 Chapter 15 On my return to the drawing-room, I found that the Mahina current had expended itself. The ladies were just putting away their work and preparing to go out. I asked them where they were going. They answered with a certain era of reserve that they were going to the bank to get some money. Now I had already collected that the mercantile affairs of the Erewhonians were conducted on a totally different system from our own. I had, however, gathered little hitherto except that they had two distinct commercial systems, of which one appealed more strongly to the imagination than anything to which we are accustomed in Europe. Inasmuch as the banks that were conducted upon this system were decorated in the most profuse fashion and all mercantile transactions were accompanied with music, so that they were called musical banks, though the music was hideous to a European ear. As for the system itself, I never understood it. Neither can I do so now. They have a code and connection with it, which I have not the slightest doubt that they understand, but no foreigner can hope to do so. One rule runs into and against another in as most complicated grammar, or as in Chinese pronunciation, wherein I am told that the slightest change in accent or tone of voice alters the meaning of a whole sentence. Whatever is incoherent in my description must be referred to the fact of my never having attained a full comprehension of the subject. So far, however, as I could collect anything certain, I gathered that they have two distinct currencies, each under the control of its own banks and mercantile codes. One of these, the one with the musical banks, was supposed to be the system, and to give out the currency in which all monetary transactions should be carried on, and as far as I could see all who wished to be considered respectable kept a larger or smaller balance at these banks. On the other hand, if there is one thing of which I am more than sure than the other, it is that the amount so kept had no direct commercial value in the outside world. I am sure that the managers and cashiers of the musical banks were not paid in their own currency. Mr. Noznabour used to go to these banks, or rather to the great mother bank of the city, sometimes but not very often. He was a pillar of one of the other kind of banks, though he appeared to hold some minor office also in the musical ones. The ladies generally went alone, as indeed was the case in most families except on state occasions. I had long wanted no more of this strange system, and had the greatest desire to accompany my hostess and her daughters. I had seen them go out almost every morning since my arrival, and had noticed that they carried their purses in their hands, not exactly ostentatiously, yet just so as those who met them should see whether they were going. I had never, however, yet been asked to go with them myself. It is not easy to convey a person's manner by words, and I can hardly give any idea of the peculiar feeling that came upon me when I saw the ladies on the point of starting for the bank. There was a something of regret, a something as though they would wish to take me with them, but did not like to ask me, and yet as though I were hardly to ask to be taken. I was determined, however, to bring matters to an issue with my hostesses about my going with them, and after a little piling, and many inquiries as to whether I was perfectly sure that I myself wished to go, it was decided that I might do so. We passed through several streets of more or less considerable houses, and at last turning around a corner we came upon a large piazza, at the end of which was a magnificent building of a strange but noble architecture and of great antiquity. It did not open directly onto the piazza, there being a screen, through which was an archway, and between the piazza and the actual precents of the bank. On passing under the archway we entered upon a green sward, and around which there ran an arcade or cloister, while in front of us up rose the majestic towers of the bank and its venerable front, which was divided into three steep recesses, and adorned with all sorts of marbles and many sculptures. On either side there were beautiful old trees, wherein the birds were busy by the hundred, and a number of quaint but substantial houses of singularly comfortable appearance. They were situated in the midst of orchards and gardens, and gave me an impression of great peace and plenty. Indeed, it had been no error to say that this building was one that appealed to the imagination. It did more. It carried both imagination and judgment by storm. It was an epic and stone and marble, and so powerful was the effect it produced on me that as I beheld it, I was charmed and melted. I felt more conscious of the existence of a remote past. One knows of this always, but the knowledge is never so living as in the actual presence of some witness to the life of bygone ages. I felt how short a space of human life was the period of our own existence. I was more impressed by my own littleness and much more inclinable to believe that the people who sense of the fitness of things was equal to the upraising of so serene handiwork were hardly likely to be wrong in the conclusions they might come to upon any subject. My feeling certainly was that the currency of this bank must be the right one. We crossed the Swad and entered the building. If the outside had been impressive, the inside was even more so. It was very lofty and divided into several parts by walls which rested upon massive pillars. The windows were filled with stained glass descriptive of the principal commercial incidents of the bank for many ages. In a remote part of the building there were men and boys singing. This was the only disturbing feature for as the gamut was still unknown there was no music in the country which could be agreeable to a European ear. The singers seemed to have derived their inspirations from the songs of birds and the wailing of the wind which last they tried to imitate in Mancoli cadences that at times degenerated into a howl. To my thinking the noise was hideous but it produced a great effect upon my companions who professed themselves much moved. As soon as the singing was over the ladies requested me to stay where I was while they went inside the place from which it had seemed to come. During their absence certain reflections forced themselves upon me and the first place it struck me as strange that the building should be so nearly empty I was almost alone and the few besides myself had been led by curiosity and had no intention of doing business with the bank. But there might be more inside I stole up to the curtain and ventured to draw the extreme edge of it on one side. No there was hardly anyone there. I saw a large number of cashiers all at their desks ready to pay checks and I saw one or two who seemed to be the managing partners. I also saw my hostess and her daughters and two or three other ladies also three or four old woman and boys from one of the neighbouring colleges of unreason. But there was no one else. This did not look as though the bank was doing a very large business and yet I had always been told that everyone in the city dealt with this establishment. I cannot describe all that took place in these inner precincts for a sinister looking person in a black gown came and made unpleasant gestures at me for peeping. I happened to have in my pocket one of the musical bank pieces which had been given me by Mrs. Noshnabor so I tried to tip him with it but having seen what it was he became so angry that I had to give him a piece of the other kind of money to pacify him. When I had done this he became civil directly. As soon as he was gone I ventured to take a second look and saw Zulora and the very act of giving a piece of paper which looked like a check to one of the cashiers. He did not examine it but putting his hand into an antique coffer hard by he pulled out a quantity of metal pieces apparently at random and handed them over without counting them. Neither did Zulora count them but put them into her purse and went back to her seat after dropping a few pieces of the other coinage into an arms box that stood by the cashier's side. Mrs. Noshnabor and Orohina then did likewise but a little later they gave all so far as I could see that they had received from their cashier back to a verger who I have no doubt put it back into the coffer from which it had been taken. They then began making towards the curtain whereon I let it drop and retreated to a reasonable distance. They soon joined me for some minutes we all kept silence but at last I ventured to remark that the bank was not so busy today as it probably often was. On this Mrs. Noshnabor said that it was indeed melancholy to see what little heed people paid to the most precious of all institutions. I could say nothing in reply but I have ever been of opinion that the greater part of mankind do approximately know where they get that which does them good. Mrs. Noshnabor went on to say that I must not think that there was any want of confidence in the bank because I had seen so few people there. The heart of the country was thoroughly devoted to these establishments and any sign of their being in danger would bring in support from the most unexpected quarters. It was only because people knew them to be so very safe that in some cases as she lamented to say in Mr. Noshnabor's that they felt that their support was unnecessary. Moreover these institutions never departed from the safest and most approved banking principles. Thus they never allowed interest on a deposit, a thing now frequently done by certain bubble companies which by doing an illegitimate trade had drawn many customers away and even the shareholders were fewer than formerly owing to the innovations of these unscrupulous persons. For the musical banks paid little or no dividend but divided their profits by way of a bonus on the original shares once in every 30,000 years. And as it was now only 2,000 years since there had been one of these distributions, people felt that they could not hope for another in their own time and preferred investments whereby they got some more tangible return, all which she said was very melancholy to think of. Having made these last admissions she returned to her original statement namely that everyone in the country really supported these banks. As to the funerals of the people and the absence of the able-bodied she pointed out to me with some justice that this was exactly what we ought to expect. The men who are most conversant about the stability of human institutions such as lawyers, men of science, doctors, statesmen, painters and the like were just those who were most likely to be misled by their own fancy accomplishments and to be made unduly suspicious by their licentious desire for greater present return, which was at the root of nine-tenths of the opposition by their vanity, which would prompt them to affect superiority to the prejudices of the vulgar and by the stings of their own conscience, which was constantly