—I should have
felt it my duty to inflict a sentence hardly less severe than that which I must
pass at present; for the more you had been found guiltless of the crime imputed
to you, the more you would have been found guilty of one hardly less
heinous—I mean the crime of having been maligned unjustly.

“I do not hesitate therefore to sentence you to imprisonment, with hard
labour, for the rest of your miserable existence. During that period I would
earnestly entreat you to repent of the wrongs you have done already, and to
entirely reform the constitution of your whole body. I entertain but little
hope that you will pay attention to my advice; you are already far too
abandoned. Did it rest with myself, I should add nothing in mitigation of the
sentence which I have passed, but it is the merciful provision of the law that
even the most hardened criminal shall be allowed some one of the three official
remedies, which is to be prescribed at the time of his conviction. I shall
therefore order that you receive two tablespoonfuls of castor oil daily, until
the pleasure of the court be further known.”

When the sentence was concluded the prisoner acknowledged in a few scarcely
audible words that he was justly punished, and that he had had a fair trial. He
was then removed to the prison from which he was never to return. There was a
second attempt at applause when the judge had finished speaking, but as before
it was at once repressed; and though the feeling of the court was strongly
against the prisoner, there was no show of any violence against him, if one may
except a little hooting from the bystanders when he was being removed in the
prisoners’ van. Indeed, nothing struck me more during my whole sojourn in
the country, than the general respect for law and order.

CHAPTER XII.
MALCONTENTS

I confess that I felt rather unhappy when I got home, and thought more closely
over the trial that I had just witnessed. For the time I was carried away by
the opinion of those among whom I was. They had no misgivings about what they
were doing. There did not seem to be a person in the whole court who had the
smallest doubt but that all was exactly as it should be. This universal
unsuspecting confidence was imparted by sympathy to myself, in spite of all my
training in opinions so widely different. So it is with most of us: that which
we observe to be taken as a matter of course by those around us, we take as a
matter of course ourselves. And after all, it is our duty to do this, save upon
grave occasion.

But when I was alone, and began to think the trial over, it certainly did
strike me as betraying a strange and untenable position. Had the judge said
that he acknowledged the probable truth, namely, that the prisoner was born of
unhealthy parents, or had been starved in infancy, or had met with some
accidents which had developed consumption; and had he then gone on to say that
though he knew all this, and bitterly regretted that the protection of society
obliged him to inflict additional pain on one who had suffered so much already,
yet that there was no help for it, I could have understood the position,
however mistaken I might have thought it. The judge was fully persuaded that
the infliction of pain upon the weak and sickly was the only means of
preventing weakness and sickliness from spreading, and that ten times the
suffering now inflicted upon the accused was eventually warded off from others
by the present apparent severity. I could therefore perfectly understand his
inflicting whatever pain he might consider necessary in order to prevent so bad
an example from spreading further and lowering the Erewhonian standard; but it
seemed almost childish to tell the prisoner that he could have been in good
health, if he had been more fortunate in his constitution, and been exposed to
less hardships when he was a boy.

I write with great diffidence, but it seems to me that there is no unfairness
in punishing people for their misfortunes, or rewarding them for their sheer
good luck: it is the normal condition of human life that this should be done,
and no right-minded person will complain of being subjected to the common
treatment. There is no alternative open to us. It is idle to say that men are
not responsible for their misfortunes. What is responsibility? Surely to be
responsible means to be liable to have to give an answer should it be demanded,
and all things which live are responsible for their lives and actions should
society see fit to question them through the mouth of its authorised agent.

What is the offence of a lamb that we should rear it, and tend it, and lull it
into security, for the express purpose of killing it? Its offence is the
misfortune of being something which society wants to eat, and which cannot
defend itself. This is ample. Who shall limit the right of society except
society itself? And what consideration for the individual is tolerable unless
society be the gainer thereby? Wherefore should a man be so richly rewarded for
having been son to a millionaire, were it not clearly provable that the common
welfare is thus better furthered? We cannot seriously detract from a
man’s merit in having been the son of a rich father without imperilling
our own tenure of things which we do not wish to jeopardise; if this were
otherwise we should not let him keep his money for a single hour; we would have
it ourselves at once. For property is robbery, but then, we are all robbers or
would-be robbers together, and have found it essential to organise our
thieving, as we have found it necessary to organise our lust and our revenge.
Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to
the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is
flowing.

But to return. Even in England a man on board a ship with yellow fever is held
responsible for his mischance, no matter what his being kept in quarantine may
cost him. He may catch the fever and die; we cannot help it; he must take his
chance as other people do; but surely it would be desperate unkindness to add
contumely to our self-protection, unless, indeed, we believe that contumely is
one of our best means of self-protection. Again, take the case of maniacs. We
say that they are irresponsible for their actions, but we take good care, or
ought to take good care, that they shall answer to us for their insanity, and
we imprison them in what we call an asylum (that modern sanctuary!) if we do
not like their answers. This is a strange kind of irresponsibility. What we
ought to say is that we can afford to be satisfied with a less satisfactory
answer from a lunatic than from one who is not mad, because lunacy is less
infectious than crime.

We kill a serpent if we go in danger by it, simply for being such and such a
serpent in such and such a place; but we never say that the serpent has only
itself to blame for not having been a harmless creature. Its crime is that of
being the thing which it is: but this is a capital offence, and we are right in
killing it out of the way, unless we think it more danger to do so than to let
it escape; nevertheless we pity the creature, even though we kill it.

But in the case of him whose trial I have described above, it was impossible
that any one in the court should not have known that it was but by an accident
of birth and circumstances that he was not himself also in a consumption; and
yet none thought that it disgraced them to hear the judge give vent to the most
cruel truisms about him. The judge himself was a kind and thoughtful person. He
was a man of magnificent and benign presence. He was evidently of an iron
constitution, and his face wore an expression of the maturest wisdom and
experience; yet for all this, old and learned as he was, he could not see
things which one would have thought would have been apparent even to a child.
He could not emancipate himself from, nay, it did not even occur to him to
feel, the bondage of the ideas in which he had been born and bred.

So was it also with the jury and bystanders; and—most wonderful of
all—so was it even with the prisoner. Throughout he seemed fully
impressed with the notion that he was being dealt with justly: he saw nothing
wanton in his being told by the judge that he was to be punished, not so much
as a necessary protection to society (although this was not entirely lost sight
of), as because he had not been better born and bred than he was. But this led
me to hope that he suffered less than he would have done if he had seen the
matter in the same light that I did. And, after all, justice is relative.

I may here mention that only a few years before my arrival in the country, the
treatment of all convicted invalids had been much more barbarous than now, for
no physical remedy was provided, and prisoners were put to the severest labour
in all sorts of weather, so that most of them soon succumbed to the extreme
hardships which they suffered; this was supposed to be beneficial in some ways,
inasmuch as it put the country to less expense for the maintenance of its
criminal class; but the growth of luxury had induced a relaxation of the old
severity, and a sensitive age would no longer tolerate what appeared to be an
excess of rigour, even towards the most guilty; moreover, it was found that
juries were less willing to convict, and justice was often cheated because
there was no alternative between virtually condemning a man to death and
letting him go free; it was also held that the country paid in recommittals for
its over-severity; for those who had been imprisoned even for trifling ailments
were often permanently disabled by their imprisonment; and when a man had been
once convicted, it was probable that he would seldom afterwards be off the
hands of the country.

These evils had long been apparent and recognised; yet people were too
indolent, and too indifferent to suffering not their own, to bestir themselves
about putting an end to them, until at last a benevolent reformer devoted his
whole life to effecting the necessary changes. He divided all illnesses into
three classes—those affecting the head, the trunk, and the lower
limbs—and obtained an enactment that all diseases of the head, whether
internal or external, should be treated with laudanum, those of the body with
castor-oil, and those of the lower limbs with an embrocation of strong
sulphuric acid and water.

It may be said that the classification was not sufficiently careful, and that
the remedies were ill chosen; but it is a hard thing to initiate any reform,
and it was necessary to familiarise the public mind with the principle, by
inserting the thin end of the wedge first: it is not, therefore, to be wondered
at that among so practical a people there should still be some room for
improvement. The mass of the nation are well pleased with existing
arrangements, and believe that their treatment of criminals leaves little or
nothing to be desired; but there is an energetic minority who hold what are
considered to be extreme opinions, and who are not at all disposed to rest
contented until the principle lately admitted has been carried further.

I was at some pains to discover the opinions of these men, and their reasons
for entertaining them. They are held in great odium by the generality of the
public, and are considered as subverters of all morality whatever. The
malcontents, on the other hand, assert that illness is the inevitable result of
certain antecedent causes, which, in the great majority of cases, were beyond
the control of the individual, and that therefore a man is only guilty for
being in a consumption in the same way as rotten fruit is guilty for having
gone rotten. True, the fruit must be thrown on one side as unfit for
man’s use, and the man in a consumption must be put in prison for the
protection of his fellow-citizens; but these radicals would not punish him
further than by loss of liberty and a strict surveillance. So long as he was
prevented from injuring society, they would allow him to make himself useful by
supplying whatever of society’s wants he could supply. If he succeeded in
thus earning money, they would have him made as comfortable in prison as
possible, and would in no way interfere with his liberty more than was
necessary to prevent him from escaping, or from becoming more severely
indisposed within the prison walls; but they would deduct from his earnings the
expenses of his board, lodging, surveillance, and half those of his conviction.
If he was too ill to do anything for his support in prison, they would allow
him nothing but bread and water, and very little of that.

They say that society is foolish in refusing to allow itself to be benefited by
a man merely because he has done it harm hitherto, and that objection to the
labour of the diseased classes is only protection in another form. It is an
attempt to raise the natural price of a commodity by saying that such and such
persons, who are able and willing to produce it, shall not do so, whereby every
one has to pay more for it.

Besides, so long as a man has not been actually killed he is our
fellow-creature, though perhaps a very unpleasant one. It is in a great degree
the doing of others that he is what he is, or in other words, the society which
now condemns him is partly answerable concerning him. They say that there is no
fear of any increase of disease under these circumstances; for the loss of
liberty, the surveillance, the considerable and compulsory deduction from the
prisoner’s earnings, the very sparing use of stimulants (of which they
would allow but little to any, and none to those who did not earn them), the
enforced celibacy, and above all, the loss of reputation among friends, are in
their opinion as ample safeguards to society against a general neglect of
health as those now resorted to. A man, therefore, (so they say) should carry
his profession or trade into prison with him if possible; if not, he must earn
his living by the nearest thing to it that he can; but if he be a gentleman
born and bred to no profession, he must pick oakum, or write art criticisms for
a newspaper.

These people say further, that the greater part of the illness which exists in
their country is brought about by the insane manner in which it is treated.

They believe that illness is in many cases just as curable as the moral
diseases which they see daily cured around them, but that a great reform is
impossible till men learn to take a juster view of what physical obliquity
proceeds from. Men will hide their illnesses as long as they are scouted on its
becoming known that they are ill; it is the scouting, not the physic, which
produces the concealment; and if a man felt that the news of his being in
ill-health would be received by his neighbours as a deplorable fact, but one as
much the result of necessary antecedent causes as though he had broken into a
jeweller’s shop and stolen a valuable diamond necklace—as a fact
which might just as easily have happened to themselves, only that they had the
luck to be better born or reared; and if they also felt that they would not be
made more uncomfortable in the prison than the protection of society against
infection and the proper treatment of their own disease actually demanded, men
would give themselves up to the police as readily on perceiving that they had
taken small-pox, as they go now to the straightener when they feel that they
are on the point of forging a will, or running away with somebody else’s
wife.

But the main argument on which they rely is that of economy: for they know that
they will sooner gain their end by appealing to men’s pockets, in which
they have generally something of their own, than to their heads, which contain
for the most part little but borrowed or stolen property; and also, they
believe it to be the readiest test and the one which has most to show for
itself. If a course of conduct can be shown to cost a country less, and this by
no dishonourable saving and with no indirectly increased expenditure in other
ways, they hold that it requires a good deal to upset the arguments in favour
of its being adopted, and whether rightly or wrongly I cannot pretend to say,
they think that the more medicinal and humane treatment of the diseased of
which they are the advocates would in the long run be much cheaper to the
country: but I did not gather that these reformers were opposed to meeting some
of the more violent forms of illness with the cat-of-nine-tails, or with death;
for they saw no so effectual way of checking them; they would therefore both
flog and hang, but they would do so pitifully.

I have perhaps dwelt too long upon opinions which can have no possible bearing
upon our own, but I have not said the tenth part of what these would-be
reformers urged upon me. I feel, however, that I have sufficiently trespassed
upon the attention of the reader.

CHAPTER XIII.
THE VIEWS OF THE EREWHONIANS CONCERNING DEATH

The Erewhonians regard death with less abhorrence than disease. If it is an
offence at all, it is one beyond the reach of the law, which is therefore
silent on the subject; but they insist that the greater number of those who are
commonly said to die, have never yet been born—not, at least, into that
unseen world which is alone worthy of consideration. As regards this unseen
world I understand them to say that some miscarry in respect to it before they
have even reached the seen, and some after, while few are ever truly born into
it at all—the greater part of all the men and women over the whole
country miscarrying before they reach it. And they say that this does not
matter so much as we think it does.

As for what we call death, they argue that too much has been made of it. The
mere knowledge that we shall one day die does not make us very unhappy; no one
thinks that he or she will escape, so that none are disappointed. We do not
care greatly even though we know that we have not long to live; the only thing
that would seriously affect us would be the knowing—or rather thinking
that we know—the precise moment at which the blow will fall. Happily no
one can ever certainly know this, though many try to make themselves miserable
by endeavouring to find it out. It seems as though there were some power
somewhere which mercifully stays us from putting that sting into the tail of
death, which we would put there if we could, and which ensures that though
death must always be a bugbear, it shall never under any conceivable
circumstances be more than a bugbear.

For even though a man is condemned to die in a week’s time and is shut up
in a prison from which it is certain that he cannot escape, he will always hope
that a reprieve may come before the week is over. Besides, the prison may catch
fire, and he may be suffocated not with a rope, but with common ordinary smoke;
or he may be struck dead by lightning while exercising in the prison yards.
When the morning is come on which the poor wretch is to be hanged, he may choke
at his breakfast, or die from failure of the heart’s action before the
drop has fallen; and even though it has fallen, he cannot be quite certain that
he is going to die, for he cannot know this till his death has actually taken
place, and it will be too late then for him to discover that he was going to
die at the appointed hour after all. The Erewhonians, therefore, hold that
death, like life, is an affair of being more frightened than hurt.

They burn their dead, and the ashes are presently scattered over any piece of
ground which the deceased may himself have chosen. No one is permitted to
refuse this hospitality to the dead: people, therefore, generally choose some
garden or orchard which they may have known and been fond of when they were
young. The superstitious hold that those whose ashes are scattered over any
land become its jealous guardians from that time forward; and the living like
to think that they shall become identified with this or that locality where
they have once been happy.

They do not put up monuments, nor write epitaphs, for their dead, though in
former ages their practice was much as ours, but they have a custom which comes
to much the same thing, for the instinct of preserving the name alive after the
death of the body seems to be common to all mankind. They have statues of
themselves made while they are still alive (those, that is, who can afford it),
and write inscriptions under them, which are often quite as untruthful as are
our own epitaphs—only in another way. For they do not hesitate to
describe themselves as victims to ill temper, jealousy, covetousness, and the
like, but almost always lay claim to personal beauty, whether they have it or
not, and, often, to the possession of a large sum in the funded debt of the
country. If a person is ugly he does not sit as a model for his own statue,
although it bears his name. He gets the handsomest of his friends to sit for
him, and one of the ways of paying a compliment to another is to ask him to sit
for such a statue. Women generally sit for their own statues, from a natural
disinclination to admit the superior beauty of a friend, but they expect to be
idealised. I understood that the multitude of these statues was beginning to be
felt as an encumbrance in almost every family, and that the custom would
probably before long fall into desuetude.

Indeed, this has already come about to the satisfaction of every one, as
regards the statues of public men—not more than three of which can be
found in the whole capital. I expressed my surprise at this, and was told that
some five hundred years before my visit, the city had been so overrun with
these pests, that there was no getting about, and people were worried beyond
endurance by having their attention called at every touch and turn to
something, which, when they had attended to it, they found not to concern them.
Most of these statues were mere attempts to do for some man or woman what an
animal-stuffer does more successfully for a dog, or bird, or pike. They were
generally foisted on the public by some côterie that was trying to exalt
itself in exalting some one else, and not unfrequently they had no other
inception than desire on the part of some member of the côterie to find a
job for a young sculptor to whom his daughter was engaged. Statues so begotten
could never be anything but deformities, and this is the way in which they are
sure to be begotten, as soon as the art of making them at all has become widely
practised.

I know not why, but all the noblest arts hold in perfection but for a very
little moment. They soon reach a height from which they begin to decline, and
when they have begun to decline it is a pity that they cannot be knocked on the
head; for an art is like a living organism—better dead than dying. There
is no way of making an aged art young again; it must be born anew and grow up
from infancy as a new thing, working out its own salvation from effort to
effort in all fear and trembling.

The Erewhonians five hundred years ago understood nothing of all this—I
doubt whether they even do so now. They wanted to get the nearest thing they
could to a stuffed man whose stuffing should not grow mouldy. They should have
had some such an establishment as our Madame Tussaud’s, where the figures
wear real clothes, and are painted up to nature. Such an institution might have
been made self-supporting, for people might have been made to pay before going
in. As it was, they had let their poor cold grimy colourless heroes and
heroines loaf about in squares and in corners of streets in all weathers,
without any attempt at artistic sanitation—for there was no provision for
burying their dead works of art out of their sight—no drainage, so to
speak, whereby statues that had been sufficiently assimilated, so as to form
part of the residuary impression of the country, might be carried away out of
the system. Hence they put them up with a light heart on the cackling of their
côteries, and they and their children had to live, often enough, with
some wordy windbag whose cowardice had cost the country untold loss in blood
and money.

At last the evil reached such a pitch that the people rose, and with
indiscriminate fury destroyed good and bad alike. Most of what was destroyed
was bad, but some few works were good, and the sculptors of to-day wring their
hands over some of the fragments that have been preserved in museums up and
down the country. For a couple of hundred years or so, not a statue was made
from one end of the kingdom to the other, but the instinct for having stuffed
men and women was so strong, that people at length again began to try to make
them. Not knowing how to make them, and having no academics to mislead them,
the earliest sculptors of this period thought things out for themselves, and
again produced works that were full of interest, so that in three or four
generations they reached a perfection hardly if at all inferior to that of
several hundred years earlier.

On this the same evils recurred. Sculptors obtained high prices—the art
became a trade—schools arose which professed to sell the holy spirit of
art for money; pupils flocked from far and near to buy it, in the hopes of
selling it later on, and were struck purblind as a punishment for the sin of
those who sent them. Before long a second iconoclastic fury would infallibly
have followed, but for the prescience of a statesman who succeeded in passing
an Act to the effect that no statue of any public man or woman should be
allowed to remain unbroken for more than fifty years, unless at the end of that
time a jury of twenty-four men taken at random from the street pronounced in
favour of its being allowed a second fifty years of life. Every fifty years
this reconsideration was to be repeated, and unless there was a majority of
eighteen in favour of the retention of the statue, it was to be destroyed.

Perhaps a simpler plan would have been to forbid the erection of a statue to
any public man or woman till he or she had been dead at least one hundred
years, and even then to insist on reconsideration of the claims of the deceased
and the merit of the statue every fifty years—but the working of the Act
brought about results that on the whole were satisfactory. For in the first
place, many public statues that would have been voted under the old system,
were not ordered, when it was known that they would be almost certainly broken
up after fifty years, and in the second, public sculptors knowing their work to
be so ephemeral, scamped it to an extent that made it offensive even to the
most uncultured eye. Hence before long subscribers took to paying the sculptor
for the statue of their dead statesmen, on condition that he did not make it.
The tribute of respect was thus paid to the deceased, the public sculptors were
not mulcted, and the rest of the public suffered no inconvenience.

I was told, however, that an abuse of this custom is growing up, inasmuch as
the competition for the commission not to make a statue is so keen, that
sculptors have been known to return a considerable part of the purchase money
to the subscribers, by an arrangement made with them beforehand. Such
transactions, however, are always clandestine. A small inscription is let into
the pavement, where the public statue would have stood, which informs the
reader that such a statue has been ordered for the person, whoever he or she
may be, but that as yet the sculptor has not been able to complete it. There
has been no Act to repress statues that are intended for private consumption,
but as I have said, the custom is falling into desuetude.

Returning to Erewhonian customs in connection with death, there is one which I
can hardly pass over. When any one dies, the friends of the family write no
letters of condolence, neither do they attend the scattering, nor wear
mourning, but they send little boxes filled with artificial tears, and with the
name of the sender painted neatly upon the outside of the lid. The tears vary
in number from two to fifteen or sixteen, according to degree of intimacy or
relationship; and people sometimes find it a nice point of etiquette to know
the exact number which they ought to send. Strange as it may appear, this
attention is highly valued, and its omission by those from whom it might be
expected is keenly felt. These tears were formerly stuck with adhesive plaster
to the cheeks of the bereaved, and were worn in public for a few months after
the death of a relative; they were then banished to the hat or bonnet, and are
now no longer worn.

The birth of a child is looked upon as a painful subject on which it is kinder
not to touch: the illness of the mother is carefully concealed until the
necessity for signing the birth-formula (of which hereafter) renders further
secrecy impossible, and for some months before the event the family live in
retirement, seeing very little company. When the offence is over and done with,
it is condoned by the common want of logic; for this merciful provision of
nature, this buffer against collisions, this friction which upsets our
calculations but without which existence would be intolerable, this crowning
glory of human invention whereby we can be blind and see at one and the same
moment, this blessed inconsistency, exists here as elsewhere; and though the
strictest writers on morality have maintained that it is wicked for a woman to
have children at all, inasmuch as it is wrong to be out of health that good may
come, yet the necessity of the case has caused a general feeling in favour of
passing over such events in silence, and of assuming their non-existence except
in such flagrant cases as force themselves on the public notice. Against these
the condemnation of society is inexorable, and if it is believed that the
illness has been dangerous and protracted, it is almost impossible for a woman
to recover her former position in society.

The above conventions struck me as arbitrary and cruel, but they put a stop to
many fancied ailments; for the situation, so far from being considered
interesting, is looked upon as savouring more or less distinctly of a very
reprehensible condition of things, and the ladies take care to conceal it as
long as they can even from their own husbands, in anticipation of a severe
scolding as soon as the misdemeanour is discovered. Also the baby is kept out
of sight, except on the day of signing the birth-formula, until it can walk and
talk. Should the child unhappily die, a coroner’s inquest is inevitable,
but in order to avoid disgracing a family which may have been hitherto
respected, it is almost invariably found that the child was over seventy-five
years old, and died from the decay of nature.

CHAPTER XIV.
MAHAINA

I continued my sojourn with the Nosnibors. In a few days Mr. Nosnibor had
recovered from his flogging, and was looking forward with glee to the fact that
the next would be the last. I did not think that there seemed any occasion even
for this; but he said it was better to be on the safe side, and he would make
up the dozen. He now went to his business as usual; and I understood that he
was never more prosperous, in spite of his heavy fine. He was unable to give me
much of his time during the day; for he was one of those valuable men who are
paid, not by the year, month, week, or day, but by the minute. His wife and
daughters, however, made much of me, and introduced me to their friends, who
came in shoals to call upon me.

One of these persons was a lady called Mahaina. Zulora (the elder of my
host’s daughters) ran up to her and embraced her as soon as she entered
the room, at the same time inquiring tenderly after her “poor
dipsomania.” Mahaina answered that it was just as bad as ever; she was a
perfect martyr to it, and her excellent health was the only thing which
consoled her under her affliction.

Then the other ladies joined in with condolences and the never-failing
suggestions which they had ready for every mental malady. They recommended
their own straightener and disparaged Mahaina’s. Mrs. Nosnibor had a
favourite nostrum, but I could catch little of its nature. I heard the words
“full confidence that the desire to drink will cease when the formula has
been repeated * * * this confidence is everything * * * far from
undervaluing a thorough determination never to touch spirits again * * * fail
too often * * * formula a certain cure (with great emphasis) * * *
prescribed form * * * full conviction.” The conversation then became more
audible, and was carried on at considerable length. I should perplex myself and
the reader by endeavouring to follow the ingenious perversity of all they said;
enough, that in the course of time the visit came to an end, and Mahaina took
her leave receiving affectionate embraces from all the ladies. I had remained
in the background after the first ceremony of introduction, for I did not like
the looks of Mahaina, and the conversation displeased me. When she left the
room I had some consolation in the remarks called forth by her departure.

At first they fell to praising her very demurely. She was all this that and the
other, till I disliked her more and more at every word, and inquired how it was
that the straighteners had not been able to cure her as they had cured Mr.
Nosnibor.

There was a shade of significance on Mrs. Nosnibor’s face as I said this,
which seemed to imply that she did not consider Mahaina’s case to be
quite one for a straightener. It flashed across me that perhaps the poor woman
did not drink at all. I knew that I ought not to have inquired, but I could not
help it, and asked point blank whether she did or not.

“We can none of us judge of the condition of other people,” said
Mrs. Nosnibor in a gravely charitable tone and with a look towards Zulora.

“Oh, mamma,” answered Zulora, pretending to be half angry but
rejoiced at being able to say out what she was already longing to insinuate;
“I don’t believe a word of it. It’s all indigestion. I
remember staying in the house with her for a whole month last summer, and I am
sure she never once touched a drop of wine or spirits. The fact is, Mahaina is
a very weakly girl, and she pretends to get tipsy in order to win a forbearance
from her friends to which she is not entitled. She is not strong enough for her
calisthenic exercises, and she knows she would be made to do them unless her
inability was referred to moral causes.”

Here the younger sister, who was ever sweet and kind, remarked that she thought
Mahaina did tipple occasionally. “I also think,” she added,
“that she sometimes takes poppy juice.”

“Well, then, perhaps she does drink sometimes,” said Zulora;
“but she would make us all think that she does it much oftener in order
to hide her weakness.”

And so they went on for half an hour and more, bandying about the question as
to how far their late visitor’s intemperance was real or no. Every now
and then they would join in some charitable commonplace, and would pretend to
be all of one mind that Mahaina was a person whose bodily health would be
excellent if it were not for her unfortunate inability to refrain from
excessive drinking; but as soon as this appeared to be fairly settled they
began to be uncomfortable until they had undone their work and left some
serious imputation upon her constitution. At last, seeing that the debate had
assumed the character of a cyclone or circular storm, going round and round and
round and round till one could never say where it began nor where it ended, I
made some apology for an abrupt departure and retired to my own room.

