CHAPTER XLII.

THE BIG DELIVERER POURS OUT ON THE FLEAS AN AWFUL STREAM OF SCORCHING TRUTHS, WHICH ARE AS MUCH AN INDICTMENT OF THE DOGS AS OF THE FLEAS.—THE POLICE DOGS GO IN OUT OF THE WET.—DESPERATE LAST EFFORT OF THE FLEAS TO REGAIN THEIR LOST POWER.—END OF THE FLEAS.—ESTABLISHMENT OF PURE DOGOGRACY UNDER A CLEANED AND PURIFIED FLAG OF THE TRULY FREE.

BUT in spite of the consternation amongst the fleas, the big dog remorselessly continued: “Furthermore, ye meanest and hatefullest suckers of blood; _ye enterprising, industrious and pushing_ ABSORBERS OF THE PRODUCTS OF OTHERS’ INDUSTRY; ye thieves, hear me! Ye have broken down the natural and just system of society, under which each dog got the full reward of his own industry.

“And it was all _our_ fault that ye did it. By the ignorant consent of the fools amongst us, ye _got on our backs_ and _we_ FOOLS _made it legal for you to be_ RASCALS and suck our blood. _We_ idiots made it compulsory on ourselves to carry you, feed you, fatten you, pamper you. We starved ourselves to make you rotten with overfeeding; and these two unnatural extremes we made to meet and form a sickening spectacle for High Heaven to spue over. We flattered you, we worshipped, praised, lauded and magnified you. We made you our gods, and taught ourselves to shake and tremble in the unapproachable light and glory of your infinite divinity. And ye were but _fleas_—little dirty insects, made great only by our stupid suffrage.

Oh, the infinite marvel of it! that the world of dogs should ever have gone so blind, imbecile and demented as to have lifted you dirty pests into the throne of the world, and made you the lords of all power and might. How many million yards of the sackcloth, and tons of the ashes of repentance will this, our mighty sin, need for its expiation! Dogs, dogs, that we were ever to have done it! But we did it; and for our reward ye drove us, ye bled us, ye tortured us, ye killed us and made merry over our corpses. Oh, shame and everlasting contempt be on us that we—without whose permission ye never could have existed one minute—should, in our fathomless stupidity, have created you, and then have abdicated the throne of our sovereignty and put you despicable, infinitesimal cusses into it!

“This was our sin; and ye, our creation, have been our just punishment. This is always Heaven’s judgment on those who sin against themselves by giving up their self respect, and surrendering their natural rights. We reap as we have sowed. We stripped ourselves of our God-given and inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—things that were NOT OURS TO GIVE AWAY—and sinfully gave them over to you, and lo! ye were the very ones who mocked and scourged our nakedness. We became your slaves and _thereby gave you the right to despise us_. We invested you with the whip and the spur, and thereby invested you with the right to drive us to the devil. And ye _have_ driven us to the devil. And we have had the added misery of seeing you trying to amuse us while driving us there.

“Ye stole all we had, and when thousands of us died of want your compassion was touched, and ye sent down for our relief quite a lot of good things, accompanied by tracts and choice extracts of Scripture, and a few requests that we be thankful and love the givers. But some of us, nosing amongst these gifts, recognized them as the same ones ye had stolen from us; and while the poor fools amongst us were trotting around thankfully licking their chops, and wagging their little tails, and tearfully and prayerfully invoking God’s choicest blessings upon you, we walked off disgusted that there should live fools so God-forsaken as to be thankful for the return of a crumb from the thief who stole his loaf. _Ye_ called it CHARITY, and the poor fools sent up a request to God to remember you in love for it. _We_ called it the small articles the thief is obliged to drop because Nemesis is after him; and we prayed God to send a time when we could remember you—WITH AN EXTINGUISHER.

