3 make
32 as certainly as 2 and 2 make 4.

I am quite sure that if this narrative should ever fall into Erewhonian
hands, it will be said that what I have written about the relations
between parents and children being seldom satisfactory is an infamous
perversion of facts, and that in truth there are few young people who do
not feel happier in the society of their nearest relations {4} than in
any other. Mr. Nosnibor would be sure to say this. Yet I cannot refrain
from expressing an opinion that he would be a good deal embarrassed if
his deceased parents were to reappear and propose to pay him a six
months' visit. I doubt whether there are many things which he would
regard as a greater infliction. They had died at a ripe old age some
twenty years before I came to know him, so the case is an extreme one;
but surely if they had treated him with what in his youth he had felt to
be true unselfishness, his face would brighten when he thought of them to
the end of his life.

In the one or two cases of true family affection which I met with, I am
sure that the young people who were so genuinely fond of their fathers
and mothers at eighteen, would at sixty be perfectly delighted were they
to get the chance of welcoming them as their guests. There is nothing
which could please them better, except perhaps to watch the happiness of
their own children and grandchildren.

This is how things should be. It is not an impossible ideal; it is one
which actually does exist in some few cases, and might exist in almost
all, with a little more patience and forbearance upon the parents' part;
but it is rare at present--so rare that they have a proverb which I can
only translate in a very roundabout way, but which says that the great
happiness of some people in a future state will consist in watching the
distress of their parents on returning to eternal companionship with
their grandfathers and grandmothers; whilst "compulsory affection" is the
idea which lies at the root of their word for the deepest anguish.

There is no talisman in the word "parent" which can generate miracles of
affection, and I can well believe that my own child might find it less of
a calamity to lose both Arowhena and myself when he is six years old,
than to find us again when he is sixty--a sentence which I would not pen
did I not feel that by doing so I was giving him something like a
hostage, or at any rate putting a weapon into his hands against me,
should