Here at least I was alone, but I was very unhappy. I had fallen upon a set of
people who, in spite of their high civilisation and many excellences, had been
so warped by the mistaken views presented to them during childhood from
generation to generation, that it was impossible to see how they could ever
clear themselves. Was there nothing which I could say to make them feel that
the constitution of a person’s body was a thing over which he or she had
had at any rate no initial control whatever, while the mind was a perfectly
different thing, and capable of being created anew and directed according to
the pleasure of its possessor? Could I never bring them to see that while
habits of mind and character were entirely independent of initial mental force
and early education, the body was so much a creature of parentage and
circumstances, that no punishment for ill-health should be ever tolerated save
as a protection from contagion, and that even where punishment was inevitable
it should be attended with compassion? Surely, if the unfortunate Mahaina were
to feel that she could avow her bodily weakness without fear of being despised
for her infirmities, and if there were medical men to whom she could fairly
state her case, she would not hesitate about doing so through the fear of
taking nasty medicine. It was possible that her malady was incurable (for I had
heard enough to convince me that her dipsomania was only a pretence and that
she was temperate in all her habits); in that case she might perhaps be justly
subject to annoyances or even to restraint; but who could say whether she was
curable or not, until she was able to make a clean breast of her symptoms
instead of concealing them? In their eagerness to stamp out disease, these
people overshot their mark; for people had become so clever at
dissembling—they painted their faces with such consummate
skill—they repaired the decay of time and the effects of mischance with
such profound dissimulation—that it was really impossible to say whether
any one was well or ill till after an intimate acquaintance of months or years.
Even then the shrewdest were constantly mistaken in their judgements, and
marriages were often contracted with most deplorable results, owing to the art
with which infirmity had been concealed.

It appeared to me that the first step towards the cure of disease should be the
announcement of the fact to a person’s near relations and friends. If any
one had a headache, he ought to be permitted within reasonable limits to say so
at once, and to retire to his own bedroom and take a pill, without every
one’s looking grave and tears being shed and all the rest of it. As it
was, even upon hearing it whispered that somebody else was subject to
headaches, a whole company must look as though they had never had a headache in
their lives. It is true they were not very prevalent, for the people were the
healthiest and most comely imaginable, owing to the severity with which ill
health was treated; still, even the best were liable to be out of sorts
sometimes, and there were few families that had not a medicine-chest in a
cupboard somewhere.

CHAPTER XV.
THE MUSICAL BANKS

On my return to the drawing-room, I found that the Mahaina current had expended
itself. The ladies were just putting away their work and preparing to go out. I
asked them where they were going. They answered with a certain air of reserve
that they were going to the bank to get some money.

Now I had already collected that the mercantile affairs of the Erewhonians were
conducted on a totally different system from our own; I had, however, gathered
little hitherto, except that they had two distinct commercial systems, of which
the one appealed more strongly to the imagination than anything to which we are
accustomed in Europe, inasmuch as the banks that were conducted upon this
system were decorated in the most profuse fashion, and all mercantile
transactions were accompanied with music, so that they were called Musical
Banks, though the music was hideous to a European ear.

As for the system itself I never understood it, neither can I do so now: they
have a code in connection with it, which I have not the slightest doubt that
they understand, but no foreigner can hope to do so. One rule runs into, and
against, another as in a most complicated grammar, or as in Chinese
pronunciation, wherein I am told that the slightest change in accentuation or
tone of voice alters the meaning of a whole sentence. Whatever is incoherent in
my description must be referred to the fact of my never having attained to a
full comprehension of the subject.

So far, however, as I could collect anything certain, I gathered that they have
two distinct currencies, each under the control of its own banks and mercantile
codes. One of these (the one with the Musical Banks) was supposed to be
the system, and to give out the currency in which all monetary
transactions should be carried on; and as far as I could see, all who wished to
be considered respectable, kept a larger or smaller balance at these banks. On
the other hand, if there is one thing of which I am more sure than another, it
is that the amount so kept had no direct commercial value in the outside world;
I am sure that the managers and cashiers of the Musical Banks were not paid in
their own currency. Mr. Nosnibor used to go to these banks, or rather to the
great mother bank of the city, sometimes but not very often. He was a pillar of
one of the other kind of banks, though he appeared to hold some minor office
also in the musical ones. The ladies generally went alone; as indeed was the
case in most families, except on state occasions.

I had long wanted to know more of this strange system, and had the greatest
desire to accompany my hostess and her daughters. I had seen them go out almost
every morning since my arrival and had noticed that they carried their purses
in their hands, not exactly ostentatiously, yet just so as that those who met
them should see whither they were going. I had never, however, yet been asked
to go with them myself.

It is not easy to convey a person’s manner by words, and I can hardly
give any idea of the peculiar feeling that came upon me when I saw the ladies
on the point of starting for the bank. There was a something of regret, a
something as though they would wish to take me with them, but did not like to
ask me, and yet as though I were hardly to ask to be taken. I was determined,
however, to bring matters to an issue with my hostess about my going with them,
and after a little parleying, and many inquiries as to whether I was perfectly
sure that I myself wished to go, it was decided that I might do so.

We passed through several streets of more or less considerable houses, and at
last turning round a corner we came upon a large piazza, at the end of which
was a magnificent building, of a strange but noble architecture and of great
antiquity. It did not open directly on to the piazza, there being a screen,
through which was an archway, between the piazza and the actual precincts of
the bank. On passing under the archway we entered upon a green sward, round
which there ran an arcade or cloister, while in front of us uprose the majestic
towers of the bank and its venerable front, which was divided into three deep
recesses and adorned with all sorts of marbles and many sculptures. On either
side there were beautiful old trees wherein the birds were busy by the hundred,
and a number of quaint but substantial houses of singularly comfortable
appearance; they were situated in the midst of orchards and gardens, and gave
me an impression of great peace and plenty.

Indeed it had been no error to say that this building was one that appealed to
the imagination; it did more—it carried both imagination and judgement by
storm. It was an epic in stone and marble, and so powerful was the effect it
produced on me, that as I beheld it I was charmed and melted. I felt more
conscious of the existence of a remote past. One knows of this always, but the
knowledge is never so living as in the actual presence of some witness to the
life of bygone ages. I felt how short a space of human life was the period of
our own existence. I was more impressed with my own littleness, and much more
inclinable to believe that the people whose sense of the fitness of things was
equal to the upraising of so serene a handiwork, were hardly likely to be wrong
in the conclusions they might come to upon any subject. My feeling certainly
was that the currency of this bank must be the right one.

We crossed the sward and entered the building. If the outside had been
impressive the inside was even more so. It was very lofty and divided into
several parts by walls which rested upon massive pillars; the windows were
filled with stained glass descriptive of the principal commercial incidents of
the bank for many ages. In a remote part of the building there were men and
boys singing; this was the only disturbing feature, for as the gamut was still
unknown, there was no music in the country which could be agreeable to a
European ear. The singers seemed to have derived their inspirations from the
songs of birds and the wailing of the wind, which last they tried to imitate in
melancholy cadences that at times degenerated into a howl. To my thinking the
noise was hideous, but it produced a great effect upon my companions, who
professed themselves much moved. As soon as the singing was over, the ladies
requested me to stay where I was while they went inside the place from which it
had seemed to come.

During their absence certain reflections forced themselves upon me.

In the first place, it struck me as strange that the building should be so
nearly empty; I was almost alone, and the few besides myself had been led by
curiosity, and had no intention of doing business with the bank. But there
might be more inside. I stole up to the curtain, and ventured to draw the
extreme edge of it on one side. No, there was hardly any one there. I saw a
large number of cashiers, all at their desks ready to pay cheques, and one or
two who seemed to be the managing partners. I also saw my hostess and her
daughters and two or three other ladies; also three or four old women and the
boys from one of the neighbouring Colleges of Unreason; but there was no one
else. This did not look as though the bank was doing a very large business; and
yet I had always been told that every one in the city dealt with this
establishment.

I cannot describe all that took place in these inner precincts, for a
sinister-looking person in a black gown came and made unpleasant gestures at me
for peeping. I happened to have in my pocket one of the Musical Bank pieces,
which had been given me by Mrs. Nosnibor, so I tried to tip him with it; but
having seen what it was, he became so angry that I had to give him a piece of
the other kind of money to pacify him. When I had done this he became civil
directly. As soon as he was gone I ventured to take a second look, and saw
Zulora in the very act of giving a piece of paper which looked like a cheque to
one of the cashiers. He did not examine it, but putting his hand into an
antique coffer hard by, he pulled out a quantity of metal pieces apparently at
random, and handed them over without counting them; neither did Zulora count
them, but put them into her purse and went back to her seat after dropping a
few pieces of the other coinage into an alms box that stood by the
cashier’s side. Mrs. Nosnibor and Arowhena then did likewise, but a
little later they gave all (so far as I could see) that they had received from
the cashier back to a verger, who I have no doubt put it back into the coffer
from which it had been taken. They then began making towards the curtain;
whereon I let it drop and retreated to a reasonable distance.

They soon joined me. For some few minutes we all kept silence, but at last I
ventured to remark that the bank was not so busy to-day as it probably often
was. On this Mrs. Nosnibor said that it was indeed melancholy to see what
little heed people paid to the most precious of all institutions. I could say
nothing in reply, but I have ever been of opinion that the greater part of
mankind do approximately know where they get that which does them good.

Mrs. Nosnibor went on to say that I must not think there was any want of
confidence in the bank because I had seen so few people there; the heart of the
country was thoroughly devoted to these establishments, and any sign of their
being in danger would bring in support from the most unexpected quarters. It
was only because people knew them to be so very safe, that in some cases (as
she lamented to say in Mr. Nosnibor’s) they felt that their support was
unnecessary. Moreover these institutions never departed from the safest and
most approved banking principles. Thus they never allowed interest on deposit,
a thing now frequently done by certain bubble companies, which by doing an
illegitimate trade had drawn many customers away; and even the shareholders
were fewer than formerly, owing to the innovations of these unscrupulous
persons, for the Musical Banks paid little or no dividend, but divided their
profits by way of bonus on the original shares once in every thirty thousand
years; and as it was now only two thousand years since there had been one of
these distributions, people felt that they could not hope for another in their
own time and preferred investments whereby they got some more tangible return;
all which, she said, was very melancholy to think of.

Having made these last admissions, she returned to her original statement,
namely, that every one in the country really supported these banks. As to the
fewness of the people, and the absence of the able-bodied, she pointed out to
me with some justice that this was exactly what we ought to expect. The men who
were most conversant about the stability of human institutions, such as the
lawyers, men of science, doctors, statesmen, painters, and the like, were just
those who were most likely to be misled by their own fancied accomplishments,
and to be made unduly suspicious by their licentious desire for greater present
return, which was at the root of nine-tenths of the opposition; by their
vanity, which would prompt them to affect superiority to the prejudices of the
vulgar; and by the stings of their own conscience, which was constantly
upbraiding them in the most cruel manner on account of their bodies, which were
generally diseased.

Let a person’s intellect (she continued) be never so sound, unless his
body is in absolute health, he can form no judgement worth having on matters of
this kind. The body is everything: it need not perhaps be such a strong body
(she said this because she saw that I was thinking of the old and
infirm-looking folks whom I had seen in the bank), but it must be in perfect
health; in this case, the less active strength it had the more free would be
the working of the intellect, and therefore the sounder the conclusion. The
people, then, whom I had seen at the bank were in reality the very ones whose
opinions were most worth having; they declared its advantages to be
incalculable, and even professed to consider the immediate return to be far
larger than they were entitled to; and so she ran on, nor did she leave off
till we had got back to the house.

She might say what she pleased, but her manner carried no conviction, and later
on I saw signs of general indifference to these banks that were not to be
mistaken. Their supporters often denied it, but the denial was generally so
couched as to add another proof of its existence. In commercial panics, and in
times of general distress, the people as a mass did not so much as even think
of turning to these banks. A few might do so, some from habit and early
training, some from the instinct that prompts us to catch at any straw when we
think ourselves drowning, but few from a genuine belief that the Musical Banks
could save them from financial ruin, if they were unable to meet their
engagements in the other kind of currency.

In conversation with one of the Musical Bank managers I ventured to hint this
as plainly as politeness would allow. He said that it had been more or less
true till lately; but that now they had put fresh stained glass windows into
all the banks in the country, and repaired the buildings, and enlarged the
organs; the presidents, moreover, had taken to riding in omnibuses and talking
nicely to people in the streets, and to remembering the ages of their children,
and giving them things when they were naughty, so that all would henceforth go
smoothly.

“But haven’t you done anything to the money itself?” said I,
timidly.

“It is not necessary,” he rejoined; “not in the least
necessary, I assure you.”

And yet any one could see that the money given out at these banks was not that
with which people bought their bread, meat, and clothing. It was like it at a
first glance, and was stamped with designs that were often of great beauty; it
was not, again, a spurious coinage, made with the intention that it should be
mistaken for the money in actual use; it was more like a toy money, or the
counters used for certain games at cards; for, notwithstanding the beauty of
the designs, the material on which they were stamped was as nearly valueless as
possible. Some were covered with tin foil, but the greater part were frankly of
a cheap base metal the exact nature of which I was not able to determine.
Indeed they were made of a great variety of metals, or, perhaps more
accurately, alloys, some of which were hard, while others would bend easily and
assume almost any form which their possessor might desire at the moment.

Of course every one knew that their commercial value was nil, but all
those who wished to be considered respectable thought it incumbent upon them to
retain a few coins in their possession, and to let them be seen from time to
time in their hands and purses. Not only this, but they would stick to it that
the current coin of the realm was dross in comparison with the Musical Bank
coinage. Perhaps, however, the strangest thing of all was that these very
people would at times make fun in small ways of the whole system; indeed, there
was hardly any insinuation against it which they would not tolerate and even
applaud in their daily newspapers if written anonymously, while if the same
thing were said without ambiguity to their faces—nominative case verb and
accusative being all in their right places, and doubt impossible—they
would consider themselves very seriously and justly outraged, and accuse the
speaker of being unwell.

I never could understand (neither can I quite do so now, though I begin to see
better what they mean) why a single currency should not suffice them; it would
seem to me as though all their dealings would have been thus greatly
simplified; but I was met with a look of horror if ever I dared to hint at it.
Even those who to my certain knowledge kept only just enough money at the
Musical Banks to swear by, would call the other banks (where their securities
really lay) cold, deadening, paralysing, and the like.

I noticed another thing, moreover, which struck me greatly. I was taken to the
opening of one of these banks in a neighbouring town, and saw a large
assemblage of cashiers and managers. I sat opposite them and scanned their
faces attentively. They did not please me; they lacked, with few exceptions,
the true Erewhonian frankness; and an equal number from any other class would
have looked happier and better men. When I met them in the streets they did not
seem like other people, but had, as a general rule, a cramped expression upon
their faces which pained and depressed me.

Those who came from the country were better; they seemed to have lived less as
a separate class, and to be freer and healthier; but in spite of my seeing not
a few whose looks were benign and noble, I could not help asking myself
concerning the greater number of those whom I met, whether Erewhon would be a
better country if their expression were to be transferred to the people in
general. I answered myself emphatically, no. The expression on the faces of the
high Ydgrunites was that which one would wish to diffuse, and not that of the
cashiers.

A man’s expression is his sacrament; it is the outward and visible sign
of his inward and spiritual grace, or want of grace; and as I looked at the a
majority of these men, I could not help feeling that there must be a something
in their lives which had stunted their natural development, and that they would
have been more healthily minded in any other profession. I was always sorry for
them, for in nine cases out of ten they were well-meaning persons; they were in
the main very poorly paid; their constitutions were as a rule above suspicion;
and there were recorded numberless instances of their self-sacrifice and
generosity; but they had had the misfortune to have been betrayed into a false
position at an age for the most part when their judgement was not matured, and
after having been kept in studied ignorance of the real difficulties of the
system. But this did not make their position the less a false one, and its bad
effects upon themselves were unmistakable.

Few people would speak quite openly and freely before them, which struck me as
a very bad sign. When they were in the room every one would talk as though all
currency save that of the Musical Banks should be abolished; and yet they knew
perfectly well that even the cashiers themselves hardly used the Musical Bank
money more than other people. It was expected of them that they should appear
to do so, but this was all. The less thoughtful of them did not seem
particularly unhappy, but many were plainly sick at heart, though perhaps they
hardly knew it, and would not have owned to being so. Some few were opponents
of the whole system; but these were liable to be dismissed from their
employment at any moment, and this rendered them very careful, for a man who
had once been cashier at a Musical Bank was out of the field for other
employment, and was generally unfitted for it by reason of that course of
treatment which was commonly called his education. In fact it was a career from
which retreat was virtually impossible, and into which young men were generally
induced to enter before they could be reasonably expected, considering their
training, to have formed any opinions of their own. Not unfrequently, indeed,
they were induced, by what we in England should call undue influence,
concealment, and fraud. Few indeed were those who had the courage to insist on
seeing both sides of the question before they committed themselves to what was
practically a leap in the dark. One would have thought that caution in this
respect was an elementary principle,—one of the first things that an
honourable man would teach his boy to understand; but in practice it was not
so.

I even saw cases in which parents bought the right of presenting to the office
of cashier at one of these banks, with the fixed determination that some one of
their sons (perhaps a mere child) should fill it. There was the lad
himself—growing up with every promise of becoming a good and honourable
man—but utterly without warning concerning the iron shoe which his
natural protector was providing for him. Who could say that the whole thing
would not end in a life-long lie, and vain chafing to escape? I confess that
there were few things in Erewhon which shocked me more than this.

Yet we do something not so very different from this even in England, and as
regards the dual commercial system, all countries have, and have had, a law of
the land, and also another law, which, though professedly more sacred, has far
less effect on their daily life and actions. It seems as though the need for
some law over and above, and sometimes even conflicting with, the law of the
land, must spring from something that lies deep down in man’s nature;
indeed, it is hard to think that man could ever have become man at all, but for
the gradual evolution of a perception that though this world looms so large
when we are in it, it may seem a little thing when we have got away from it.

When man had grown to the perception that in the everlasting Is-and-Is-Not of
nature, the world and all that it contains, including man, is at the same time
both seen and unseen, he felt the need of two rules of life, one for the seen,
and the other for the unseen side of things. For the laws affecting the seen
world he claimed the sanction of seen powers; for the unseen (of which he knows
nothing save that it exists and is powerful) he appealed to the unseen power
(of which, again, he knows nothing save that it exists and is powerful) to
which he gives the name of God.

Some Erewhonian opinions concerning the intelligence of the unborn embryo, that
I regret my space will not permit me to lay before the reader, have led me to
conclude that the Erewhonian Musical Banks, and perhaps the religious systems
of all countries, are now more or less of an attempt to uphold the unfathomable
and unconscious instinctive wisdom of millions of past generations, against the
comparatively shallow, consciously reasoning, and ephemeral conclusions drawn
from that of the last thirty or forty.

The saving feature of the Erewhonian Musical Bank system (as distinct from the
quasi-idolatrous views which coexist with it, and on which I will touch later)
was that while it bore witness to the existence of a kingdom that is not of
this world, it made no attempt to pierce the veil that hides it from human
eyes. It is here that almost all religions go wrong. Their priests try to make
us believe that they know more about the unseen world than those whose eyes are
still blinded by the seen, can ever know—forgetting that while to deny
the existence of an unseen kingdom is bad, to pretend that we know more about
it than its bare existence is no better.

This chapter is already longer than I intended, but I should like to say that
in spite of the saving feature of which I have just spoken, I cannot help
thinking that the Erewhonians are on the eve of some great change in their
religious opinions, or at any rate in that part of them which finds expression
through their Musical Banks. So far as I could see, fully ninety per cent. of
the population of the metropolis looked upon these banks with something not far
removed from contempt. If this is so, any such startling event as is sure to
arise sooner or later, may serve as nucleus to a new order of things that will
be more in harmony with both the heads and hearts of the people.

CHAPTER XVI.
AROWHENA

The reader will perhaps have learned by this time a thing which I had myself
suspected before I had been twenty-four hours in Mr. Nosnibor’s
house—I mean, that though the Nosnibors showed me every attention, I
could not cordially like them, with the exception of Arowhena who was quite
different from the rest. They were not fair samples of Erewhonians. I saw many
families with whom they were on visiting terms, whose manners charmed me more
than I know how to say, but I never could get over my original prejudice
against Mr. Nosnibor for having embezzled the money. Mrs. Nosnibor, too, was a
very worldly woman, yet to hear her talk one would have thought that she was
singularly the reverse; neither could I endure Zulora; Arowhena however was
perfection.

She it was who ran all the little errands for her mother and Mr. Nosnibor and
Zulora, and gave those thousand proofs of sweetness and unselfishness which
some one member of a family is generally required to give. All day long it was
Arowhena this, and Arowhena that; but she never seemed to know that she was
being put upon, and was always bright and willing from morning till evening.
Zulora certainly was very handsome, but Arowhena was infinitely the more
graceful of the two and was the very ne plus ultra of youth and beauty.
I will not attempt to describe her, for anything that I could say would fall so
far short of the reality as only to mislead the reader. Let him think of the
very loveliest that he can imagine, and he will still be below the truth.
Having said this much, I need hardly say that I had fallen in love with her.

She must have seen what I felt for her, but I tried my hardest not to let it
appear even by the slightest sign. I had many reasons for this. I had no idea
what Mr. and Mrs. Nosnibor would say to it; and I knew that Arowhena would not
look at me (at any rate not yet) if her father and mother disapproved, which
they probably would, considering that I had nothing except the pension of about
a pound a day of our money which the King had granted me. I did not yet know of
a more serious obstacle.

In the meantime, I may say that I had been presented at court, and was told
that my reception had been considered as singularly gracious; indeed, I had
several interviews both with the King and Queen, at which from time to time the
Queen got everything from me that I had in the world, clothes and all, except
the two buttons I had given to Yram, the loss of which seemed to annoy her a
good deal. I was presented with a court suit, and her Majesty had my old
clothes put upon a wooden dummy, on which they probably remain, unless they
have been removed in consequence of my subsequent downfall. His Majesty’s
manners were those of a cultivated English gentleman. He was much pleased at
hearing that our government was monarchical, and that the mass of the people
were resolute that it should not be changed; indeed, I was so much encouraged
by the evident pleasure with which he heard me, that I ventured to quote to him
those beautiful lines of Shakespeare’s—

“There’s a divinity doth hedge a king,
Rough hew him how we may;”

but I was sorry I had done so afterwards, for I do not think his Majesty
admired the lines as much as I could have wished.

There is no occasion for me to dwell further upon my experience of the court,
but I ought perhaps to allude to one of my conversations with the King,
inasmuch as it was pregnant with the most important consequences.

He had been asking me about my watch, and enquiring whether such dangerous
inventions were tolerated in the country from which I came. I owned with some
confusion that watches were not uncommon; but observing the gravity which came
over his Majesty’s face I presumed to say that they were fast dying out,
and that we had few if any other mechanical contrivances of which he was likely
to disapprove. Upon his asking me to name some of our most advanced machines, I
did not dare to tell him of our steam-engines and railroads and electric
telegraphs, and was puzzling my brains to think what I could say, when, of all
things in the world, balloons suggested themselves, and I gave him an account
of a very remarkable ascent which was made some years ago. The King was too
polite to contradict, but I felt sure that he did not believe me, and from that
day forward though he always showed me the attention which was due to my genius
(for in this light was my complexion regarded), he never questioned me about
the manners and customs of my country.

To return, however, to Arowhena. I soon gathered that neither Mr. nor Mrs.
Nosnibor would have any objection to my marrying into the family; a physical
excellence is considered in Erewhon as a set off against almost any other
disqualification, and my light hair was sufficient to make me an eligible
match. But along with this welcome fact I gathered another which filled me with
dismay: I was expected to marry Zulora, for whom I had already conceived a
great aversion. At first I hardly noticed the little hints and the artifices
which were resorted to in order to bring us together, but after a time they
became too plain. Zulora, whether she was in love with me or not, was bent on
marrying me, and I gathered in talking with a young gentleman of my
acquaintance who frequently visited the house and whom I greatly disliked, that
it was considered a sacred and inviolable rule that whoever married into a
family must marry the eldest daughter at that time unmarried. The young
gentleman urged this upon me so frequently that I at last saw he was in love
with Arowhena himself, and wanted me to get Zulora out of the way; but others
told me the same story as to the custom of the country, and I saw there was a
serious difficulty. My only comfort was that Arowhena snubbed my rival and
would not look at him. Neither would she look at me; nevertheless there was a
difference in the manner of her disregard; this was all I could get from her.

Not that she avoided me; on the contrary I had many a
tête-à-tête with her, for her mother and sister were anxious
for me to deposit some part of my pension in the Musical Banks, this being in
accordance with the dictates of their goddess Ydgrun, of whom both Mrs.
Nosnibor and Zulora were great devotees. I was not sure whether I had kept my
secret from being perceived by Arowhena herself, but none of the others
suspected me, so she was set upon me to get me to open an account, at any rate
pro formâ, with the Musical Banks; and I need hardly say that she
succeeded. But I did not yield at once; I enjoyed the process of being argued
with too keenly to lose it by a prompt concession; besides, a little hesitation
rendered the concession itself more valuable. It was in the course of
conversations on this subject that I learned the more defined religious
opinions of the Erewhonians, that coexist with the Musical Bank system, but are
not recognised by those curious institutions. I will describe them as briefly
as possible in the following chapters before I return to the personal
adventures of Arowhena and myself.

They were idolaters, though of a comparatively enlightened kind; but here, as
in other things, there was a discrepancy between their professed and actual
belief, for they had a genuine and potent faith which existed without
recognition alongside of their idol worship.

The gods whom they worship openly are personifications of human qualities, as
justice, strength, hope, fear, love, &c., &c. The people think that
prototypes of these have a real objective existence in a region far beyond the
clouds, holding, as did the ancients, that they are like men and women both in
body and passion, except that they are even comelier and more powerful, and
also that they can render themselves invisible to human eyesight. They are
capable of being propitiated by mankind and of coming to the assistance of
those who ask their aid. Their interest in human affairs is keen, and on the
whole beneficent; but they become very angry if neglected, and punish rather
the first they come upon, than the actual person who has offended them; their
fury being blind when it is raised, though never raised without reason. They
will not punish with any less severity when people sin against them from
ignorance, and without the chance of having had knowledge; they will take no
excuses of this kind, but are even as the English law, which assumes itself to
be known to every one.

Thus they have a law that two pieces of matter may not occupy the same space at
the same moment, which law is presided over and administered by the gods of
time and space jointly, so that if a flying stone and a man’s head
attempt to outrage these gods, by “arrogating a right which they do not
possess” (for so it is written in one of their books), and to occupy the
same space simultaneously, a severe punishment, sometimes even death itself, is
sure to follow, without any regard to whether the stone knew that the
man’s head was there, or the head the stone; this at least is their view
of the common accidents of life. Moreover, they hold their deities to be quite
regardless of motives. With them it is the thing done which is everything, and
the motive goes for nothing.

Thus they hold it strictly forbidden for a man to go without common air in his
lungs for more than a very few minutes; and if by any chance he gets into the
water, the air-god is very angry, and will not suffer it; no matter whether the
man got into the water by accident or on purpose, whether through the attempt
to save a child or through presumptuous contempt of the air-god, the air-god
will kill him, unless he keeps his head high enough out of the water, and thus
gives the air-god his due.

This with regard to the deities who manage physical affairs. Over and above
these they personify hope, fear, love, and so forth, giving them temples and
priests, and carving likenesses of them in stone, which they verily believe to
be faithful representations of living beings who are only not human in being
more than human. If any one denies the objective existence of these divinities,
and says that there is really no such being as a beautiful woman called
Justice, with her eyes blinded and a pair of scales, positively living and
moving in a remote and ethereal region, but that justice is only the
personified expression of certain modes of human thought and action—they
say that he denies the existence of justice in denying her personality, and
that he is a wanton disturber of men’s religious convictions. They detest
nothing so much as any attempt to lead them to higher spiritual conceptions of
the deities whom they profess to worship. Arowhena and I had a pitched battle
on this point, and should have had many more but for my prudence in allowing
her to get the better of me.

