 With the above words the good man left the room before I had time to express my astonishment in hearing such extraordinary language from the lips of one who seemed to be a reputable member of society. In bezel a large sum of money under singularly distressing circumstances I exclaimed to myself and asked me to go and stay with him, I shall do nothing of this sort, compromise myself with 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're 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 begot 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 five hundred thousand horsepower, 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 horsepower, and keeps a capital table, besides his two daughters are among the most beautiful women in Erdogan. When I heard all this I confessed 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 plursy or been generally unfortunate and that I was in fear of infection. I am not much afraid of infections, 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 birth 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 basis 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've 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 the 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 yet been 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 mountainside, 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 Chowbock. I wondered what Chowbock told him about me when he got back. He had done well in going back, Chowbock had. He was not handsome, nay, he was hideous, and it would have gone hardly with him. Twilight drew on and rain patterned against the windows. Never yet had I felt so unhappy, except during three days of seasickness at the beginning of my voyage from England. I sat musing and in a great melancholy until Eram 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 Eram's melancholy I felt more unhappy than I can describe, and remained so till I got to bed and sleep sealed my eyelids. On a waking next morning I was much better. It was settled that I was to make my start in a conveyance which was to be waiting for me at eleven o'clock. And the anticipation of change put me in good spirits which even the tearful face of Eram 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 goodbye a hundred times till I was fairly overcome with her great sweetness and her sorrow, I tore myself away from her and got downstairs to the Kalesh 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 traveled 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 average. Each day we had a fresh horse. As I have said already, I could see nothing of the country. I only knew that it was level, and that several times we had to cross large rivers and 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 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 naivete 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 humor with myself and everyone 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 eat, which really did seem to have some temperamenting 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 humor. 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 hypotheticals, 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 eleven 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 past. 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 Chowbox ancestors whom they could find, in order to sacrifice them in the presence of these deities and thus avert ugliness and disease from the Irawanians themselves. It had been whispered, but my informant assured me untruely, 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 the Chowbox tribe if they crossed over into Irawan. I was told that nobody knew, in as much 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 as to be criminally liable. Their offense 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 of incurable boars, and made to work at being bored for so many hours a day by the Irawanian 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 rumors of its substance might perhaps have become current among Chowbox 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 cost of the apparent retrogression in all arts, sciences, and inventions. I learned that about 400 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 hypotheticals wrote an extraordinary book, from which I proposed 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 271 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 laboring 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 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 another 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 the streets of a handsome town, and got onto a long, broad, and level road, with poplar trees on either side. The road was raised slightly above the surrounding country, and had formally been a railway. The fields on either side were in the highest conceivable cultivation, but the harvest and also the vintage had already been gathered. The weather had got cooler more rapidly than could be quite accounted for by the progress of the season, so I rather thought we must have been making away from the sun, and for 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 vigor 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 respective 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 perfusion of delicious fruit, closely resembling the figs, peaches, and pears of Italy and France. I saw no wild animals, but birds were plentiful, as much as in Europe, but not tame as they had been on the other side of the ranges. They were shot at with the crossbow 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 to like 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 of 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 counsellors, 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 his seat therein. I again bowed profoundly to the mayor and counsellors, and drove off with my entertainer, whose name was Senage Nostnobor. 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 Senage Nostnobor'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 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 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 and full bearing. The house itself was approached by a courtyard, and round it was a corridor onto which rooms opened, as in 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 saved 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. Nostnobor took me through several spacious rooms till we reached a boudoir, where it were his wife and daughters of whom I had heard from the interpreter. Mrs. Nostnobor 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 Arowena, for the elder sister was haughty, while the younger had a very winning manner. Mrs. Nostnobor received me with the perfection of courtesies 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 imbecile money I thought 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 the dinner there came a tall lean man with a black beard, to whom Mr. Nostnobor and the whole family paid great attention. He was the family straightener. With this gentleman Mr. Nostnobor retired into another room, from which there presently preceded 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. Nostnobor himself. Poor Papa said Arowena 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 endeavored 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 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 has tried before a jury of his countrymen and, if convicted, is held up before public scorn and sentenced more or less severely as the case may be. There are subdivisions of illness into crimes and misdemeanors as were the fences amongst ourselves, a man being punished very heavily for serious illness while failure of eyes or hearing in 1 over 65 who has a good health hitherto is dealt with by fine only or imprisonment and default of payment. But if a man forages a check 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 is unquestionably indicating something seriously wrong with the individual whom this behaves is nevertheless held to be the result of either prenatal or postnatal misfortune. The strange part of the story, however, is that though they ascribe moral defects to the effect of misfortunes 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 offense against society in as much 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. For and indeed as such ideas are to our own, traces of somewhat similar opinions can be found even in 19th century England. If a person has an abscess, the medical man will say it contains pecanth matter and people will 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, Erwinian opinions may be still more clearly noted. The Mohamedans, for example, to this day send their female prisoners to hospitals and the New England majories visit any misfortune with a forceful 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, Pavoro des Grotto, Ha Hamazzo, Suzio. 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 cab driver of pre-possessing manners and appearance, but then lost sight of him. On asking what had become of him, he was told that he was imprisoned 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 pre-possessing young cab driver. Ah, caro signore, he exclaimed. Sono sic ani chino lovino, tri ani di militari, i due ani discrazia, etc. 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 imprisoned. 