To read the Personal Memoirs with a knowledge of the circumstances under which Grant wrote them is to gain insight into the reasons for his military success. — James McPherson

***

The presidency changed neither Ulysses S. Grant’s approach to leadership, nor his character. In the White House, Grant exhibited the same even-tempered ability to guide the nation through eight years of tensions after the Civil War as he did in his most important victories on the battlefield at Fort Donelson, Vicksburg and Appomattox.

His has been, perhaps, one of the most underrated presidencies in American history, as charges of cronyism have rung down through the decades, but the facts remain: Grant kept the nation from certain turmoil during one of its most volatile, postwar periods, when Nathaniel Bedford Forest’s Ku Klux Klan was attempting to wreak havoc in the South, when southern leaders simply traded one form of racial oppression for another and when America was on the brink of war with Spain. As president, Grant signed civil rights legislation, oversaw the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and set up America as an arbitrator on the world stage. After a failed third term campaign, Grant toured the world to much fanfare from Japan and China and Russia, thus serving as a kind of “coming out party” for the nation for which he had fought so nobly years earlier.

Clearly, Grant’s presidency was not without accusations of scandal. Perhaps the most famous affair was Black Friday, in which gold speculators Jay Gould and James Fisk seduced Grant’s brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, and assistant treasurer Daniel Butterfield into the action. While Grant was never directly linked to the scandal to use the government to raise the price of gold for speculative purchasing, Butterfield and Corbin were the real and unsuspecting culprits, with Gould pulling the strings in the background. With the price of gold eventually reaching a little less than $160, Harris Fahnestock of Jay Cooke and Company was among bankers wiring telegraphs to Washington calling for government intervention:

Immediate interference in this gold market is imperative. Exchange of four millions gold for bonds immediately done would change current at once. Otherwise, advance [in the price of gold] is indefinite.

Fully aware of the gravity of the situation, treasury secretary George Boutwell suggested to Grant that the government buy $3 million in gold from the New York subtreasury. In characteristic coolness, one can imagine Grant uttering this terse command:

I think you had better make it five million.

And what of Fisk and Gould? Jennie and Abel Corbin made a special trip from New York to appeal to Grant to help Corbin’s his now-suffering friends who had played too heavy a hand in their speculative ventures. Smith recounts the episode in elucidating detail:

Grant listened politely, puffed on his cigar, and then rose from his chair, cutting his brother-in-law off in mid-sentence. ‘This matter has been concluded,’ the president said. ‘I cannot open up or consider the subject.’ The United States, for the first time, had intervened massively to bring order to the marketplace. It was a watershed in the history of the American economy.

Here is Grant at his presidential best, and Smith at his authoritative best: Grant, displaying the same decisive adroitness that carried many a crucial battle in the Civil War and Smith painting a sharp image of his subject’s calm demeanor and simple logic.

In “This Mighty Scourge, ” historian James McPherson leaves it to Union general John Schofield to give the best account of the driving force behind Grant’s decisiveness under pressure:

It is one thing to describe Grant’s calmness under pressure, his ability to size up a situation quickly, and his decisiveness in action. It is quite another to explain the inner sources of these strengths. Ultimately, as Sherman noted, the explanation must remain a mystery. … Schofield noted that the most extraordinary quality of Grant’s ‘extraordinary character’ was ‘its extreme simplicity—so extreme that many have entirely overlooked it in their search for some deeply hidden secret to account for so great a character, unmindful that simplicity is one of the most prominent attributes of greatness.’ Grant made it look easy.

Grant, who left the active campaigning to others during the 1868 election, did not receive the Republican nomination for a third term. As Smith said, he was relieved, telling John Russell Young that the happiest day of his life was when he left Washington. “I felt like a boy getting out of school,” Grant said. Smith concludes the biography with the words of James Garfield:

No American has carried greater fame out of the White House than this silent man who leaves it today.

As Smith well notes, Grant wrote his memoirs while watching the clock and dying of cancer. Despite Grant’s circumstances while gathering his thoughts, historians have described the memoirs as lucid and engaging. “Action verbs predominate:,” Smith said. ‘move … engage … start … attack.:’”

Grant is generous with praise and sparing with criticism. He admits mistakes: ‘I have always regretted that last attack at Cold Harbor was made …. No advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained.’

