Still the polity was defective, for the country remained subject to
crime, misery, and disease.

The proverb that "Prevention is better than cure," to which everybody
gives unhesitating assent, but which is often forgotten in practice,
lies at the root of most of the reforms, both moral and physical,
effected by the Tootmanyoso. The policy of prevention--that is, of
destroying maladies of mind and body in the germ, before they had been
allowed to spread their poison--was one of his leading principles. Under
his influence, the physicians of Montalluyah made it less their duty to
cure than to prevent disease, therein differing widely from our
practitioners, who are not usually called to exercise their skill until
a malady has been developed, and has perhaps assumed large proportions.

Under his influence likewise it was thought better to diminish moral
evil by extirpating faults in the child, rather than by punishing crimes
in the man.

Another prominent feature in the polity of the great Legislator of
Montalluyah is the occupation of every person in the intellectual or
physical pursuit for which he has been fitted by natural qualifications,
developed and fortified by culture. Nobility, position, and wealth are
made to depend on merit alone, ascertained by a mechanism which neither
favouritism, ignorance, nor accident can affect. These laws may for an
instant seem to partake of a democratic tinge; but it will be clearly
perceived that the regulations concerning the institutions of property
and marriage are diametrically opposite to those which have rendered the
theories of Communists so generally hateful.

Many of the Tootmanyoso's reforms resulted from an application of