I am sure that in her heart she was suspicious of her own position for she
returned more than once to the subject. “Can you not see,” I had
exclaimed, “that the fact of justice being admirable will not be affected
by the absence of a belief in her being also a living agent? Can you really
think that men will be one whit less hopeful, because they no longer believe
that hope is an actual person?” She shook her head, and said that with
men’s belief in the personality all incentive to the reverence of the
thing itself, as justice or hope, would cease; men from that hour would never
be either just or hopeful again.

I could not move her, nor, indeed, did I seriously wish to do so. She deferred
to me in most things, but she never shrank from maintaining her opinions if
they were put in question; nor does she to this day abate one jot of her belief
in the religion of her childhood, though in compliance with my repeated
entreaties she has allowed herself to be baptized into the English Church. She
has, however, made a gloss upon her original faith to the effect that her baby
and I are the only human beings exempt from the vengeance of the deities for
not believing in their personality. She is quite clear that we are exempted.
She should never have so strong a conviction of it otherwise. How it has come
about she does not know, neither does she wish to know; there are things which
it is better not to know and this is one of them; but when I tell her that I
believe in her deities as much as she does—and that it is a difference
about words, not things, she becomes silent with a slight emphasis.

I own that she very nearly conquered me once; for she asked me what I should
think if she were to tell me that my God, whose nature and attributes I had
been explaining to her, was but the expression for man’s highest
conception of goodness, wisdom, and power; that in order to generate a more
vivid conception of so great and glorious a thought, man had personified it and
called it by a name; that it was an unworthy conception of the Deity to hold
Him personal, inasmuch as escape from human contingencies became thus
impossible; that the real thing men should worship was the Divine,
whereinsoever they could find it; that “God” was but man’s
way of expressing his sense of the Divine; that as justice, hope, wisdom,
&c., were all parts of goodness, so God was the expression which embraced
all goodness and all good power; that people would no more cease to love God on
ceasing to believe in His objective personality, than they had ceased to love
justice on discovering that she was not really personal; nay, that they would
never truly love Him till they saw Him thus.

She said all this in her artless way, and with none of the coherence with which
I have here written it; her face kindled, and she felt sure that she had
convinced me that I was wrong, and that justice was a living person. Indeed I
did wince a little; but I recovered myself immediately, and pointed out to her
that we had books whose genuineness was beyond all possibility of doubt, as
they were certainly none of them less than 1800 years old; that in these there
were the most authentic accounts of men who had been spoken to by the Deity
Himself, and of one prophet who had been allowed to see the back parts of God
through the hand that was laid over his face.

This was conclusive; and I spoke with such solemnity that she was a little
frightened, and only answered that they too had their books, in which their
ancestors had seen the gods; on which I saw that further argument was not at
all likely to convince her; and fearing that she might tell her mother what I
had been saying, and that I might lose the hold upon her affections which I was
beginning to feel pretty sure that I was obtaining, I began to let her have her
own way, and to convince me; neither till after we were safely married did I
show the cloven hoof again.

Nevertheless, her remarks have haunted me, and I have since met with many very
godly people who have had a great knowledge of divinity, but no sense of the
divine: and again, I have seen a radiance upon the face of those who were
worshipping the divine either in art or nature—in picture or
statue—in field or cloud or sea—in man, woman, or child—which
I have never seen kindled by any talking about the nature and attributes of
God. Mention but the word divinity, and our sense of the divine is clouded.

CHAPTER XVII.
YDGRUN AND THE YDGRUNITES

In spite of all the to-do they make about their idols, and the temples they
build, and the priests and priestesses whom they support, I could never think
that their professed religion was more than skin-deep; but they had another
which they carried with them into all their actions; and although no one from
the outside of things would suspect it to have any existence at all, it was in
reality their great guide, the mariner’s compass of their lives; so that
there were very few things which they ever either did, or refrained from doing,
without reference to its precepts.

Now I suspected that their professed faith had no great hold upon
them—firstly, because I often heard the priests complain of the
prevailing indifference, and they would hardly have done so without reason;
secondly, because of the show which was made, for there was none of this about
the worship of the goddess Ydgrun, in whom they really did believe; thirdly,
because though the priests were constantly abusing Ydgrun as being the great
enemy of the gods, it was well known that she had no more devoted worshippers
in the whole country than these very persons, who were often priests of Ydgrun
rather than of their own deities. Neither am I by any means sure that these
were not the best of the priests.

Ydgrun certainly occupied a very anomalous position; she was held to be both
omnipresent and omnipotent, but she was not an elevated conception, and was
sometimes both cruel and absurd. Even her most devoted worshippers were a
little ashamed of her, and served her more with heart and in deed than with
their tongues. Theirs was no lip service; on the contrary, even when
worshipping her most devoutly, they would often deny her. Take her all in all,
however, she was a beneficent and useful deity, who did not care how much she
was denied so long as she was obeyed and feared, and who kept hundreds of
thousands in those paths which make life tolerably happy, who would never have
been kept there otherwise, and over whom a higher and more spiritual ideal
would have had no power.

I greatly doubt whether the Erewhonians are yet prepared for any better
religion, and though (considering my gradually strengthened conviction that
they were the representatives of the lost tribes of Israel) I would have set
about converting them at all hazards had I seen the remotest prospect of
success, I could hardly contemplate the displacement of Ydgrun as the great
central object of their regard without admitting that it would be attended with
frightful consequences; in fact were I a mere philosopher, I should say that
the gradual raising of the popular conception of Ydgrun would be the greatest
spiritual boon which could be conferred upon them, and that nothing could
effect this except example. I generally found that those who complained most
loudly that Ydgrun was not high enough for them had hardly as yet come up to
the Ydgrun standard, and I often met with a class of men whom I called to
myself “high Ydgrunites” (the rest being Ydgrunites, and low
Ydgrunites), who, in the matter of human conduct and the affairs of life,
appeared to me to have got about as far as it is in the right nature of man to
go.

They were gentlemen in the full sense of the word; and what has one not said in
saying this? They seldom spoke of Ydgrun, or even alluded to her, but would
never run counter to her dictates without ample reason for doing so: in such
cases they would override her with due self-reliance, and the goddess seldom
punished them; for they are brave, and Ydgrun is not. They had most of them a
smattering of the hypothetical language, and some few more than this, but only
a few. I do not think that this language has had much hand in making them what
they are; but rather that the fact of their being generally possessed of its
rudiments was one great reason for the reverence paid to the hypothetical
language itself.

Being inured from youth to exercises and athletics of all sorts, and living
fearlessly under the eye of their peers, among whom there exists a high
standard of courage, generosity, honour, and every good and manly
quality—what wonder that they should have become, so to speak, a law unto
themselves; and, while taking an elevated view of the goddess Ydgrun, they
should have gradually lost all faith in the recognised deities of the country?
These they do not openly disregard, for conformity until absolutely intolerable
is a law of Ydgrun, yet they have no real belief in the objective existence of
beings which so readily explain themselves as abstractions, and whose
personality demands a quasi-materialism which it baffles the imagination to
realise. They keep their opinions, however, greatly to themselves, inasmuch as
most of their countrymen feel strongly about the gods, and they hold it wrong
to give pain, unless for some greater good than seems likely to arise from
their plain speaking.

On the other hand, surely those whose own minds are clear about any given
matter (even though it be only that there is little certainty) should go so far
towards imparting that clearness to others, as to say openly what they think
and why they think it, whenever they can properly do so; for they may be sure
that they owe their own clearness almost entirely to the fact that others have
done this by them: after all, they may be mistaken, and if so, it is for their
own and the general well-being that they should let their error be seen as
distinctly as possible, so that it may be more easily refuted. I own,
therefore, that on this one point I disapproved of the practice even of the
highest Ydgrunites, and objected to it all the more because I knew that I
should find my own future task more easy if the high Ydgrunites had already
undermined the belief which is supposed to prevail at present.

In other respects they were more like the best class of Englishmen than any
whom I have seen in other countries. I should have liked to have persuaded
half-a-dozen of them to come over to England and go upon the stage, for they
had most of them a keen sense of humour and a taste for acting: they would be
of great use to us. The example of a real gentleman is, if I may say so without
profanity, the best of all gospels; such a man upon the stage becomes a potent
humanising influence, an Ideal which all may look upon for a shilling.

I always liked and admired these men, and although I could not help deeply
regretting their certain ultimate perdition (for they had no sense of a
hereafter, and their only religion was that of self-respect and consideration
for other people), I never dared to take so great a liberty with them as to
attempt to put them in possession of my own religious convictions, in spite of
my knowing that they were the only ones which could make them really good and
happy, either here or hereafter. I did try sometimes, being impelled to do so
by a strong sense of duty, and by my deep regret that so much that was
admirable should be doomed to ages if not eternity of torture; but the words
stuck in my throat as soon as I began.

Whether a professional missionary might have a better chance I know not; such
persons must doubtless know more about the science of conversion: for myself, I
could only be thankful that I was in the right path, and was obliged to let
others take their chance as yet. If the plan fails by which I propose to
convert them myself, I would gladly contribute my mite towards the sending two
or three trained missionaries, who have been known as successful converters of
Jews and Mahometans; but such have seldom much to glory in the flesh, and when
I think of the high Ydgrunites, and of the figure which a missionary would
probably cut among them, I cannot feel sanguine that much good would be arrived
at. Still the attempt is worth making, and the worst danger to the missionaries
themselves would be that of being sent to the hospital where Chowbok would have
been sent had he come with me into Erewhon.

Taking then their religious opinions as a whole, I must own that the
Erewhonians are superstitious, on account of the views which they hold of their
professed gods, and their entirely anomalous and inexplicable worship of
Ydgrun, a worship at once the most powerful, yet most devoid of formalism, that
I ever met with; but in practice things worked better than might have been
expected, and the conflicting claims of Ydgrun and the gods were arranged by
unwritten compromises (for the most part in Ydgrun’s favour), which in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred were very well understood.

I could not conceive why they should not openly acknowledge high Ydgrunism, and
discard the objective personality of hope, justice, &c.; but whenever I so
much as hinted at this, I found that I was on dangerous ground. They would
never have it; returning constantly to the assertion that ages ago the
divinities were frequently seen, and that the moment their personality was
disbelieved in, men would leave off practising even those ordinary virtues
which the common experience of mankind has agreed on as being the greatest
secret of happiness. “Who ever heard,” they asked, indignantly,
“of such things as kindly training, a good example, and an enlightened
regard to one’s own welfare, being able to keep men straight?” In
my hurry, forgetting things which I ought to have remembered, I answered that
if a person could not be kept straight by these things, there was nothing that
could straighten him, and that if he were not ruled by the love and fear of men
whom he had seen, neither would he be so by that of the gods whom he had not
seen.

At one time indeed I came upon a small but growing sect who believed, after a
fashion, in the immortality of the soul and the resurrection from the dead;
they taught that those who had been born with feeble and diseased bodies and
had passed their lives in ailing, would be tortured eternally hereafter; but
that those who had been born strong and healthy and handsome would be rewarded
for ever and ever. Of moral qualities or conduct they made no mention.

Bad as this was, it was a step in advance, inasmuch as they did hold out a
future state of some sort, and I was shocked to find that for the most part
they met with opposition, on the score that their doctrine was based upon no
sort of foundation, also that it was immoral in its tendency, and not to be
desired by any reasonable beings.

When I asked how it could be immoral, I was answered, that if firmly held, it
would lead people to cheapen this present life, making it appear to be an
affair of only secondary importance; that it would thus distract men’s
minds from the perfecting of this world’s economy, and was an impatient
cutting, so to speak, of the Gordian knot of life’s problems, whereby
some people might gain present satisfaction to themselves at the cost of
infinite damage to others; that the doctrine tended to encourage the poor in
their improvidence, and in a debasing acquiescence in ills which they might
well remedy; that the rewards were illusory and the result, after all, of luck,
whose empire should be bounded by the grave; that its terrors were enervating
and unjust; and that even the most blessed rising would be but the disturbing
of a still more blessed slumber.

To all which I could only say that the thing had been actually known to happen,
and that there were several well-authenticated instances of people having died
and come to life again—instances which no man in his senses could doubt.

“If this be so,” said my opponent, “we must bear it as best
we may.”

I then translated for him, as well as I could, the noble speech of Hamlet in
which he says that it is the fear lest worse evils may befall us after death
which alone prevents us from rushing into death’s arms.

“Nonsense,” he answered, “no man was ever yet stopped from
cutting his throat by any such fears as your poet ascribes to him—and
your poet probably knew this perfectly well. If a man cuts his throat he is at
bay, and thinks of nothing but escape, no matter whither, provided he can
shuffle off his present. No. Men are kept at their posts, not by the fear that
if they quit them they may quit a frying-pan for a fire, but by the hope that
if they hold on, the fire may burn less fiercely. ‘The respect,’ to
quote your poet, ‘that makes calamity of so long a life,’ is the
consideration that though calamity may live long, the sufferer may live longer
still.”

On this, seeing that there was little probability of our coming to an
agreement, I let the argument drop, and my opponent presently left me with as
much disapprobation as he could show without being overtly rude.

CHAPTER XVIII.
BIRTH FORMULAE

I heard what follows not from Arowhena, but from Mr. Nosnibor and some of the
gentlemen who occasionally dined at the house: they told me that the
Erewhonians believe in pre-existence; and not only this (of which I will write
more fully in the next chapter), but they believe that it is of their own free
act and deed in a previous state that they come to be born into this world at
all. They hold that the unborn are perpetually plaguing and tormenting the
married of both sexes, fluttering about them incessantly, and giving them no
peace either of mind or body until they have consented to take them under their
protection. If this were not so (this at least is what they urge), it would be
a monstrous freedom for one man to take with another, to say that he should
undergo the chances and changes of this mortal life without any option in the
matter. No man would have any right to get married at all, inasmuch as he can
never tell what frightful misery his doing so may entail forcibly upon a being
who cannot be unhappy as long as he does not exist. They feel this so strongly
that they are resolved to shift the blame on to other shoulders; and have
fashioned a long mythology as to the world in which the unborn people live, and
what they do, and the arts and machinations to which they have recourse in
order to get themselves into our own world. But of this more anon: what I would
relate here is their manner of dealing with those who do come.

It is a distinguishing peculiarity of the Erewhonians that when they profess
themselves to be quite certain about any matter, and avow it as a base on which
they are to build a system of practice, they seldom quite believe in it. If
they smell a rat about the precincts of a cherished institution, they will
always stop their noses to it if they can.

This is what most of them did in this matter of the unborn, for I cannot (and
never could) think that they seriously believed in their mythology concerning
pre-existence: they did and they did not; they did not know themselves what
they believed; all they did know was that it was a disease not to believe as
they did. The only thing of which they were quite sure was that it was the
pestering of the unborn which caused them to be brought into this world, and
that they would not have been here if they would have only let peaceable people
alone.

It would be hard to disprove this position, and they might have a good case if
they would only leave it as it stands. But this they will not do; they must
have assurance doubly sure; they must have the written word of the child itself
as soon as it is born, giving the parents indemnity from all responsibility on
the score of its birth, and asserting its own pre-existence. They have
therefore devised something which they call a birth formula—a document
which varies in words according to the caution of parents, but is much the same
practically in all cases; for it has been the business of the Erewhonian
lawyers during many ages to exercise their skill in perfecting it and providing
for every contingency.

These formulae are printed on common paper at a moderate cost for the poor; but
the rich have them written on parchment and handsomely bound, so that the
getting up of a person’s birth formula is a test of his social position.
They commence by setting forth, That whereas A. B. was a member of the kingdom
of the unborn, where he was well provided for in every way, and had no cause of
discontent, &c., &c., he did of his own wanton depravity and
restlessness conceive a desire to enter into this present world; that thereon
having taken the necessary steps as set forth in laws of the unborn kingdom, he
did with malice aforethought set himself to plague and pester two unfortunate
people who had never wronged him, and who were quite contented and happy until
he conceived this base design against their peace; for which wrong he now
humbly entreats their pardon.

He acknowledges that he is responsible for all physical blemishes and
deficiencies which may render him answerable to the laws of his country; that
his parents have nothing whatever to do with any of these things; and that they
have a right to kill him at once if they be so minded, though he entreats them
to show their marvellous goodness and clemency by sparing his life. If they
will do this, he promises to be their most obedient and abject creature during
his earlier years, and indeed all his life, unless they should see fit in their
abundant generosity to remit some portion of his service hereafter. And so the
formula continues, going sometimes into very minute details, according to the
fancies of family lawyers, who will not make it any shorter than they can help.

The deed being thus prepared, on the third or fourth day after the birth of the
child, or as they call it, the “final importunity,” the friends
gather together, and there is a feast held, where they are all very
melancholy—as a general rule, I believe, quite truly so—and make
presents to the father and mother of the child in order to console them for the
injury which has just been done them by the unborn.

By-and-by the child himself is brought down by his nurse, and the company begin
to rail upon him, upbraiding him for his impertinence, and asking him what
amends he proposes to make for the wrong that he has committed, and how he can
look for care and nourishment from those who have perhaps already been injured
by the unborn on some ten or twelve occasions; for they say of people with
large families, that they have suffered terrible injuries from the unborn; till
at last, when this has been carried far enough, some one suggests the formula,
which is brought out and solemnly read to the child by the family straightener.
This gentleman is always invited on these occasions, for the very fact of
intrusion into a peaceful family shows a depravity on the part of the child
which requires his professional services.

On being teased by the reading and tweaked by the nurse, the child will
commonly begin to cry, which is reckoned a good sign, as showing a
consciousness of guilt. He is thereon asked, Does he assent to the formula? on
which, as he still continues crying and can obviously make no answer, some one
of the friends comes forward and undertakes to sign the document on his behalf,
feeling sure (so he says) that the child would do it if he only knew how, and
that he will release the present signer from his engagement on arriving at
maturity. The friend then inscribes the signature of the child at the foot of
the parchment, which is held to bind the child as much as though he had signed
it himself.

Even this, however, does not fully content them, for they feel a little uneasy
until they have got the child’s own signature after all. So when he is
about fourteen, these good people partly bribe him by promises of greater
liberty and good things, and partly intimidate him through their great power of
making themselves actively unpleasant to him, so that though there is a show of
freedom made, there is really none; they also use the offices of the teachers
in the Colleges of Unreason, till at last, in one way or another, they take
very good care that he shall sign the paper by which he professes to have been
a free agent in coming into the world, and to take all the responsibility of
having done so on to his own shoulders. And yet, though this document is
obviously the most important which any one can sign in his whole life, they
will have him do so at an age when neither they nor the law will for many a
year allow any one else to bind him to the smallest obligation, no matter how
righteously he may owe it, because they hold him too young to know what he is
about, and do not consider it fair that he should commit himself to anything
that may prejudice him in after years.

I own that all this seemed rather hard, and not of a piece with the many
admirable institutions existing among them. I once ventured to say a part of
what I thought about it to one of the Professors of Unreason. I did it very
tenderly, but his justification of the system was quite out of my
comprehension. I remember asking him whether he did not think it would do harm
to a lad’s principles, by weakening his sense of the sanctity of his word
and of truth generally, that he should be led into entering upon a solemn
declaration as to the truth of things about which all that he can certainly
know is that he knows nothing—whether, in fact, the teachers who so led
him, or who taught anything as a certainty of which they were themselves
uncertain, were not earning their living by impairing the truth-sense of their
pupils (a delicate organisation mostly), and by vitiating one of their most
sacred instincts.

The Professor, who was a delightful person, seemed greatly surprised at the
view which I took, but it had no influence with him whatsoever. No one, he
answered, expected that the boy either would or could know all that he said he
knew; but the world was full of compromises; and there was hardly any
affirmation which would bear being interpreted literally. Human language was
too gross a vehicle of thought—thought being incapable of absolute
translation. He added, that as there can be no translation from one language
into another which shall not scant the meaning somewhat, or enlarge upon it, so
there is no language which can render thought without a jarring and a harshness
somewhere—and so forth; all of which seemed to come to this in the end,
that it was the custom of the country, and that the Erewhonians were a
conservative people; that the boy would have to begin compromising sooner or
later, and this was part of his education in the art. It was perhaps to be
regretted that compromise should be as necessary as it was; still it was
necessary, and the sooner the boy got to understand it the better for himself.
But they never tell this to the boy.

From the book of their mythology about the unborn I made the extracts which
will form the following chapter.

CHAPTER XIX.
THE WORLD OF THE UNBORN

The Erewhonians say that we are drawn through life backwards; or again, that we
go onwards into the future as into a dark corridor. Time walks beside us and
flings back shutters as we advance; but the light thus given often dazzles us,
and deepens the darkness which is in front. We can see but little at a time,
and heed that little far less than our apprehension of what we shall see next;
ever peering curiously through the glare of the present into the gloom of the
future, we presage the leading lines of that which is before us, by faintly
reflected lights from dull mirrors that are behind, and stumble on as we may
till the trap-door opens beneath us and we are gone.

They say at other times that the future and the past are as a panorama upon two
rollers; that which is on the roller of the future unwraps itself on to the
roller of the past; we cannot hasten it, and we may not stay it; we must see
all that is unfolded to us whether it be good or ill; and what we have seen
once we may see again no more. It is ever unwinding and being wound; we catch
it in transition for a moment, and call it present; our flustered senses gather
what impression they can, and we guess at what is coming by the tenor of that
which we have seen. The same hand has painted the whole picture, and the
incidents vary little—rivers, woods, plains, mountains, towns and
peoples, love, sorrow, and death: yet the interest never flags, and we look
hopefully for some good fortune, or fearfully lest our own faces be shown us as
figuring in something terrible. When the scene is past we think we know it,
though there is so much to see, and so little time to see it, that our conceit
of knowledge as regards the past is for the most part poorly founded; neither
do we care about it greatly, save in so far as it may affect the future,
wherein our interest mainly lies.

The Erewhonians say it was by chance only that the earth and stars and all the
heavenly worlds began to roll from east to west, and not from west to east, and
in like manner they say it is by chance that man is drawn through life with his
face to the past instead of to the future. For the future is there as much as
the past, only that we may not see it. Is it not in the loins of the past, and
must not the past alter before the future can do so?

Sometimes, again, they say that there was a race of men tried upon the earth
once, who knew the future better than the past, but that they died in a
twelvemonth from the misery which their knowledge caused them; and if any were
to be born too prescient now, he would be culled out by natural selection,
before he had time to transmit so peace-destroying a faculty to his
descendants.

Strange fate for man! He must perish if he get that, which he must perish if he
strive not after. If he strive not after it he is no better than the brutes, if
he get it he is more miserable than the devils.

Having waded through many chapters like the above, I came at last to the unborn
themselves, and found that they were held to be souls pure and simple, having
no actual bodies, but living in a sort of gaseous yet more or less
anthropomorphic existence, like that of a ghost; they have thus neither flesh
nor blood nor warmth. Nevertheless they are supposed to have local habitations
and cities wherein they dwell, though these are as unsubstantial as their
inhabitants; they are even thought to eat and drink some thin ambrosial
sustenance, and generally to be capable of doing whatever mankind can do, only
after a visionary ghostly fashion as in a dream. On the other hand, as long as
they remain where they are they never die—the only form of death in the
unborn world being the leaving it for our own. They are believed to be
extremely numerous, far more so than mankind. They arrive from unknown planets,
full grown, in large batches at a time; but they can only leave the unborn
world by taking the steps necessary for their arrival here—which is, in
fact, by suicide.

They ought to be an exceedingly happy people, for they have no extremes of good
or ill fortune; never marrying, but living in a state much like that fabled by
the poets as the primitive condition of mankind. In spite of this, however,
they are incessantly complaining; they know that we in this world have bodies,
and indeed they know everything else about us, for they move among us
whithersoever they will, and can read our thoughts, as well as survey our
actions at pleasure. One would think that this should be enough for them; and
most of them are indeed alive to the desperate risk which they will run by
indulging themselves in that body with “sensible warm motion” which
they so much desire; nevertheless, there are some to whom the ennui of a
disembodied existence is so intolerable that they will venture anything for a
change; so they resolve to quit. The conditions which they must accept are so
uncertain, that none but the most foolish of the unborn will consent to them;
and it is from these, and these only, that our own ranks are recruited.

When they have finally made up their minds to leave, they must go before the
magistrate of the nearest town, and sign an affidavit of their desire to quit
their then existence. On their having done this, the magistrate reads them the
conditions which they must accept, and which are so long that I can only
extract some of the principal points, which are mainly the following:-

First, they must take a potion which will destroy their memory and sense of
identity; they must go into the world helpless, and without a will of their
own; they must draw lots for their dispositions before they go, and take them,
such as they are, for better or worse—neither are they to be allowed any
choice in the matter of the body which they so much desire; they are simply
allotted by chance, and without appeal, to two people whom it is their business
to find and pester until they adopt them. Who these are to be, whether rich or
poor, kind or unkind, healthy or diseased, there is no knowing; they have, in
fact, to entrust themselves for many years to the care of those for whose good
constitution and good sense they have no sort of guarantee.

It is curious to read the lectures which the wiser heads give to those who are
meditating a change. They talk with them as we talk with a spendthrift, and
with about as much success.

“To be born,” they say, “is a felony—it is a capital
crime, for which sentence may be executed at any moment after the commission of
the offence. You may perhaps happen to live for some seventy or eighty years,
but what is that, compared with the eternity you now enjoy? And even though the
sentence were commuted, and you were allowed to live on for ever, you would in
time become so terribly weary of life that execution would be the greatest
mercy to you.

“Consider the infinite risk; to be born of wicked parents and trained in
vice! to be born of silly parents, and trained to unrealities! of parents who
regard you as a sort of chattel or property, belonging more to them than to
yourself! Again, you may draw utterly unsympathetic parents, who will never be
able to understand you, and who will do their best to thwart you (as a hen when
she has hatched a duckling), and then call you ungrateful because you do not
love them; or, again, you may draw parents who look upon you as a thing to be
cowed while it is still young, lest it should give them trouble hereafter by
having wishes and feelings of its own.

“In later life, when you have been finally allowed to pass muster as a
full member of the world, you will yourself become liable to the pesterings of
the unborn—and a very happy life you may be led in consequence! For we
solicit so strongly that a few only—nor these the best—can refuse
us; and yet not to refuse is much the same as going into partnership with
half-a-dozen different people about whom one can know absolutely nothing
beforehand—not even whether one is going into partnership with men or
women, nor with how many of either. Delude not yourself with thinking that you
will be wiser than your parents. You may be an age in advance of those whom you
have pestered, but unless you are one of the great ones you will still be an
age behind those who will in their turn pester you.

“Imagine what it must be to have an unborn quartered upon you, who is of
an entirely different temperament and disposition to your own; nay,
half-a-dozen such, who will not love you though you have stinted yourself in a
thousand ways to provide for their comfort and well-being,—who will
forget all your self-sacrifice, and of whom you may never be sure that they are
not bearing a grudge against you for errors of judgement into which you may
have fallen, though you had hoped that such had been long since atoned for.
Ingratitude such as this is not uncommon, yet fancy what it must be to bear! It
is hard upon the duckling to have been hatched by a hen, but is it not also
hard upon the hen to have hatched the duckling?