“And this time has come now. We came here and heard you devising new schemes to divert us from our discontent. Ye knew that discontent is the precursor of investigation and the knowledge of what is amiss. We heard you propose everything but the only thing needful, viz: TO GET OFF OUR BACKS. Ye would make us believe that ye sought OUR GOOD; but the real motive of your conduct was YOUR OWN SAFETY. Your blood sucking franchise being your very life, ye could not, of course, think of giving it up; so ye proposed to throw a meatless bone to the dogs in the shape of Free Gospel, Free Music, Free Pictures and CHARITY BALLS—which are nothing less than a damnable endeavor to palm off on God and us your love of display and riotous pleasure as CHARITY. Ye _must_ have your hops anyhow. Ye _must_ have your ostentatious displays of pride and property, and your nights of dissipation; but the happy thought struck you that you might kill two birds with one stone, and have your unrestricted, selfish, fleshly pleasures, and by garbing them in the disguise of Charity, get also by means of them into Heaven’s good book. But we have found you out, and concluded that if we have our own freedom we can get our own gospel and music and pictures and do our own dancing.

“Therefore, we, in our plenary power to enforce this decision, do enact that _we will do without fleas_, and we do hereby resume the control of our own bodies; and therewith we resume all our self-alienated rights and powers; and at the same time we give, grant and convey to you, for your behoof and benefit, all that gospel, that music and those pictures ye have provided for us. We shall not need them now; ye may, for, lo! your doom is sealed.”

“What doom? What dog insolence is this?” cried one of the eminent fleas, in a bold tone. “Dost thou not know, dog, that this is sedition, anarchy and a breach of the peace? Begone! thou and thy low-born, dirty and ill-smelling crew, or by the Law we will turn you over to the police dogs.” And all the other fleas, plucking up heart at these words, cried out too; “Yes, begone!”

But the dogs laughed, and their leader said: “The day of dogs’ obedience to the commands of fleas is gone. Said I not unto you that their eyes had been moistened with the Dilute Solution of Common Sense, and that they can now see through fleas? Ye have not heard; but I and these my fellow dogs were commissioned by the other dogs of Canisville to come here and tell you that a new Will of the Dogs Expresser hath been set up, a very much bigger, better and more effective one than that which ye commanded your slaves and imported beasts to destroy and burn with fire. This Expresser hath the novel but righteous provision for _dogs_ to sit at the bottom of the shute thereof and _do the counting_. This hath been set up in the Public Place and all the dogs have this day dropped their little wills into the slot thereof, and when the trap in the bottom was pulled and the wills were counted it was found that there was a Great Majority, and the Great Majority said that both the fraudulent Nighuntos and the swindling Faraways should get away from the Tank, that the Blood and Bones Mill should be broken down and the Handle sold to the devil; that the lying Bamboozling Committee and the Great Many Headed Daily Press should be branded as frauds, and that all dogs, big, little and whatsoever, should be absolutely forbidden to contribute in any degree to the maintenance of fleas, and any dog found guilty of having the smallest flea on him should be treated as a public enemy and driven out of the city into the wilderness.

“The police dogs, alarmed at this universal coming of the dogs to their senses, have retired to their kennels, to watch the weathercock, and some very impulsive ones, being quite confident that the dogs are now on top, have very ostentatiously clubbed several eminent fleas; and the Bamboozlers and the Monstrous Fleas, after calling in vain on the prudent and non-committal police dogs to club back to slavery the newly self-enfranchised dogs, have run away. Bones and meat are coming out of their hiding places, and flesh is beginning to grow over the poor dogs’ bones; and we are here to tell you to depart peaceably and find some other community of fools to live on, or live on one another, we care not which.”

But the fleas flew into a great rage, and cried out: “To Hades with your infernal Expresser! Fleas always have been on top, and will be forever!” and, yelling “Down with Sedition,” they with one accord jumped upon the backs of the dogs, and knowing it was now a case of victory or death, they beset them sorely, saying they would teach the miserable, thankless curs who was master. There were many fleas to each dog, and they were very fierce and savage, but not a dog whined or scratched. With tail erect and a noble light in his intelligent eye, the leader turned and departed, followed in like manner by all the others. They passed a place where a lot of timber had been cut and each seized a big chip in his mouth as he trotted along. Soon they came to where flowed a considerable stream of water, on the bank of which they formed _in reverse order_. Then, with tails trailed in the very dust, and to the murmuring music of the moving waters, they waded in backwards as far as they could until nothing but the chips and the very tip of each nose was above the water. This caused the fleas to drop all thoughts but those of self-preservation, and in a scrambling panic they scampered from dry point to dry point till the chip was the only resting place for their feet. Then, holding each nose upright and each chip well aloft, each dog sank, until nothing but the chip, black with a cursing mob of outwitted and dethroned blood-suckers, was to be seen above the water. A moment more and each dog let go his chip and came to the surface a little way up stream, giving the widest possible berth to any chips floating away from his fellow dogs. Farther up the stream they took to the banks, on which they gathered together and from which they exhorted the drowning fleas to practice the virtue of content, and to look above to that Heaven to which they had so often pointed the dogs. But as the mob of erstwhile powerful tyrants floated away into the dim, forgotten Past, there came for answer only a wail of despair and a dying prayer that God would avenge them some day on a wicked and thankless race of dogs. The dogs, however, with humble and contrite hearts, burst forth into a dog song of deliverance, which ran:

