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immoderately indulged in. I was shown more than one case in which the
real or supposed virtues of parents were visited upon the children to the
third and fourth generation. The straighteners say that the most that
can be truly said for virtue is that there is a considerable balance in
its favour, and that it is on the whole a good deal better to be on its
side than against it; but they urge that there is much pseudo-virtue
going about, which is apt to let people in very badly before they find it
out. Those men, they say, are best who are not remarkable either for
vice or virtue. I told them about Hogarth's idle and industrious
apprentices, but they did not seem to think that the industrious
apprentice was a very nice person.




CHAPTER XI: SOME EREWHONIAN TRIALS


In Erewhon as in other countries there are some courts of justice that
deal with special subjects. Misfortune generally, as I have above
explained, is considered more or less criminal, but it admits of
classification, and a court is assigned to each of the main heads under
which it can be supposed to fall. Not very long after I had reached the
capital I strolled into the Personal Bereavement Court, and was much both
interested and pained by listening to the trial of a man who was accused
of having just lost a wife to whom he had been tenderly attached, and who
had left him with three little children, of whom the eldest was only
three years old.

The defence which the prisoner's counsel endeavoured to establish was,
that the prisoner had never really loved his wife; but it broke down
completely, for the public prosecutor called witness after witness who
deposed to the fact that the couple had been devoted to one another, and
the prisoner repeatedly wept as incidents were put in evidence that
reminded him of the irreparable nature of the loss he had sustained. The
jury returned a verdict of guilty after very little deliberation, but
recommended the prisoner to mercy on the ground that he had but recently
insured his wife's life for a considerable sum, and might be deemed lucky
inasmuch as he had received the money without demur from the insurance
company, though he had only paid two premiums.

I have just said that the jury found the prisoner guilty. When the judge
passed sentence, I was struck with the way in which the prisoner's
counsel was rebuked for having referred to a work in which the guilt of
such misfortunes as the prisoner's was extenuated to a degree that roused
the indignation of the court.

"We shall have," said the judge, "these crude and subversionary books
from time to time until it is recognised as an axiom of morality that
luck is the only fit object of human veneration. How far a man has any
right to be more lucky and hence more venerable than his neighbours, is a
point that always has been, and always will be, settled proximately by a
kind of higgling and haggling of the market, and ultimately by brute

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