nce been
cashier at a Musical Bank was out of the field for other employment, and
was generally unfitted for it by reason of that 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 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 presenting 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 another law, which, though professedly more
sacred, has far less effect on their daily life 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 uns