Further, McPherson wrote about Grant’s work:

To read the Personal Memoirs with a knowledge of the circumstances under which Grant wrote them is to gain insight into the reasons for his military success.

In “Grant” through Smith we see a man who seems void of most, if not all, of the contemptible qualities that we can recognize in less backboned leaders: disloyal, dishonest, fake, egotistical and pompous. For all of his accomplishments in the Civil War and in the White House, perhaps Grant can be granted a notch or two of slack for his one obvious character flaw: loyalty to a fault.

In any case, we can credit Smith for bringing the full breath of Grant’s life into crystal clear view in the most digestible, accessible biography I have ever read.

Rating:

You are lost and disillusioned. What an awful thing to say.

Lovely song:

Here is the final version of the book tower picture showing books read in 2011 from our office read-off. The photo on the right now includes “Tried By War.”

Here are eight of the books that are on the docket for this year. I’m planning to continue in Civil War and revolutionary history but also have the urge to venture a little more into literature this year. I’m especially compelled to read some of the works that Christopher Hithens has reviewed in the last five or so years, reviews that were published in his most recent collection, “Arguably.”

Books in 2012

The autobiography of William Butler Yeats: Consisting of reveries over childhood and youth, the trembling of the veil, and dramatis personae	Tom Paine: America's Godfather, 1737-1809
This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War	General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse
Nathan Bedford Forrest's Redemption	Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays: The First and Second Series
The Civil War (American Heritage Books)	Grant

“I can’t spare this man, he fights.” – Abraham LincolnIf biographers may sometimes be accused of treating their subjects with too much bias one way or the other, Jean Edward Smith may perhaps be forgiven in the case of “Grant,” the seminal work about the U.S. Civil War general who can be credited with not only, and most famously, dealing the death blow to the Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia on the eastern front, but with opening the path to Atlanta for Sherman in the west.

One can see this not-undeserved admiration for Grant in Smith’s opening to the chapter titled, “Appomattox,” in which readers learn about Grant’s revolutionary strategy to move his forces around Lee’s main line of entrenchments to the east and then south to cross the James River in an attempt to roll up the Confederacy’s right flank.

In December 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, General George Patton broke contact with the enemy to his front, wheeled 90 degrees north, and took the Third Army on a forced march parallel to the line of battle to extricate the 101st Airborne at Bastogne. It was a perilous maneuver and an incredible tactical achievement, and it in no way diminishes Patton’s accomplishment to say that it pales alongside Grant’s withdrawal from Cold Harbor and his crossing of the James in June 1864.

One reason that Smith said it paled in comparison to Grant’s maneuver is likely because the blue coats did it some 80 years before Patton in a far less technologically advanced military era. Grant’s plan was also an extremely risky one. Had Lee moved against Grant as the latter’s forces headed southward, Lee could have nipped at Grant’s heels and took apart Federal troops piecemeal. Lee could not have anticipated what Grant was up to, however, and the Army of the Potomac successfully made it to the James.

This critical point in the eastern campaign, and one that would ultimately decide the outcome of the entire war and save the Union was indicative of Grant’s abilities on the field of battle. Fearless, cool under pressure and relentlessly fixated on the offensive, the general deserves our admiration as a commander exactly because he was a foil to the rather lifeless and immovable likes of McClellan, McDowell and Hooker. “Fightin Joe” Hooker, McClellan and Grant’s other predecessors were mostly failures with only intermittent successes in the east. Only until Grant arrived from the west did Lincoln know that he had a general who would at long last put the fight to Lee. And fight he did. The brutality with which Grant and Lee hit each other in the Wilderness, at Spotsylvania and at Cold Harbor is hard to overstate. By that point in the war, both Grant and Lincoln knew that nothing short of all-out war would defeat Lee’s forces, and Grant said in 1864 that

I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.

Smith not only captures Grant’s adeptness in the field and his humble presentation — Grant could rarely be distinguished by his dress from his subordinates — but also the chilling scenes that greeted combatants on both sides that took place in the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania. “The slaughter was unrelenting,” Smith said about the battlefield at Spotsylvania:

So too was the rain, turning trench floors into an oozy much where the dead and the wounded were trampled out of sight by men fighting for their lives.