operating them in the most cruel manner on account of their bodies which were generally diseased. Let a person's intellect, she continued, be never so sound unless his body is in absolute health. He can form no judgment worth having on matters of this kind. The body is everything. It need not perhaps be such a strong body, she said this because she saw that I was thinking of the old and unfirm looking folks who I had seen in the bank, but it must be in perfect health. In this case, the less active strength it had, the more free it would be the working of the intellect and therefore the sound of the conclusion. The people then, whom I had seen at the bank, were in reality the very ones whose opinions were most worth having. They declared its advantages to be incalculable and even professed to consider the immediate return to be far larger than they were entitled to, and so she ran on. Nor did she leave off until we had got back to the house. She might say what she pleased, but her manner carried no conviction, and later on I saw signs of general indifference to these banks that were not to be mistaken. Their supporters often denied it, but the denial was generally so couched as to add another proof of its existence. In commercial panics, and in times of general distress, the people as a mass did not so much even think of turning to these banks. A few might do so, some from habit and early training, some from the instinct that prompts us to catch at any straw when we think ourselves drowning. But few from a general one believe that the musical banks could save them from financial ruin if they were unable to meet their engagements and the other kind of currency. In conversation with one of the musical bank managers, I've mentioned to hint that this as plainly as politeness would allow. He said that it had been more or less true until lately, but now that they had put fresh stained glass windows into all banks in the country and repaired the buildings and enlarged the organs, the presidents more ever had taken to riding and omnibuses and talking nicely to people in the streets and to remembering the ages of their children and giving them things when they were naughty. So that all would henceforth go smoothly. But haven't you done anything to the money itself? I said timidly. It is not necessary, he rejoined. Not in the least necessary, I assure you. And yet anyone could see that the money given out at these banks was not that with which people bought their bread, meat and clothing. It was like it at first glance and was stamped with designs that were often of great beauty. It was not, again, a spurious coinage made with the intention that it should be mistaken for the money in actual use. It was more like a toy money, or the counters used for certain games at cards. For notwithstanding the beauty of the designs, the material on which they were stamped was as nearly valueless as possible. Some were covered with tin foil, but the greater part were frankly of a cheap base metal, the exact nature of which I was not able to determine. Indeed, they were made of a great variety of metals, or perhaps more accurately alloys. Some of which were hard, or others could bend easily and assume almost any form which their possessor might desire at the moment. Of course, everyone knew that their commercial value was nil. But all those who wished to be considered respectful, thought incumbent upon them so retain a few coins in their possession, and to let them be seen from time to time in their hands and purses. Not only this, but they would stick to it that the current coin of the realm was dross in comparison with the musical bank coinage. Perhaps, however, the strangest thing of all was that these very people would at times make fun in small ways of the whole system. Indeed, there was hardly any insinuation against it which they would not tolerate and even applaud in their daily newspapers if written anonymously. Well, if the same thing was said without ambiguity to their faces, nominative case, verb, and accuses of all being in their right places, and doubt impossible, they would consider themselves very seriously and justly outraged, and accuse the speaker of being unwell. I never could understand, neither can I quite do so now, though I began to see better what they mean, why a single currency should not suffice them. It would seem to me as though all their dealings would have been thus greatly simplified, but I was met with a look of horror if I ever dared to hint at it. Even those who to my certain knowledge kept only just enough money at the musical banks to swear by, would call the other banks where their securities really lay cold, deadening, paralyzing, and the like. I noticed another thing, moreover, which struck me greatly. I was taken to the opening of one of these banks in a neighbouring town, and saw a large assemblage of cashiers and managers. I sought opposite them, and scanned their faces attentively. They did not please me. They lacked, with few exceptions, the true erronean frankness, and an equal number from any other class would have looked happier and better men. When I met them in the streets, they did not seem like other people, but had, as a general rule, a cramped expression upon their faces, which pained and oppressed me. Those who came from the country were better. They seemed to have lived less as a separate class, and to be freer and healthier. But in spite of my seeing not a few whose looks were benign and noble, I could not help asking myself concerning the greater number of those whom I met, where the error one would be a better country if their expression were to be transferred to the people in general. I answered myself emphatically no. The expression on the faces of the high Yadrinites was that which one would wish to diffuse, and not that of the cashiers. A man's expression is his sacrament. It is the outward and visible sign of his inward and spiritual grace, or want of grace. And as I looked at the majority of these men, I could not help feeling that there must be a something in their lives which had stunted their natural development, and that they would have been more healthy and minded in any other profession. I was always fiery for them. For in nine cases out of ten they were well-meaning persons. They were in the main, very poorly paid. Their constitutions were as a rule above suspicion, and there were recorded numberless instances of their self-sacrifice and generosity, but they had the misfortune to have been betrayed into a false position, at an age for the most part when their judgment was not matured, and after having been kept in studied ignorance of the real difficulties of the system. But this did not make their position the lesser false one, and its bad effects upon them were unmistakable. Few people would speak quite openly and freely before them, which struck me as a very bad sign. When they were in the room everyone would talk as though all currency saved that of the musical banks should be abolished, and yet they knew perfectly well that even the cashiers themselves hardly used the musical bank money more than the other people. It was expected of them that they should appear to do so, but this was all. The less thoughtful of them did not seem particularly unhappy, but many were plainly sick at heart, though perhaps they hardly knew it, and would not have owned up to being so. Some few were opponents of the whole system, but these were liable to be dismissed from their employment at any moment, and this rendered them very careful. For a man who had once been cashier at a musical bank was out of the field for other employment, and was genuinely unfitted for it by reason of the course of treatment, which was commonly called his education. In fact, it was a career from which retreat was virtually impossible, and into which young men were generally induced to enter before they could be reasonably expected, considering their training to have formed any opinions of their own. Not unfrequently, indeed, they were induced by what we in England should call undue influence, concealment, and fraud. Few indeed were those who had the courage to insist on seeing both sides of the question before they committed themselves to what was practically a leap in the dark. One would have thought that the caution in this respect was an elementary principle. One of the first things that an honourable man would teach his boy to understand, but in practice it was not so. I even saw cases in which the parents brought the right of presenting to the office of cashier at one of these banks with a fixed determination that some one of their sons, perhaps a mere child, should fill it. There was a lad himself growing up with every promise of becoming a good and honourable man, but utterly without warning concerning the iron shoe which his natural protector was providing for him. Who could say that the whole thing would not end in a lifelong lie and vain chafing to escape? I confess that there were few things in Erewhon which shocked me more than this. Yet we do something not so very different from this even in England, and as regards the dual commercial system all countries have and have had a law of the land and also another law, which though professedly more sacred has far less effect on their daily lives and actions. It seems as though the need for some law over and above and sometimes even conflicting with the law of the land must spring from something that lies deep down in man's nature. Indeed it is hard to think that man could ever have become man at all, but for the gradual evolution of a perception that though this world looms so large when we are in it, it may seem a little thing when we have got away from it. When man had grown to the perception that in the everlasting is and is not of nature, the world and all that it contains including man is at the same time both seen and unseen, he felt the need of two rules of life, one for the seen and the other for the unseen side of things. For the laws affecting the seen world he claimed the sanction of seen powers. For the unseen, of which he knows nothing, save that it exists and it is powerful, he appealed to the unseen power, of which again he knows nothing, save that it exists and is powerful, to which he gives the name God. Some Aeronian opinions considering the intelligence of the unborn embryo that I regret my space will not permit me to lay before the reader have led me to conclude that the Aeronian musical banks and perhaps the religious systems of all countries are now more or less of an attempt to uphold the unfathomable and unconscious instinctive wisdom of millions of past generations against the comparatively shallow consciously reasoning and ephemeral conclusions drawn from that of the last 30 or 40. The saving feature of the Aeronian musical bank system is distinct from the crazy idolatrous views which coexist with it and on which I will touch later was that while it bore witness to the existence of a kingdom that is not of this world, it made no attempt to pierce the veil that hides it from human eyes. It is