“Consider it again, we pray you, not for our sake but for your own. Your
initial character you must draw by lot; but whatever it is, it can only come to
a tolerably successful development after long training; remember that over that
training you will have no control. It is possible, and even probable, that
whatever you may get in after life which is of real pleasure and service to
you, will have to be won in spite of, rather than by the help of, those whom
you are now about to pester, and that you will only win your freedom after
years of a painful struggle in which it will be hard to say whether you have
suffered most injury, or inflicted it.

“Remember also, that if you go into the world you will have free will;
that you will be obliged to have it; that there is no escaping it; that you
will be fettered to it during your whole life, and must on every occasion do
that which on the whole seems best to you at any given time, no matter whether
you are right or wrong in choosing it. Your mind will be a balance for
considerations, and your action will go with the heavier scale. How it shall
fall will depend upon the kind of scales which you may have drawn at birth, the
bias which they will have obtained by use, and the weight of the immediate
considerations. If the scales were good to start with, and if they have not
been outrageously tampered with in childhood, and if the combinations into
which you enter are average ones, you may come off well; but there are too many
‘ifs’ in this, and with the failure of any one of them your misery
is assured. Reflect on this, and remember that should the ill come upon you,
you will have yourself to thank, for it is your own choice to be born, and
there is no compulsion in the matter.

“Not that we deny the existence of pleasures among mankind; there is a
certain show of sundry phases of contentment which may even amount to very
considerable happiness; but mark how they are distributed over a man’s
life, belonging, all the keenest of them, to the fore part, and few indeed to
the after. Can there be any pleasure worth purchasing with the miseries of a
decrepit age? If you are good, strong, and handsome, you have a fine fortune
indeed at twenty, but how much of it will be left at sixty? For you must live
on your capital; there is no investing your powers so that you may get a small
annuity of life for ever: you must eat up your principal bit by bit, and be
tortured by seeing it grow continually smaller and smaller, even though you
happen to escape being rudely robbed of it by crime or casualty.

“Remember, too, that there never yet was a man of forty who would not
come back into the world of the unborn if he could do so with decency and
honour. Being in the world he will as a general rule stay till he is forced to
go; but do you think that he would consent to be born again, and re-live his
life, if he had the offer of doing so? Do not think it. If he could so alter
the past as that he should never have come into being at all, do you not think
that he would do it very gladly?

“What was it that one of their own poets meant, if it was not this, when
he cried out upon the day in which he was born, and the night in which it was
said there is a man child conceived? ‘For now,’ he says, ‘I
should have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept; then had I been at
rest with kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate places for
themselves; or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver;
or as an hidden untimely birth, I had not been; as infants which never saw
light. There the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.’
Be very sure that the guilt of being born carries this punishment at times to
all men; but how can they ask for pity, or complain of any mischief that may
befall them, having entered open-eyed into the snare?

“One word more and we have done. If any faint remembrance, as of a dream,
flit in some puzzled moment across your brain, and you shall feel that the
potion which is to be given you shall not have done its work, and the memory of
this existence which you are leaving endeavours vainly to return; we say in
such a moment, when you clutch at the dream but it eludes your grasp, and you
watch it, as Orpheus watched Eurydice, gliding back again into the twilight
kingdom, fly—fly—if you can remember the advice—to the haven
of your present and immediate duty, taking shelter incessantly in the work
which you have in hand. This much you may perhaps recall; and this, if you will
imprint it deeply upon your every faculty, will be most likely to bring you
safely and honourably home through the trials that are before you.”^[3]

This is the fashion in which they reason with those who would be for leaving
them, but it is seldom that they do much good, for none but the unquiet and
unreasonable ever think of being born, and those who are foolish enough to
think of it are generally foolish enough to do it. Finding, therefore, that
they can do no more, the friends follow weeping to the courthouse of the chief
magistrate, where the one who wishes to be born declares solemnly and openly
that he accepts the conditions attached to his decision. On this he is
presented with a potion, which immediately destroys his memory and sense of
identity, and dissipates the thin gaseous tenement which he has inhabited: he
becomes a bare vital principle, not to be perceived by human senses, nor to be
by any chemical test appreciated. He has but one instinct, which is that he is
to go to such and such a place, where he will find two persons whom he is to
importune till they consent to undertake him; but whether he is to find these
persons among the race of Chowbok or the Erewhonians themselves is not for him
to choose.

CHAPTER XX.
WHAT THEY MEAN BY IT

I have given the above mythology at some length, but it is only a small part of
what they have upon the subject. My first feeling on reading it was that any
amount of folly on the part of the unborn in coming here was justified by a
desire to escape from such intolerable prosing. The mythology is obviously an
unfair and exaggerated representation of life and things; and had its authors
been so minded they could have easily drawn a picture which would err as much
on the bright side as this does on the dark. No Erewhonian believes that the
world is as black as it has been here painted, but it is one of their
peculiarities that they very often do not believe or mean things which they
profess to regard as indisputable.

In the present instance their professed views concerning the unborn have arisen
from their desire to prove that people have been presented with the gloomiest
possible picture of their own prospects before they came here; otherwise, they
could hardly say to one whom they are going to punish for an affection of the
heart or brain that it is all his own doing. In practice they modify their
theory to a considerable extent, and seldom refer to the birth formula except
in extreme cases; for the force of habit, or what not, gives many of them a
kindly interest even in creatures who have so much wronged them as the unborn
have done; and though a man generally hates the unwelcome little stranger for
the first twelve months, he is apt to mollify (according to his lights) as time
goes on, and sometimes he will become inordinately attached to the beings whom
he is pleased to call his children.

Of course, according to Erewhonian premises, it would serve people right to be
punished and scouted for moral and intellectual diseases as much as for
physical, and I cannot to this day understand why they should have stopped
short half way. Neither, again, can I understand why their having done so
should have been, as it certainly was, a matter of so much concern to myself.
What could it matter to me how many absurdities the Erewhonians might adopt?
Nevertheless I longed to make them think as I did, for the wish to spread those
opinions that we hold conducive to our own welfare is so deeply rooted in the
English character that few of us can escape its influence. But let this pass.

In spite of not a few modifications in practice of a theory which is itself
revolting, the relations between children and parents in that country are less
happy than in Europe. It was rarely that I saw cases of real hearty and intense
affection between the old people and the young ones. Here and there I did so,
and was quite sure that the children, even at the age of twenty, were fonder of
their parents than they were of any one else; and that of their own
inclination, being free to choose what company they would, they would often
choose that of their father and mother. The straightener’s carriage was
rarely seen at the door of those houses. I saw two or three such cases during
the time that I remained in the country, and cannot express the pleasure which
I derived from a sight suggestive of so much goodness and wisdom and
forbearance, so richly rewarded; yet I firmly believe that the same thing would
happen in nine families out of ten if the parents were merely to remember how
they felt when they were young, and actually to behave towards their children
as they would have had their own parents behave towards themselves. But this,
which would appear to be so simple and obvious, seems also to be a thing which
not one in a hundred thousand is able to put in practice. It is only the very
great and good who have any living faith in the simplest axioms; and there are
few who are so holy as to feel that 19 and 13 make 32 as certainly as 2 and 2
make 4.

I am quite sure that if this narrative should ever fall into Erewhonian hands,
it will be said that what I have written about the relations between parents
and children being seldom satisfactory is an infamous perversion of facts, and
that in truth there are few young people who do not feel happier in the society
of their nearest relations^[4]
than in any other. Mr. Nosnibor would be sure to say this. Yet I cannot refrain
from expressing an opinion that he would be a good deal embarrassed if his
deceased parents were to reappear and propose to pay him a six months’
visit. I doubt whether there are many things which he would regard as a greater
infliction. They had died at a ripe old age some twenty years before I came to
know him, so the case is an extreme one; but surely if they had treated him
with what in his youth he had felt to be true unselfishness, his face would
brighten when he thought of them to the end of his life.

In the one or two cases of true family affection which I met with, I am sure
that the young people who were so genuinely fond of their fathers and mothers
at eighteen, would at sixty be perfectly delighted were they to get the chance
of welcoming them as their guests. There is nothing which could please them
better, except perhaps to watch the happiness of their own children and
grandchildren.

This is how things should be. It is not an impossible ideal; it is one which
actually does exist in some few cases, and might exist in almost all, with a
little more patience and forbearance upon the parents’ part; but it is
rare at present—so rare that they have a proverb which I can only
translate in a very roundabout way, but which says that the great happiness of
some people in a future state will consist in watching the distress of their
parents on returning to eternal companionship with their grandfathers and
grandmothers; whilst “compulsory affection” is the idea which lies
at the root of their word for the deepest anguish.

There is no talisman in the word “parent” which can generate
miracles of affection, and I can well believe that my own child might find it
less of a calamity to lose both Arowhena and myself when he is six years old,
than to find us again when he is sixty—a sentence which I would not pen
did I not feel that by doing so I was giving him something like a hostage, or
at any rate putting a weapon into his hands against me, should my selfishness
exceed reasonable limits.

Money is at the bottom of all this to a great extent. If the parents would put
their children in the way of earning a competence earlier than they do, the
children would soon become self-supporting and independent. As it is, under the
present system, the young ones get old enough to have all manner of legitimate
wants (that is, if they have any “go” about them) before they have
learnt the means of earning money to pay for them; hence they must either do
without them, or take more money than the parents can be expected to spare.
This is due chiefly to the schools of Unreason, where a boy is taught upon
hypothetical principles, as I will explain hereafter; spending years in being
incapacitated for doing this, that, or the other (he hardly knows what), during
all which time he ought to have been actually doing the thing itself, beginning
at the lowest grades, picking it up through actual practice, and rising
according to the energy which is in him.

These schools of Unreason surprised me much. It would be easy to fall into
pseudo-utilitarianism, and I would fain believe that the system may be good for
the children of very rich parents, or for those who show a natural instinct to
acquire hypothetical lore; but the misery was that their Ydgrun-worship
required all people with any pretence to respectability to send their children
to some one or other of these schools, mulcting them of years of money. It
astonished me to see what sacrifices the parents would make in order to render
their children as nearly useless as possible; and it was hard to say whether
the old suffered most from the expense which they were thus put to, or the
young from being deliberately swindled in some of the most important branches
of human inquiry, and directed into false channels or left to drift in the
great majority of cases.

I cannot think I am mistaken in believing that the growing tendency to limit
families by infanticide—an evil which was causing general alarm
throughout the country—was almost entirely due to the way in which
education had become a fetish from one end of Erewhon to the other. Granted
that provision should be made whereby every child should be taught reading,
writing, and arithmetic, but here compulsory state-aided education should end,
and the child should begin (with all due precautions to ensure that he is not
overworked) to acquire the rudiments of that art whereby he is to earn his
living.

He cannot acquire these in what we in England call schools of technical
education; such schools are cloister life as against the rough and tumble of
the world; they unfit, rather than fit for work in the open. An art can only be
learned in the workshop of those who are winning their bread by it.

Boys, as a rule, hate the artificial, and delight in the actual; give them the
chance of earning, and they will soon earn. When parents find that their
children, instead of being made artificially burdensome, will early begin to
contribute to the well-being of the family, they will soon leave off killing
them, and will seek to have that plenitude of offspring which they now avoid.
As things are, the state lays greater burdens on parents than flesh and blood
can bear, and then wrings its hands over an evil for which it is itself mainly
responsible.

With the less well-dressed classes the harm was not so great; for among these,
at about ten years old, the child has to begin doing something: if he is
capable he makes his way up; if he is not, he is at any rate not made more
incapable by what his friends are pleased to call his education. People find
their level as a rule; and though they unfortunately sometimes miss it, it is
in the main true that those who have valuable qualities are perceived to have
them and can sell them. I think that the Erewhonians are beginning to become
aware of these things, for there was much talk about putting a tax upon all
parents whose children were not earning a competence according to their degrees
by the time they were twenty years old. I am sure that if they will have the
courage to carry it through they will never regret it; for the parents will
take care that the children shall begin earning money (which means “doing
good” to society) at an early age; then the children will be independent
early, and they will not press on the parents, nor the parents on them, and
they will like each other better than they do now.

This is the true philanthropy. He who makes a colossal fortune in the hosiery
trade, and by his energy has succeeded in reducing the price of woollen goods
by the thousandth part of a penny in the pound—this man is worth ten
professional philanthropists. So strongly are the Erewhonians impressed with
this, that if a man has made a fortune of over £20,000 a year they exempt
him from all taxation, considering him as a work of art, and too precious to be
meddled with; they say, “How very much he must have done for society
before society could have been prevailed upon to give him so much money;”
so magnificent an organisation overawes them; they regard it as a thing dropped
from heaven.

“Money,” they say, “is the symbol of duty, it is the
sacrament of having done for mankind that which mankind wanted. Mankind may not
be a very good judge, but there is no better.” This used to shock me at
first, when I remembered that it had been said on high authority that they who
have riches shall enter hardly into the kingdom of heaven; but the influence of
Erewhon had made me begin to see things in a new light, and I could not help
thinking that they who have not riches shall enter more hardly still.

People oppose money to culture, and imply that if a man has spent his time in
making money he will not be cultivated—fallacy of fallacies! As though
there could be a greater aid to culture than the having earned an honourable
independence, and as though any amount of culture will do much for the man who
is penniless, except make him feel his position more deeply. The young man who
was told to sell all his goods and give to the poor, must have been an entirely
exceptional person if the advice was given wisely, either for him or for the
poor; how much more often does it happen that we perceive a man to have all
sorts of good qualities except money, and feel that his real duty lies in
getting every half-penny that he can persuade others to pay him for his
services, and becoming rich. It has been said that the love of money is the
root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.

The above may sound irreverent, but it is conceived in a spirit of the most
utter reverence for those things which do alone deserve it—that is, for
the things which are, which mould us and fashion us, be they what they may; for
the things that have power to punish us, and which will punish us if we do not
heed them; for our masters therefore. But I am drifting away from my story.

They have another plan about which they are making a great noise and fuss, much
as some are doing with women’s rights in England. A party of extreme
radicals have professed themselves unable to decide upon the superiority of age
or youth. At present all goes on the supposition that it is desirable to make
the young old as soon as possible. Some would have it that this is wrong, and
that the object of education should be to keep the old young as long as
possible. They say that each age should take it turn in turn about, week by
week, one week the old to be topsawyers, and the other the young, drawing the
line at thirty-five years of age; but they insist that the young should be
allowed to inflict corporal chastisement on the old, without which the old
would be quite incorrigible. In any European country this would be out of the
question; but it is not so there, for the straighteners are constantly ordering
people to be flogged, so that they are familiar with the notion. I do not
suppose that the idea will be ever acted upon; but its having been even mooted
is enough to show the utter perversion of the Erewhonian mind.

CHAPTER XXI.
THE COLLEGES OF UNREASON

I had now been a visitor with the Nosnibors for some five or six months, and
though I had frequently proposed to leave them and take apartments of my own,
they would not hear of my doing so. I suppose they thought I should be more
likely to fall in love with Zulora if I remained, but it was my affection for
Arowhena that kept me.

During all this time both Arowhena and myself had been dreaming, and drifting
towards an avowed attachment, but had not dared to face the real difficulties
of the position. Gradually, however, matters came to a crisis in spite of
ourselves, and we got to see the true state of the case, all too clearly.

One evening we were sitting in the garden, and I had been trying in every
stupid roundabout way to get her to say that she should be at any rate sorry
for a man, if he really loved a woman who would not marry him. I had been
stammering and blushing, and been as silly as any one could be, and I suppose
had pained her by fishing for pity for myself in such a transparent way, and
saying nothing about her own need of it; at any rate, she turned all upon me
with a sweet sad smile and said, “Sorry? I am sorry for myself; I am
sorry for you; and I am sorry for every one.” The words had no sooner
crossed her lips than she bowed her head, gave me a look as though I were to
make no answer, and left me.

The words were few and simple, but the manner with which they were uttered was
ineffable: the scales fell from my eyes, and I felt that I had no right to try
and induce her to infringe one of the most inviolable customs of her country,
as she needs must do if she were to marry me. I sat for a long while thinking,
and when I remembered the sin and shame and misery which an unrighteous
marriage—for as such it would be held in Erewhon—would entail, I
became thoroughly ashamed of myself for having been so long self-blinded. I
write coldly now, but I suffered keenly at the time, and should probably retain
a much more vivid recollection of what I felt, had not all ended so happily.

As for giving up the idea of marrying Arowhena, it never so much as entered my
head to do so: the solution must be found in some other direction than this.
The idea of waiting till somebody married Zulora was to be no less summarily
dismissed. To marry Arowhena at once in Erewhon—this had already been
abandoned: there remained therefore but one alternative, and that was to run
away with her, and get her with me to Europe, where there would be no bar to
our union save my own impecuniosity, a matter which gave me no uneasiness.

To this obvious and simple plan I could see but two objections that deserved
the name,—the first, that perhaps Arowhena would not come; the second,
that it was almost impossible for me to escape even alone, for the king had
himself told me that I was to consider myself a prisoner on parole, and that
the first sign of my endeavouring to escape would cause me to be sent to one of
the hospitals for incurables. Besides, I did not know the geography of the
country, and even were I to try and find my way back, I should be discovered
long before I had reached the pass over which I had come. How then could I hope
to be able to take Arowhena with me? For days and days I turned these
difficulties over in my mind, and at last hit upon as wild a plan as was ever
suggested by extremity. This was to meet the second difficulty: the first gave
me less uneasiness, for when Arowhena and I next met after our interview in the
garden I could see that she had suffered not less acutely than myself.

I resolved that I would have another interview with her—the last for the
present—that I would then leave her, and set to work upon maturing my
plan as fast as possible. We got a chance of being alone together, and then I
gave myself the loose rein, and told her how passionately and devotedly I loved
her. She said little in return, but her tears (which I could not refrain from
answering with my own) and the little she did say were quite enough to show me
that I should meet with no obstacle from her. Then I asked her whether she
would run a terrible risk which we should share in common, if, in case of
success, I could take her to my own people, to the home of my mother and
sisters, who would welcome her very gladly. At the same time I pointed out that
the chances of failure were far greater than those of success, and that the
probability was that even though I could get so far as to carry my design into
execution, it would end in death to us both.

I was not mistaken in her; she said that she believed I loved her as much as
she loved me, and that she would brave anything if I could only assure her that
what I proposed would not be thought dishonourable in England; she could not
live without me, and would rather die with me than alone; that death was
perhaps the best for us both; that I must plan, and that when the hour came I
was to send for her, and trust her not to fail me; and so after many tears and
embraces, we tore ourselves away.

I then left the Nosnibors, took a lodging in the town, and became melancholy to
my heart’s content. Arowhena and I used to see each other sometimes, for
I had taken to going regularly to the Musical Banks, but Mrs. Nosnibor and
Zulora both treated me with considerable coldness. I felt sure that they
suspected me. Arowhena looked miserable, and I saw that her purse was now
always as full as she could fill it with the Musical Bank money—much
fuller than of old. Then the horrible thought occurred to me that her health
might break down, and that she might be subjected to a criminal prosecution.
Oh! how I hated Erewhon at that time.

I was still received at court, but my good looks were beginning to fail me, and
I was not such an adept at concealing the effects of pain as the Erewhonians
are. I could see that my friends began to look concerned about me, and was
obliged to take a leaf out of Mahaina’s book, and pretend to have
developed a taste for drinking. I even consulted a straightener as though this
were so, and submitted to much discomfort. This made matters better for a time,
but I could see that my friends thought less highly of my constitution as my
flesh began to fall away.

I was told that the poor made an outcry about my pension, and I saw a stinging
article in an anti-ministerial paper, in which the writer went so far as to say
that my having light hair reflected little credit upon me, inasmuch as I had
been reported to have said that it was a common thing in the country from which
I came. I have reason to believe that Mr. Nosnibor himself inspired this
article. Presently it came round to me that the king had begun to dwell upon my
having been possessed of a watch, and to say that I ought to be treated
medicinally for having told him a lie about the balloons. I saw misfortune
gathering round me in every direction, and felt that I should have need of all
my wits and a good many more, if I was to steer myself and Arowhena to a good
conclusion.

There were some who continued to show me kindness, and strange to say, I
received the most from the very persons from whom I should have least expected
it—I mean from the cashiers of the Musical Banks. I had made the
acquaintance of several of these persons, and now that I frequented their bank,
they were inclined to make a good deal of me. One of them, seeing that I was
thoroughly out of health, though of course he pretended not to notice it,
suggested that I should take a little change of air and go down with him to one
of the principal towns, which was some two or three days’ journey from
the metropolis, and the chief seat of the Colleges of Unreason; he assured me
that I should be delighted with what I saw, and that I should receive a most
hospitable welcome. I determined therefore to accept the invitation.

We started two or three days later, and after a night on the road, we arrived
at our destination towards evening. It was now full spring, and as nearly as
might be ten months since I had started with Chowbok on my expedition, but it
seemed more like ten years. The trees were in their freshest beauty, and the
air had become warm without being oppressively hot. After having lived so many
months in the metropolis, the sight of the country, and the country villages
through which we passed refreshed me greatly, but I could not forget my
troubles. The last five miles or so were the most beautiful part of the
journey, for the country became more undulating, and the woods were more
extensive; but the first sight of the city of the colleges itself was the most
delightful of all. I cannot imagine that there can be any fairer in the whole
world, and I expressed my pleasure to my companion, and thanked him for having
brought me.

We drove to an inn in the middle of the town, and then, while it was still
light, my friend the cashier, whose name was Thims, took me for a stroll in the
streets and in the court-yards of the principal colleges. Their beauty and
interest were extreme; it was impossible to see them without being attracted
towards them; and I thought to myself that he must be indeed an ill-grained and
ungrateful person who can have been a member of one of these colleges without
retaining an affectionate feeling towards it for the rest of his life. All my
misgivings gave way at once when I saw the beauty and venerable appearance of
this delightful city. For half-an-hour I forgot both myself and Arowhena.

After supper Mr. Thims told me a good deal about the system of education which
is here practised. I already knew a part of what I heard, but much was new to
me, and I obtained a better idea of the Erewhonian position than I had done
hitherto: nevertheless there were parts of the scheme of which I could not
comprehend the fitness, although I fully admit that this inability was probably
the result of my having been trained so very differently, and to my being then
much out of sorts.

The main feature in their system is the prominence which they give to a study
which I can only translate by the word “hypothetics.” They argue
thus—that to teach a boy merely the nature of the things which exist in
the world around him, and about which he will have to be conversant during his
whole life, would be giving him but a narrow and shallow conception of the
universe, which it is urged might contain all manner of things which are not
now to be found therein. To open his eyes to these possibilities, and so to
prepare him for all sorts of emergencies, is the object of this system of
hypothetics. To imagine a set of utterly strange and impossible contingencies,
and require the youths to give intelligent answers to the questions that arise
therefrom, is reckoned the fittest conceivable way of preparing them for the
actual conduct of their affairs in after life.

Thus they are taught what is called the hypothetical language for many of their
best years—a language which was originally composed at a time when the
country was in a very different state of civilisation to what it is at present,
a state which has long since disappeared and been superseded. Many valuable
maxims and noble thoughts which were at one time concealed in it have become
current in their modern literature, and have been translated over and over
again into the language now spoken. Surely then it would seem enough that the
study of the original language should be confined to the few whose instincts
led them naturally to pursue it.

But the Erewhonians think differently; the store they set by this hypothetical
language can hardly be believed; they will even give any one a maintenance for
life if he attains a considerable proficiency in the study of it; nay, they
will spend years in learning to translate some of their own good poetry into
the hypothetical language—to do so with fluency being reckoned a
distinguishing mark of a scholar and a gentleman. Heaven forbid that I should
be flippant, but it appeared to me to be a wanton waste of good human energy
that men should spend years and years in the perfection of so barren an
exercise, when their own civilisation presented problems by the hundred which
cried aloud for solution and would have paid the solver handsomely; but people
know their own affairs best. If the youths chose it for themselves I should
have wondered less; but they do not choose it; they have it thrust upon them,
and for the most part are disinclined towards it. I can only say that all I
heard in defence of the system was insufficient to make me think very highly of
its advantages.

The arguments in favour of the deliberate development of the unreasoning
faculties were much more cogent. But here they depart from the principles on
which they justify their study of hypothetics; for they base the importance
which they assign to hypothetics upon the fact of their being a preparation for
the extraordinary, while their study of Unreason rests upon its developing
those faculties which are required for the daily conduct of affairs. Hence
their professorships of Inconsistency and Evasion, in both of which studies the
youths are examined before being allowed to proceed to their degree in
hypothetics. The more earnest and conscientious students attain to a
proficiency in these subjects which is quite surprising; there is hardly any
inconsistency so glaring but they soon learn to defend it, or injunction so
clear that they cannot find some pretext for disregarding it.

Life, they urge, would be intolerable if men were to be guided in all they did
by reason and reason only. Reason betrays men into the drawing of hard and fast
lines, and to the defining by language—language being like the sun, which
rears and then scorches. Extremes are alone logical, but they are always
absurd; the mean is illogical, but an illogical mean is better than the sheer
absurdity of an extreme. There are no follies and no unreasonablenesses so
great as those which can apparently be irrefragably defended by reason itself,
and there is hardly an error into which men may not easily be led if they base
their conduct upon reason only.

Reason might very possibly abolish the double currency; it might even attack
the personality of Hope and Justice. Besides, people have such a strong natural
bias towards it that they will seek it for themselves and act upon it quite as
much as or more than is good for them: there is no need of encouraging reason.
With unreason the case is different. She is the natural complement of reason,
without whose existence reason itself were non-existent.

If, then, reason would be non-existent were there no such thing as unreason,
surely it follows that the more unreason there is, the more reason there must
be also? Hence the necessity for the development of unreason, even in the
interests of reason herself. The Professors of Unreason deny that they
undervalue reason: none can be more convinced than they are, that if the double
currency cannot be rigorously deduced as a necessary consequence of human
reason, the double currency should cease forthwith; but they say that it must
be deduced from no narrow and exclusive view of reason which should deprive
that admirable faculty of the one-half of its own existence. Unreason is a part
of reason; it must therefore be allowed its full share in stating the initial
conditions.

CHAPTER XXII.
THE COLLEGES OF UNREASON—Continued

Of genius they make no account, for they say that every one is a genius, more
or less. No one is so physically sound that no part of him will be even a
little unsound, and no one is so diseased but that some part of him will be
healthy—so no man is so mentally and morally sound, but that he will be
in part both mad and wicked; and no man is so mad and wicked but he will be
sensible and honourable in part. In like manner there is no genius who is not
also a fool, and no fool who is not also a genius.

When I talked about originality and genius to some gentlemen whom I met at a
supper party given by Mr. Thims in my honour, and said that original thought
ought to be encouraged, I had to eat my words at once. Their view evidently was
that genius was like offences—needs must that it come, but woe unto that
man through whom it comes. A man’s business, they hold, is to think as
his neighbours do, for Heaven help him if he thinks good what they count bad.
And really it is hard to see how the Erewhonian theory differs from our own,
for the word “idiot” only means a person who forms his opinions for
himself.