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 them as fortune 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 Erwonians, 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 recognized as regarding 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 practice much as medical men in England, and receive a quasi-seraptitious feel in every visit. They are treated with the same unreserve, and obeyed as readily as their own doctors, that is to say, on the whole sufficiently, because people know that it is in 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 erronean 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 manner 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. It is not only natural, but desirable for any society, whether of man or brute. The fact therefore, that the erroneans 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 is robbed of bank, for instance, till he is 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 valet eudonarians, 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 polite classes tolerate even such a common complementary 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 College 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, seem 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 have thoroughly understood his case. The reader will have no difficulty in believing that the laws regarding ill health were frequently evaded by the help of recognized fictions, which everyone 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 Nasnebours, 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 marketplace 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 clothesbrush, 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. Nasnebours, who had been keeping an ear on all that I had been saying, praised me when the lady was gone. Nothing, she said, could have been more polite according to Erwani and etiquette. She then explained that to have stolen a pair of socks, or to have the socks in more colloquial language, was a recognized 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 Erwanian refusing to do what a 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 illnesses if we were treated as the Erwanians are, when they have anything to 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 are found out, and should hate a single flogging given in the way of mere punishment more than an amputation of a limb. If it were given 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 was only by an accident of constitution that he was not in the light plight himself. So the Erwanians 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 swindle a confiding widow out of the hole 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 standpoint as my neighbors. But after a few weeks' stay with the Nassibords, I got to understand things better, especially on having heard all about my host 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 poo-pooed 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 set 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 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. Nastibor'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 logitious life for many years, had at last been 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 homeopathy 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 by the misplaced confidence court if she had not escaped its clutches by dying shortly after she had discovered her loss. As for Mr. Nasnebore, 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 Erwan 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. Nasnebore and the family's 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 eyes, which argued a billiest 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 at 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 had the hardy-hood to confess that a furious outbreak of ill-humor 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 gray voice. We can do nothing for the bodies of our patients. Such matters are beyond our providence, 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. Nasnabor, 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 sigh gave him great pleasure, and he assured me that he almost felt 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. Nasnabor was constantly attentive to his business, and largely increased his already great possessions. But I never heard a whisper to the effectiveness having been indisposed a second time, or made money by other than the most strictly honorable means. I did hear afterwards in confidence that there may have been reason to believe that his health had not been 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, and 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 had no mercy on such illnesses as fevers or guitarists 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 toned 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 fast, and are continued by the student until he finds that he really can subdue all the more usual vices in his own person, and hits 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 special 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 Erwonians whole 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 that third and fourth generation. The straighteners say that the most it could be truly said for virtue is that there is a considerable balance in its favor, 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. End of Chapter 10 Recording by James Christopher JxChristopher at yahoo.com Chapter 11 of Aeroan This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Neil Donnelly Aeroan by Samuel Butler Chapter 11 Some Aeronian Trials In Aeroan 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 defense which the prisoners council endeavored 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 and 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 in as much 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 a way which the prisoner's counsel was rebuked for having referred to a work in which the guilt of such misfortune as the prisoners 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 recognized 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 neighbors is a point that always has been and always will be settled proximately by a kind of haggling and haggling of the market and ultimately by a 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 laws. Nature attaches a severe penalty to such offenses and human law must emphasize the decrees of nature. But for the recommendation of the jury I should have given you six months hard labor. I will however commute your sentence to one of three months with the option of a fine of twenty-five percent 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 a large property during his minority by his guardian who was also one of his nearest relations. His father had been long and dead and it was for this reason that his offense came on for trial and the personal bereavement court. The lad who was undefended pleaded that he was young 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 outraged the moral sense of their friends they must expect to suffer accordingly. He then ordered the prisoner to apologize 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 offense 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 to do so in order that I may exhaust this subject before proceeding to others. And moreover I should never come to an end where I had 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 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 defense. 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 accepted 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 jailers 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 favor 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 notebook 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 and 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 laboring 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 erratically evicious but yours is no case for compassion. This is not your first offense. 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 23 years old you have been imprisoned on no less than 14 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 offenses. 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 body 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 hear after 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 practice secretly and can be consulted only at the greatest risk would become frequent visitors in every household their organization and their intimate acquaintance with the 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 depositories of power in the nation and have all that we hold precious at their mercy. A time of universal deep positionalization 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 you're 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 a 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 at 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 send you to imprisonment with hard labor 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 device 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 perversion 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 tablespoons of castor oil daily until the pleasure of the court be further known when this 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 accept a little hooting from the bystanders when he was being removed in the prisoner's van indeed nothing struck me more during my whole sojourn in the country than the general respect for law and order End of Chapter 11 Chapter 12 of Era Juan This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Roger Maline Era Juan by Samuel Butler Chapter 12 Malcontent 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 opinion 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 Erohonian 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 authorized agent. What is the offense of a lamb that we should rear it and tend it and lull it into security for the express purpose of killing it? Its offense 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 imperiling our own tenure of things which we do not wish to jeopardize. 