Page 263 - erewhon

creature living, when she feels the knife at her throat, is apt
to develop unexpected powers of resistance, and to send
doctrinaires flying, even when they have bound her down
and think they have her at their mercy. What happened,
so far as I could collect it from the best authorities, was as
follows:-
Some two thousand five hundred years ago the Erewho-
nians were still uncivilised, and lived by hunting, fishing, a
rude system of agriculture, and plundering such few other
nations as they had not yet completely conquered. They had
no schools or systems of philosophy, but by a kind of dog-
knowledge did that which was right in their own eyes and
in those of their neighbours; the common sense, therefore,
of the public being as yet unvitiated, crime and disease were
looked upon much as they are in other countries.
But with the gradual advance of civilisation and increase
in material prosperity, people began to ask questions about
things that they had hitherto taken as matters of course,
and one old gentleman, who had great influence over them
by reason of the sanctity of his life, and his supposed in-
spiration by an unseen power, whose existence was now
beginning to be felt, took it into his head to disquiet him-
self about the rights of animals—a question that so far had
disturbed nobody.
All prophets are more or less fussy, and this old gentle-
man seems to have been one of the more fussy ones. Being
maintained at the public expense, he had ample leisure,
and not content with limiting his attention to the rights
of animals, he wanted to reduce right and wrong to rules,

Erewhon