Page 155 - erewhon

ment 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 en-
ter 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 commit-
ted themselves to what was practically a leap in the dark.
One would have thought that caution in this respect was
an elementary principle,—one of the first things that an
honourable man would teach his boy to understand; but in
practice it was not so.
I even saw cases in which parents bought the right of pre-
senting to the office of cashier at one of these banks, with the
fixed determination that some one of their sons (perhaps
a mere child) should fill it. There was the lad himself—
growing up with every promise of becoming a good and
honourable man—but utterly without warning concerning
the iron shoe which his natural protector was providing for
him. Who could say that the whole thing would not end
in a life-long lie, and vain chafing to escape? I confess that
there were few things in Erewhon which shocked me more
than this.
Yet we do something not so very different from this even
in England, and as regards the dual commercial system, all
countries have, and have had, a law of the land, and also an-
other law, which, though professedly more sacred, has far

1 Erewhon