here that almost all religions go wrong. Their priests try to make us believe that they know more about the unseen world than those whose eyes are still blinded by the scene, can ever know forgetting that while to deny the existence of an unseen kingdom is bad, to pretend that we know more about it than its bare existence is no better. This chapter is already longer than I hadn't intended and I would like to say that in spite of the saving feature of which I have just spoken, I cannot help thinking that the Aeronians are on the eve of some great change in their religious opinions or at any rate in that part of them which funds the expression through their musical banks. So far as I could see fully 90% of the population of the metropolis looked upon these banks with something not far removed from contempt. If this is so, any such startling event as is sure to arise sooner or later may serve as a nucleus to a new order of things that will be more in harmony with both the heads and hearts of the people. End of Chapter 15. Chapter 16 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 16. Aeroena. The reader will perhaps have learned by this time a thing which I had myself suspected before I had been twenty-four hours in Mr. Nasinibur's house. I mean that though the Nasinibur showed me every attention I could not cordially like them with the exception of Aeroena who was quite different from the rest. They were not fair samples of Aeroonians. I saw many families with whom they were on visiting terms whose manners charmed me more than I know how to say but I never could get over my original prejudice against Mr. Nasinibur for having embezzled the money. Mrs. Nasinibur II was a very worldly woman yet to hear her talk one would have thought that she was singularly the reverse. Neither could I endure Zulora. Aeroena however was perfection. She it was who ran all the little errands for her mother and Mr. Nasinibur and Zulora and gave those thousand proofs of sweetness and unselfishness which some one member of a family is generally required to give. All day long it was Aeroena this and Aeroena that but she never seemed to know that she was being put upon and was always bright and willing from morning till evening. Zulora certainly was very handsome but Aeroena was infinitely the more graceful of the two and was the very naeplu ultra of youth and beauty. I will not attempt to describe her for anything that I could say would fall so far short of the reality as only to mislead the reader. Let him think of the very loveliest that he can imagine and he will still be below the truth. Having said this much I need hardly say that I had fallen in love with her. She must have seen what I felt for her but I tried my hardest not to let it appear even by the slightest sign. I had many reasons for this. I had no idea what Mr. and Mrs. Nasnabor would say to it and I knew that Aeroena would not look at me at any rate not yet if her father and mother disapproved which they probably would considering that I had nothing except the pension of about a pound a day of our money which the king had granted me. I did not yet know of a more serious obstacle. In the meantime I may say that I had been presented at court and was told that my reception had been considered as singularly gracious. Indeed I had several interviews both with the king and queen at which from time to time the queen got everything from me I had in the world clothes and all except the two buttons I had given to Iram the loss of which seemed to annoy her a good deal. I was presented with a court suit and her majesty had my old clothes put upon a wooden dummy on which they probably remain unless they had been removed in consequence of my subsequent downfall. His majesty's manners were those of a cultivated English gentleman. He was much pleased at hearing that our government was monarchical and that the mass of the people were resolute that it should not be changed. Indeed I was so much encouraged by the evident pleasure with which he heard me that I ventured to quote to him those beautiful lines of Shakespeare's. There is a divinity Doth hedge a king rough hue him how we may but I was sorry I had done so afterwards for I do not think his majesty admired the lines as much as I could have wished. There is no occasion for me to dwell further upon my experience of the court but I ought perhaps to allude to one of my conversations with the king in as much as it was pregnant with the most important consequences. He had been asking about my watch and inquiring whether such dangerous inventions were tolerated in the country from which I came. I owned with some confusion that watches were not uncommon but observing the gravity which came over his majesty's face I presumed to say that they were fast dying out and that we had few if any other mechanical contrivances of which he was likely to disapprove. Upon his asking me to name some of our most advanced machines I did not dare to tell him of our steam engines and railroads and electric telegraphs and was puzzling my brains to think what I could say when of all things in the world balloons suggested themselves and I gave him an account of a very remarkable ascent which was made some years ago. The king was too polite to contradict but I felt sure that he did not believe me and from that day forward though he always showed me the attention which was due to my genius for in this light was my complexion regarded he never questioned me about the manners and customs of my country to return however to Eruena. I soon gathered that neither mister nor mrs. Nasnabur would have any objection to my marrying into the family physical excellence is considered an Eruan as a set off against almost any other disqualification and my light hair was sufficient to make me an eligible match but along with this welcome fact I gather another which filled me with dismay I was expected to marry Zulora for whom I had already conceived a great aversion at first I hardly noticed the little hints and the artifices which were resorted to in order to bring us together but after a time they became too plain Zulora whether she was in love with me or not was bent on marrying me and I gathered in talking with a young gentleman of my acquaintance who frequently visited the house and whom I greatly disliked that it was considered a sacred and inviolable rule that whoever married into a family must marry the eldest daughter at that time unmarried the young gentleman urged this upon me so frequently that I at last saw he was in love with Eruena himself and wanted me to get Zulora out of the way but others told me the same story as to the custom of the country and I saw there was a serious difficulty my only comfort was that Eruena snubbed my rival and would not look at him neither would she look at me nevertheless there was a difference in the manner of her disregard this was all I could get from her and not that she avoided me on the contrary I had many a tate-a-tate with her for her mother and sister were anxious for me to deposit some part of my pension in the musical banks this being in accordance with the dictates of their goddess Idgrun of whom both mrs. Naznabor and Zulora were great devotees I was not sure whether I'd kept my secret from being perceived by Eruena herself but none of the others suspected me so she was set upon me to get me to open an account at any rate pro forma with the musical banks and I need hardly say that she succeeded but I did not yield at once I enjoyed the process of being argued with too keenly to lose it by a prompt concession besides a little hesitation rendered the concession itself more valuable it was in the course of conversations on this subject that I learned the more defined religious opinions of the Arwanians that coexist with the musical bank system but are not recognized by those curious institutions I will describe them as briefly as possible in the following chapters before I return to the personal adventures of Eruena and myself they were idolaters though of a comparatively enlightened kind but here as in other things there was a discrepancy between their professed and actual belief for they had a genuine and potent faith which existed without recognition alongside of their idol worship the gods whom they worship openly are personifications of human qualities as justice strength hope fear love etc etc the people think that prototypes of these have a real objective existence in a region far beyond the clouds holding as did the ancients that they are like men and women both in body and passion except that they are even comelier and more powerful and also that they can render themselves invisible to human eyesight they are capable of being propitiated by mankind and of coming to the assistance of those who ask their aid their interest in human affairs is keen and on the whole beneficent but they become very angry if neglected and punish rather the first they come upon then the actual person who has offended them their fury being blind when it is raised though never raised without reason they will not punish with any less severity when people sin against them from ignorance and without the chance of having had knowledge they will take no excuse of this kind but are even as the english law which assumes itself to be known to everyone thus they have a law that two pieces of matter may not occupy the same space at the same moment which law is presided over and administered by the gods of time and space jointly so that if a flying stone and a man's head attempt to outrage these gods by arrogating a right which they do not possess for so it is written in one of their books and to occupy the same space simultaneously a severe punishment sometimes even death itself is sure to follow without any regard to whether the stone knew that the man's head was there or the head the stone this at least is their view of the common accidents of life moreover they hold their deities to be quite regardless of motives with them it is the thing done which is everything and the motive goes for nothing thus they hold it strictly forbidden for a man to go without common air in his lungs for more than a very few minutes and if by any chance he gets into the water the air god is very angry and will not suffer it no matter whether the man got into the water by accident or on purpose whether through the attempt to save a child or through presumptuous contempt of the air god the air god will kill him unless he keeps his head high enough out of the water and thus gives the air god his due this with regard to the deities who manage physical affairs over and above these they personify hope fear love and so forth giving them temples and priests and carving likenesses of them in stone which they verily believe to be faithful representations of living beings who are only not human in being more than human if anyone denies the objective existence of these divinities and says that there is really no such being as a beautiful woman called justice with her eyes blinded and a pair of scales positively living and moving in a remote and ethereal