This was the world in which Grant so unflinchingly operated, and this is the world and the life of the man Smith recalls with engaging lucidity and detail. I am as yet a little more than halfway through the work, but if it ends as it began, Smith’s “Grant” may go down as one of the most accessible and enjoyable histories I have ever read. On Grant, it is already the most significant.

OK, so I don’t have an exact page count for both of us — we both teetered out a little toward the end of the year  — but in the office read-off between Blake and myself, we completed somewhere in the neighborhood of 7,500 pages apiece totaling 21 books each. Without further adieu, here are our towers side by side in the order with which we completed them (books on the bottom were read near the beginning of 2011):

My tower on the right is missing “Tried By War” by McPherson because a pal of ours is currently reading it. And to answer the most immediate question that may surface about this post: yes, judging from the rather dense material above, we’ve got problems.

In any case, here is my list for 2011:

- “Positivist Republic: Auguste Comte and the Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1920″ – Gillis Harp – 264
- “Letter to a Christian Nation” – Sam Harris (reread) – 114
- “John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights” – David S. Reynolds – 592
- “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho – 165
- “Middlemarch: A study of Provincial Life” by George Eliot – 794
- “1491″ – 403
- “Thomas Jefferson Vs. Religious Oppression” – 150
- “Night” by Elie Weisel – 120
- “1421: The Year China Discovered America” by Gaven Menzies – 491, finished in spring
- “From Sea to Shining Sea: From the War of 1812 to the Mexican War, the Saga of America’s Expansion” by Robert Leckie – 623, finished in late spring
- “The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson” by Charles B. Sanford – 179, finished in summer
- “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief” by James McPherson – 384, finished in summer
- “Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South” by Albert Raboteau – 321, finished in summer
- “Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society” by John Andrew III – 199, finished in august
- “Union 1812: The Americans who Fought the Second War of Independence” by A.J. Langguth – 409, finished 9/7/11 = 5208
- “Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788″ by Pauline Maier – 489, finished 10/2/11 = 5697
- “The Federalist Papers” by Madison, Hamilton and Jay – 527, finished 10/30/11 = 6224
- “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism” by Susan Jacoby – 370
- “The Theory of the Leisure Class” by Thorstein Veblen – 400 = 6994
- “Erewhon” by Samuel Butler – 260
- “The Anti-Federalists: Critics of the Constitution 1781-1788″ by Jackson Turner Main – 286 = 7540 (21 books)

I nominate “Ratification” as the de facto best book that I’ve read this year, with “From Sea to Shining Sea” coming in second and “Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society” at a close third. My personal favorite was “John Brown: Abolitionist,” and my proudest achievement this year would be, of course, “Middlemarch.” Shew. Looks like I’ll have to bring out the heavy guns this year to top that. Maybe some Edward Gibbon is in order.

In the waning minutes of another year, I highlight the top 20 posts on this site from 2011:

