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habit, or what not, gives many of them a kindly interest even in creatures who have so much wronged them as the unborn have done; and though a man generally hates the unwelcome little stranger for the first twelve months, he is apt to mollify (according to his lights) as time goes on, and sometimes he will become inordinately attached to the beings whom he is pleased to call his children.

Of course, according to Erewhonian premises, it would serve people right to be punished and scouted for moral and intellectual diseases as much as for physical, but here they stop short half-way. They see that the movements of the body are within a person's own control, whereon they conclude that its health is so also; they are keenly alive to the consequences of a physical deterioration, and are therefore inexorable upon this head, resting upon their mythology of the unborn; but they shrink from going further, because they feel that few have either had power over their own original disposition, or been able to escape from free will: they are therefore loath to give scouting a logical position in their theories concerning moral delinquency.

In spite, however, of modifications in practice of a theory which is itself revolting, the relations between children and parents in that country are less happy than in Europe. It was rarely that I saw cases of real hearty and intense affection between the old people and the young ones. Here and there I did so, and was quite sure that the children, even at the age of twenty, were fonder of their parents than they were of any one else; and that of their own inclination, being free to choose what company they would,