Like most of the great satirists of the world, Butler's saeva indignatio was aroused by the daily conflicts between reason and stupidity, between candor and disingenuousness, with all their mutations of hypocrisy, guile, deceit, and sham. In "Erewhon" it was human unreason, as a clever youth sees it, that he was attacking. We remember vividly the beautiful Erewhonians, who knew disease to be sin, but believed vice to be only disease. We remember the "straighteners" who gave moral medicine to the ethically unwell, the musical banks, the hypothetical language, the machines that threatened to master men, as in the war of 1914- 1918 and in the industrial system of to-day they have mastered men and made them their slaves. There was a youthful vigor in "Erewhon," a joyous negligence as to where the blow should fall, a sense of not being responsible for the world the author flicked with his lash, which saved the book from the condemnation that would have been its fate had the Victorians taken it seriously. It was an uneven book, beginning with vivid narrative in the best tradition of Defoe, losing itself finally in difficult argument, and cut short in mid-career. "Erewhon Revisited" is much better constructed. The old craftsman has profited by his years of labor in the British Museum. He has a story to tell, and tells it, weighting it with satire judiciously, as a fisherman weights his set line. If his tale becomes unreal it is only when he knows the author is ready to hear the author in person. If the Erewhon of his first visit does not fit his new conception he ruthlessly changes it. One misses the satiric _tours de force_ of the first "Erewhon." There is nothing so brilliant as the chapters on disease and machines which for fifty years since life has been illustrating. But "Erewhon Revisited" is a finished book; it has artistic unity. And why does Butler revisit Erewhon? Not because he was trained as a priest and must have an excuse to rediscuss theology, although the story of the book suggests this explanation. Higgs, the mysterious stranger of "Erewhon," who escaped by a balloon, has become a subject for myth. In Erewhon he is declared the child of the sun. Miracles gather about the supreme miracle of his air-born departure. His "Sayings," a mixture of Biblical quotation and homely philosophy, strained through Erewhonian intellects, become a new ethics and a new theology. His clothes are adopted for national wear (although through uncertainty as to how to put them on one part of the kingdom goes with buttons and pockets behind). Sunchildism becomes the state religion. The musical banks, which had been trading in stale idealism, take it over and get new life; and the professors of Bridgeford, the intellectuals of the kingdom, capitalize it, as we say to-day, and thus tighten their grip on the public's mind and purse.