region but that justice is only the personified expression of certain modes of human thought and action they say that he denies the existence of justice in denying her personality and that he is a wanton disturber of men's religious convictions they detest nothing so much as any attempt to lead them to higher spiritual conceptions of the deities whom they profess to worship erowena and i had a pitched battle on this point and should have had many more but for my prudence in allowing her to get the better of me i'm sure that in her heart she was suspicious of her own position for she returned more than once to the subject can you not see i had exclaimed that the fact of justice being admirable will not be affected by the absence of a belief in her being also a living agent and can you really think that men will be one witless hopeful because they no longer believe that hope is an actual person she shook her head and said that with men's belief in the personality all incentive to the reverence of the thing itself as justice or hope would cease men from that hour would never be either just or hopeful again i could not move her nor indeed did i seriously wish to do so she deferred to me in most things but she never shrank from maintaining her opinions if they were put in question nor does she to this day abate one jot of her belief in the religion of her childhood though in compliance with my repeated entreaties she has allowed herself to be baptized into the english church she has however made a gloss upon her original faith to the effect that her baby and i are the only human beings exempt from the vengeance of the deities are not believing in their personality she is quite clear that we are exempted she should never have so strong a conviction of it otherwise how it has come about she does not know neither does she wish to know there are things which it is better not to know and this is one of them but when i tell her that i believe in her deities as much as she does and that it is a difference about words not things she becomes silent with a slight emphasis i own that she very nearly conquered me once for she asked me what i should think if she were to tell me that my god whose nature and attributes i had been explained to her was but the expression for man's highest conception of goodness wisdom and power that in order to generate a more vivid conception of so great and glorious a thought man had personified it and called it by name that it was an unworthy conception of the deity to hold him personal in as much as escape from human contingencies became thus impossible that the real thing it mentioned worship was the divine wherein so ever they could find it that god was but man's way of expressing his sense of the divine that as justice hope wisdom etc were all parts of goodness so god was the expression which embraced all goodness and all good power that people would no more cease to love god on ceasing to believe in his objective personality then they had ceased to love justice on discovering that she was not really personal and they that they would never truly love him till they saw him thus she said all this in her artless way and with none of the coherence with which i have here written it her face kindled and she felt sure that she had convinced me that i was wrong and that justice was a living person indeed i did win so little but i recovered myself immediately and pointed out to her that we had books whose genuineness was beyond all possibility of doubt as they were certainly none of them less than 1800 years old that in these they were the most authentic accounts of men who had been spoken to by the deity himself and of one prophet who had been allowed to see the back parts of god through the hand that was laid over his face this was conclusive and i spoke with such solemnity that she was a little frightened and only answered that they too had their books in which their ancestors had seen the god on which i saw that further argument was not at all likely to convince her and fearing that she might tell her mother what i had been saying and that i might lose the hold upon her affections which i was beginning to feel pretty sure that i was obtaining i began to let her have her own way and to convince me neither till after we were safely married did i show the club and hoof again nevertheless her remarks have haunted me and i have since met with many very godly people who have had a great knowledge of divinity but no sense of the divine and again i have seen a radiance upon the face of those who were worshiping the divine either in art or nature in picture or statue in field or cloud or sea and man woman or child which i have never seen kindled by any talking about the nature and attributes of god mentioned but the word divinity and our sense of the divine is clouded end of chapter 16 chapter 17 of arawan this is a libervox recording all libervox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libervox.org recording by neil donnelly arawan by samuel butler chapter 17 idgrun and the idgrinites in spite of all the to-do they make about their idols and the temples they build and the priests and priestesses whom they support i could never think that their professed religion was more than skin deep but they had another which they carried with them into all their actions and although no one from the outside of things would suspect it to have any existence at all it was in reality the great guide the mariners compass of their lives so that there were very few things which they ever either did or refrained from doing without reference to its precepts now i suspected that their professed faith had no great hold upon them firstly because i often heard the priests complain of the prevailing indifference and they would hardly have done so without reason secondly because of the show which was made for there was none of this about the worship of the goddess idgrun in whom they really did believe thirdly because though the priests were constantly abusing idgrun as being the great enemy of the gods it was well known that she had no more devoted worshipers in the whole country than these very persons there were often priests of idgrun rather than of their own deities neither am i by any means sure that these were not the best of the priests idgrun certainly occupied a very anomalous position she was held to be both omnipresent and omnipotent but she was not an elevated conception and was sometimes both cruel and absurd even her most devoted worshipers were a little ashamed of her and served her more with heart and indeed then with their tongues theirs was no lip service on the contrary even when worshiping her most devoutly they would often deny her take her all in all however she was a beneficent and useful deity who did not care how much she was denied so long as she was obeyed and feared and who kept hundreds of thousands in those paths which make life tolerably happy who would never have been kept there otherwise and over whom a higher and more spiritual ideal would have had no power i greatly doubt whether the Erwonians are yet prepared for any better religion and though considering my gradually strengthened conviction that they were the representatives of the lost tribes of israel i would have said about converting them at all hazards had i seen the remotest prospect of success i could hardly contemplate the displacement of idgrun as the great central object of their regard without admitting that it would be attended with frightful consequences in fact were i a mere philosopher i should say that the gradual raising of the popular conception of idgrun would be the greatest spiritual boon which could be conferred upon them and that nothing could affect this except example i generally found that those who complained most loudly that idgrun was not high enough for them had hardly as yet come up to the idgrun standard and i often met with a class of men whom i called to myself high idgrunites the rest being idgrunites and low idgrunites who in the matter of human conduct and the affairs of life appeared to me to have got about as far as it is in the right nature of man to go they were gentlemen in the full sense of the word and what has one not said in saying this they seldom spoke of idgrun or even alluded to her but would never run counter to her dictates without ample reason for doing so in such cases they would override her with due self reliance and the goddess seldom punished them for they are brave and idgrun is not they had most of them a smattering of the hypothetical language and some few more than this but only a few i do not think that this language has had much hand in making them what they are but rather that the fact of their being generally possessed of its rudiments was one great reason for the reverence paid to the hypothetical language itself being enured from youth to exercises and athletics of all sorts and living fearlessly under the eye of their peers among whom there exists a high standard of courage generosity honor and every good and manly quality what wonder that they should have become so to speak a law unto themselves and while taking an elevated view of the goddess idgrun they should have gradually lost all faith and they recognize deities of the country these they do not openly disregard for conformity until absolutely intolerable is a law of idgrun yet they have no real belief in the objective existence of beings which so readily explain themselves as abstractions and whose personality demands a quasi materialism which it baffles the imagination to realize they keep their opinions however greatly to themselves in as much as most of their countrymen feel strongly about the gods and they hold it wrong to give pain unless for some greater good than seems likely to arise from their plain speaking on the other hand surely those whose own minds are clear about any given matter even though it be only that there is little certainty should go so far towards imparting that clearness to others as to say openly what they think and why they think it whenever they can properly do so for they may be sure that they owe their own clearness almost entirely to the fact that others have done this by them after all they may be mistaken and if so it is for their own and the general well being that they should let their error be seen as distinctly as possible so that it may be more easily refuted I own therefore that on this one point I disapproved of the practice even of the highest idgranites and objected to it all the more because I knew that I should find my own future task more easy if the high idgranites had already undermined the belief which is supposed to prevail at present in other respects they were more like the best class of Englishmen than any whom I have seen in other countries I should have liked to have persuaded half a dozen of them to come over to England and go upon the stage for they had most of them a keen sense of humor and a taste for acting they would be of great use to us the example of a real gentleman is if I may say so without profanity the best of all gospels such a man upon the stage becomes a potent humanizing influence an ideal which all may look upon for a shilling I always liked and admired these men and although I could not help deeply regretting their certain ultimate perdition for they had no sense of a hereafter and their only religion was that of self-respect and consideration for other people I never dared to take so greater liberty with them as to attempt to put them in possession of my own religious convictions in spite of my knowing that they were the only ones which could make them really good and happy either here or hereafter I did try sometimes being impelled to do so by a strong sense of duty and by my deep regret that so much that was admirable should be doomed to ages if not eternity of torture but the words stuck in my throat as soon as I began whether a professional missionary might have a better chance I know not such persons must doubt there's no more about the science of conversion for myself I could only be thankful that I was on the right path and was obliged to let others take their chance as yet if the plan fails by which I propose to convert them myself I would gladly contribute my might towards the sending two or three trained missionaries who have been known as successful convert of the Jews and Mohammedans but such have seldom much to glory in the flesh and when I think of the high edugranites and of the figure which a missionary would probably cut among them I cannot feel sanguine that much good would be arrived at still the attempt is worth making and the worst danger to the missionaries themselves would be that of being sent to the hospital where Chaubok would have been sent had he come with me into Erawan taking then their religious opinions as a whole I must own that the Erawanians are superstitious on account of the views which they hold of their professed gods and they're entirely anomalous and inexplicable worship of Idgran a worship at once the most powerful yet most devoid of formalism that I ever met with but in practice things worked better than might have been expected and the conflicting claims of Idgran and the gods were arranged by unwritten compromises for the most part in Idgran's favor which in 99 cases out of 100 were very well understood I could not conceive why they should not openly acknowledge high Idgranism and discard the objective personality of hope justice etc but whenever I so much as hinted at this I found that I was on dangerous ground they would never have it returning constantly to the assertion that ages ago the divinities were frequently seen and that the moment their personality was disbelieved and men would leave off practicing even those ordinary virtues which the common experience of mankind has agreed on as being the greatest secret of happiness whoever heard they asked indignantly of such things as kindly training a good example and an enlightened regard to one's own welfare being able to keep men straight in my hurry forgetting things which I ought to have remembered I answered that if a person could not be kept straight by these things there was nothing that could straighten him and that if he were not ruled by the love and fear of man whom he had seen neither would he be so by that of the gods whom he had not seen at one time indeed I came upon a small but growing sect who believed after a fashion in the immortality of the soul on the resurrection from the dead they taught that those who had been born with feeble and diseased bodies and had passed their lives in ailing would be tortured eternally hereafter but that those who had been born strong and healthy and handsome would be rewarded forever and ever of moral qualities or conduct they made no mention bad as this was it was a step in advance in as much as they did hold out a future state of some sort and I was shocked to find that for the most part they met with opposition on the score that their doctrine was based upon no sort of foundation also that it was immoral in its tendency and not to be desired by any reasonable beings when I asked how it could be immoral I was answered that if firmly held it would lead people to cheapen this present life making it appear to be an affair of only secondary importance that it would thus distract men's minds from the perfecting of this world's economy and it was an impatient cutting so to speak of the gory and knot of life's problems whereby some people might gain present satisfaction to themselves at the cost of infinite damage to others that the doctrine tended to encourage the poor in their improvidence and in a debasing acquiescence and ills which they might well remedy that the rewards were illusory and the result after all of luck whose empire should be bounded by the grave that its terrors were innervating and unjust and that even the most blessed rising would be but the disturbing of a still more blessed slumber to all which I could only say that the thing had been actually known to happen and that there were several well authenticated instances of people having died and come to life again instances which no man in his senses could doubt if this be so said my opponent we must bear it as best we may I then translated for him as well as I could the noble speech of Hamlet in which he says that it is the fear lest worse evils may befall us after death which alone prevents us from rushing into death's arms nonsense he answered no man was ever yet stopped from cutting his throat by any such fears as your poet ascribes to him and your poet probably knew this perfectly well if a man cuts his throat he is at bay and thinks of nothing but escape no matter whether provided he can shuffle off his present no men are kept at their posts not by the fear that if they quit them they may quit a frying pan for a fire but by the hope that if they hold on the fire may burn less fiercely the respect to quote your poet that makes calamity so long a life is the consideration that though calamity may live long the sufferer may live longer still on this seeing that there was little probability of our coming to an agreement I let the argument drop and my opponent presently left me with as much disapprobation as he could show without being overtly rude end of chapter 17 please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Ernst Batinama Chapter 18 Birth Formulae I heard what follows not from Arujina but from Mr. Nosnibor and some of the gentlemen who occasionally dined at the house they told me that the Irohonians believe in pre-existence they're not only this of which I will write more fully in the next chapter but they believe that it is of their own free act indeed in a previous state that they come to be born into this world at all they hold that the unborn are perpetually plaguing and tormenting the marriage of both sexes fluttering about them incessantly and giving them no peace either of mind or body until they have consented to take them under their protection if this were not so this at least is what they urge it would be a monstrous freedom for one man to take with another to say that he should undergo the chances and changes of this mortal life without any option in a matter no man would have any right to get married at all in as much as he can never tell what frightful misery he's doing so may entail forcibly upon a being who cannot be unhappy as long as he does not exist they feel this so strongly that they are resolved to shift the blame on to other shoulders and have fashioned along mythology as to the world in which the unborn people live and what they do in the arts imaginations to which they have recourse in order to get themselves into our own world but of this more anon what I would relate here is the manner of dealing with those who do come it is a distinguishing peculiarity of the Ilihonians that when they profess themselves to be quite certain about any matter and avow it as a base in which they are to build a system of practice they seldom quite believe in it if they smell a rat about the precincts of a cherished institution they will always stop their noses to it if they can this is what most of them did in this matter of the unborn for I cannot and ever could think that they seriously believed in their mythology concerning pre-existence they did and they did not they did not know themselves what they believed all they did know was that it was a disease not to believe as they did the only thing of which they were quite sure was that it was the pestering of the unborn which caused them to be brought into this world and that they would not have been here if they would have only let peaceable people alone it would be hard to disprove this position and they might have a good case if they would only leave it as it stands but this they will not do they must have assurance doubly sure they must have the written word of the child itself as soon as it is born giving the parents indemnity from all responsibility on the score of its birth and asserting its own pre-existence they have therefore devised something which they call a birth formula the document which varies in words according to the caution of parents but is much the same practically in all cases for it has been the business of the Irohonian lawyers during many ages to exercise the skill in perfecting it and providing for every contingency these formulae are printed on common paper at a moderate cost for the poor but the rich have them written on parchment and handsomely bound so that the getting up of a person's birth formula is a test of his social position they commence by setting forth that whereas A.B. was a member of the kingdom of the unborn where he was well provided for in every way and had no cause of discontent etc etc he did of his own wanton depravity and restlessness conceive a desire to enter into this present world that thereon having taken the necessary steps as set forth in laws of the unborn kingdom he did with malice forethought set himself to plague and pester two unfortunate people who had never wronged him and who were quite contented and happy until he conceived this based design against their peace for which wrong he now humbly entreats their pardon he acknowledges that he is responsible for all physical blemishes and deficiencies which may render him answerable to the laws of his country that his parents have nothing whatever to do with any of these things and that they have a right to kill him at once if they be so minded though he entreats them to show their marvelous goodness and clemency by sparing his life if they will do this he promises to be the most obedient and abject creature during his earlier years and indeed all his life unless they should see fit in their abundant generosity to remit some portion of his service hereafter and so the formula continues going sometimes into very minute details according to the fancies of family lawyers who will not make it any shorter than they can help the deed being thus prepared on the third or fourth day after the birth of the child or as they call it the final opportunity the friends gather together and there is a feast held where they are all very melancholy as a general rule I believe quite truly so and make presents to the father and mother of the child in order to console them for the injury which has just been done them by the unborn by and by the child himself is brought down by his nurse and the company begin to rail upon him upgrading him for his impertinence and asking him what demands he proposes to make for the wrong that he has committed and how he can look for care and nourishment from those who have perhaps already been injured by the unborn on some 10 or 12 occasions for they say of people with large families that they have suffered terrible injuries from the unborn till at last when this has been carried far enough someone suggests the formula which is brought out and solemnly read to the child by the family straightener this gentleman is always invited on these occasions for the very fact of intrusion into peaceful family shows a depravity on the part of the child which requires his professional services on being teased by the reading and tweaked by the nurse the child will commonly begin to cry which is reckoned a good sign as showing a consciousness of guilt he is there on asked does he ascent to the formula on which as he still continues crying and can obviously make no answer some one of the friends comes forward and undertakes to sign the document on his behalf feeling sure so he says that a child would do it if he only knew how and that he will release the present signer from his engagement on arriving at maturity the friend then inscribes the signature of the child at the foot of the parchment which is held to bind the child as much as though he had signed it himself even this however does not fully content them for they feel a little uneasy until they have got the child's own signature after all so when he is about 14 these good people partly bribe him by promises of greater liberty and good things and partly intimidate him through their great power of making themselves actively unpleasant to him so that though there is a show of freedom made there is really none they also use the offices of the teachers in the colleges of unreason to let last in one way or another they take very good care that you shall sign the paper for which he professes to have been a free agent in coming into the world and to take all the responsibility of having done so on to his own shoulders and yet though this document is obviously the most important which anyone can sign in his whole life they will have him do so at an age when neither they nor the law will for many a year allow anyone else to bind him to the smallest obligation no matter how righteously he may owe it because they hold him too young to know what he is about and do not consider it fair that he should commit himself to anything that may prejudice him in after years I own that all this seemed rather hard and not of a peace with the many admirable institutions existing among them I once ventured to say a part of what I thought about it to one of the professors of unreason I did it very tenderly but his justification of the system was quite out of my comprehension I remember asking him whether he did not think it would do harm to allowed's principles by weakening his sense of the sanctity of his word and of truth generally that he should be led into entering upon the solemn declaration as to the truth of things about which all that he can certainly know is that he knows nothing whether in fact the teachers who so let him or taught anything as a certainty of which they were themselves uncertain were not earning the living by impairing the truth sense of their pupils a delicate organization mostly and by initiating one of the most concrete instincts the professor who was a delightful person seemed greatly surprised to the view which I took but it had no influence with him whatsoever no one he answered expected that a boy either would or could know all that he said he knew but the world was full of compromises and there was hardly any affirmation which would bear being interpreted literally the most gross of vehicle of thought thought being incapable of absolute translation he added that as there can be no translation from one language into another which shall not scant the meaning somewhat or enlarge upon it so there is no language which can render thought without adjuring under harshness somewhere and so forth all of which seem to come to this in the end that it was the customer of the country and that the Irihonians were the conservative people that a boy would have to begin compromising sooner or later and this was part of his education in the art it was perhaps to be regretted that compromise should be as necessary as it was still it was necessary and the sooner the boy got to understand it the better for himself but they never tell this to the boy from the book of their mythology about the unborn I made the extracts which will form the following chapter End of Chapter 18 Recording by Ernst Patinama Amsterdam The Netherlands Chapter 19 of Aerovan 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 Aerovan by Samuel Butler Chapter 19 The World of the Unborn The Aerovanians say that we are drawn through life backwards or again that we go onwards into the future as into a dark corridor Time walks beside us and flings back shutters as we advance but the light thus given often dazzles us and deepens the darkness which is in front We can see but little at a time we heed that little far less than our apprehension of what we shall see next ever peering curiously through the glare of the present into the gloom of the future We presage the leading lines of that which is before us by faintly reflected lights from dull mirrors that are behind and stumble on as we may till the trap door opens beneath us and we are gone They say at other times that the future and the past are on two rollers That which is on the roller of the future unwraps itself on to the roller of the past We cannot hasten it and we may not stay it We must see all that is unfolded to us whether it be good or ill and what we have seen once we may see again no more It is ever unwinding and being wound We catch it in transition for a moment and call it present Our flustered senses gather what and we guess at what is coming by the tenor of that which we have seen The same hand as painted the whole picture and the incidents vary little rivers, woods, plains, mountains, towns and peoples love, sorrow and death yet the interest never flags and we look hopefully for some good fortune or fearfully lest our own faces be shown us as figuring in something terrible When the scene is past we think we know it so there is so much to see and so little time to see it that our conceit of knowledge as it regards the past is for the most part poorly founded Neither do we care about it greatly save in so far as it may affect the future wherein our interest mainly lies The Erewhonians say it was by chance only that the earth and stars and all the heavenly worlds began to roll from east to west and not from west to east and in like manner they say it is by chance that man is drawn through life with his face to the past instead of to the future for the future is there as much as the past only that we may not see it Is it not in the loins of the past and must not the past alter before the future can do so? Sometimes again they say that there was a race of men tried upon the earth once who knew the future better than the past but that they died in a twelve month from the misery which their knowledge causes them and if any were to be born too prescient now he would be called out by natural selection before he had time to transmit so peace destroying a faculty to his descendants Strange fate for man he must perish if he get that which he must perish if he strive not after if he strive not after it he is no better than the Brutes if he gets it he is more miserable than the devils Having waited through many chapters like the above I came at last to the unborn themselves and found that they were held to be souls pure and simple having no actual bodies but living in a sort of gaseous yet more or less anthropomorphic existence like that of a ghost they have thus neither flesh nor blood nor warmth nevertheless they are supposed to have local habitations and cities wherein they dwell though these are as unsubstantial as their inhabitants they are even thought to eat and drink some thin ambrosial sustenance and generally to be capable of doing whatever mankind can do only after a visionary ghostly fashion as in a dream on the other hand as long as they remain where they are they never die the only form of death in the unborn world being the leaving of it for our own they are believed to be extremely numerous far more so than mankind they arrive from unknown planets full grown in large batches at a time but they can only leave the unborn world by taking the steps necessary for their arrival here which is in fact by suicide they ought to be an exceedingly happy people for they have no extremes of good or ill fortune never marrying but living in a state much like that fabled by the poets as the primitive conditioned of mankind in spite of this however they are incessantly complaining they know that we in this world have bodies and indeed they know everything else about us for they move among us with us whoever they will and can read our thoughts as well as survey our actions at pleasure one would think that this should be enough for them and most of them are indeed alive to the desperate risk which they will run by indulging themselves in that body with sensible warm emotion which they so much desire nevertheless there are some to whom the ennui of a disembodied existence is so intolerable that they will venture anything for a change so they resolve to quit the conditions which they must accept are so uncertain that none but the most foolish of the unborn will consent to them and it is from these and these only that our own ranks are recruited when they have finally made up their minds to leave they must go before the magistrate of the nearest town and sign an affidavit of their desire to quit their then existence on their having done this the magistrate reads them the conditions which they must accept and which are so long that I can only extract some of the principle points which are mainly the following first they must take a potion which will destroy their memory and sense of identity they must go into the world helpless and without a will of their own they draw lots for their dispositions before they go and take them such as they are for better or worse neither are they to be allowed any choice in the matter of the body which they so much desire they are simply allotted by chance and without appeal to two people whom it is their business to find and pester until they adopt them who these are to be whether rich or poor, kind or unkind healthy or diseased there is no knowing they have in fact to entrust themselves for many years to the care of those for whose good constitution and good sense they have no sort of guarantee it is curious to read the lectures which the wiser heads give to those who are meditating a change they talk with them as we talk with a spendthrift and with about as much success to be born they say is a felony it is a capital crime for which sentence may be executed any moment after the commission of the offense you may perhaps happen to live for some 70 or 80 years but what is that compared with the eternity you now enjoy and even though the sentence were commuted and you are allowed to live on forever you would in time become so terribly weary of life that execution would be the greatest mercy to you consider the infinite risk to be born of wicked parents and trained to vice to be born of silly parents and trained to unrealities of parents who regard you as a sort of chattel or property belonging more to them than to yourself again you may draw utterly unsympathetic parents who will never be able to understand you and who will do their best to thwart you as a hen when she has hatched a duckling and then call you ungrateful because you do not love them or again you may draw parents who look upon you as a thing to be cowed while it is still young and the best it should give them trouble hereafter by having wishes and feelings of its own in later life when you have been finally allowed to pass musture as a full member of the world you will yourself become liable to the pestings of the unborn and a very happy life you may be led in consequence for we solicit so strongly that a few only nor these the best can refuse us and yet not to refute is much the same as going into partnership with a dozen different people about whom one can know absolutely nothing beforehand not even whether one is going to partnership with men or women nor with how many of either delude not yourself with thinking that you will be wiser than your parents you may be an age in advance of those whom you have pestered but unless you are one of the great ones you will still be an age behind those who will in their turn pester you imagine what it must be to have an unborn and unapported upon you who is of an entirely different temperament and disposition to your own nay half a dozen such who will not love you though you have stinted yourself in a thousand ways to provide for their comfort and well-being who will forget all your self-sacrifice and of whom you may never be sure that they are not bearing a grudge against you for errors of judgment into which you may have fallen though you had hoped that such had been long since atoned for ungratitude such as this is not uncommon yet fancy what it must be to bear it is hard upon the duckling to have been hatched by a hen but is it not also hard upon the hen to have hatched the duckling consider again we pray you not for our sake but for your own your initial character you must draw by lot but whatever it is it can only come to a tolerably successful development after long training remember that over that training you will have no control it is possible and even probable that whatever you may get in afterlife which is of real pleasure and service to you will have to be one in spite of rather than by the help of those whom you are now about to pester and that you will only win your freedom after years of a painful struggle in which it will be hard to say whether you have suffered the most or inflicted it remember also that if you go under the world you will have free will that you will be obliged to have it that there is no escaping it that you will be fettered to it during your whole life and must on every occasion do that which on the whole seems best to you at any given time no matter whether you are right or wrong in choosing it your mind will be a balance for considerations and your actions will go with your scale how it shall fall will depend upon the kind of scales which you may have drawn at birth and if they have not been outrageously tampered with in childhood and if the combinations into which you enter are average ones you may come off well but there are too many ifs in this and with the failure of any one of them your misery is assured reflect on this and remember that should the ill come upon you you will have yourself to thank for it is your own choice to be born and there is no compulsion in the matter not that we deny the existence of pleasures among mankind there is a certain show of sundry phases of contentment which may even amount to a very considerable happiness but mark how they are distributed over man's life belonging all the keenest of them to the for part and few indeed to the after there be any pleasure worth purchasing with the miseries of a decrepit age if you are good strong and handsome you have a fine fortune indeed at twenty but how much of it will be left at sixty for you must live on your capital there is no investing your powers so that you may get a small annuity of life forever you must eat up your principle bit by bit and be tortured by seeing it grow continually smaller and smaller even though you happen to escape being rudely robbed of it by crime or a casualty remember too that there never yet was a man of forty who would not come back into the world of the unborn if he could do so with decency and honor being in the world he will as a general rule stay till he is forced to go but do you think he would consent to be born again and relive his life if he had the offer of doing so if he could so alter the past as that he should never have come into being at all do you not think that he would do it very gladly what was it that one of their own poets meant if it was not this when he cried out upon the day in which he was born and the night in which it was said there is a man child conceived for now he says I should have lain still and been quiet I should have slept then had I been at rest with kings and counselors of the earth which built desolate places for themselves or with princes that had gold who filled their houses with silver or as an hidden untimely birth I had not been as infants which never saw light there the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest be very sure that the guilt of being born carries this punishment at all times to all men but how can they ask for pity or complain of any mischief that may befall them having entered open-eyed into the snare one word more and we have done if any faint remembrance as of a dream flit in some puzzled moment across your brain and you shall feel that the potion which is to be given you shall not have done its work and the memory of this existence which you are leaving endeavors vainly to return we say in such a moment when you clutch at the dream but it eludes your grasp and you watch it as Orpheus watched Eurydice gliding back again into the twilight kingdom fly fly if you can remember the advice to the haven of your present and immediate duty taking shelter incessantly in the work which you have in hand this much you may perhaps recall and this if you will imprinted deeply upon your every faculty will be most likely to bring you safely and honorably home through the trials that are before you this is the fashion in which they reason with those who would be for leaving them but it is seldom that they do much good for none but the unquiet and unreasonable ever think of being born and those who are foolish enough to think of it are generally foolish enough to do it finding therefore that they can do no more the friends follow weeping to the courthouse of the chief magistrate where the one who wishes to be born declares solemnly and openly that he accepts the conditions attached to his decisions on this he is presented with a potion which immediately destroys his memory and sense of identity and dissipates the thin gaseous tenement which he has inhabited he becomes a bare vital principal not to be perceived by human senses nor to be by any chemical test appreciated he has but one instinct which is that he is to go to such and such a place where he will find two persons whom he is to import tune till they consent to undertake him but whether he is to find these persons among the race of Chaubach or the Arvanians themselves is not for him to choose End of Chapter 19 CHAPTER XX of ERA 1 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 Hannah Dowell ERA 1 by Samuel Butler CHAPTER XX What they mean by it I have given the above mythology at some length, but it is only a small part of what they have upon the subject. My first feeling on reading it was that any amount of folly on the part of the unborn incoming here was justified by a desire to escape from such intolerable prosing. The mythology is obviously an unfair and exaggerated representation of life and things, and had its authors been so minded they could have easily drawn a picture which would err as much on the bright side as this does on the dark. No Aeronian believes that the world is as black as it has here been painted, but it is one of their peculiarities that they very often do not believe or mean things which they profess to regard as indisputable. In the present instance their professed views concerning the unborn have arisen from their desire to prove that people have been presented with the gloomiest possible picture of their own prospects before they came here. Otherwise they could hardly say to one whom they are going to punish for an affection of the heart or brain, that it is all his own doing. In practice they modify their theory to a considerable extent, and seldom refer to the birth formula except in extreme cases. For the force of habit, or what not, gives many of them a kindly interest, even in creatures who have so much wronged them as the unborn have done. And though a man generally hates the unwelcome little stranger for the first twelve months he is apt to modify according to his lights, as time goes on, and sometimes he will become inordinately attached to the beings whom he is pleased to call his children. Of course, according to Erechonian premises it would serve people right to be punished and scouted for moral and intellectual diseases as much as for physical, and I cannot this day understand why they should have stopped short half way. Neither again can I understand why they having done so should have been, as it certainly was, a matter of so much concern to myself. What could it matter to me how many absurdities the Erebonians might adopt? Nevertheless, I long to make them think as I did, for the wish to spread these opinions that we hold conducive to our own welfare is so deeply rooted in the English character that few of us can escape its influence. But let this pass. In spite of not a few modifications in practice of a theory which is itself revolting the relations between children and parents in that country are less happy than in Europe. It was rarely that I saw cases of real hearty and intense affection between old people and the young ones. Here and there I did so and was quite sure about the children, even at the age of twenty, were fonder of their parents than they were of anyone else and that of their own inclination free to choose what company