Erewhon Revisited Twenty Years Later, Both by the Original Discoverer of the Country and by His SonButler, Samuel
Philosophy
Erewhon Revisited Twenty Years Later, Both by the Original Discoverer of the Country and by His Son
Butler, Samuel
Satire; Utopian fiction; Utopias -- Fiction
“You see those vergers standing near my brothers, who gave up their seats
to us. Hanky tried to goad you into speaking that they might arrest you,
and get you into the Bank prisons. If you fall into their hands you are
lost. I must arrest you instantly on a charge of poaching on the King’s
preserves, and make you my prisoner. Let those vergers catch sight of
the warrant which I shall now give you. Read it and return it to me.
Come with me quietly after service. I think you had better not reveal
yourself at all.”
As soon as he had given my father time to read the foregoing, George took
a warrant out of his pocket. My father pretended to read it and returned
it. George then laid his hand on his shoulder, and in an undertone
arrested him. He then wrote on another scrap of paper and passed it on
to the elder of his two brothers. It was to the effect that he had now
arrested my father, and that if the vergers attempted in any way to
interfere between him and his prisoner, his brothers were to arrest both
of them, which, as special constables, they had power to do.
Yram had noted Hanky’s attempt to goad my father, and had not been
prepared for his stealing a march upon her by trying to get my father
arrested by Musical Bank officials, rather than by her son. On the
preceding evening this last plan had been arranged on; and she knew
nothing of the note that Hanky had sent an hour or two later to the
Manager of the temple--the substance of which the reader can sufficiently
guess. When she had heard Hanky’s words and saw the vergers, she was for
a few minutes seriously alarmed, but she was reassured when she saw
George give my father the warrant, and her two sons evidently explaining
the position to the vergers.
Hanky had by this time changed his theme, and was warning his hearers of
the dangers that would follow on the legalization of the medical
profession, and the repeal of the edicts against machines. Space forbids
me to give his picture of the horrible tortures that future generations
would be put to by medical men, if these were not duly kept in check by
the influence of the Musical Banks; the horrors of the inquisition in the
middle ages are nothing to what he depicted as certain to ensue if
medical men were ever to have much money at their command. The only
people in whose hands money might be trusted safely were those who
presided over the Musical Banks. This tirade was followed by one not
less alarming about the growth of materialistic tendencies among the
artisans employed in the production of mechanical inventions. My father,
though his eyes had been somewhat opened by the second of the two
processions he had seen on his way to Sunch’ston, was not prepared to
find that in spite of the superficially almost universal acceptance of
the new faith, there was a powerful, and it would seem growing,
undercurrent of scepticism, with a desire to reduce his escape with my
mother to a purely natural occurence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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