The Dogs and the Fleas / By One of the Dogs

by Frederic Scrimshaw

And all the Bamboozlers answered, “Aye, we hear.”

“Very good then,” said the Many Headed, “dogs have one great weakness, and that weakness is their silly love of noise and show. All history shows, and all our experience proves, that nothing fetches dogs so quick as noise, racket, din and gaudy show. Low, coarse, undiscerning simpletons, they are all animal sensibility, and have not yet developed the ability to pick truth from error, reality from show, and fraud out of its fine garments of honesty; gumps and boobies, they are pleased with a rattle and tickled with a straw.

“Work then, therefore, along the line of their strongest weakness. Give them noise to make, and plenty of it; something to make an idiotic din with; something to make them happy and shout. Let us make them a Bell, a big Bell, an enormous Bell; and we will call it a Liberty Bell. And so bewitched and superstitionized are they now with everything that is called Liberty that without more ado they will fall down and worship it. Then we will set them all to hammer on it, and the noise of the hammering thereof will please the poor idiots immensely; and then with our solemnest visages, we will call the noise the Proclamation of Liberty; at which bewitching words they will all fall down and worship again. So shall their befoolment, imbecilitation and enslavement be clinched and confirmed for ever, and ye fleas shall reign supreme, and suck their blood for ever and ever, Amen.”

“Bravo! Bravo!” cried all the fleas in chorus. “Good! Grand! give ’em a Bell, poor imbeciles; anything to please ’em; noise is cheap, and Liberty metal costs less than Liberty itself.”

And the suggestion of the Great Many Headed Gee Whizz seemed good unto the Committee, and they made him Minister Plenipotentiary in the matter. And he went and sent his Circulators abroad amongst the dogs, to tell them that a grand new pleasure had been devised for them; that their prosperity, their glory, their independence, their National Wealth, their unexampled LIBERTY, were all agoing to be celebrated with a Bell, a big Bell, a nonpareil Bell, that should weigh thirteen thousand pounds, and, with gorgeous ceremonies, should be baptized a LIBERTY BELL, to the honor of God and the glory of themselves; and the show would be worth going many miles to see; and every Tom, Dick, Harry and Jack was agoing to hammer on it, in honor of everything and everybody, at every hour of day and night; and the noise of it would be beau-u-u-tiful, and it would be so loud, and there would be such a lot of it that the heavens would be just full of it; that all the angels would knock off their regular business and make a great holiday to listen to it; and we should all prostrate ourselves and tell God what a wise thing he did when he passed by all the other dogs in the world and picked US out to be the recipients of such wealth and glory and Liberty as he had deluged us with.

And the dogs were delighted with the prospect of so much glory, and paid great attention to do as they were told.

Then in due time, the Great Daily Press announced that the Bamboozling Committee had appointed themselves, in the name of the dogs, to devise a Bell and to superintend all the ceremonies.

Then they proclaimed abroad that as all, both dogs and fleas, were the recipients of Heaven’s blessings of wealth and Freedom, and as this Bell was to be an emblematic Bell, all, both dogs and fleas, must contribute something towards the making of it; so that when its voice should be hammered out, it should be the voice of all. Therefore every one must bring a bit of metal of some sort and cast it into the fire.

And on a day appointed, the fleas and the dogs were gathered around the melting pot; and the fleas, being very wealthy, sent in, with much ostentation, gold and silver, and nickel, which they called Liberty Metal, and which with prayer was cast into the fire; and the dogs, being very poor, went about and scratched up old bits of junk tin, and iron and brass, and brought them, and with prayer cast them into the fire; then all the salaried barkers said grace over the melting mass; and the ever-ready Tee de Little Wit Blatherskite, explained that the emblematic meaning of this unifying fusion of all these heterogeneous elements, was that we all, though fleas and dogs, poor and rich, small and great, white and black, weak and strong, were really only one, having all interests in common, and that as in this grand composite Bell, the glory of each component part was merged in the glory of the whole, so the glory of each in this nation—poor and rich, top and bottom—was merged in the glory of the whole of us; in short, the E Pluribus Unum of the Bell typified the E Pluribus Unum of us.