talk as though
all currency save that of the Musical Banks should be abolished; and yet they
knew perfectly well that even the cashiers themselves hardly used the Musical
Bank money more than other people. It was expected of them that they should
appear to do so, but this was all. The less thoughtful of them did not seem
particularly unhappy, but many were plainly sick at heart, though perhaps they
hardly knew it, and would not have owned to being so. Some few were opponents of
the whole system; but these were liable to be dismissed from their employment at
any moment, and this rendered them very careful, for a man who had once been
cashier at a Musical Bank was out of the field for other employment, and was
generally unfitted for it by reason of that course of treatment which was
commonly called his education. In fact it was a career from which retreat was
virtually impossible, and into which young men were generally induced to enter
before they could be reasonably expected, considering their training, to have
formed any opinions of their own. Not unfrequently, indeed, they were induced,
by what we in England should call undue influence, concealment, and fraud. Few
indeed were those who had the courage to insist on seeing both sides of the
question before they committed themselves to what was practically a leap in the
dark. One would have thought that caution in this respect was an elementary
principle, - one of the first things that an honourable man would teach his boy
to understand; but in practice it was not so.
    I even saw cases in which parents bought the right of presenting to the
office of cashier at one of these banks, with the fixed determination that some
one of their sons (perhaps a mere child) should fill it. There was the lad
himself - growing up with every promise of becoming a good and honourable man -
but utterly without warning concerning the iron shoe which his natural protector
was providing for him. Who could say that the whole thing would not end in a
lifelong lie, and vain chafing to escape? I confess that there were few things
in Erewhon which shocked me more than this.
    Yet we do something not so very different from this even in England, and as
regards the dual commercial system, all countries have, and have had, a law of
the land, and also another law, which, though professedly more sacred, has far
less effect on their daily life and actions. It seems as though the need for
some law over and above, and sometimes even conflicting with, the law of the
land, must spring