740 
Longevity , 
[November, 
as may render him fitted to re-enter society. His banish- 
ment is softened by the permitted visits of friends, and when 
recovery is completed he is free. But in confirmed cases 
where the criminality is incurable, the law is inexorable : 
incurable mad men and mad women, treated with all ima- 
ginable care and consideration, are retained apart to the end 
of their lives. They must not corrupt others. Most of all, 
they must not be the fathers and mothers of a new progeny, 
corrupted by that most silent and potent of all corrupting 
influences, hereditary taint. 
The education of this ideal people is never forced. Hard 
examinations, prizes, rewards for work, — all these stimu- 
lants would be held as mentally poisonous, mere excitants 
of local emulation, to the exclusion of the general. Learn- 
ing is universally appreciated, and the office of teacher is 
amongst the very highest in the social scale. 
It is, further, a part of the whole economy of the Saluts 
that they never dream either of killing themselves or injuring 
themselves by work on the one hand, or by retirement from 
work on the other. They hold that a human being is con- 
structed to perform a certain amount of work. His heart 
is born to deliver a certain number of beats, — say, in one 
hundred years of natural life, three billions six hundred and 
fifty millions of beats. He is constituted to develop in the 
various organs of his body so many trillions of adtive cells, 
which make up his molecular organism, and which, duly 
supplied with force derived from without, are capable of 
performing so much work as they live and die. More force 
of heart, more development of cells, more life in short, no 
man or woman can ever possess than that with which they 
are primitively endowed, as far, at all events, as are yet 
known, and all the free will in the world cannot change this 
one fundamental fadt. At the same time free will can do 
this much : it can use its own as it likes ; it can wear out 
its cell life altogether equally and sedately, and so live the 
whole allotted time, keeping a good margin ; or it can wear 
out its cell life altogether and rapidly, leaving no margin ; 
or it can wear out the cell life of one particular organ — 
brain, heart, stomach, liver, kidney — by excessive use and 
exhaustion of the cells of such organ, and so can kill the 
whole organisation by the death of one organ, the rest of 
the organs being still in condition, perchance, for years of 
activity. He only should retire from adfive work from whom 
work retires, is another idea and pradfice so faithfully fol- 
lowed that every town yields many workers who, like Titian 
the Great, are doing their full quantity at the centenaries of 