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 organize our thieving as we have found it necessary to organize 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 offense, 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 anyone 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 magnificence and benign presence. He was evidently of an iron constitution, and his face wore an expression of the maturist 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 labor 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, in as much 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 rigor, 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 alternatives between virtually condemning a man to death and letting him go free. It was also held that the country paid in reccomitals 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 recognized, yet people were too indolent and too indifferent to suffering not their own to besture 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 ladenum, those of the body with castor oil, and those of the lower limbs with an umbrocation of strong sulfuric 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 familiarize 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 them 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 and 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 is done at 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 everyone 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 obliguity 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 physics, which produces the concealment, and if a man felt that the news of his being in ill health would be received by his neighbors as a deplorable fact, but one as much the result of necessary antecedent causes, as though he had broken into a jeweler'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 unperceiving that they had taken smallpox, 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 readiness 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 dishonorable saving, and with no indirectly increased expenditure in other ways, they hold that it requires a good deal to upset the arguments in favor 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 disease 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 anine 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. Irihwan, chapter 13, the views of the Irihonians concerning death. The Irihonians regard death with less abhorrence than disease. If it is an offense at all, it is one beyond the reach of the law, which is therefore silent on the subject. But they insist that a 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 scene, and some after, while few are ever truly born into it at all. The great 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. To me, 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 was some power somewhere, which mercifully stays us from putting that sting into detail 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 shot 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 to pull wretches 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's 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 the appointed hour after all. The Arihonians, 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 found 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 too 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 to 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 idealized. I understood that the multitude of these statues was beginning to be felt as an encumbrance in almost every family, and that a custom would probably before long fall into desuitude. Indeed, this has already come about to the satisfaction of everyone 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 500 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, and 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, or to an animal stuffer does more successfully for a dog, or bird, or pike. They were generally foisted on the public by some co-tree that was trying to exalt itself in exalting someone else, and not unfrequently they had no other inception than desire on the part of some member of the co-tree 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 imperfection 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 a new and grow up from infancy as a new thing, working out its own salvation from effort to effort in all fear and trembling. The early Hornians, 500 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 moldy. They should have had some such an establishment as our madame to source, 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 the 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 residual 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 the cootries, 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 a 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 today 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, where 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 ever 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 per-blind as a punishment for the sin of those who sent them. Before long a second iconoclastic fury would infallibly have followed, but for depressions 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 dared 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 on the Riyadh 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 the work to be so ephemeral scummed 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 the dead statesman on condition that he did not make it. The tribute of respect was thus paid to the deceased, the public sculptors were not marked, and the rest of the public suffered to 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 led 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 following into disceritude. Returning to Irihonian customs in connection with death, there is one which I can hardly pass over. When anyone 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 submission, by those from whom it might be expected, is keenly felt. These tears were formally 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 hut of Bonnet, and are now no longer worn. The birth of a child is looked upon as a painful subject, and 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 you're after, renders further secrecy impossible, and for some months before the event, the family leave 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 striders 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 nonexistence, except in such flagrant cases, has forced 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 fancy tailwinds. 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 scalding as soon as the misdemeanor 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 a 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 a child was over 75 years old and died from the decay of nature. I continued my sojourn with the Nasnabours. In a few days, Mr. Nasnabour 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 Mahena. 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. Mahena 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 Mahenas. Mrs. Anasinibur had a favorite 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, failed 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 Mahena 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 Mahena, 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, until 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. Nasnabur. There was a shade of significance on Mrs. Nasnabur's face, as I said this, which seemed to imply that she did not consider Mahena'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. Nasnabur in a gravely charitable tone, and with a look towards Zulorah. Oh, Mama answered Zulor, 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, Mahena 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 Mahena did tipple occasionally. I also think, she added, that she sometimes takes poppy juice. Well then, perhaps she does drink sometimes, said Zulor, 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 temperance was real or no. Every now and then they would join in some charitable common place, and would pretend to be all of one mind that Mahena 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 civilization 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 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 Mahana 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 dypsomaniac was only a pretense, 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 anyone was well or ill till after an intimate acquaintance of months or years. Even then the shrewdest were constantly mistaken in their judgments, 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 anyone 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 everyone'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 commonly 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 a few families that had not a medicine chest and a cupboard somewhere.