ngerous,
and was just excluded by the limit of 271 years. Then came the
reactionary civil wars which nearly ruined the country, but which it
would be beyond my present scope to describe.

CHAPTER XXVI: THE VIEWS OF AN EREWHONIAN PROPHET CONCERNING THE RIGHTS OF
ANIMALS

It will be seen from the foregoing chapters that the Erewhonians are a
meek and long-suffering people, easily led by the nose, and quick to
offer up common sense at the shrine of logic, when a philosopher arises
among them, who carries them away through his reputation for especial
learning, or by convincing them that their existing institutions are not
based on the strictest principles of morality.

The series of revolutions on which I shall now briefly touch shows this
even more plainly than the way (already dealt with) in which at a later
date they cut their throats in the matter of machinery; for if the second
of the two reformers of whom I am about to speak had had his way--or
rather the way that he professed to have--the whole race would have died
of starvation within a twelve-month. Happily common sense, though she is
by nature the gentlest 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 Erewhonians 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 inspiration by an unseen power, whose existence was now
beginning to be felt, took it into his head to disquiet himself about the
rights of animals--a question that so far had disturbed nobody.

All prop