• Jan. 5: Movie review: ‘Agora’ - “Given how beautiful and reasonably-minded Hypatia is thought to have been, I felt intense anger at the end of this film that such a smart and lovely creature had to endure such a hideous death by people who thought they had God on their side. And more than that, the feeling was tinged with the thought that she probably died in real life by a much worse means than suffocation and also that countless women were burned and hung or stoned as witches because of religion and ignorance. That’s not fiction.”
• Jan. 12: Harris on the Ten Commandments - “The need to dismiss religion in polite society still and unrelentingly presses upon us as a species, and this will continue as long as man fails to, in turn, dismiss his fear of death and the dark. “
• Feb. 12: Camus: ‘The point is to live’ - “So, like Sisyphus, in a moment that would shake most anyone to utter despair, Mersault is happy. And here is the consummation for Mersault and for the “Return to Tipasa” quote: Mersault had lived. He had experienced good times and bad, but in both, he found peace.”
• March 6: Why moderate religion is more bankrupt than fundamentalism - “Many, even myself, wholeheartedly agree that “love wins.” Some just don’t feel the need to summon God to make it so. As it turns out, love wins every day without him.”
• March 11: On the genesis of life - “Perhaps every theist agrees that there is an appearance of a design, but when I consider the vast number of failed planets and potential planets in our universe through the eons, the likelihood of a planet like ours eventually arising seems quite high, and in some 12-14 billion years, so high that we should be surprised if such a planet had not eventually formed. We live in that eventuality.”
• April 16: The gospel untruth – “It is, of course, within one’s right to believe something based on scant evidence and from a book steeped in contradictions, faulty science and math, bare bones textual evidence and stunningly primitive ethical codes. Some happily do, and all the better for them. … But even a cursory look at the case for the gospels reminds the rest of us that while Easter eggs, candy, and springtime offer nice pleasantries this time of year, the religious element ever behind the upcoming holiday was built, glorified and crowned on a now teetering house of cards.”
• May 2: 10 basic questions for believers (with sub-questions) – “What kind of loving father demands you love him or face the fire if you don’t? What kind of loving father demands you pass spiritual tests (Job, Abraham) to show your devotion?”
• May 13: Book review: ‘Night’ and the problem of evil – “No book that I have ever read brings these questions to the forefront with such brutal honesty. And I think it may be for that reason that The Times used the words “terrifying power” to describe this short, but seismic cattle car ride through the bowels of man’s darkest hour.”
• June 22: Jefferson’s religion - “To say Jefferson was a Christian in the modern sense of the word, that is, that Jesus was God incarnate, rose from the dead on the third day and will judge mankind on the last day, would be a false statement to make any way you slice it. He was a Christian in this sense only: he argued that to be literally “Christ-like” (the meaning of the word itself) was the highest moral height a person could reach, and that is all. Of everything else modern Christians believe about Jesus, Jefferson rejected without compunction, and this is clear from his letters and correspondence. In the modern sense of the word, Jefferson would not be a Christian and would be bound for eternal fire based on the doctrine of today’s Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Church of Gods and Calvinists.”
• June 30: Book review: ‘Tried by War’ – “Unlike other Lincoln biographies, which typically focus on his stance and political efforts to abolish slavery, his assassination, his humble upbringings and other topics, few, as McPherson points out, have delved specifically into Lincoln’s role as commander in chief.”
• July 3: Response to a recent letter to the editor – “And speaking of snakes, the Bible, with its differing accounts of man’s creation in the Garden, the variant steps by which the universe was made and contradictory details about Noah’s Ark, the Ten Commandments, Christ and, indeed, the very nature of God, the good book does a fine job of disproving itself and provides not even the hint of a “reasonable explanation.”
• Aug. 21: Book review: ‘Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society’ – “The conservative voice, often toeing the religious line, hostile to teaching evolution in the classroom, friendly to interests of corporations and investment bankers, hostile to the interests of minorities and the poor and hostile to change, is too strong in this nation, while the progressive voice, the only voice that demonstrably moves people toward ultimate utilitarianism, is too weak.”
• Sept. 13: Gene therapy to treat cancer - “…  it’s hard to overstate how important research into cell modification, gene therapy and stem cell research could be in treating and curing some of the most destruction diseases of our time, from Lou Gehrig’s, to cancer, immune deficiencies, Parkinson’s and others, yet, most of the evangelical people in this nation are worried about protecting the interests of clusters of undifferentiated cells.”
• Sept. 25: Biblical deconstruction I: In exordium – “The Bible, as much and probably more so than the Koran (since the Bible is older), has been the central cause of more human suffering and misery than I care to contemplate. God himself, if he existed, would be on the hook for at least 2.476 million people, not counting the flood, first-born Egyptians killed, etc. Thousands of his followers have millions more on their hands, from the Crusades, to Native Americans, to Africans dying from not having access to condoms (thanks to the Catholic church), to the Salem Witch Trials, to … it goes on.”
• Sept. 29: Biblical deconstruction II: the garden – “Last, how moral is it that the crimes of a person from, say, the 18th century, be used to convict and imprison someone living in 2011? Yet, the errant choice of two people forever impacts the lives (and apparently the afterlifes) of every single person who has or who ever will live simply because a god in an ancient text penned by superstitious society in Palestine deems it so. Yet still, God doesn’t seem very interested in the “sins” of millions of blasphemers and worshipers of other gods that followed Adam and Eve, except of course, in the pages of the Bible. As it happens, the world outside of the Bible, the only world that matters, hasn’t heard a peep from Big Brother.”
• Oct. 5: Biblical deconstruction III: Cain and Abel – “If God, then, is the author of reason, reason itself must be modified to also include murderous, barbarous, cruel and sadistic, scheming, as well as capriciousness, which is actually one of his least offensive attributes.”
•  Oct. 8: Real inspiration – “Religious folks talk a lot about spiritual inspiration. Well, how about inspiration, made possible by science, that brings a deaf woman to tears?”
• Nov. 20: No, this is not a spoof - “Has the electorate mindset shifted so much that a former establishment politician like Gingrich has to change is tone and amplify his speech to have a chance in 2012?”
• Nov. 30: On Butler’s ‘Erewhon’ – “All things considered, then, the entire text of the book is basically a business proposal that includes some proselytizing ruminations, and hidden behind the plot is Butler’s own cunning way of dicing up elements of Victorian life with the satirical knife edge.”
•  Dec. 23: Josephus and the historical Jesus – “Article 3 is obviously the passage that Christians pull out of context and attempt to claim this is evidence for Jesus outside of scripture. First, an observing Jew would not admit that Jesus was the Christ, much less make laudatory comments about him like: there were “ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him.”