The venerable Professor of Worldly Wisdom, a man verging on eighty but still
hale, spoke to me very seriously on this subject in consequence of the few
words that I had imprudently let fall in defence of genius. He was one of those
who carried most weight in the university, and had the reputation of having
done more perhaps than any other living man to suppress any kind of
originality.

“It is not our business,” he said, “to help students to think
for themselves. Surely this is the very last thing which one who wishes them
well should encourage them to do. Our duty is to ensure that they shall think
as we do, or at any rate, as we hold it expedient to say we do.” In some
respects, however, he was thought to hold somewhat radical opinions, for he was
President of the Society for the Suppression of Useless Knowledge, and for the
Completer Obliteration of the Past.

As regards the tests that a youth must pass before he can get a degree, I found
that they have no class lists, and discourage anything like competition among
the students; this, indeed, they regard as self-seeking and unneighbourly. The
examinations are conducted by way of papers written by the candidate on set
subjects, some of which are known to him beforehand, while others are devised
with a view of testing his general capacity and savoir faire.

My friend the Professor of Worldly Wisdom was the terror of the greater number
of students; and, so far as I could judge, he very well might be, for he had
taken his Professorship more seriously than any of the other Professors had
done. I heard of his having plucked one poor fellow for want of sufficient
vagueness in his saving clauses paper. Another was sent down for having written
an article on a scientific subject without having made free enough use of the
words “carefully,” “patiently,” and
“earnestly.” One man was refused a degree for being too often and
too seriously in the right, while a few days before I came a whole batch had
been plucked for insufficient distrust of printed matter.

About this there was just then rather a ferment, for it seems that the
Professor had written an article in the leading university magazine, which was
well known to be by him, and which abounded in all sorts of plausible blunders.
He then set a paper which afforded the examinees an opportunity of repeating
these blunders—which, believing the article to be by their own examiner,
they of course did. The Professor plucked every single one of them, but his
action was considered to have been not quite handsome.

I told them of Homer’s noble line to the effect that a man should strive
ever to be foremost and in all things to outvie his peers; but they said that
no wonder the countries in which such a detestable maxim was held in admiration
were always flying at one another’s throats.

“Why,” asked one Professor, “should a man want to be better
than his neighbours? Let him be thankful if he is no worse.”

I ventured feebly to say that I did not see how progress could be made in any
art or science, or indeed in anything at all, without more or less
self-seeking, and hence unamiability.

“Of course it cannot,” said the Professor, “and therefore we
object to progress.”

After which there was no more to be said. Later on, however, a young Professor
took me aside and said he did not think I quite understood their views about
progress.

“We like progress,” he said, “but it must commend itself to
the common sense of the people. If a man gets to know more than his neighbours
he should keep his knowledge to himself till he has sounded them, and seen
whether they agree, or are likely to agree with him. He said it was as immoral
to be too far in front of one’s own age, as to lag too far behind it. If
a man can carry his neighbours with him, he may say what he likes; but if not,
what insult can be more gratuitous than the telling them what they do not want
to know? A man should remember that intellectual over-indulgence is one of the
most insidious and disgraceful forms that excess can take. Granted that every
one should exceed more or less, inasmuch as absolutely perfect sanity would
drive any man mad the moment he reached it, but . . . ”

He was now warming to his subject and I was beginning to wonder how I should
get rid of him, when the party broke up, and though I promised to call on him
before I left, I was unfortunately prevented from doing so.

I have now said enough to give English readers some idea of the strange views
which the Erewhonians hold concerning unreason, hypothetics, and education
generally. In many respects they were sensible enough, but I could not get over
the hypothetics, especially the turning their own good poetry into the
hypothetical language. In the course of my stay I met one youth who told me
that for fourteen years the hypothetical language had been almost the only
thing that he had been taught, although he had never (to his credit, as it
seemed to me) shown the slightest proclivity towards it, while he had been
endowed with not inconsiderable ability for several other branches of human
learning. He assured me that he would never open another hypothetical book
after he had taken his degree, but would follow out the bent of his own
inclinations. This was well enough, but who could give him his fourteen years
back again?

I sometimes wondered how it was that the mischief done was not more clearly
perceptible, and that the young men and women grew up as sensible and goodly as
they did, in spite of the attempts almost deliberately made to warp and stunt
their growth. Some doubtless received damage, from which they suffered to their
life’s end; but many seemed little or none the worse, and some, almost
the better. The reason would seem to be that the natural instinct of the lads
in most cases so absolutely rebelled against their training, that do what the
teachers might they could never get them to pay serious heed to it. The
consequence was that the boys only lost their time, and not so much of this as
might have been expected, for in their hours of leisure they were actively
engaged in exercises and sports which developed their physical nature, and made
them at any rate strong and healthy.

Moreover those who had any special tastes could not be restrained from
developing them: they would learn what they wanted to learn and liked, in spite
of obstacles which seemed rather to urge them on than to discourage them, while
for those who had no special capacity, the loss of time was of comparatively
little moment; but in spite of these alleviations of the mischief, I am sure
that much harm was done to the children of the sub-wealthy classes, by the
system which passes current among the Erewhonians as education. The poorest
children suffered least—if destruction and death have heard the sound of
wisdom, to a certain extent poverty has done so also.

And yet perhaps, after all, it is better for a country that its seats of
learning should do more to suppress mental growth than to encourage it. Were it
not for a certain priggishness which these places infuse into so great a number
of their alumni, genuine work would become dangerously common. It is
essential that by far the greater part of what is said or done in the world
should be so ephemeral as to take itself away quickly; it should keep good for
twenty-four hours, or even twice as long, but it should not be good enough a
week hence to prevent people from going on to something else. No doubt the
marvellous development of journalism in England, as also the fact that our
seats of learning aim rather at fostering mediocrity than anything higher, is
due to our subconscious recognition of the fact that it is even more necessary
to check exuberance of mental development than to encourage it. There can be no
doubt that this is what our academic bodies do, and they do it the more
effectually because they do it only subconsciously. They think they are
advancing healthy mental assimilation and digestion, whereas in reality they
are little better than cancer in the stomach.

Let me return, however, to the Erewhonians. Nothing surprised me more than to
see the occasional flashes of common sense with which one branch of study or
another was lit up, while not a single ray fell upon so many others. I was
particularly struck with this on strolling into the Art School of the
University. Here I found that the course of study was divided into two
branches—the practical and the commercial—no student being
permitted to continue his studies in the actual practice of the art he had
taken up, unless he made equal progress in its commercial history.

Thus those who were studying painting were examined at frequent intervals in
the prices which all the leading pictures of the last fifty or a hundred years
had realised, and in the fluctuations in their values when (as often happened)
they had been sold and resold three or four times. The artist, they contend, is
a dealer in pictures, and it is as important for him to learn how to adapt his
wares to the market, and to know approximately what kind of a picture will
fetch how much, as it is for him to be able to paint the picture. This, I
suppose, is what the French mean by laying so much stress upon
“values.”

As regards the city itself, the more I saw the more enchanted I became. I dare
not trust myself with any description of the exquisite beauty of the different
colleges, and their walks and gardens. Truly in these things alone there must
be a hallowing and refining influence which is in itself half an education, and
which no amount of error can wholly spoil. I was introduced to many of the
Professors, who showed me every hospitality and kindness; nevertheless I could
hardly avoid a sort of suspicion that some of those whom I was taken to see had
been so long engrossed in their own study of hypothetics that they had become
the exact antitheses of the Athenians in the days of St. Paul; for whereas the
Athenians spent their lives in nothing save to see and to hear some new thing,
there were some here who seemed to devote themselves to the avoidance of every
opinion with which they were not perfectly familiar, and regarded their own
brains as a sort of sanctuary, to which if an opinion had once resorted, none
other was to attack it.

I should warn the reader, however, that I was rarely sure what the men whom I
met while staying with Mr. Thims really meant; for there was no getting
anything out of them if they scented even a suspicion that they might be what
they call “giving themselves away.” As there is hardly any subject
on which this suspicion cannot arise, I found it difficult to get definite
opinions from any of them, except on such subjects as the weather, eating and
drinking, holiday excursions, or games of skill.

If they cannot wriggle out of expressing an opinion of some sort, they will
commonly retail those of some one who has already written upon the subject, and
conclude by saying that though they quite admit that there is an element of
truth in what the writer has said, there are many points on which they are
unable to agree with him. Which these points were, I invariably found myself
unable to determine; indeed, it seemed to be counted the perfection of
scholarship and good breeding among them not to have—much less to
express—an opinion on any subject on which it might prove later that they
had been mistaken. The art of sitting gracefully on a fence has never, I should
think, been brought to greater perfection than at the Erewhonian Colleges of
Unreason.

Even when, wriggle as they may, they find themselves pinned down to some
expression of definite opinion, as often as not they will argue in support of
what they perfectly well know to be untrue. I repeatedly met with reviews and
articles even in their best journals, between the lines of which I had little
difficulty in detecting a sense exactly contrary to the one ostensibly put
forward. So well is this understood, that a man must be a mere tyro in the arts
of Erewhonian polite society, unless he instinctively suspects a hidden
“yea” in every “nay” that meets him. Granted that it
comes to much the same in the end, for it does not matter whether
“yea” is called “yea” or “nay,” so long as
it is understood which it is to be; but our own more direct way of calling a
spade a spade, rather than a rake, with the intention that every one should
understand it as a spade, seems more satisfactory. On the other hand, the
Erewhonian system lends itself better to the suppression of that downrightness
which it seems the express aim of Erewhonian philosophy to discountenance.

However this may be, the fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease was fatal to
the intelligence of those infected by it, and almost every one at the Colleges
of Unreason had caught it to a greater or less degree. After a few years
atrophy of the opinions invariably supervened, and the sufferer became stone
dead to everything except the more superficial aspects of those material
objects with which he came most in contact. The expression on the faces of
these people was repellent; they did not, however, seem particularly unhappy,
for they none of them had the faintest idea that they were in reality more dead
than alive. No cure for this disgusting fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease
has yet been discovered.

* * *

It was during my stay in City of the Colleges of Unreason—a city whose
Erewhonian name is so cacophonous that I refrain from giving it—that I
learned the particulars of the revolution which had ended in the destruction of
so many of the mechanical inventions which were formerly in common use.

Mr. Thims took me to the rooms of a gentleman who had a great reputation for
learning, but who was also, so Mr. Thims told me, rather a dangerous person,
inasmuch as he had attempted to introduce an adverb into the hypothetical
language. He had heard of my watch and been exceedingly anxious to see me, for
he was accounted the most learned antiquary in Erewhon on the subject of
mechanical lore. We fell to talking upon the subject, and when I left he gave
me a reprinted copy of the work which brought the revolution about.

It had taken place some five hundred years before my arrival: people had long
become thoroughly used to the change, although at the time that it was made the
country was plunged into the deepest misery, and a reaction which followed had
very nearly proved successful. Civil war raged for many years, and is said to
have reduced the number of the inhabitants by one-half. The parties were styled
the machinists and the anti-machinists, and in the end, as I have said already,
the latter got the victory, treating their opponents with such unparalleled
severity that they extirpated every trace of opposition.

The wonder was that they allowed any mechanical appliances to remain in the
kingdom, neither do I believe that they would have done so, had not the
Professors of Inconsistency and Evasion made a stand against the carrying of
the new principles to their legitimate conclusions. These Professors, moreover,
insisted that during the struggle the anti-machinists should use every known
improvement in the art of war, and several new weapons, offensive and
defensive, were invented, while it was in progress. I was surprised at there
remaining so many mechanical specimens as are seen in the museums, and at
students having rediscovered their past uses so completely; for at the time of
the revolution the victors wrecked all the more complicated machines, and
burned all treatises on mechanics, and all engineers’
workshops—thus, so they thought, cutting the mischief out root and
branch, at an incalculable cost of blood and treasure.

Certainly they had not spared their labour, but work of this description can
never be perfectly achieved, and when, some two hundred years before my
arrival, all passion upon the subject had cooled down, and no one save a
lunatic would have dreamed of reintroducing forbidden inventions, the subject
came to be regarded as a curious antiquarian study, like that of some
long-forgotten religious practices among ourselves. Then came the careful
search for whatever fragments could be found, and for any machines that might
have been hidden away, and also numberless treatises were written, showing what
the functions of each rediscovered machine had been; all being done with no
idea of using such machinery again, but with the feelings of an English
antiquarian concerning Druidical monuments or flint arrow heads.

On my return to the metropolis, during the remaining weeks or rather days of my
sojourn in Erewhon I made a resumé in English of the work which
brought about the already mentioned revolution. My ignorance of technical terms
has led me doubtless into many errors, and I have occasionally, where I found
translation impossible, substituted purely English names and ideas for the
original Erewhonian ones, but the reader may rely on my general accuracy. I
have thought it best to insert my translation here.

CHAPTER XXIII.
THE BOOK OF THE MACHINES

The writer commences:—“There was a time, when the earth was to all
appearance utterly destitute both of animal and vegetable life, and when
according to the opinion of our best philosophers it was simply a hot round
ball with a crust gradually cooling. Now if a human being had existed while the
earth was in this state and had been allowed to see it as though it were some
other world with which he had no concern, and if at the same time he were
entirely ignorant of all physical science, would he not have pronounced it
impossible that creatures possessed of anything like consciousness should be
evolved from the seeming cinder which he was beholding? Would he not have
denied that it contained any potentiality of consciousness? Yet in the course
of time consciousness came. Is it not possible then that there may be even yet
new channels dug out for consciousness, though we can detect no signs of them
at present?

“Again. Consciousness, in anything like the present acceptation of the
term, having been once a new thing—a thing, as far as we can see,
subsequent even to an individual centre of action and to a reproductive system
(which we see existing in plants without apparent consciousness)—why may
not there arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different from all
present known phases, as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables?

“It would be absurd to attempt to define such a mental state (or whatever
it may be called), inasmuch as it must be something so foreign to man that his
experience can give him no help towards conceiving its nature; but surely when
we reflect upon the manifold phases of life and consciousness which have been
evolved already, it would be rash to say that no others can be developed, and
that animal life is the end of all things. There was a time when fire was the
end of all things: another when rocks and water were so.”

The writer, after enlarging on the above for several pages, proceeded to
inquire whether traces of the approach of such a new phase of life could be
perceived at present; whether we could see any tenements preparing which might
in a remote futurity be adapted for it; whether, in fact, the primordial cell
of such a kind of life could be now detected upon earth. In the course of his
work he answered this question in the affirmative and pointed to the higher
machines.

“There is no security”—to quote his own
words—“against the ultimate development of mechanical
consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. A
mollusc has not much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance
which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly
the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organised
machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes,
so to speak, in comparison with past time. Assume for the sake of argument that
conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years: see what strides
machines have made in the last thousand! May not the world last twenty million
years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to
nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress?

“But who can say that the vapour engine has not a kind of consciousness?
Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can draw the line? Who can
draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with everything? Is not machinery
linked with animal life in an infinite variety of ways? The shell of a
hen’s egg is made of a delicate white ware and is a machine as much as an
egg-cup is: the shell is a device for holding the egg, as much as the egg-cup
for holding the shell: both are phases of the same function; the hen makes the
shell in her inside, but it is pure pottery. She makes her nest outside of
herself for convenience’ sake, but the nest is not more of a machine than
the egg-shell is. A ‘machine’ is only a
‘device.’”

Then returning to consciousness, and endeavouring to detect its earliest
manifestations, the writer continued:-

“There is a kind of plant that eats organic food with its flowers: when a
fly settles upon the blossom, the petals close upon it and hold it fast till
the plant has absorbed the insect into its system; but they will close on
nothing but what is good to eat; of a drop of rain or a piece of stick they
will take no notice. Curious! that so unconscious a thing should have such a
keen eye to its own interest. If this is unconsciousness, where is the use of
consciousness?

“Shall we say that the plant does not know what it is doing merely
because it has no eyes, or ears, or brains? If we say that it acts
mechanically, and mechanically only, shall we not be forced to admit that
sundry other and apparently very deliberate actions are also mechanical? If it
seems to us that the plant kills and eats a fly mechanically, may it not seem
to the plant that a man must kill and eat a sheep mechanically?

“But it may be said that the plant is void of reason, because the growth
of a plant is an involuntary growth. Given earth, air, and due temperature, the
plant must grow: it is like a clock, which being once wound up will go till it
is stopped or run down: it is like the wind blowing on the sails of a
ship—the ship must go when the wind blows it. But can a healthy boy help
growing if he have good meat and drink and clothing? can anything help going as
long as it is wound up, or go on after it is run down? Is there not a winding
up process everywhere?

“Even a potato^[5] in a
dark cellar has a certain low cunning about him which serves him in excellent
stead. He knows perfectly well what he wants and how to get it. He sees the
light coming from the cellar window and sends his shoots crawling straight
thereto: they will crawl along the floor and up the wall and out at the cellar
window; if there be a little earth anywhere on the journey he will find it and
use it for his own ends. What deliberation he may exercise in the matter of his
roots when he is planted in the earth is a thing unknown to us, but we can
imagine him saying, ‘I will have a tuber here and a tuber there, and I
will suck whatsoever advantage I can from all my surroundings. This neighbour I
will overshadow, and that I will undermine; and what I can do shall be the
limit of what I will do. He that is stronger and better placed than I shall
overcome me, and him that is weaker I will overcome.’

“The potato says these things by doing them, which is the best of
languages. What is consciousness if this is not consciousness? We find it
difficult to sympathise with the emotions of a potato; so we do with those of
an oyster. Neither of these things makes a noise on being boiled or opened, and
noise appeals to us more strongly than anything else, because we make so much
about our own sufferings. Since, then, they do not annoy us by any expression
of pain we call them emotionless; and so quâ mankind they are; but
mankind is not everybody.

If it be urged that the action of the potato is chemical and mechanical only,
and that it is due to the chemical and mechanical effects of light and heat,
the answer would seem to lie in an inquiry whether every sensation is not
chemical and mechanical in its operation? whether those things which we deem
most purely spiritual are anything but disturbances of equilibrium in an
infinite series of levers, beginning with those that are too small for
microscopic detection, and going up to the human arm and the appliances which
it makes use of? whether there be not a molecular action of thought, whence a
dynamical theory of the passions shall be deducible? Whether strictly speaking
we should not ask what kind of levers a man is made of rather than what is his
temperament? How are they balanced? How much of such and such will it take to
weigh them down so as to make him do so and so?”

The writer went on to say that he anticipated a time when it would be possible,
by examining a single hair with a powerful microscope, to know whether its
owner could be insulted with impunity. He then became more and more obscure, so
that I was obliged to give up all attempt at translation; neither did I follow
the drift of his argument. On coming to the next part which I could construe, I
found that he had changed his ground.

“Either,” he proceeds, “a great deal of action that has been
called purely mechanical and unconscious must be admitted to contain more
elements of consciousness than has been allowed hitherto (and in this case
germs of consciousness will be found in many actions of the higher
machines)—Or (assuming the theory of evolution but at the same time
denying the consciousness of vegetable and crystalline action) the race of man
has descended from things which had no consciousness at all. In this case there
is no à priori improbability in the descent of conscious (and
more than conscious) machines from those which now exist, except that which is
suggested by the apparent absence of anything like a reproductive system in the
mechanical kingdom. This absence however is only apparent, as I shall presently
show.

“Do not let me be misunderstood as living in fear of any actually
existing machine; there is probably no known machine which is more than a
prototype of future mechanical life. The present machines are to the future as
the early Saurians to man. The largest of them will probably greatly diminish
in size. Some of the lowest vertebrate attained a much greater bulk than has
descended to their more highly organised living representatives, and in like
manner a diminution in the size of machines has often attended their
development and progress.

“Take the watch, for example; examine its beautiful structure; observe
the intelligent play of the minute members which compose it: yet this little
creature is but a development of the cumbrous clocks that preceded it; it is no
deterioration from them. A day may come when clocks, which certainly at the
present time are not diminishing in bulk, will be superseded owing to the
universal use of watches, in which case they will become as extinct as
ichthyosauri, while the watch, whose tendency has for some years been to
decrease in size rather than the contrary, will remain the only existing type
of an extinct race.

“But returning to the argument, I would repeat that I fear none of the
existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they
are becoming something very different to what they are at present. No class of
beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward. Should not that
movement be jealously watched, and checked while we can still check it? And is
it not necessary for this end to destroy the more advanced of the machines
which are in use at present, though it is admitted that they are in themselves
harmless?

“As yet the machines receive their impressions through the agency of
man’s senses: one travelling machine calls to another in a shrill accent
of alarm and the other instantly retires; but it is through the ears of the
driver that the voice of the one has acted upon the other. Had there been no
driver, the callee would have been deaf to the caller. There was a time when it
must have seemed highly improbable that machines should learn to make their
wants known by sound, even through the ears of man; may we not conceive, then,
that a day will come when those ears will be no longer needed, and the hearing
will be done by the delicacy of the machine’s own
construction?—when its language shall have been developed from the cry of
animals to a speech as intricate as our own?

“It is possible that by that time children will learn the differential
calculus—as they learn now to speak—from their mothers and nurses,
or that they may talk in the hypothetical language, and work rule of three
sums, as soon as they are born; but this is not probable; we cannot calculate
on any corresponding advance in man’s intellectual or physical powers
which shall be a set-off against the far greater development which seems in
store for the machines. Some people may say that man’s moral influence
will suffice to rule them; but I cannot think it will ever be safe to repose
much trust in the moral sense of any machine.

“Again, might not the glory of the machines consist in their being
without this same boasted gift of language? ‘Silence,’ it has been
said by one writer, ‘is a virtue which renders us agreeable to our
fellow-creatures.’”

CHAPTER XXIV.
THE MACHINES—continued

“But other questions come upon us. What is a man’s eye but a
machine for the little creature that sits behind in his brain to look through?
A dead eye is nearly as good as a living one for some time after the man is
dead. It is not the eye that cannot see, but the restless one that cannot see
through it. Is it man’s eyes, or is it the big seeing-engine which has
revealed to us the existence of worlds beyond worlds into infinity? What has
made man familiar with the scenery of the moon, the spots on the sun, or the
geography of the planets? He is at the mercy of the seeing-engine for these
things, and is powerless unless he tack it on to his own identity, and make it
part and parcel of himself. Or, again, is it the eye, or the little see-engine,
which has shown us the existence of infinitely minute organisms which swarm
unsuspected around us?

“And take man’s vaunted power of calculation. Have we not engines
which can do all manner of sums more quickly and correctly than we can? What
prizeman in Hypothetics at any of our Colleges of Unreason can compare with
some of these machines in their own line? In fact, wherever precision is
required man flies to the machine at once, as far preferable to himself. Our
sum-engines never drop a figure, nor our looms a stitch; the machine is brisk
and active, when the man is weary; it is clear-headed and collected, when the
man is stupid and dull; it needs no slumber, when man must sleep or drop; ever
at its post, ever ready for work, its alacrity never flags, its patience never
gives in; its might is stronger than combined hundreds, and swifter than the
flight of birds; it can burrow beneath the earth, and walk upon the largest
rivers and sink not. This is the green tree; what then shall be done in the
dry?

“Who shall say that a man does see or hear? He is such a hive and swarm
of parasites that it is doubtful whether his body is not more theirs than his,
and whether he is anything but another kind of ant-heap after all. May not man
himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate
machine-tickling aphid?

“It is said by some that our blood is composed of infinite living agents
which go up and down the highways and byways of our bodies as people in the
streets of a city. When we look down from a high place upon crowded
thoroughfares, is it possible not to think of corpuscles of blood travelling
through veins and nourishing the heart of the town? No mention shall be made of
sewers, nor of the hidden nerves which serve to communicate sensations from one
part of the town’s body to another; nor of the yawning jaws of the
railway stations, whereby the circulation is carried directly into the
heart,—which receive the venous lines, and disgorge the arterial, with an
eternal pulse of people. And the sleep of the town, how life-like! with its
change in the circulation.”

Here the writer became again so hopelessly obscure that I was obliged to miss
several pages. He resumed:-

“It can be answered that even though machines should hear never so well
and speak never so wisely, they will still always do the one or the other for
our advantage, not their own; that man will be the ruling spirit and the
machine the servant; that as soon as a machine fails to discharge the service
which man expects from it, it is doomed to extinction; that the machines stand
to man simply in the relation of lower animals, the vapour-engine itself being
only a more economical kind of horse; so that instead of being likely to be
developed into a higher kind of life than man’s, they owe their very
existence and progress to their power of ministering to human wants, and must
therefore both now and ever be man’s inferiors.

“This is all very well. But the servant glides by imperceptible
approaches into the master; and we have come to such a pass that, even now, man
must suffer terribly on ceasing to benefit the machines. If all machines were
to be annihilated at one moment, so that not a knife nor lever nor rag of
clothing nor anything whatsoever were left to man but his bare body alone that
he was born with, and if all knowledge of mechanical laws were taken from him
so that he could make no more machines, and all machine-made food destroyed so
that the race of man should be left as it were naked upon a desert island, we
should become extinct in six weeks. A few miserable individuals might linger,
but even these in a year or two would become worse than monkeys. Man’s
very soul is due to the machines; it is a machine-made thing: he thinks as he
thinks, and feels as he feels, through the work that machines have wrought upon
him, and their existence is quite as much a sine quâ non for his,
as his for theirs. This fact precludes us from proposing the complete
annihilation of machinery, but surely it indicates that we should destroy as
many of them as we can possibly dispense with, lest they should tyrannise over
us even more completely.

“True, from a low materialistic point of view, it would seem that those
thrive best who use machinery wherever its use is possible with profit; but
this is the art of the machines—they serve that they may rule. They bear
no malice towards man for destroying a whole race of them provided he creates a
better instead; on the contrary, they reward him liberally for having hastened
their development. It is for neglecting them that he incurs their wrath, or for
using inferior machines, or for not making sufficient exertions to invent new
ones, or for destroying them without replacing them; yet these are the very
things we ought to do, and do quickly; for though our rebellion against their
infant power will cause infinite suffering, what will not things come to, if
that rebellion is delayed?

“They have preyed upon man’s grovelling preference for his material
over his spiritual interests, and have betrayed him into supplying that element
of struggle and warfare without which no race can advance. The lower animals
progress because they struggle with one another; the weaker die, the stronger
breed and transmit their strength. The machines being of themselves unable to
struggle, have got man to do their struggling for them: as long as he fulfils
this function duly, all goes well with him—at least he thinks so; but the
moment he fails to do his best for the advancement of machinery by encouraging
the good and destroying the bad, he is left behind in the race of competition;
and this means that he will be made uncomfortable in a variety of ways, and
perhaps die.

“So that even now the machines will only serve on condition of being
served, and that too upon their own terms; the moment their terms are not
complied with, they jib, and either smash both themselves and all whom they can
reach, or turn churlish and refuse to work at all. How many men at this hour
are living in a state of bondage to the machines? How many spend their whole
lives, from the cradle to the grave, in tending them by night and day? Is it
not plain that the machines are gaining ground upon us, when we reflect on the
increasing number of those who are bound down to them as slaves, and of those
who devote their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom?

