which they were thus put to, or the young from being
deliberately swindled in some of the most important branches of human inquiry,
and directed into false channels or left to drift in the great majority of
cases.
    I cannot think I am mistaken in believing that the growing tendency to limit
families by infanticide - an evil which was causing general alarm throughout the
country - was almost entirely due to the way in which education had become a
fetish from one end of Erewhon to the other. Granted that provision should be
made whereby every child should be taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, but
here compulsory state-aided education should end, and the child should begin
(with all due precautions to ensure that he is not overworked) to acquire the
rudiments of that art whereby he is to 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;