And here is an inspiring clip about Hitchens peering into the abyss and smiling all the while:

A couple very short posts tonight because it is late on the East Coast, but here is one of the best lines I have ever heard from author Christopher Hitchens. If anyone is familiar with his body of work, that is saying something.

One of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.

I have run this line through my mind at least 10 times today. Here is the video:

As an English major, with a particular interest in British literature, no less, it’s peculiar to me that I did not come across the fascinating novel, “Erewhon” by Samuel Butler, in my studies. Perhaps because of my personal religious inclinations at the time and my particular college of choice, Clemson, works that were critical of religion were, purposefully or not, conspicuously absent from most course syllabi.

In any case, my particular copy came from a friend who thought I might find it to be an interesting read. And indeed I have. To briefly outline the premise, the British protagonist and traveler, Higgs, is working along one portion of an island. The book doesn’t say precisely where, but the notes indicate that Butler was writing from his experiences while in New Zealand. Higgs subsequently decides to trek inland with another character named Chowbok to find a suitable place in which he can raise sheep for profit on his own. Butler was a sheep farmer in New Zealand from 1860-64. Further inland, Higgs, whose companion eventually abandoned him on the trip, finds a civilization called “Erewhon,” the people of which, he later learns, have a decided distaste for machines, sick people and reason, among other things.

In one town, called the City of the Colleges of Unreason, the protagonist comes across college professors that specialize in subjects such as inconsistency, evasion and worldly wisdom and societies such as the “Suppression of Useless Knowledge” and the “Completer Obliteration of the Past.”

In the book, the reader learns of all sorts of practices and strains of thought that are wildly foreign to even 19th century ears, much less 21st century ones. For instance, human conception is really an incarnation from a pre-existence. In these pre-existence, the people, in their pre-forms, are really in some kind of ghostly, ethereal state, and to get into the tangible world, that is, to be conceived inside a mother that is actually not of their own choosing, they have to sign a document waiving their right to choose and confirming that they agree to be conceived. They don’t get to choose what kind of family, poor or rich, into which they are born. Further, Erewhon’s inhabitants have come to believe that technology, and particularly in the form of “The Machines,” is dangerous to the survival of humanity because they feel that the machines could eventually eclipse humans in intelligence. This idea, of course, is quite ahead of its time since it’s really Butler who is writing it some 70 years or so before the first computer was ever actually invented.

The two most important sections of “Erewhon” in my view are the chapters titled, “The Musical Banks” and the three-part, “The Book of the Machines.”

The Musical Banks chapter is a criticism of religious hypocrisy and the almost insatiable desire of the faithful to raise money for the church (God, if he wanted churches to have paid employees and various programs, could he not provide for them outright without making their members pick up the tab with the notorious 10 percent business?). The Wikipedia entry on the book claims the chapter is partially about the ancient practice of “coinage,” but this may be too complicated an interpretation. Butler seems to simply be comparing churches to banks in their capacity and ability to collect and store money. The images of pagan gods on the Erewhonian money also alludes to the tie between the church and pecuniary interests.

