Page 90 - erewhon

impatient of one another’s boredom, but would soon die if
they had no one whom they might bore—in fact, that they
would be kept as professional borees. When I heard this, it
occurred to me that some rumours of its substance might
perhaps have become current among Chowbok’s people;
for the agony of his fear had been too great to have been
inspired by the mere dread of being burnt alive before the
statues.
I also questioned them about the museum of old ma-
chines, and the cause of the apparent retrogression in all
arts, sciences, and inventions. I learnt that about four hun-
dred years previously, the state of mechanical knowledge
was far beyond our own, and was advancing with prodi-
gious rapidity, until one of the most learned professors
of hypothetics wrote an extraordinary book (from which
I propose to give extracts later on), proving that the ma-
chines were ultimately destined to supplant the race of man,
and to become instinct with a vitality as different from, and
superior to, that of animals, as animal to vegetable life. So
convincing was his reasoning, or unreasoning, to this effect,
that he carried the country with him; and they made a clean
sweep of all machinery that had not been in use for more
than two hundred and seventy-one years (which period was
arrived at after a series of compromises), and strictly for-
bade all further improvements and inventions under pain
of being considered in the eye of the law to be labouring
under typhus fever, which they regard as one of the worst
of all crimes.
This is the only case in which they have confounded