Sound the loud timbrel o’er Misery’s dark sea, The Suckers are gone, the enslaved ones are free; Their power and their pride are gone down in the wave, And the curse is removed, of Master and slave.

And the dogs with songs and joy marched back to the city, and Pup McPoodle and all his gang of wicked and cowardly courtier dogs, hearing of their coming, were seized with terror, and “put” with such rapidity that the momentum of their going carried them far out of sight, and it is supposed they are going still.

And the free and happy dogs called the Big Dog Retriever, “for,” said they, “he hath retrieved our lost prosperity,” and they cried aloud that he be elected chief; but the Big Dog would not consent, and he said unto them: “No; I will not be your chief. Be ye your own chief; let this, for the future, be a government of the dogs, by the dogs, and for the dogs; delegate not your power to anyone, be he never so wise and good, for the dogs that do that commit treason against themselves, and if their chief sell them to the fleas, they are but justly punished, as ye have been by Pup McPoodle.” And all the dogs, having still the influence of the Dilute Solution in their eyes, cried out with one accord: “That is Plain Common Sense; _we_ will be the government, and no one shall have the power.”

And it was so. And they set up and kept up all the year round a great, big, free Will of the Dogs Expresser, and through it they passed a law that whatsoever law should henceforth be made should be _ratified by the dogs_ through the Will Expresser. And it was so. And all laws whatsoever which they had _were_ ratified through it and without its ratification was no law made that was made. And their laws were very few and very good; for they found that the wisdom of _all_ the dogs was greater than the wisdom of any one dog or of any few dogs; and there being very few laws, they were simple and easy to understand, for the object sought thereby was Justice and not to fatten fleas.

They also made what they called a Constitution—a Solemn League and Covenant—which they ratified seven times through the Will Expresser, that provided that fleas and suckers of any description should be regarded as Unconstitutional insects, to be arrested on sight and driven ignominiously out of town, and that any law to allow them an existence amongst dogs should be Unconstitutional, and that any dog who should ever propose such a law should be declared a traitor to the community, and condemned to abide by himself in the wilderness, and that any dog who even spoke with any favor of fleas should be deemed insane and be locked up out of sight.

So peace, good order and freedom abounded, and with these came more to eat than they ever needed.

And having true Freedom in the land they pulled down the Liberty Bell, and the grotesque copper Lie that disfigured the prospect at the gates of the city, and broke them both up for old junk, for they said they could not endure the sight of emblems that were lies when they were put up, and only reminded them of the days when they were bamboozled and cheated; and anyway, they said, real true Freedom was _seen_ and _felt_ everywhere, and needed no clangor of metal to proclaim its existence; for a Freedom that needed such an infernal din and racket and oratory and show to make itself known was evidently _not self-evident_.

And as for the old Flag of the Free, they hardly knew what to do with it. Some said that the fleas and the Bamboozlers had made such a lie of it, had so blasphemed Liberty in its name, and had so defiled it by hoisting it over so many damnable and bloody iniquities that, really, the only proper thing to do was to burn it and devise a new one. But some said that as it was originally devised by fairly honest dogs who had had no education concerning and experience with fleas, such as the expensive and terrible one they had just gone through, they thought if the old Flag were well fumigated to take away the sickening smell of fleas that clung to it, and were well scrubbed and scoured, and had all the dirt washed out of it, it would do very well. So they cleansed and purified it, and set it up; and under it they lived perfectly happy ever after.

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES.

1. Silently corrected simple spelling, grammar, and typographical errors.

2. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed.

3. A list of contents has been created by the transcriber.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Dogs and the Fleas, by Frederic Scrimshaw