Here is Butler’s rather biting conclusion of the Musical Banks chapter:

The saving feature of the Erewhonian Musical Bank system … was that while it bore witness to the existence of a kingdom that is not of this world, it made no attempt to pierce the veil that hides it from human eyes.  It is here that almost all religions go wrong.  Their priests try to make us believe that they know more about the unseen world than those whose eyes are still blinded by the seen, can ever know—forgetting that while to deny the existence of an unseen kingdom is bad, to pretend that we know more about it than its bare existence is no better. …

So far as I could see, fully ninety per cent. of the population of the metropolis looked upon these banks with something not far removed from contempt.  If this is so, any such startling event as is sure to arise sooner or later, may serve as nucleus to a new order of things that will be more in harmony with both the heads and hearts of the people.

The chapter titled, “The Book of the Machines,” outlines why the Erewhon people have come to mistrust machines and why they have, for the most part, done away with them in their society. As Higgs notes, all traces of machines (watches, for instance) have been stored away and are never used. Indeed, Higgs was heavily frowned upon and made to turn over his watch when he entered their city.

In a passage that eerily foresees the 2004 film, I Robot, the Isaac Asimov short stories from the mid-1950s, as well as the greatly diminished physical size of modern computer CPU chips, readers learn of the concern Erewhonians have for the evolution by which they fear machines may morph into something more than they are at the present:

The largest of them will probably greatly diminish in size.  Some of the lowest vertebrate attained a much greater bulk than has descended to their more highly organised living representatives, and in like manner a diminution in the size of machines has often attended their development and progress. …

“But returning to the argument, I would repeat that I fear none of the existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present.  No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward.  Should not that movement be jealously watched, and checked while we can still check it?  And is it not necessary for this end to destroy the more advanced of the machines which are in use at present, though it is admitted that they are in themselves harmless?

“As yet the machines receive their impressions through the agency of man’s senses: one travelling machine calls to another in a shrill accent of alarm and the other instantly retires; but it is through the ears of the driver that the voice of the one has acted upon the other.  Had there been no driver, the callee would have been deaf to the caller.  There was a time when it must have seemed highly improbable that machines should learn to make their wants known by sound, even through the ears of man; may we not conceive, then, that a day will come when those ears will be no longer needed, and the hearing will be done by the delicacy of the machine’s own construction?—when its language shall have been developed from the cry of animals to a speech as intricate as our own? …

Some people may say that man’s moral influence will suffice to rule them; but I cannot think it will ever be safe to repose much trust in the moral sense of any machine.

“Again, might not the glory of the machines consist in their being without this same boasted gift of language?  ‘Silence,’ it has been said by one writer, ‘is a virtue which renders us agreeable to our fellow-creatures.’”

The title of the book is an anagram for the word “nowhere,” and quite possibly, while Erewhon the place may be modeled after New Zealand, we can probably think of it in literary as a hypothetical space and not intended to represent any specific region, other than a remote spot where a civilization of people have developed a unique set of beliefs. Through these people’s thoughts and actions, we get a better understanding of what happens when religion plays the trump card and human morality takes a wrong turn. For instance, in Erewhon, sick people are treated as criminals, often dying while attempting to carry out their harsh sentences, while actual criminals are seemingly coddled and given a form of “therapy” to help them recover from their “immoral” state.

As if the satire was not laid on heavy enough while Higgs was actually in Erewhon, once he gets back to England, Higgs begins planning a way to attempt to ship a number of Erewhonians back to Europe, put them to work in a moneymaking venture, complete with shareholders, and convert them to Christianity:

By the time the emigrants got too old for work they could then by shipped back to Erewhon and carry the good seed with them.

I can see no hitch nor difficulty about the matter, and trust that this book will sufficiently advertise the scheme to insure the subscription of the necessary capital; as soon as this is forthcoming I will guarantee that I convert the Erewhonians not only into good Christians but into a source of considerable profit to the shareholders.

All things considered, then, the entire text of the book is basically a business proposal that includes some proselytizing ruminations, and hidden behind the plot is Butler’s own cunning way of dicing up elements of Victorian life with the satirical knife edge.

Rating: