o earn his living.

He cannot acquire these in what we in England call schools of technical
education; such schools are cloister life as against the rough and tumble
of the world; they unfit, rather than fit for work in the open. An art
can only be learned in the workshop of those who are winning their bread
by it.

Boys, as a rule, hate the artificial, and delight in the actual; give
them the chance of earning, and they will soon earn. When parents find
that their children, instead of being made artificially burdensome, will
early begin to contribute to the well-being of the family, they will soon
leave off killing them, and will seek to have that plenitude of offspring
which they now avoid. As things are, the state lays greater burdens on
parents than flesh and blood can bear, and then wrings its hands over an
evil for which it is itself mainly responsible.

With the less well-dressed classes the harm was not so great; for among
these, at about ten years old, the child has to begin doing something: if
he is capable he makes his way up; if he is not, he is at any rate not
made more incapable by what his friends are pleased to call his
education. People find their level as a rule; and though they
unfortunately sometimes miss it, it is in the main true that those who
have valuable qualities are perceived to have them and can sell them. I
think that the Erewhonians are beginning to become aware of these things,
for there was much talk about putting a tax upon all parents whose
children were not earning a competence according to their degrees by the
time they were twenty years old. I am sure that if they will have the
courage to carry it through they will never regret it; for the parents
will take care that the children shall begin earning money (which means
"doing good" to society) at an early age; then the children will be
independent early, and they will not press on the parents, nor the
parents on them, and they will like each other better than they do now.

This is the true philanthropy. He who makes a colossal fortune in the
hosiery trade, and by his energy has succeeded in reducing the price of
woollen goods by the thousandth part of a penny in the pound--this man is
worth ten professional philanthropists. So strongly are the Erewhonians
impressed with this, that if a man has made a fortune of over 20,000
pounds a year they exempt him from all taxation, considering him as a
work of art, and too precious t