The Erewhonians regard death with less abhorrence than disease.  If it is an offence at all, it is one beyond the reach of the law, which is therefore silent on the subject; but they insist that the greater number of those who are commonly said to die, have never yet been born—­not, at least, into that unseen world which is alone worthy of consideration.  As regards this unseen world I understand them to say that some miscarry in respect to it before they have even reached the seen, and some after, while few are ever truly born into it at all—­the greater part of all the men and women over the whole country miscarrying before they reach it.  And they say that this does not matter so much as we think it does.

As for what we call death, they argue that too much has been made of it.  The mere knowledge that we shall one day die does not make us very unhappy; no one thinks that he or she will escape, so that none are disappointed.  We do not care greatly even though we know that we have not long to live; the only thing that would seriously affect us would be the knowing—­or rather thinking that we know—­the precise moment at which the blow will fall.  Happily no one can ever certainly know this, though many try to make themselves miserable by endeavouring to find it out.  It seems as though there were some power somewhere which mercifully stays us from putting that sting into the tail of death, which we would put there if we could, and which ensures that though death must always be a bugbear, it shall never under any conceivable circumstances be more than a bugbear.

For even though a man is condemned to die in a week’s time and is shut up in a prison from which it is certain that he cannot escape, he will always hope that a reprieve may come before the week is over.  Besides, the prison may catch fire, and he may be suffocated not with a rope, but with common ordinary smoke; or he may be struck dead by lightning while exercising in the prison yards.  When the morning is come on which the poor wretch is to be hanged, he may choke at his breakfast, or die from failure of the heart’s action before the drop has fallen; and even though it has fallen, he cannot be quite certain that he is going to die, for he cannot know this till his death has actually taken place, and it will be too late then for him to discover that he was going to die at the appointed hour after all.  The Erewhonians, therefore, hold that death, like life, is an affair of being more frightened than hurt.

They burn their dead, and the ashes are presently scattered over any piece of ground which the deceased may himself have chosen.  No one is permitted to refuse this hospitality to the dead:  people, therefore, generally choose some garden or orchard which they may have known and been fond of when they were young.  The superstitious hold that those whose ashes are scattered over any land become its jealous guardians from that time forward; and the living like to think that they shall become identified with this or that locality where they have once been happy.