Page 150 - erewhon

by their licentious desire for greater present return, which
was at the root of nine-tenths of the opposition; by their
vanity, which would prompt them to affect superiority to
the prejudices of the vulgar; and by the stings of their own
conscience, which was constantly upbraiding them in the
most cruel manner on account of their bodies, which were
generally diseased.
Let a person’s intellect (she continued) be never so
sound, unless his body is in absolute health, he can form
no judgement worth having on matters of this kind. The
body is everything: it need not perhaps be such a strong
body (she said this because she saw that I was thinking of
the old and infirm-looking folks whom I had seen in the
bank), but it must be in perfect health; in this case, the less
active strength it had the more free would be the working
of the intellect, and therefore the sounder the conclusion.
The people, then, whom I had seen at the bank were in real-
ity the very ones whose opinions were most worth having;
they declared its advantages to be incalculable, and even
professed to consider the immediate return to be far larger
than they were entitled to; and so she ran on, nor did she
leave off till we had got back to the house.
She might say what she pleased, but her manner carried
no conviction, and later on I saw signs of general indiffer-
ence 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 com-
mercial panics, and in times of general distress, the people
as a mass did not so much as even think of turning to these

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