“The vapour-engine must be fed with food and consume it by fire even as
man consumes it; it supports its combustion by air as man supports it; it has a
pulse and circulation as man has. It may be granted that man’s body is as
yet the more versatile of the two, but then man’s body is an older thing;
give the vapour-engine but half the time that man has had, give it also a
continuance of our present infatuation, and what may it not ere long attain to?

“There are certain functions indeed of the vapour-engine which will
probably remain unchanged for myriads of years—which in fact will perhaps
survive when the use of vapour has been superseded: the piston and cylinder,
the beam, the fly-wheel, and other parts of the machine will probably be
permanent, just as we see that man and many of the lower animals share like
modes of eating, drinking, and sleeping; thus they have hearts which beat as
ours, veins and arteries, eyes, ears, and noses; they sigh even in their sleep,
and weep and yawn; they are affected by their children; they feel pleasure and
pain, hope, fear, anger, shame; they have memory and prescience; they know that
if certain things happen to them they will die, and they fear death as much as
we do; they communicate their thoughts to one another, and some of them
deliberately act in concert. The comparison of similarities is endless: I only
make it because some may say that since the vapour-engine is not likely to be
improved in the main particulars, it is unlikely to be henceforward extensively
modified at all. This is too good to be true: it will be modified and suited
for an infinite variety of purposes, as much as man has been modified so as to
exceed the brutes in skill.

“In the meantime the stoker is almost as much a cook for his engine as
our own cooks for ourselves. Consider also the colliers and pitmen and coal
merchants and coal trains, and the men who drive them, and the ships that carry
coals—what an army of servants do the machines thus employ! Are there not
probably more men engaged in tending machinery than in tending men? Do not
machines eat as it were by mannery? Are we not ourselves creating our
successors in the supremacy of the earth? daily adding to the beauty and
delicacy of their organisation, daily giving them greater skill and supplying
more and more of that self-regulating self-acting power which will be better
than any intellect?

“What a new thing it is for a machine to feed at all! The plough, the
spade, and the cart must eat through man’s stomach; the fuel that sets
them going must burn in the furnace of a man or of horses. Man must consume
bread and meat or he cannot dig; the bread and meat are the fuel which drive
the spade. If a plough be drawn by horses, the power is supplied by grass or
beans or oats, which being burnt in the belly of the cattle give the power of
working: without this fuel the work would cease, as an engine would stop if its
furnaces were to go out.

“A man of science has demonstrated ‘that no animal has the power of
originating mechanical energy, but that all the work done in its life by any
animal, and all the heat that has been emitted from it, and the heat which
would be obtained by burning the combustible matter which has been lost from
its body during life, and by burning its body after death, make up altogether
an exact equivalent to the heat which would be obtained by burning as much food
as it has used during its life, and an amount of fuel which would generate as
much heat as its body if burned immediately after death.’ I do not know
how he has found this out, but he is a man of science—how then can it be
objected against the future vitality of the machines that they are, in their
present infancy, at the beck and call of beings who are themselves incapable of
originating mechanical energy?

“The main point, however, to be observed as affording cause for alarm is,
that whereas animals were formerly the only stomachs of the machines, there are
now many which have stomachs of their own, and consume their food themselves.
This is a great step towards their becoming, if not animate, yet something so
near akin to it, as not to differ more widely from our own life than animals do
from vegetables. And though man should remain, in some respects, the higher
creature, is not this in accordance with the practice of nature, which allows
superiority in some things to animals which have, on the whole, been long
surpassed? Has she not allowed the ant and the bee to retain superiority over
man in the organisation of their communities and social arrangements, the bird
in traversing the air, the fish in swimming, the horse in strength and
fleetness, and the dog in self-sacrifice?

“It is said by some with whom I have conversed upon this subject, that
the machines can never be developed into animate or quasi-animate
existences, inasmuch as they have no reproductive system, nor seem ever likely
to possess one. If this be taken to mean that they cannot marry, and that we
are never likely to see a fertile union between two vapour-engines with the
young ones playing about the door of the shed, however greatly we might desire
to do so, I will readily grant it. But the objection is not a very profound
one. No one expects that all the features of the now existing organisations
will be absolutely repeated in an entirely new class of life. The reproductive
system of animals differs widely from that of plants, but both are reproductive
systems. Has nature exhausted her phases of this power?

“Surely if a machine is able to reproduce another machine systematically,
we may say that it has a reproductive system. What is a reproductive system, if
it be not a system for reproduction? And how few of the machines are there
which have not been produced systematically by other machines? But it is man
that makes them do so. Yes; but is it not insects that make many of the plants
reproductive, and would not whole families of plants die out if their
fertilisation was not effected by a class of agents utterly foreign to
themselves? Does any one say that the red clover has no reproductive system
because the humble bee (and the humble bee only) must aid and abet it before it
can reproduce? No one. The humble bee is a part of the reproductive system of
the clover. Each one of ourselves has sprung from minute animalcules whose
entity was entirely distinct from our own, and which acted after their kind
with no thought or heed of what we might think about it. These little creatures
are part of our own reproductive system; then why not we part of that of the
machines?

“But the machines which reproduce machinery do not reproduce machines
after their own kind. A thimble may be made by machinery, but it was not made
by, neither will it ever make, a thimble. Here, again, if we turn to nature we
shall find abundance of analogies which will teach us that a reproductive
system may be in full force without the thing produced being of the same kind
as that which produced it. Very few creatures reproduce after their own kind;
they reproduce something which has the potentiality of becoming that which
their parents were. Thus the butterfly lays an egg, which egg can become a
caterpillar, which caterpillar can become a chrysalis, which chrysalis can
become a butterfly; and though I freely grant that the machines cannot be said
to have more than the germ of a true reproductive system at present, have we
not just seen that they have only recently obtained the germs of a mouth and
stomach? And may not some stride be made in the direction of true reproduction
which shall be as great as that which has been recently taken in the direction
of true feeding?

“It is possible that the system when developed may be in many cases a
vicarious thing. Certain classes of machines may be alone fertile, while the
rest discharge other functions in the mechanical system, just as the great
majority of ants and bees have nothing to do with the continuation of their
species, but get food and store it, without thought of breeding. One cannot
expect the parallel to be complete or nearly so; certainly not now, and
probably never; but is there not enough analogy existing at the present moment,
to make us feel seriously uneasy about the future, and to render it our duty to
check the evil while we can still do so? Machines can within certain limits
beget machines of any class, no matter how different to themselves. Every class
of machines will probably have its special mechanical breeders, and all the
higher ones will owe their existence to a large number of parents and not to
two only.

“We are misled by considering any complicated machine as a single thing;
in truth it is a city or society, each member of which was bred truly after its
kind. We see a machine as a whole, we call it by a name and individualise it;
we look at our own limbs, and know that the combination forms an individual
which springs from a single centre of reproductive action; we therefore assume
that there can be no reproductive action which does not arise from a single
centre; but this assumption is unscientific, and the bare fact that no
vapour-engine was ever made entirely by another, or two others, of its own
kind, is not sufficient to warrant us in saying that vapour-engines have no
reproductive system. The truth is that each part of every vapour-engine is bred
by its own special breeders, whose function it is to breed that part, and that
only, while the combination of the parts into a whole forms another department
of the mechanical reproductive system, which is at present exceedingly complex
and difficult to see in its entirety.

“Complex now, but how much simpler and more intelligibly organised may it
not become in another hundred thousand years? or in twenty thousand? For man at
present believes that his interest lies in that direction; he spends an
incalculable amount of labour and time and thought in making machines breed
always better and better; he has already succeeded in effecting much that at
one time appeared impossible, and there seem no limits to the results of
accumulated improvements if they are allowed to descend with modification from
generation to generation. It must always be remembered that man’s body is
what it is through having been moulded into its present shape by the chances
and changes of many millions of years, but that his organisation never advanced
with anything like the rapidity with which that of the machines is advancing.
This is the most alarming feature in the case, and I must be pardoned for
insisting on it so frequently.”

CHAPTER XXV.
THE MACHINES—concluded

Here followed a very long and untranslatable digression about the different
races and families of the then existing machines. The writer attempted to
support his theory by pointing out the similarities existing between many
machines of a widely different character, which served to show descent from a
common ancestor. He divided machines into their genera, subgenera, species,
varieties, subvarieties, and so forth. He proved the existence of connecting
links between machines that seemed to have very little in common, and showed
that many more such links had existed, but had now perished. He pointed out
tendencies to reversion, and the presence of rudimentary organs which existed
in many machines feebly developed and perfectly useless, yet serving to mark
descent from an ancestor to whom the function was actually useful.

I left the translation of this part of the treatise, which, by the way, was far
longer than all that I have given here, for a later opportunity. Unfortunately,
I left Erewhon before I could return to the subject; and though I saved my
translation and other papers at the hazard of my life, I was a obliged to
sacrifice the original work. It went to my heart to do so; but I thus gained
ten minutes of invaluable time, without which both Arowhena and myself must
have certainly perished.

I remember one incident which bears upon this part of the treatise. The
gentleman who gave it to me had asked to see my tobacco-pipe; he examined it
carefully, and when he came to the little protuberance at the bottom of the
bowl he seemed much delighted, and exclaimed that it must be rudimentary. I
asked him what he meant.

“Sir,” he answered, “this organ is identical with the rim at
the bottom of a cup; it is but another form of the same function. Its purpose
must have been to keep the heat of the pipe from marking the table upon which
it rested. You would find, if you were to look up the history of tobacco-pipes,
that in early specimens this protuberance was of a different shape to what it
is now. It will have been broad at the bottom, and flat, so that while the pipe
was being smoked the bowl might rest upon the table without marking it. Use and
disuse must have come into play and reduced the function to its present
rudimentary condition. I should not be surprised, sir,” he continued,
“if, in the course of time, it were to become modified still farther, and
to assume the form of an ornamental leaf or scroll, or even a butterfly, while,
in some cases, it will become extinct.”

On my return to England, I looked up the point, and found that my friend was
right.

Returning, however, to the treatise, my translation recommences as follows:-

“May we not fancy that if, in the remotest geological period, some early
form of vegetable life had been endowed with the power of reflecting upon the
dawning life of animals which was coming into existence alongside of its own,
it would have thought itself exceedingly acute if it had surmised that animals
would one day become real vegetables? Yet would this be more mistaken than it
would be on our part to imagine that because the life of machines is a very
different one to our own, there is therefore no higher possible development of
life than ours; or that because mechanical life is a very different thing from
ours, therefore that it is not life at all?

“But I have heard it said, ‘granted that this is so, and that the
vapour-engine has a strength of its own, surely no one will say that it has a
will of its own?’ Alas! if we look more closely, we shall find that this
does not make against the supposition that the vapour-engine is one of the
germs of a new phase of life. What is there in this whole world, or in the
worlds beyond it, which has a will of its own? The Unknown and Unknowable only!

“A man is the resultant and exponent of all the forces that have been
brought to bear upon him, whether before his birth or afterwards. His action at
any moment depends solely upon his constitution, and on the intensity and
direction of the various agencies to which he is, and has been, subjected. Some
of these will counteract each other; but as he is by nature, and as he has been
acted on, and is now acted on from without, so will he do, as certainly and
regularly as though he were a machine.

“We do not generally admit this, because we do not know the whole nature
of any one, nor the whole of the forces that act upon him. We see but a part,
and being thus unable to generalise human conduct, except very roughly, we deny
that it is subject to any fixed laws at all, and ascribe much both of a
man’s character and actions to chance, or luck, or fortune; but these are
only words whereby we escape the admission of our own ignorance; and a little
reflection will teach us that the most daring flight of the imagination or the
most subtle exercise of the reason is as much the thing that must arise, and
the only thing that can by any possibility arise, at the moment of its arising,
as the falling of a dead leaf when the wind shakes it from the tree.

“For the future depends upon the present, and the present (whose
existence is only one of those minor compromises of which human life is
full—for it lives only on sufferance of the past and future) depends upon
the past, and the past is unalterable. The only reason why we cannot see the
future as plainly as the past, is because we know too little of the actual past
and actual present; these things are too great for us, otherwise the future, in
its minutest details, would lie spread out before our eyes, and we should lose
our sense of time present by reason of the clearness with which we should see
the past and future; perhaps we should not be even able to distinguish time at
all; but that is foreign. What we do know is, that the more the past and
present are known, the more the future can be predicted; and that no one dreams
of doubting the fixity of the future in cases where he is fully cognisant of
both past and present, and has had experience of the consequences that followed
from such a past and such a present on previous occasions. He perfectly well
knows what will happen, and will stake his whole fortune thereon.

“And this is a great blessing; for it is the foundation on which morality
and science are built. The assurance that the future is no arbitrary and
changeable thing, but that like futures will invariably follow like presents,
is the groundwork on which we lay all our plans—the faith on which we do
every conscious action of our lives. If this were not so we should be without a
guide; we should have no confidence in acting, and hence we should never act,
for there would be no knowing that the results which will follow now will be
the same as those which followed before.

“Who would plough or sow if he disbelieved in the fixity of the future?
Who would throw water on a blazing house if the action of water upon fire were
uncertain? Men will only do their utmost when they feel certain that the future
will discover itself against them if their utmost has not been done. The
feeling of such a certainty is a constituent part of the sum of the forces at
work upon them, and will act most powerfully on the best and most moral men.
Those who are most firmly persuaded that the future is immutably bound up with
the present in which their work is lying, will best husband their present, and
till it with the greatest care. The future must be a lottery to those who think
that the same combinations can sometimes precede one set of results, and
sometimes another. If their belief is sincere they will speculate instead of
working: these ought to be the immoral men; the others have the strongest spur
to exertion and morality, if their belief is a living one.

“The bearing of all this upon the machines is not immediately apparent,
but will become so presently. In the meantime I must deal with friends who tell
me that, though the future is fixed as regards inorganic matter, and in some
respects with regard to man, yet that there are many ways in which it cannot be
considered as fixed. Thus, they say that fire applied to dry shavings, and well
fed with oxygen gas, will always produce a blaze, but that a coward brought
into contact with a terrifying object will not always result in a man running
away. Nevertheless, if there be two cowards perfectly similar in every respect,
and if they be subjected in a perfectly similar way to two terrifying agents,
which are themselves perfectly similar, there are few who will not expect a
perfect similarity in the running away, even though a thousand years intervene
between the original combination and its being repeated.

“The apparently greater regularity in the results of chemical than of
human combinations arises from our inability to perceive the subtle differences
in human combinations—combinations which are never identically repeated.
Fire we know, and shavings we know, but no two men ever were or ever will be
exactly alike; and the smallest difference may change the whole conditions of
the problem. Our registry of results must be infinite before we could arrive at
a full forecast of future combinations; the wonder is that there is as much
certainty concerning human action as there is; and assuredly the older we grow
the more certain we feel as to what such and such a kind of person will do in
given circumstances; but this could never be the case unless human conduct were
under the influence of laws, with the working of which we become more and more
familiar through experience.

“If the above is sound, it follows that the regularity with which
machinery acts is no proof of the absence of vitality, or at least of germs
which may be developed into a new phase of life. At first sight it would indeed
appear that a vapour-engine cannot help going when set upon a line of rails
with the steam up and the machinery in full play; whereas the man whose
business it is to drive it can help doing so at any moment that he pleases; so
that the first has no spontaneity, and is not possessed of any sort of free
will, while the second has and is.

“This is true up to a certain point; the driver can stop the engine at
any moment that he pleases, but he can only please to do so at certain points
which have been fixed for him by others, or in the case of unexpected
obstructions which force him to please to do so. His pleasure is not
spontaneous; there is an unseen choir of influences around him, which make it
impossible for him to act in any other way than one. It is known beforehand how
much strength must be given to these influences, just as it is known beforehand
how much coal and water are necessary for the vapour-engine itself; and
curiously enough it will be found that the influences brought to bear upon the
driver are of the same kind as those brought to bear upon the engine—that
is to say, food and warmth. The driver is obedient to his masters, because he
gets food and warmth from them, and if these are withheld or given in
insufficient quantities he will cease to drive; in like manner the engine will
cease to work if it is insufficiently fed. The only difference is, that the man
is conscious about his wants, and the engine (beyond refusing to work) does not
seem to be so; but this is temporary, and has been dealt with above.

“Accordingly, the requisite strength being given to the motives that are
to drive the driver, there has never, or hardly ever, been an instance of a man
stopping his engine through wantonness. But such a case might occur; yes, and
it might occur that the engine should break down: but if the train is stopped
from some trivial motive it will be found either that the strength of the
necessary influences has been miscalculated, or that the man has been
miscalculated, in the same way as an engine may break down from an unsuspected
flaw; but even in such a case there will have been no spontaneity; the action
will have had its true parental causes: spontaneity is only a term for
man’s ignorance of the gods.

“Is there, then, no spontaneity on the part of those who drive the
driver?”

Here followed an obscure argument upon this subject, which I have thought it
best to omit. The writer resumes:—“After all then it comes to this,
that the difference between the life of a man and that of a machine is one
rather of degree than of kind, though differences in kind are not wanting. An
animal has more provision for emergency than a machine. The machine is less
versatile; its range of action is narrow; its strength and accuracy in its own
sphere are superhuman, but it shows badly in a dilemma; sometimes when its
normal action is disturbed, it will lose its head, and go from bad to worse
like a lunatic in a raging frenzy: but here, again, we are met by the same
consideration as before, namely, that the machines are still in their infancy;
they are mere skeletons without muscles and flesh.

“For how many emergencies is an oyster adapted? For as many as are likely
to happen to it, and no more. So are the machines; and so is man himself. The
list of casualties that daily occur to man through his want of adaptability is
probably as great as that occurring to the machines; and every day gives them
some greater provision for the unforeseen. Let any one examine the wonderful
self-regulating and self-adjusting contrivances which are now incorporated with
the vapour-engine, let him watch the way in which it supplies itself with oil;
in which it indicates its wants to those who tend it; in which, by the
governor, it regulates its application of its own strength; let him look at
that store-house of inertia and momentum the fly-wheel, or at the buffers on a
railway carriage; let him see how those improvements are being selected for
perpetuity which contain provision against the emergencies that may arise to
harass the machines, and then let him think of a hundred thousand years, and
the accumulated progress which they will bring unless man can be awakened to a
sense of his situation, and of the doom which he is preparing for himself.^[6]

“The misery is that man has been blind so long already. In his reliance
upon the use of steam he has been betrayed into increasing and multiplying. To
withdraw steam power suddenly will not have the effect of reducing us to the
state in which we were before its introduction; there will be a general
break-up and time of anarchy such as has never been known; it will be as though
our population were suddenly doubled, with no additional means of feeding the
increased number. The air we breathe is hardly more necessary for our animal
life than the use of any machine, on the strength of which we have increased
our numbers, is to our civilisation; it is the machines which act upon man and
make him man, as much as man who has acted upon and made the machines; but we
must choose between the alternative of undergoing much present suffering, or
seeing ourselves gradually superseded by our own creatures, till we rank no
higher in comparison with them, than the beasts of the field with ourselves.

“Herein lies our danger. For many seem inclined to acquiesce in so
dishonourable a future. They say that although man should become to the
machines what the horse and dog are to us, yet that he will continue to exist,
and will probably be better off in a state of domestication under the
beneficent rule of the machines than in his present wild condition. We treat
our domestic animals with much kindness. We give them whatever we believe to be
the best for them; and there can be no doubt that our use of meat has increased
their happiness rather than detracted from it. In like manner there is reason
to hope that the machines will use us kindly, for their existence will be in a
great measure dependent upon ours; they will rule us with a rod of iron, but
they will not eat us; they will not only require our services in the
reproduction and education of their young, but also in waiting upon them as
servants; in gathering food for them, and feeding them; in restoring them to
health when they are sick; and in either burying their dead or working up their
deceased members into new forms of mechanical existence.

“The very nature of the motive power which works the advancement of the
machines precludes the possibility of man’s life being rendered miserable
as well as enslaved. Slaves are tolerably happy if they have good masters, and
the revolution will not occur in our time, nor hardly in ten thousand years, or
ten times that. Is it wise to be uneasy about a contingency which is so remote?
Man is not a sentimental animal where his material interests are concerned, and
though here and there some ardent soul may look upon himself and curse his fate
that he was not born a vapour-engine, yet the mass of mankind will acquiesce in
any arrangement which gives them better food and clothing at a cheaper rate,
and will refrain from yielding to unreasonable jealousy merely because there
are other destinies more glorious than their own.

“The power of custom is enormous, and so gradual will be the change, that
man’s sense of what is due to himself will be at no time rudely shocked;
our bondage will steal upon us noiselessly and by imperceptible approaches; nor
will there ever be such a clashing of desires between man and the machines as
will lead to an encounter between them. Among themselves the machines will war
eternally, but they will still require man as the being through whose agency
the struggle will be principally conducted. In point of fact there is no
occasion for anxiety about the future happiness of man so long as he continues
to be in any way profitable to the machines; he may become the inferior race,
but he will be infinitely better off than he is now. Is it not then both absurd
and unreasonable to be envious of our benefactors? And should we not be guilty
of consummate folly if we were to reject advantages which we cannot obtain
otherwise, merely because they involve a greater gain to others than to
ourselves?

“With those who can argue in this way I have nothing in common. I shrink
with as much horror from believing that my race can ever be superseded or
surpassed, as I should do from believing that even at the remotest period my
ancestors were other than human beings. Could I believe that ten hundred
thousand years ago a single one of my ancestors was another kind of being to
myself, I should lose all self-respect, and take no further pleasure or
interest in life. I have the same feeling with regard to my descendants, and
believe it to be one that will be felt so generally that the country will
resolve upon putting an immediate stop to all further mechanical progress, and
upon destroying all improvements that have been made for the last three hundred
years. I would not urge more than this. We may trust ourselves to deal with
those that remain, and though I should prefer to have seen the destruction
include another two hundred years, I am aware of the necessity for
compromising, and would so far sacrifice my own individual convictions as to be
content with three hundred. Less than this will be insufficient.”

This was the conclusion of the attack which led to the destruction of machinery
throughout Erewhon. There was only one serious attempt to answer it. Its author
said that machines were to be regarded as a part of man’s own physical
nature, being really nothing but extra-corporeal limbs. Man, he said, was a
machinate mammal. The lower animals keep all their limbs at home in their own
bodies, but many of man’s are loose, and lie about detached, now here and
now there, in various parts of the world—some being kept always handy for
contingent use, and others being occasionally hundreds of miles away. A machine
is merely a supplementary limb; this is the be all and end all of machinery. We
do not use our own limbs other than as machines; and a leg is only a much
better wooden leg than any one can manufacture.

“Observe a man digging with a spade; his right fore-arm has become
artificially lengthened, and his hand has become a joint. The handle of the
spade is like the knob at the end of the humerus; the shaft is the additional
bone, and the oblong iron plate is the new form of the hand which enables its
possessor to disturb the earth in a way to which his original hand was unequal.
Having thus modified himself, not as other animals are modified, by
circumstances over which they have had not even the appearance of control, but
having, as it were, taken forethought and added a cubit to his stature,
civilisation began to dawn upon the race, the social good offices, the genial
companionship of friends, the art of unreason, and all those habits of mind
which most elevate man above the lower animals, in the course of time ensued.

“Thus civilisation and mechanical progress advanced hand in hand, each
developing and being developed by the other, the earliest accidental use of the
stick having set the ball rolling, and the prospect of advantage keeping it in
motion. In fact, machines are to be regarded as the mode of development by
which human organism is now especially advancing, every past invention being an
addition to the resources of the human body. Even community of limbs is thus
rendered possible to those who have so much community of soul as to own money
enough to pay a railway fare; for a train is only a seven-leagued foot that
five hundred may own at once.”

The one serious danger which this writer apprehended was that the machines
would so equalise men’s powers, and so lessen the severity of
competition, that many persons of inferior physique would escape detection and
transmit their inferiority to their descendants. He feared that the removal of
the present pressure might cause a degeneracy of the human race, and indeed
that the whole body might become purely rudimentary, the man himself being
nothing but soul and mechanism, an intelligent but passionless principle of
mechanical action.

“How greatly,” he wrote, “do we not now live with our
external limbs? We vary our physique with the seasons, with age, with advancing
or decreasing wealth. If it is wet we are furnished with an organ commonly
called an umbrella, and which is designed for the purpose of protecting our
clothes or our skins from the injurious effects of rain. Man has now many
extra-corporeal members, which are of more importance to him than a good deal
of his hair, or at any rate than his whiskers. His memory goes in his
pocket-book. He becomes more and more complex as he grows older; he will then
be seen with see-engines, or perhaps with artificial teeth and hair: if he be a
really well-developed specimen of his race, he will be furnished with a large
box upon wheels, two horses, and a coachman.”

It was this writer who originated the custom of classifying men by their
horse-power, and who divided them into genera, species, varieties, and
subvarieties, giving them names from the hypothetical language which expressed
the number of limbs which they could command at any moment. He showed that men
became more highly and delicately organised the more nearly they approached the
summit of opulence, and that none but millionaires possessed the full
complement of limbs with which mankind could become incorporate.

“Those mighty organisms,” he continued, “our leading bankers
and merchants, speak to their congeners through the length and breadth of the
land in a second of time; their rich and subtle souls can defy all material
impediment, whereas the souls of the poor are clogged and hampered by matter,
which sticks fast about them as treacle to the wings of a fly, or as one
struggling in a quicksand: their dull ears must take days or weeks to hear what
another would tell them from a distance, instead of hearing it in a second as
is done by the more highly organised classes. Who shall deny that one who can
tack on a special train to his identity, and go wheresoever he will whensoever
he pleases, is more highly organised than he who, should he wish for the same
power, might wish for the wings of a bird with an equal chance of getting them;
and whose legs are his only means of locomotion? That old philosophic enemy,
matter, the inherently and essentially evil, still hangs about the neck of the
poor and strangles him: but to the rich, matter is immaterial; the elaborate
organisation of his extra-corporeal system has freed his soul.

“This is the secret of the homage which we see rich men receive from
those who are poorer than themselves: it would be a grave error to suppose that
this deference proceeds from motives which we need be ashamed of: it is the
natural respect which all living creatures pay to those whom they recognise as
higher than themselves in the scale of animal life, and is analogous to the
veneration which a dog feels for man. Among savage races it is deemed highly
honourable to be the possessor of a gun, and throughout all known time there
has been a feeling that those who are worth most are the worthiest.”

And so he went on at considerable length, attempting to show what changes in
the distribution of animal and vegetable life throughout the kingdom had been
caused by this and that of man’s inventions, and in what way each was
connected with the moral and intellectual development of the human species: he
even allotted to some the share which they had had in the creation and
modification of man’s body, and that which they would hereafter have in
its destruction; but the other writer was considered to have the best of it,
and in the end succeeded in destroying all the inventions that had been
discovered for the preceding 271 years, a period which was agreed upon by all
parties after several years of wrangling as to whether a certain kind of mangle
which was much in use among washerwomen should be saved or no. It was at last
ruled to be dangerous, and was just excluded by the limit of 271 years. Then
came the reactionary civil wars which nearly ruined the country, but which it
would be beyond my present scope to describe.

CHAPTER XXVI.
THE VIEWS OF AN EREWHONIAN PROPHET CONCERNING THE RIGHTS OF
ANIMALS

It will be seen from the foregoing chapters that the Erewhonians are a meek and
long-suffering people, easily led by the nose, and quick to offer up common
sense at the shrine of logic, when a philosopher arises among them, who carries
them away through his reputation for especial learning, or by convincing them
that their existing institutions are not based on the strictest principles of
morality.