they would would often choose that of their father and mother. The straightness carried was rarely seen at the door of those houses. I saw two or three such cases during the time that I remained in the country and could not express the pleasure which I derived from a sight suggestive of so much goodness and wisdom and forbearance so richly rewarded. Yet I firmly believe that the same thing would happen in nine families out of ten if the parents were merely to remember how they felt when they were young and actually behaved towards their children as they would have had their own parents behave towards them. But this which would appear to be so simple and obvious seems also to be a thing which not one in a hundred thousand is able to put in practice. It is only the very great and good who have made any living faith in the simplest axioms and there are a few who are so holy as to feel that nineteen and thirteen make thirty-two as certainly as two and two make four. I am quite sure that if this narrative should ever fall into Erebonian hands it will be said that what I have written about the relations between parents and children being seldom satisfactory is an infamous perversion of facts and that in truth there are a few young people who do not feel happier in the society of their nearest relations than in any other. Mr. Nozibor would be sure to say this yet I cannot refrain from expressing an opinion that he would be a good deal embarrassed if his deceased parents were to appear and propose to pay him the six months visit. I doubt whether there are many things that are as great an infliction. They had died at a ripe old age some twenty years before I came to know him so the case is an extreme one but surely if they had treated him with what in his youth he had felt to be true and selfishness his face would brighten when he thought of them to the end of his life. In the one or two cases of true family affection which I met with I am sure that the young people who were so genuinely fond of their fathers and mothers at eighteen would at sixty be perfectly delighted were they to get the chance of welking them as their guests. There is nothing which could please them better except perhaps to watch the happiness of their own children and grandchildren. This is how things should be it is not an impossible ideal there is one which actually does exist in some few cases and might exist in almost all with a little more patience and forbearance upon the parents part but it is rare at present so rare that they have a proverb which I can only translate in a very roundabout way but which says that the great happiness of some people in the future state will consist in watching the distress of their parents upon returning to eternal companionship with their grandfathers and grandmothers whilst compulsory affection is the idea which lies at the root of their word for the deepest anguish. There is no talisman in the word parent which can generate miracles of affection and I can well believe that my own child might find it less of a calamity to lose both Erwenna and myself when he is six years old than to find us again when he is sixty. A sentence which I would not pen did I not feel that by doing so I was giving him something like a hostage or at any rate putting a weapon into his hands against me should my selfishness exceed reasonable limits. Money is at the bottom of all of this to a great extent if the parents would put their children in the way of earning a competence earlier than they do the children would soon become self-supporting and independent. As it is under the present system the young ones get old enough to have all manner of legitimate wants. That is if they have any go about them before they have learnt the means of earning money to pay for them. Hence they must either do without them or take more money than the parents can be expected to spare. This is due chiefly to the schools of unreason where a boy is taught upon hypothetical principles as I will explain hereafter spending years in being incapacitated for doing this that or the other. He hardly knows what during all which time he ought to have been actually doing the thing itself. Beginning at the lowest grades picking it up through actual practice and rising according to the energy which is in him. These schools of unreason surprised me much. It would be easy to fall into pseudo-utalitarianism and I would fain believe that the system may be good for the children of very rich parents or for those who show natural instinct to acquire hypothetical law but the misery was their young dren workshop required all people with any pretence respectability to send the children to someone or other of these schools mulching them of years of money. It astonished me to see what sacrifices the parents would make in order to render their children as nearly useless as possible and it was hard to say whether the old suffered most from events with which they were thus put to or the young from being deliberately swindled in some of the most important branches of human inquiry and directed into false channels or left to drift in the great majority of cases. I cannot think that I am mistaken in believing that the growing tendency to limit families by infanticide an evil which was causing general alarm throughout the country was entirely due to the way in which education had become a fetish from one end of era one to the other. Granted that provision should be made whereby every child should be taught reading, writing and arithmetic but here compulsory state aided education should end and the child should begin with all due precautions to ensure that he is not overworked to acquire the rudiments of that art whereby he is to earn his living. He cannot acquire these in what we in England call schools of technical education such schools are cloister life as against the rough and tumble of the world they unfit rather than fit for work in the open an art can only be learned in the workshop of those who are given their bread by it boys as a rule hate the artificial and delight in the actual give them the chance of earning and they will soon earn when parents find that their children instead of being made artificially burdensome will early begin to contribute to the well-being of the family they will soon leave off killing them and will seek to have that plentitude of offspring which they now avoid as things are the state it lays greater burdens on parents and flesh and blood can bear and then rings its hands over an evil for which it is itself mainly responsible with the less well-dressed classes the harm was not so great for among these at about ten years old the child has to begin doing something if he is capable he makes his way up if he is not at any rate not made more incapable by what his friends or police recall his education people find their level as a rule and though they are unfortunate they sometimes miss it it is in the main true that those who have valuable qualities are perceived to have them and can sell them I think that the Erebonians are beginning to become aware of these things for there was much talk about putting tax upon all parents and the children were not earning a competence according to their degrees by the time they were twenty years old I am sure that if they will have the courage to carry it through they will never regret it the parents will take care that the children shall begin earning money which means doing good to society at an early age then the children will be independent early and they will not press on the parents nor the parents on them and they will like each other better than they do now this is the true philanthropy he who makes a colossal fortune in the hosu trade and by his energy succeeded in reducing the price of wooden goods by the thousands part of a penny in the pound this man is worth ten professional philanthropists so strongly are the Erebonians impressed with this that if a man has made a fortune of over twenty thousand a year they exempt him from all taxation considering him as a work of art and too precious to be meddled with they say how very much he must have done for society before society could have been prevailed upon to give him so much money so magnificent an organisation over oars them they regard it as a thing dropped from heaven money they say is the symbol of duty it is the sacrament of having done for mankind that which mankind wanted mankind might not be a very good judge but there is no better this used to shock me at first when I remembered that it had been said on high authority that they who have riches shall enter hardly into the kingdom of heaven but the influence of Erebon had made me begin to see things in a new light and I could not help thinking that they who have not riches shall enter more hardly still people oppose money to culture and imply that if a man has spent his time in making money he will not be cultivated fallacy of fallacies as though there could be a greater aid to culture than the having earned an honourable independence and as though any amount of culture will do match the man who is penniless except make him feel his position more deeply the young man who was told to sell all his goods must have been an entirely exceptional person if the advice was given wisely either for him or for the poor how much more often does it happen that we perceive a man to have all sorts of good qualities except money and feel that his real duty lies in getting every half penny and persuade others to pay him for his services and becoming rich it has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil the want of money is so quite as truly the above may sound irreverent but it is conceived in a spirit of the most utter reverence for those things which do alone deserve it that is the things which are which mould us and fashion us be they what they may for the things that have the power to punish us and which will punish us if we do not heed them for our masters therefore but I am drifting away from my story they have another plan about which they are making a great noise in fuss much as some are doing with women's rights in England a party of extreme radicals have professed themselves unable to decide upon the superiority of age or youth at present all goes on the supposition that it is desirable to make the young old as soon as possible some would have it that this is wrong and that the object of education should be to keep the old young as long as possible they say that each age should take it turn about week by week one week to the old to be top-soyers and the other the young during the line at 35 years of age but they insist that the young should be allowed to inflict corp of chastisement on the old without which the old would be quite incorrigible in any European country this would be out of the question but it is not so here for the straightness are constantly ordering people to be flogged so that they are familiar with the notion I do not suppose that the idea will ever be acted upon but it's having been even mooted is enough to show the utter perversion of the eronian mind