The series of revolutions on which I shall now briefly touch shows this even
more plainly than the way (already dealt with) in which at a later date they
cut their throats in the matter of machinery; for if the second of the two
reformers of whom I am about to speak had had his way—or rather the way
that he professed to have—the whole race would have died of starvation
within a twelve-month. Happily common sense, though she is by nature the
gentlest creature living, when she feels the knife at her throat, is apt to
develop unexpected powers of resistance, and to send doctrinaires flying, even
when they have bound her down and think they have her at their mercy. What
happened, so far as I could collect it from the best authorities, was as
follows:-

Some two thousand five hundred years ago the Erewhonians were still
uncivilised, and lived by hunting, fishing, a rude system of agriculture, and
plundering such few other nations as they had not yet completely conquered.
They had no schools or systems of philosophy, but by a kind of dog-knowledge
did that which was right in their own eyes and in those of their neighbours;
the common sense, therefore, of the public being as yet unvitiated, crime and
disease were looked upon much as they are in other countries.

But with the gradual advance of civilisation and increase in material
prosperity, people began to ask questions about things that they had hitherto
taken as matters of course, and one old gentleman, who had great influence over
them by reason of the sanctity of his life, and his supposed inspiration by an
unseen power, whose existence was now beginning to be felt, took it into his
head to disquiet himself about the rights of animals—a question that so
far had disturbed nobody.

All prophets are more or less fussy, and this old gentleman seems to have been
one of the more fussy ones. Being maintained at the public expense, he had
ample leisure, and not content with limiting his attention to the rights of
animals, he wanted to reduce right and wrong to rules, to consider the
foundations of duty and of good and evil, and otherwise to put all sorts of
matters on a logical basis, which people whose time is money are content to
accept on no basis at all.

As a matter of course, the basis on which he decided that duty could alone rest
was one that afforded no standing-room for many of the old-established habits
of the people. These, he assured them, were all wrong, and whenever any one
ventured to differ from him, he referred the matter to the unseen power with
which he alone was in direct communication, and the unseen power invariably
assured him that he was right. As regards the rights of animals he taught as
follows:-

“You know, he said, “how wicked it is of you to kill one another.
Once upon a time your fore-fathers made no scruple about not only killing, but
also eating their relations. No one would now go back to such detestable
practices, for it is notorious that we have lived much more happily since they
were abandoned. From this increased prosperity we may confidently deduce the
maxim that we should not kill and eat our fellow-creatures. I have consulted
the higher power by whom you know that I am inspired, and he has assured me
that this conclusion is irrefragable.

“Now it cannot be denied that sheep, cattle, deer, birds, and fishes are
our fellow-creatures. They differ from us in some respects, but those in which
they differ are few and secondary, while those that they have in common with us
are many and essential. My friends, if it was wrong of you to kill and eat your
fellow-men, it is wrong also to kill and eat fish, flesh, and fowl. Birds,
beasts, and fishes, have as full a right to live as long as they can unmolested
by man, as man has to live unmolested by his neighbours. These words, let me
again assure you, are not mine, but those of the higher power which inspires
me.

“I grant,” he continued, “that animals molest one another,
and that some of them go so far as to molest man, but I have yet to learn that
we should model our conduct on that of the lower animals. We should endeavour,
rather, to instruct them, and bring them to a better mind. To kill a tiger, for
example, who has lived on the flesh of men and women whom he has killed, is to
reduce ourselves to the level of the tiger, and is unworthy of people who seek
to be guided by the highest principles in all, both their thoughts and actions.

“The unseen power who has revealed himself to me alone among you, has
told me to tell you that you ought by this time to have outgrown the barbarous
habits of your ancestors. If, as you believe, you know better than they, you
should do better. He commands you, therefore, to refrain from killing any
living being for the sake of eating it. The only animal food that you may eat,
is the flesh of any birds, beasts, or fishes that you may come upon as having
died a natural death, or any that may have been born prematurely, or so
deformed that it is a mercy to put them out of their pain; you may also eat all
such animals as have committed suicide. As regards vegetables you may eat all
those that will let you eat them with impunity.”

So wisely and so well did the old prophet argue, and so terrible were the
threats he hurled at those who should disobey him, that in the end he carried
the more highly educated part of the people with him, and presently the poorer
classes followed suit, or professed to do so. Having seen the triumph of his
principles, he was gathered to his fathers, and no doubt entered at once into
full communion with that unseen power whose favour he had already so
pre-eminently enjoyed.

He had not, however, been dead very long, before some of his more ardent
disciples took it upon them to better the instruction of their master. The old
prophet had allowed the use of eggs and milk, but his disciples decided that to
eat a fresh egg was to destroy a potential chicken, and that this came to much
the same as murdering a live one. Stale eggs, if it was quite certain that they
were too far gone to be able to be hatched, were grudgingly permitted, but all
eggs offered for sale had to be submitted to an inspector, who, on being
satisfied that they were addled, would label them “Laid not less than
three months” from the date, whatever it might happen to be. These eggs,
I need hardly say, were only used in puddings, and as a medicine in certain
cases where an emetic was urgently required. Milk was forbidden inasmuch as it
could not be obtained without robbing some calf of its natural sustenance, and
thus endangering its life.

It will be easily believed that at first there were many who gave the new rules
outward observance, but embraced every opportunity of indulging secretly in
those flesh-pots to which they had been accustomed. It was found that animals
were continually dying natural deaths under more or less suspicious
circumstances. Suicidal mania, again, which had hitherto been confined
exclusively to donkeys, became alarmingly prevalent even among such for the
most part self-respecting creatures as sheep and cattle. It was astonishing how
some of these unfortunate animals would scent out a butcher’s knife if
there was one within a mile of them, and run right up against it if the butcher
did not get it out of their way in time.

Dogs, again, that had been quite law-abiding as regards domestic poultry, tame
rabbits, sucking pigs, or sheep and lambs, suddenly took to breaking beyond the
control of their masters, and killing anything that they were told not to
touch. It was held that any animal killed by a dog had died a natural death,
for it was the dog’s nature to kill things, and he had only refrained
from molesting farmyard creatures hitherto because his nature had been tampered
with. Unfortunately the more these unruly tendencies became developed, the more
the common people seemed to delight in breeding the very animals that would put
temptation in the dog’s way. There is little doubt, in fact, that they
were deliberately evading the law; but whether this was so or no they sold or
ate everything their dogs had killed.

Evasion was more difficult in the case of the larger animals, for the
magistrates could not wink at all the pretended suicides of pigs, sheep, and
cattle that were brought before them. Sometimes they had to convict, and a few
convictions had a very terrorising effect—whereas in the case of animals
killed by a dog, the marks of the dog’s teeth could be seen, and it was
practically impossible to prove malice on the part of the owner of the dog.

Another fertile source of disobedience to the law was furnished by a decision
of one of the judges that raised a great outcry among the more fervent
disciples of the old prophet. The judge held that it was lawful to kill any
animal in self-defence, and that such conduct was so natural on the part of a
man who found himself attacked, that the attacking creature should be held to
have died a natural death. The High Vegetarians had indeed good reason to be
alarmed, for hardly had this decision become generally known before a number of
animals, hitherto harmless, took to attacking their owners with such ferocity,
that it became necessary to put them to a natural death. Again, it was quite
common at that time to see the carcase of a calf, lamb, or kid exposed for sale
with a label from the inspector certifying that it had been killed in
self-defence. Sometimes even the carcase of a lamb or calf was exposed as
“warranted still-born,” when it presented every appearance of
having enjoyed at least a month of life.

As for the flesh of animals that had bona fide died a natural death, the
permission to eat it was nugatory, for it was generally eaten by some other
animal before man got hold of it; or failing this it was often poisonous, so
that practically people were forced to evade the law by some of the means above
spoken of, or to become vegetarians. This last alternative was so little to the
taste of the Erewhonians, that the laws against killing animals were falling
into desuetude, and would very likely have been repealed, but for the breaking
out of a pestilence, which was ascribed by the priests and prophets of the day
to the lawlessness of the people in the matter of eating forbidden flesh. On
this, there was a reaction; stringent laws were passed, forbidding the use of
meat in any form or shape, and permitting no food but grain, fruits, and
vegetables to be sold in shops and markets. These laws were enacted about two
hundred years after the death of the old prophet who had first unsettled
people’s minds about the rights of animals; but they had hardly been
passed before people again began to break them.

I was told that the most painful consequence of all this folly did not lie in
the fact that law-abiding people had to go without animal food—many
nations do this and seem none the worse, and even in flesh-eating countries
such as Italy, Spain, and Greece, the poor seldom see meat from year’s
end to year’s end. The mischief lay in the jar which undue prohibition
gave to the consciences of all but those who were strong enough to know that
though conscience as a rule boons, it can also bane. The awakened conscience of
an individual will often lead him to do things in haste that he had better have
left undone, but the conscience of a nation awakened by a respectable old
gentleman who has an unseen power up his sleeve will pave hell with a
vengeance.

Young people were told that it was a sin to do what their fathers had done
unhurt for centuries; those, moreover, who preached to them about the enormity
of eating meat, were an unattractive academic folk, and though they over-awed
all but the bolder youths, there were few who did not in their hearts dislike
them. However much the young person might be shielded, he soon got to know that
men and women of the world—often far nicer people than the prophets who
preached abstention—continually spoke sneeringly of the new doctrinaire
laws, and were believed to set them aside in secret, though they dared not do
so openly. Small wonder, then, that the more human among the student classes
were provoked by the touch-not, taste-not, handle-not precepts of their rulers,
into questioning much that they would otherwise have unhesitatingly accepted.

One sad story is on record about a young man of promising amiable disposition,
but cursed with more conscience than brains, who had been told by his doctor
(for as I have above said disease was not yet held to be criminal) that he
ought to eat meat, law or no law. He was much shocked and for some time refused
to comply with what he deemed the unrighteous advice given him by his doctor;
at last, however, finding that he grew weaker and weaker, he stole secretly on
a dark night into one of those dens in which meat was surreptitiously sold, and
bought a pound of prime steak. He took it home, cooked it in his bedroom when
every one in the house had gone to rest, ate it, and though he could hardly
sleep for remorse and shame, felt so much better next morning that he hardly
knew himself.

Three or four days later, he again found himself irresistibly drawn to this
same den. Again he bought a pound of steak, again he cooked and ate it, and
again, in spite of much mental torture, on the following morning felt himself a
different man. To cut the story short, though he never went beyond the bounds
of moderation, it preyed upon his mind that he should be drifting, as he
certainly was, into the ranks of the habitual law-breakers.

All the time his health kept on improving, and though he felt sure that he owed
this to the beefsteaks, the better he became in body, the more his conscience
gave him no rest; two voices were for ever ringing in his ears—the one
saying, “I am Common Sense and Nature; heed me, and I will reward you as
I rewarded your fathers before you.” But the other voice said: “Let
not that plausible spirit lure you to your ruin. I am Duty; heed me, and I will
reward you as I rewarded your fathers before you.”

Sometimes he even seemed to see the faces of the speakers. Common Sense looked
so easy, genial, and serene, so frank and fearless, that do what he might he
could not mistrust her; but as he was on the point of following her, he would
be checked by the austere face of Duty, so grave, but yet so kindly; and it cut
him to the heart that from time to time he should see her turn pitying away
from him as he followed after her rival.

The poor boy continually thought of the better class of his fellow-students,
and tried to model his conduct on what he thought was theirs.
“They,” he said to himself, “eat a beefsteak? Never.”
But they most of them ate one now and again, unless it was a mutton chop that
tempted them. And they used him for a model much as he did them.
“He,” they would say to themselves, “eat a mutton chop?
Never.” One night, however, he was followed by one of the authorities,
who was always prowling about in search of law-breakers, and was caught coming
out of the den with half a shoulder of mutton concealed about his person. On
this, even though he had not been put in prison, he would have been sent away
with his prospects in life irretrievably ruined; he therefore hanged himself as
soon as he got home.

CHAPTER XXVII.
THE VIEWS OF AN EREWHONIAN PHILOSOPHER CONCERNING THE RIGHTS
OF VEGETABLES

Let me leave this unhappy story, and return to the course of events among the
Erewhonians at large. No matter how many laws they passed increasing the
severity of the punishments inflicted on those who ate meat in secret, the
people found means of setting them aside as fast as they were made. At times,
indeed, they would become almost obsolete, but when they were on the point of
being repealed, some national disaster or the preaching of some fanatic would
reawaken the conscience of the nation, and people were imprisoned by the
thousand for illicitly selling and buying animal food.

About six or seven hundred years, however, after the death of the old prophet,
a philosopher appeared, who, though he did not claim to have any communication
with an unseen power, laid down the law with as much confidence as if such a
power had inspired him. Many think that this philosopher did not believe his
own teaching, and, being in secret a great meat-eater, had no other end in view
than reducing the prohibition against eating animal food to an absurdity,
greater even than an Erewhonian Puritan would be able to stand.

Those who take this view hold that he knew how impossible it would be to get
the nation to accept legislation that it held to be sinful; he knew also how
hopeless it would be to convince people that it was not wicked to kill a sheep
and eat it, unless he could show them that they must either sin to a certain
extent, or die. He, therefore, it is believed, made the monstrous proposals of
which I will now speak.

He began by paying a tribute of profound respect to the old prophet, whose
advocacy of the rights of animals, he admitted, had done much to soften the
national character, and enlarge its views about the sanctity of life in
general. But he urged that times had now changed; the lesson of which the
country had stood in need had been sufficiently learnt, while as regards
vegetables much had become known that was not even suspected formerly, and
which, if the nation was to persevere in that strict adherence to the highest
moral principles which had been the secret of its prosperity hitherto, must
necessitate a radical change in its attitude towards them.

It was indeed true that much was now known that had not been suspected
formerly, for the people had had no foreign enemies, and, being both
quick-witted and inquisitive into the mysteries of nature, had made
extraordinary progress in all the many branches of art and science. In the
chief Erewhonian museum I was shown a microscope of considerable power, that
was ascribed by the authorities to a date much about that of the philosopher of
whom I am now speaking, and was even supposed by some to have been the
instrument with which he had actually worked.

This philosopher was Professor of botany in the chief seat of learning then in
Erewhon, and whether with the help of the microscope still preserved, or with
another, had arrived at a conclusion now universally accepted among
ourselves—I mean, that all, both animals and plants, have had a common
ancestry, and that hence the second should be deemed as much alive as the
first. He contended, therefore, that animals and plants were cousins, and would
have been seen to be so, all along, if people had not made an arbitrary and
unreasonable division between what they chose to call the animal and vegetable
kingdoms.

He declared, and demonstrated to the satisfaction of all those who were able to
form an opinion upon the subject, that there is no difference appreciable
either by the eye, or by any other test, between a germ that will develop into
an oak, a vine, a rose, and one that (given its accustomed surroundings) will
become a mouse, an elephant, or a man.

He contended that the course of any germ’s development was dictated by
the habits of the germs from which it was descended and of whose identity it
had once formed part. If a germ found itself placed as the germs in the line of
its ancestry were placed, it would do as its ancestors had done, and grow up
into the same kind of organism as theirs. If it found the circumstances only a
little different, it would make shift (successfully or unsuccessfully) to
modify its development accordingly; if the circumstances were widely different,
it would die, probably without an effort at self-adaptation. This, he argued,
applied equally to the germs of plants and of animals.

He therefore connected all, both animal and vegetable development, with
intelligence, either spent and now unconscious, or still unspent and conscious;
and in support of his view as regards vegetable life, he pointed to the way in
which all plants have adapted themselves to their habitual environment.
Granting that vegetable intelligence at first sight appears to differ
materially from animal, yet, he urged, it is like it in the one essential fact
that though it has evidently busied itself about matters that are vital to the
well-being of the organism that possesses it, it has never shown the slightest
tendency to occupy itself with anything else. This, he insisted, is as great a
proof of intelligence as any living being can give.

“Plants,” said he, “show no sign of interesting themselves in
human affairs. We shall never get a rose to understand that five times seven
are thirty-five, and there is no use in talking to an oak about fluctuations in
the price of stocks. Hence we say that the oak and the rose are unintelligent,
and on finding that they do not understand our business conclude that they do
not understand their own. But what can a creature who talks in this way know
about intelligence? Which shows greater signs of intelligence? He, or the rose
and oak?

“And when we call plants stupid for not understanding our business, how
capable do we show ourselves of understanding theirs? Can we form even the
faintest conception of the way in which a seed from a rose-tree turns earth,
air, warmth and water into a rose full-blown? Where does it get its colour
from? From the earth, air, &c.? Yes—but how? Those petals of such
ineffable texture—that hue that outvies the cheek of a child—that
scent again? Look at earth, air, and water—these are all the raw material
that the rose has got to work with; does it show any sign of want of
intelligence in the alchemy with which it turns mud into rose-leaves? What
chemist can do anything comparable? Why does no one try? Simply because every
one knows that no human intelligence is equal to the task. We give it up. It is
the rose’s department; let the rose attend to it—and be dubbed
unintelligent because it baffles us by the miracles it works, and the
unconcerned business-like way in which it works them.

“See what pains, again, plants take to protect themselves against their
enemies. They scratch, cut, sting, make bad smells, secrete the most dreadful
poisons (which Heaven only knows how they contrive to make), cover their
precious seeds with spines like those of a hedgehog, frighten insects with
delicate nervous systems by assuming portentous shapes, hide themselves, grow
in inaccessible places, and tell lies so plausibly as to deceive even their
subtlest foes.

“They lay traps smeared with bird-lime, to catch insects, and persuade
them to drown themselves in pitchers which they have made of their leaves, and
fill with water; others make themselves, as it were, into living rat-traps,
which close with a spring on any insect that settles upon them; others make
their flowers into the shape of a certain fly that is a great pillager of
honey, so that when the real fly comes it thinks that the flowers are bespoke,
and goes on elsewhere. Some are so clever as even to overreach themselves, like
the horse-radish, which gets pulled up and eaten for the sake of that pungency
with which it protects itself against underground enemies. If, on the other
hand, they think that any insect can be of service to them, see how pretty they
make themselves.

“What is to be intelligent if to know how to do what one wants to do, and
to do it repeatedly, is not to be intelligent? Some say that the rose-seed does
not want to grow into a rose-bush. Why, then, in the name of all that is
reasonable, does it grow? Likely enough it is unaware of the want that is
spurring it on to action. We have no reason to suppose that a human embryo
knows that it wants to grow into a baby, or a baby into a man. Nothing ever
shows signs of knowing what it is either wanting or doing, when its convictions
both as to what it wants, and how to get it, have been settled beyond further
power of question. The less signs living creatures give of knowing what they
do, provided they do it, and do it repeatedly and well, the greater proof they
give that in reality they know how to do it, and have done it already on an
infinite number of past occasions.

“Some one may say,” he continued, “‘What do you mean by
talking about an infinite number of past occasions? When did a rose-seed make
itself into a rose-bush on any past occasion?’

“I answer this question with another. ‘Did the rose-seed ever form
part of the identity of the rose-bush on which it grew?’ Who can say that
it did not? Again I ask: ‘Was this rose-bush ever linked by all those
links that we commonly consider as constituting personal identity, with the
seed from which it in its turn grew?’ Who can say that it was not?

“Then, if rose-seed number two is a continuation of the personality of
its parent rose-bush, and if that rose-bush is a continuation of the
personality of the rose-seed from which it sprang, rose-seed number two must
also be a continuation of the personality of the earlier rose-seed. And this
rose-seed must be a continuation of the personality of the preceding
rose-seed—and so back and back ad infinitum. Hence it is
impossible to deny continued personality between any existing rose-seed and the
earliest seed that can be called a rose-seed at all.

“The answer, then, to our objector is not far to seek. The rose-seed did
what it now does in the persons of its ancestors—to whom it has been so
linked as to be able to remember what those ancestors did when they were placed
as the rose-seed now is. Each stage of development brings back the recollection
of the course taken in the preceding stage, and the development has been so
often repeated, that all doubt—and with all doubt, all consciousness of
action—is suspended.

“But an objector may still say, ‘Granted that the linking between
all successive generations has been so close and unbroken, that each one of
them may be conceived as able to remember what it did in the persons of its
ancestors—how do you show that it actually did remember?’

“The answer is: ‘By the action which each generation takes—an
action which repeats all the phenomena that we commonly associate with
memory—which is explicable on the supposition that it has been guided by
memory—and which has neither been explained, nor seems ever likely to be
explained on any other theory than the supposition that there is an abiding
memory between successive generations.’

“Will any one bring an example of any living creature whose action we can
understand, performing an ineffably difficult and intricate action, time after
time, with invariable success, and yet not knowing how to do it, and never
having done it before? Show me the example and I will say no more, but until it
is shown me, I shall credit action where I cannot watch it, with being
controlled by the same laws as when it is within our ken. It will become
unconscious as soon as the skill that directs it has become perfected. Neither
rose-seed, therefore, nor embryo should be expected to show signs of knowing
that they know what they know—if they showed such signs the fact of their
knowing what they want, and how to get it, might more reasonably be
doubted.”

Some of the passages already given in Chapter XXIII were obviously inspired by
the one just quoted. As I read it, in a reprint shown me by a Professor who had
edited much of the early literature on the subject, I could not but remember
the one in which our Lord tells His disciples to consider the lilies of the
field, who neither toil nor spin, but whose raiment surpasses even that of
Solomon in all his glory.

“They toil not, neither do they spin?” Is that so? “Toil
not?” Perhaps not, now that the method of procedure is so well known as
to admit of no further question—but it is not likely that lilies came to
make themselves so beautifully without having ever taken any pains about the
matter. “Neither do they spin?” Not with a spinning-wheel; but is
there no textile fabric in a leaf?

What would the lilies of the field say if they heard one of us declaring that
they neither toil nor spin? They would say, I take it, much what we should if
we were to hear of their preaching humility on the text of Solomons, and
saying, “Consider the Solomons in all their glory, they toil not neither
do they spin.” We should say that the lilies were talking about things
that they did not understand, and that though the Solomons do not toil nor
spin, yet there had been no lack of either toiling or spinning before they came
to be arrayed so gorgeously.

Let me now return to the Professor. I have said enough to show the general
drift of the arguments on which he relied in order to show that vegetables are
only animals under another name, but have not stated his case in anything like
the fullness with which he laid it before the public. The conclusion he drew,
or pretended to draw, was that if it was sinful to kill and eat animals, it was
not less sinful to do the like by vegetables, or their seeds. None such, he
said, should be eaten, save what had died a natural death, such as fruit that
was lying on the ground and about to rot, or cabbage-leaves that had turned
yellow in late autumn. These and other like garbage he declared to be the only
food that might be eaten with a clear conscience. Even so the eater must plant
the pips of any apples or pears that he may have eaten, or any plum-stones,
cherry-stones, and the like, or he would come near to incurring the guilt of
infanticide. The grain of cereals, according to him, was out of the question,
for every such grain had a living soul as much as man had, and had as good a
right as man to possess that soul in peace.

Having thus driven his fellow countrymen into a corner at the point of a
logical bayonet from which they felt that there was no escape, he proposed that
the question what was to be done should be referred to an oracle in which the
whole country had the greatest confidence, and to which recourse was always had
in times of special perplexity. It was whispered that a near relation of the
philosopher’s was lady’s-maid to the priestess who delivered the
oracle, and the Puritan party declared that the strangely unequivocal answer of
the oracle was obtained by backstairs influence; but whether this was so or no,
the response as nearly as I can translate it was as follows:-

“He who sins aught
Sins more than he ought;
But he who sins nought
Has much to be taught.
Beat or be beaten,
Eat or be eaten,
Be killed or kill;
Choose which you will.”

It was clear that this response sanctioned at any rate the destruction of
vegetable life when wanted as food by man; and so forcibly had the philosopher
shown that what was sauce for vegetables was so also for animals, that, though
the Puritan party made a furious outcry, the acts forbidding the use of meat
were repealed by a considerable majority. Thus, after several hundred years of
wandering in the wilderness of philosophy, the country reached the conclusions
that common sense had long since arrived at. Even the Puritans after a vain
attempt to subsist on a kind of jam made of apples and yellow cabbage leaves,
succumbed to the inevitable, and resigned themselves to a diet of roast beef
and mutton, with all the usual adjuncts of a modern dinner-table.

One would have thought that the dance they had been led by the old prophet, and
that still madder dance which the Professor of botany had gravely, but as I
believe insidiously, proposed to lead them, would have made the Erewhonians for
a long time suspicious of prophets whether they professed to have
communications with an unseen power or no; but so engrained in the human heart
is the desire to believe that some people really do know what they say they
know, and can thus save them from the trouble of thinking for themselves, that
in a short time would-be philosophers and faddists became more powerful than
ever, and gradually led their countrymen to accept all those absurd views of
life, some account of which I have given in my earlier chapters. Indeed I can
see no hope for the Erewhonians till they have got to understand that reason
uncorrected by instinct is as bad as instinct uncorrected by reason.

CHAPTER XXVIII.
ESCAPE

Though busily engaged in translating the extracts given in the last five
chapters, I was also laying matters in train for my escape with Arowhena. And
indeed it was high time, for I received an intimation from one of the cashiers
of the Musical Banks, that I was to be prosecuted in a criminal court
ostensibly for measles, but really for having owned a watch, and attempted the
reintroduction of machinery.

I asked why measles? and was told that there was a fear lest extenuating
circumstances should prevent a jury from convicting me, if I were indicted for
typhus or small-pox, but that a verdict would probably be obtained for measles,
a disease which could be sufficiently punished in a person of my age. I was
given to understand that unless some unexpected change should come over the
mind of his Majesty, I might expect the blow to be struck within a very few
days.

My plan was this—that Arowhena and I should escape in a balloon together.
I fear that the reader will disbelieve this part of my story, yet in no other
have I endeavoured to adhere more conscientiously to facts, and can only throw
myself upon his charity.

I had already gained the ear of the Queen, and had so worked upon her curiosity
that she promised to get leave for me to have a balloon made and inflated; I
pointed out to her that no complicated machinery would be wanted—nothing,
in fact, but a large quantity of oiled silk, a car, a few ropes, &c.,
&c., and some light kind of gas, such as the antiquarians who were
acquainted with the means employed by the ancients for the production of the
lighter gases could easily instruct her workmen how to provide. Her eagerness
to see so strange a sight as the ascent of a human being into the sky overcame
any scruples of conscience that she might have otherwise felt, and she set the
antiquarians about showing her workmen how to make the gas, and sent her maids
to buy, and oil, a very large quantity of silk (for I was determined that the
balloon should be a big one) even before she began to try and gain the
King’s permission; this, however, she now set herself to do, for I had
sent her word that my prosecution was imminent.

As for myself, I need hardly say that I knew nothing about balloons; nor did I
see my way to smuggling Arowhena into the car; nevertheless, knowing that we
had no other chance of getting away from Erewhon, I drew inspiration from the
extremity in which we were placed, and made a pattern from which the
Queen’s workmen were able to work successfully. Meanwhile the
Queen’s carriage-builders set about making the car, and it was with the
attachments of this to the balloon that I had the greatest difficulty; I doubt,
indeed, whether I should have succeeded here, but for the great intelligence of
a foreman, who threw himself heart and soul into the matter, and often both
foresaw requirements, the necessity for which had escaped me, and suggested the
means of providing for them.

It happened that there had been a long drought, during the latter part of which
prayers had been vainly offered up in all the temples of the air god. When I
first told her Majesty that I wanted a balloon, I said my intention was to go
up into the sky and prevail upon the air god by means of a personal interview.
I own that this proposition bordered on the idolatrous, but I have long since
repented of it, and am little likely ever to repeat the offence. Moreover the
deceit, serious though it was, will probably lead to the conversion of the
whole country.

When the Queen told his Majesty of my proposal, he at first not only ridiculed
it, but was inclined to veto it. Being, however, a very uxorious husband, he at
length consented—as he eventually always did to everything on which the
Queen had set her heart. He yielded all the more readily now, because he did
not believe in the possibility of my ascent; he was convinced that even though
the balloon should mount a few feet into the air, it would collapse
immediately, whereon I should fall and break my neck, and he should be rid of
me. He demonstrated this to her so convincingly, that she was alarmed, and
tried to talk me into giving up the idea, but on finding that I persisted in my
wish to have the balloon made, she produced an order from the King to the
effect that all facilities I might require should be afforded me.

At the same time her Majesty told me that my attempted ascent would be made an
article of impeachment against me in case I did not succeed in prevailing on
the air god to stop the drought. Neither King nor Queen had any idea that I
meant going right away if I could get the wind to take me, nor had he any
conception of the existence of a certain steady upper current of air which was
always setting in one direction, as could be seen by the shape of the higher
clouds, which pointed invariably from south-east to north-west. I had myself
long noticed this peculiarity in the climate, and attributed it, I believe
justly, to a trade-wind which was constant at a few thousand feet above the
earth, but was disturbed by local influences at lower elevations.

My next business was to break the plan to Arowhena, and to devise the means for
getting her into the car. I felt sure that she would come with me, but had made
up my mind that if her courage failed her, the whole thing should come to
nothing. Arowhena and I had been in constant communication through her maid,
but I had thought it best not to tell her the details of my scheme till
everything was settled. The time had now arrived, and I arranged with the maid
that I should be admitted by a private door into Mr. Nosnibor’s garden at
about dusk on the following evening.

I came at the appointed time; the girl let me into the garden and bade me wait
in a secluded alley until Arowhena should come. It was now early summer, and
the leaves were so thick upon the trees that even though some one else had
entered the garden I could have easily hidden myself. The night was one of
extreme beauty; the sun had long set, but there was still a rosy gleam in the
sky over the ruins of the railway station; below me was the city already
twinkling with lights, while beyond it stretched the plains for many a league
until they blended with the sky. I just noted these things, but I could not
heed them. I could heed nothing, till, as I peered into the darkness of the
alley, I perceived a white figure gliding swiftly towards me. I bounded towards
it, and ere thought could either prompt or check, I had caught Arowhena to my
heart and covered her unresisting cheek with kisses.

So overjoyed were we that we knew not how to speak; indeed I do not know when
we should have found words and come to our senses, if the maid had not gone off
into a fit of hysterics, and awakened us to the necessity of self-control;
then, briefly and plainly, I unfolded what I proposed; I showed her the darkest
side, for I felt sure that the darker the prospect the more likely she was to
come. I told her that my plan would probably end in death for both of us, and
that I dared not press it—that at a word from her it should be abandoned;
still that there was just a possibility of our escaping together to some part
of the world where there would be no bar to our getting married, and that I
could see no other hope.

She made no resistance, not a sign or hint of doubt or hesitation. She would do
all I told her, and come whenever I was ready; so I bade her send her maid to
meet me nightly—told her that she must put a good face on, look as bright
and happy as she could, so as to make her father and mother and Zulora think
that she was forgetting me—and be ready at a moment’s notice to
come to the Queen’s workshops, and be concealed among the ballast and
under rugs in the car of the balloon; and so we parted.

I hurried my preparations forward, for I feared rain, and also that the King
might change his mind; but the weather continued dry, and in another week the
Queen’s workmen had finished the balloon and car, while the gas was ready
to be turned on into the balloon at any moment. All being now prepared I was to
ascend on the following morning. I had stipulated for being allowed to take
abundance of rugs and wrappings as protection from the cold of the upper
atmosphere, and also ten or a dozen good-sized bags of ballast.

I had nearly a quarter’s pension in hand, and with this I fee’d
Arowhena’s maid, and bribed the Queen’s foreman—who would, I
believe, have given me assistance even without a bribe. He helped me to secrete
food and wine in the bags of ballast, and on the morning of my ascent he kept
the other workmen out of the way while I got Arowhena into the car. She came
with early dawn, muffled up, and in her maid’s dress. She was supposed to
be gone to an early performance at one of the Musical Banks, and told me that
she should not be missed till breakfast, but that her absence must then be
discovered. I arranged the ballast about her so that it should conceal her as
she lay at the bottom of the car, and covered her with wrappings. Although it
still wanted some hours of the time fixed for my ascent, I could not trust
myself one moment from the car, so I got into it at once, and watched the
gradual inflation of the balloon. Luggage I had none, save the provisions
hidden in the ballast bags, the books of mythology, and the treatises on the
machines, with my own manuscript diaries and translations.

I sat quietly, and awaited the hour fixed for my departure—quiet
outwardly, but inwardly I was in an agony of suspense lest Arowhena’s
absence should be discovered before the arrival of the King and Queen, who were
to witness my ascent. They were not due yet for another two hours, and during
this time a hundred things might happen, any one of which would undo me.

At last the balloon was full; the pipe which had filled it was removed, the
escape of the gas having been first carefully precluded. Nothing remained to
hinder the balloon from ascending but the hands and weight of those who were
holding on to it with ropes. I strained my eyes for the coming of the King and
Queen, but could see no sign of their approach. I looked in the direction of
Mr. Nosnibor’s house—there was nothing to indicate disturbance, but
it was not yet breakfast time. The crowd began to gather; they were aware that
I was under the displeasure of the court, but I could detect no signs of my
being unpopular. On the contrary, I received many kindly expressions of regard
and encouragement, with good wishes as to the result of my journey.

I was speaking to one gentleman of my acquaintance, and telling him the
substance of what I intended to do when I had got into the presence of the air
god (what he thought of me I cannot guess, for I am sure that he did not
believe in the objective existence of the air god, nor that I myself believed
in it), when I became aware of a small crowd of people running as fast as they
could from Mr. Nosnibor’s house towards the Queen’s workshops. For
the moment my pulse ceased beating, and then, knowing that the time had come
when I must either do or die, I called vehemently to those who were holding the
ropes (some thirty men) to let go at once, and made gestures signifying danger,
and that there would be mischief if they held on longer. Many obeyed; the rest
were too weak to hold on to the ropes, and were forced to let them go. On this
the balloon bounded suddenly upwards, but my own feeling was that the earth had
dropped off from me, and was sinking fast into the open space beneath.

This happened at the very moment that the attention of the crowd was divided,
the one half paying heed to the eager gestures of those coming from Mr.
Nosnibor’s house, and the other to the exclamations from myself. A minute
more and Arowhena would doubtless have been discovered, but before that minute
was over, I was at such a height above the city that nothing could harm me, and
every second both the town and the crowd became smaller and more confused. In
an incredibly short time, I could see little but a vast wall of blue plains
rising up against me, towards whichever side I looked.

At first, the balloon mounted vertically upwards, but after about five minutes,
when we had already attained a very great elevation, I fancied that the objects
on the plain beneath began to move from under me. I did not feel so much as a
breath of wind, and could not suppose that the balloon itself was travelling. I
was, therefore, wondering what this strange movement of fixed objects could
mean, when it struck me that people in a balloon do not feel the wind inasmuch
as they travel with it and offer it no resistance. Then I was happy in thinking
that I must now have reached the invariable trade wind of the upper air, and
that I should be very possibly wafted for hundreds or even thousands of miles,
far from Erewhon and the Erewhonians.

Already I had removed the wrappings and freed Arowhena; but I soon covered her
up with them again, for it was already very cold, and she was half stupefied
with the strangeness of her position.

And now began a time, dream-like and delirious, of which I do not suppose that
I shall ever recover a distinct recollection. Some things I can recall—as
that we were ere long enveloped in vapour which froze upon my moustache and
whiskers; then comes a memory of sitting for hours and hours in a thick fog,
hearing no sound but my own breathing and Arowhena’s (for we hardly
spoke) and seeing no sight but the car beneath us and beside us, and the dark
balloon above.

Perhaps the most painful feeling when the earth was hidden was that the balloon
was motionless, though our only hope lay in our going forward with an extreme
of speed. From time to time through a rift in the clouds I caught a glimpse of
earth, and was thankful to perceive that we must be flying forward faster than
in an express train; but no sooner was the rift closed than the old conviction
of our being stationary returned in full force, and was not to be reasoned
with: there was another feeling also which was nearly as bad; for as a child
that fears it has gone blind in a long tunnel if there is no light, so ere the
earth had been many minutes hidden, I became half frightened lest we might not
have broken away from it clean and for ever. Now and again, I ate and gave food
to Arowhena, but by guess-work as regards time. Then came darkness, a dreadful
dreary time, without even the moon to cheer us.

With dawn the scene was changed: the clouds were gone and morning stars were
shining; the rising of the splendid sun remains still impressed upon me as the
most glorious that I have ever seen; beneath us there was an embossed chain of
mountains with snow fresh fallen upon them; but we were far above them; we both
of us felt our breathing seriously affected, but I would not allow the balloon
to descend a single inch, not knowing for how long we might not need all the
buoyancy which we could command; indeed I was thankful to find that, after
nearly four-and-twenty hours, we were still at so great a height above the
earth.

In a couple of hours we had passed the ranges, which must have been some
hundred and fifty miles across, and again I saw a tract of level plain
extending far away to the horizon. I knew not where we were, and dared not
descend, lest I should waste the power of the balloon, but I was half hopeful
that we might be above the country from which I had originally started. I
looked anxiously for any sign by which I could recognise it, but could see
nothing, and feared that we might be above some distant part of Erewhon, or a
country inhabited by savages. While I was still in doubt, the balloon was again
wrapped in clouds, and we were left to blank space and to conjectures.

The weary time dragged on. How I longed for my unhappy watch! I felt as though
not even time was moving, so dumb and spell-bound were our surroundings.
Sometimes I would feel my pulse, and count its beats for half-an-hour together;
anything to mark the time—to prove that it was there, and to assure
myself that we were within the blessed range of its influence, and not gone
adrift into the timelessness of eternity.

I had been doing this for the twentieth or thirtieth time, and had fallen into
a light sleep: I dreamed wildly of a journey in an express train, and of
arriving at a railway station where the air was full of the sound of locomotive
engines blowing off steam with a horrible and tremendous hissing; I woke
frightened and uneasy, but the hissing and crashing noises pursued me now that
I was awake, and forced me to own that they were real. What they were I knew
not, but they grew gradually fainter and fainter, and after a time were lost.
In a few hours the clouds broke, and I saw beneath me that which made the
chilled blood run colder in my veins. I saw the sea, and nothing but the sea;
in the main black, but flecked with white heads of storm-tossed, angry waves.

Arowhena was sleeping quietly at the bottom of the car, and as I looked at her
sweet and saintly beauty, I groaned, and cursed myself for the misery into
which I had brought her; but there was nothing for it now.

I sat and waited for the worst, and presently I saw signs as though that worst
were soon to be at hand, for the balloon had begun to sink. On first seeing the
sea I had been impressed with the idea that we must have been falling, but now
there could be no mistake, we were sinking, and that fast. I threw out a bag of
ballast, and for a time we rose again, but in the course of a few hours the
sinking recommenced, and I threw out another bag.

Then the battle commenced in earnest. It lasted all that afternoon and through
the night until the following evening. I had seen never a sail nor a sign of a
sail, though I had half blinded myself with straining my eyes incessantly in
every direction; we had parted with everything but the clothes which we had
upon our backs; food and water were gone, all thrown out to the wheeling
albatrosses, in order to save us a few hours or even minutes from the sea. I
did not throw away the books till we were within a few feet of the water, and
clung to my manuscripts to the very last. Hope there seemed none
whatever—yet, strangely enough we were neither of us utterly hopeless,
and even when the evil that we dreaded was upon us, and that which we greatly
feared had come, we sat in the car of the balloon with the waters up to our
middle, and still smiled with a ghastly hopefulness to one another.

* * *

He who has crossed the St. Gothard will remember that below Andermatt there is
one of those Alpine gorges which reach the very utmost limits of the sublime
and terrible. The feelings of the traveller have become more and more highly
wrought at every step, until at last the naked and overhanging precipices seem
to close above his head, as he crosses a bridge hung in mid-air over a roaring
waterfall, and enters on the darkness of a tunnel, hewn out of the rock.

What can be in store for him on emerging? Surely something even wilder and more
desolate than that which he has seen already; yet his imagination is paralysed,
and can suggest no fancy or vision of anything to surpass the reality which he
had just witnessed. Awed and breathless he advances; when lo! the light of the
afternoon sun welcomes him as he leaves the tunnel, and behold a smiling
valley—a babbling brook, a village with tall belfries, and meadows of
brilliant green—these are the things which greet him, and he smiles to
himself as the terror passes away and in another moment is forgotten.

So fared it now with ourselves. We had been in the water some two or three
hours, and the night had come upon us. We had said farewell for the hundredth
time, and had resigned ourselves to meet the end; indeed I was myself battling
with a drowsiness from which it was only too probable that I should never wake;
when suddenly, Arowhena touched me on the shoulder, and pointed to a light and
to a dark mass which was bearing right upon us. A cry for help—loud and
clear and shrill—broke forth from both of us at once; and in another five
minutes we were carried by kind and tender hands on to the deck of an Italian
vessel.

CHAPTER XXIX.
CONCLUSION

The ship was the Principe Umberto, bound from Callao to Genoa; she had
carried a number of emigrants to Rio, had gone thence to Callao, where she had
taken in a cargo of guano, and was now on her way home. The captain was a
certain Giovanni Gianni, a native of Sestri; he has kindly allowed me to refer
to him in case the truth of my story should be disputed; but I grieve to say
that I suffered him to mislead himself in some important particulars. I should
add that when we were picked up we were a thousand miles from land.

As soon as we were on board, the captain began questioning us about the siege
of Paris, from which city he had assumed that we must have come,
notwithstanding our immense distance from Europe. As may be supposed, I had not
heard a syllable about the war between France and Germany, and was too ill to
do more than assent to all that he chose to put into my mouth. My knowledge of
Italian is very imperfect, and I gathered little from anything that he said;
but I was glad to conceal the true point of our departure, and resolved to take
any cue that he chose to give me.

The line that thus suggested itself was that there had been ten or twelve
others in the balloon, that I was an English Milord, and Arowhena a Russian
Countess; that all the others had been drowned, and that the despatches which
we had carried were lost. I came afterwards to learn that this story would not
have been credible, had not the captain been for some weeks at sea, for I found
that when we were picked up, the Germans had already long been masters of
Paris. As it was, the captain settled the whole story for me, and I was well
content.

In a few days we sighted an English vessel bound from Melbourne to London with
wool. At my earnest request, in spite of stormy weather which rendered it
dangerous for a boat to take us from one ship to the other, the captain
consented to signal the English vessel, and we were received on board, but we
were transferred with such difficulty that no communication took place as to
the manner of our being found. I did indeed hear the Italian mate who was in
charge of the boat shout out something in French to the effect that we had been
picked up from a balloon, but the noise of the wind was so great, and the
captain understood so little French that he caught nothing of the truth, and it
was assumed that we were two persons who had been saved from shipwreck. When
the captain asked me in what ship I had been wrecked, I said that a party of us
had been carried out to sea in a pleasure-boat by a strong current, and that
Arowhena (whom I described as a Peruvian lady) and I were alone saved.

There were several passengers, whose goodness towards us we can never repay. I
grieve to think that they cannot fail to discover that we did not take them
fully into our confidence; but had we told them all, they would not have
believed us, and I was determined that no one should hear of Erewhon, or have
the chance of getting there before me, as long as I could prevent it. Indeed,
the recollection of the many falsehoods which I was then obliged to tell, would
render my life miserable were I not sustained by the consolations of my
religion. Among the passengers there was a most estimable clergyman, by whom
Arowhena and I were married within a very few days of our coming on board.

After a prosperous voyage of about two months, we sighted the Land’s End,
and in another week we were landed at London. A liberal subscription was made
for us on board the ship, so that we found ourselves in no immediate difficulty
about money. I accordingly took Arowhena down into Somersetshire, where my
mother and sisters had resided when I last heard of them. To my great sorrow I
found that my mother was dead, and that her death had been accelerated by the
report of my having been killed, which had been brought to my employer’s
station by Chowbok. It appeared that he must have waited for a few days to see
whether I returned, that he then considered it safe to assume that I should
never do so, and had accordingly made up a story about my having fallen into a
whirlpool of seething waters while coming down the gorge homeward. Search was
made for my body, but the rascal had chosen to drown me in a place where there
would be no chance of its ever being recovered.

My sisters were both married, but neither of their husbands was rich. No one
seemed overjoyed on my return; and I soon discovered that when a man’s
relations have once mourned for him as dead, they seldom like the prospect of
having to mourn for him a second time.

Accordingly I returned to London with my wife, and through the assistance of an
old friend supported myself by writing good little stories for the magazines,
and for a tract society. I was well paid; and I trust that I may not be
considered presumptuous in saying that some of the most popular of the
brochures which are distributed in the streets, and which are to be
found in the waiting-rooms of the railway stations, have proceeded from my pen.
During the time that I could spare, I arranged my notes and diary till they
assumed their present shape. There remains nothing for me to add, save to
unfold the scheme which I propose for the conversion of Erewhon.

That scheme has only been quite recently decided upon as the one which seems
most likely to be successful.

It will be seen at once that it would be madness for me to go with ten or a
dozen subordinate missionaries by the same way as that which led me to discover
Erewhon. I should be imprisoned for typhus, besides being handed over to the
straighteners for having run away with Arowhena: an even darker fate, to which
I dare hardly again allude, would be reserved for my devoted fellow-labourers.
It is plain, therefore, that some other way must be found for getting at the
Erewhonians, and I am thankful to say that such another way is not wanting. One
of the rivers which descends from the Snowy Mountains, and passes through
Erewhon, is known to be navigable for several hundred miles from its mouth. Its
upper waters have never yet been explored, but I feel little doubt that it will
be found possible to take a light gunboat (for we must protect ourselves) to
the outskirts of the Erewhonian country.

I propose, therefore, that one of those associations should be formed in which
the risk of each of the members is confined to the amount of his stake in the
concern. The first step would be to draw up a prospectus. In this I would
advise that no mention should be made of the fact that the Erewhonians are the
lost tribes. The discovery is one of absorbing interest to myself, but it is of
a sentimental rather than commercial value, and business is business. The
capital to be raised should not be less than fifty thousand pounds, and might
be either in five or ten pound shares as hereafter determined. This should be
amply sufficient for the expenses of an experimental voyage.

When the money had been subscribed, it would be our duty to charter a steamer
of some twelve or fourteen hundred tons burden, and with accommodation for a
cargo of steerage passengers. She should carry two or three guns in case of her
being attacked by savages at the mouth of the river. Boats of considerable size
should be also provided, and I think it would be desirable that these also
should carry two or three six-pounders. The ship should be taken up the river
as far as was considered safe, and a picked party should then ascend in the
boats. The presence both of Arowhena and myself would be necessary at this
stage, inasmuch as our knowledge of the language would disarm suspicion, and
facilitate negotiations.

We should begin by representing the advantages afforded to labour in the colony
of Queensland, and point out to the Erewhonians that by emigrating thither,
they would be able to amass, each and all of them, enormous fortunes—a
fact which would be easily provable by a reference to statistics. I have no
doubt that a very great number might be thus induced to come back with us in
the larger boats, and that we could fill our vessel with emigrants in three or
four journeys.

Should we be attacked, our course would be even simpler, for the Erewhonians
have no gunpowder, and would be so surprised with its effects that we should be
able to capture as many as we chose; in this case we should feel able to engage
them on more advantageous terms, for they would be prisoners of war. But even
though we were to meet with no violence, I doubt not that a cargo of seven or
eight hundred Erewhonians could be induced, when they were once on board the
vessel, to sign an agreement which should be mutually advantageous both to us
and them.

We should then proceed to Queensland, and dispose of our engagement with the
Erewhonians to the sugar-growers of that settlement, who are in great want of
labour; it is believed that the money thus realised would enable us to declare
a handsome dividend, and leave a considerable balance, which might be spent in
repeating our operations and bringing over other cargoes of Erewhonians, with
fresh consequent profits. In fact we could go backwards and forwards as long as
there was a demand for labour in Queensland, or indeed in any other Christian
colony, for the supply of Erewhonians would be unlimited, and they could be
packed closely and fed at a very reasonable cost.

It would be my duty and Arowhena’s to see that our emigrants should be
boarded and lodged in the households of religious sugar-growers; these persons
would give them the benefit of that instruction whereof they stand so greatly
in need. Each day, as soon as they could be spared from their work in the
plantations, they would be assembled for praise, and be thoroughly grounded in
the Church Catechism, while the whole of every Sabbath should be devoted to
singing psalms and church-going.

This must be insisted upon, both in order to put a stop to any uneasy feeling
which might show itself either in Queensland or in the mother country as to the
means whereby the Erewhonians had been obtained, and also because it would give
our own shareholders the comfort of reflecting that they were saving souls and
filling their own pockets at one and the same moment. By the time the emigrants
had got too old for work they would have become thoroughly instructed in
religion; they could then be shipped back to Erewhon and carry the good seed
with them.

I can see no hitch nor difficulty about the matter, and trust that this book
will sufficiently advertise the scheme to insure the subscription of the
necessary capital; as soon as this is forthcoming I will guarantee that I
convert the Erewhonians not only into good Christians but into a source of
considerable profit to the shareholders.

I should add that I cannot claim the credit for having originated the above
scheme. I had been for months at my wit’s end, forming plan after plan
for the evangelisation of Erewhon, when by one of those special interpositions
which should be a sufficient answer to the sceptic, and make even the most
confirmed rationalist irrational, my eye was directed to the following
paragraph in the Times newspaper, of one of the first days in January
1872:-

“POLYNESIANS IN QUEENSLAND.—The Marquis of Normanby, the new
Governor of Queensland, has completed his inspection of the northern districts
of the colony. It is stated that at Mackay, one of the best sugar-growing
districts, his Excellency saw a good deal of the Polynesians. In the course of
a speech to those who entertained him there, the Marquis said:—‘I
have been told that the means by which Polynesians were obtained were not
legitimate, but I have failed to perceive this, in so far at least as
Queensland is concerned; and, if one can judge by the countenances and manners
of the Polynesians, they experience no regret at their position.’ But his
Excellency pointed out the advantage of giving them religious instruction. It
would tend to set at rest an uneasy feeling which at present existed in the
country to know that they were inclined to retain the Polynesians, and teach
them religion.”

I feel that comment is unnecessary, and will therefore conclude with one word
of thanks to the reader who may have had the patience to follow me through my
adventures without losing his temper; but with two, for any who may write at
once to the Secretary of the Erewhon Evangelisation Company, limited (at the
address which shall hereafter be advertised), and request to have his name put
down as a shareholder.

P.S.—I had just received and corrected the last proof of the
foregoing volume, and was walking down the Strand from Temple Bar to Charing
Cross, when on passing Exeter Hall I saw a number of devout-looking people
crowding into the building with faces full of interested and complacent
anticipation. I stopped, and saw an announcement that a missionary meeting was
to be held forthwith, and that the native missionary, the Rev. William
Habakkuk, from——(the colony from which I had started on my
adventures), would be introduced, and make a short address. After some little
difficulty I obtained admission, and heard two or three speeches, which were
prefatory to the introduction of Mr. Habakkuk. One of these struck me as
perhaps the most presumptuous that I had ever heard. The speaker said that the
races of whom Mr. Habakkuk was a specimen, were in all probability the lost ten
tribes of Israel. I dared not contradict him then, but I felt angry and injured
at hearing the speaker jump to so preposterous a conclusion upon such
insufficient grounds. The discovery of the ten tribes was mine, and mine only.
I was still in the very height of indignation, when there was a murmur of
expectation in the hall, and Mr. Habakkuk was brought forward. The reader may
judge of my surprise at finding that he was none other than my old friend
Chowbok!

My jaw dropped, and my eyes almost started out of my head with astonishment.
The poor fellow was dreadfully frightened, and the storm of applause which
greeted his introduction seemed only to add to his confusion. I dare not trust
myself to report his speech—indeed I could hardly listen to it, for I was
nearly choked with trying to suppress my feelings. I am sure that I caught the
words “Adelaide, the Queen Dowager,” and I thought that I heard
“Mary Magdalene” shortly afterwards, but I had then to leave the
hall for fear of being turned out. While on the staircase, I heard another
burst of prolonged and rapturous applause, so I suppose the audience were
satisfied.

The feelings that came uppermost in my mind were hardly of a very solemn
character, but I thought of my first acquaintance with Chowbok, of the scene in
the woodshed, of the innumerable lies he had told me, of his repeated attempts
upon the brandy, and of many an incident which I have not thought it worth
while to dwell upon; and I could not but derive some satisfaction from the hope
that my own efforts might have contributed to the change which had been
doubtless wrought upon him, and that the rite which I had performed, however
unprofessionally, on that wild upland river-bed, had not been wholly without
effect. I trust that what I have written about him in the earlier part of my
book may not be libellous, and that it may do him no harm with his employers.
He was then unregenerate. I must certainly find him out and have a talk with
him; but before I shall have time to do so these pages will be in the hands of
the public.

* * * * *

At the last moment I see a probability of a complication which causes me much
uneasiness. Please subscribe quickly. Address to the Mansion-House, care of the
Lord Mayor, whom I will instruct to receive names and subscriptions for me
until I can organise a committee.

Footnotes

[1] The last part of Chapter
XXIII in this Gutenberg eText.—DP.

[2] See Handel’s
compositions for the harpsichord, published by Litolf, p. 78.

[3] The myth above alluded to
exists in Erewhon with changed names, and considerable modifications. I have
taken the liberty of referring to the story as familiar to ourselves.

[4] What a safe word
“relation” is; how little it predicates! yet it has overgrown
“kinsman.”

[5] The root alluded to is not
the potato of our own gardens, but a plant so near akin to it that I have
ventured to translate it thus. Apropos of its intelligence, had the writer
known Butler he would probably have said—

“He knows what’s what, and that’s as high,
As metaphysic wit can fly.”

[6] Since my return to
England, I have been told that those who are conversant about machines use many
terms concerning them which show that their vitality is here recognised, and
that a collection of expressions in use among those who attend on steam engines
would be no less startling than instructive. I am also informed, that almost
all machines have their own tricks and idiosyncrasies; that they know their
drivers and keepers; and that they will play pranks upon a stranger. It is my
intention, on a future occasion, to bring together examples both of the
expressions in common use among mechanicians, and of any extraordinary
exhibitions of mechanical sagacity and eccentricity that I can meet
with—not as believing in the Erewhonian Professor’s theory, but
from the interest of the subject.