“But us dogs, whom ye condescendingly permit to pay for all this, and allow to look at the glory of afar off, whom ye permit to read of the forty-course banquets ye feast at in our name, ye taught that we owed our very life to you, and that it was our duty to give up our daily blood to you, and give thanks to Almighty God that He had in boundless mercy so bountifully blessed us with fleas. And we dogs did so deeply fall into the idiocy and supineness generated by immemorial usage and custom, that we came to regard this division of us into masses and classes, sucked and suckers, robbed and robbers, workers and idlers, starved and overfed, as of natural order and divine appointment.
“That is, most of us did. There were a few who refused to wag the adulatory tail of approval of this system. We ceased not to howl and bark day and night our discontent. And for this ye called in dogs of Belial to witness against some of us, saying, they did blaspheme God and the Law, and then ye carried them forth and stoned them with stones, or hanged them with ropes till they died. And ye threw mud at us in the name of the Lord, and went and told the hungriest and leanest and foolishest dogs amongst us that we were ‘Socialists,’ ‘Seditionists,’ and ‘Anarchists;’ and they, not knowing in their heart what those words meant, did therefore hound us and mob us and persecute us for endeavoring to restore to them the liberty they had lost. Oh, they accused us of disturbing their rest; of trying to make them discontented; of imperilling their positions with their natural superiors, the fleas; of trying to subvert the natural order of suckers and sucked, and of trying to bring on the day of judgment and the destruction of the universe. Poor fools!
“But one day, two or three of the hungriest of us wandered away out of town, and lay down under a tree in a solitary place to think and weep out the sadness of our hearts; and as we wept and meditated, behold an Angel appeared unto us and saluted us. And we, shaking with terror, said, ‘Who art thou?’ and he said, ‘I am Plain Common Sense, the rarest Angel of all that visit the earth; Heaven hath appointed me Messenger-in-Particular to the hungriest of the hungry.
“‘I never visit fleas, and seldom do I come to fat and comfortable dogs. I am a lonely Angel, and I have a tremendously long beat to patrol, which I cannot, even if I make haste, complete in less than ten hundred years; therefore, ye are very lucky in being here just as I was passing. But whosoever entertaineth me receiveth always a blessing.’
“So saying, he drew from a pocket in his toga, a little phial containing a thin and colorless fluid, and bidding us hold up our faces, he, with his finger, moistened our eyes with the fluid. Instantly, our eyes were endowed with a marvellous seeing power, and our brains seemed to be filled with lightning flashes. ‘See ye any better now?’ said he. ‘Infinitely,’ said we; ‘why, we see what a lot of unspeakable idiots, and wooden-headed fools we are, not to have seen what a lot of utterly useless, superfluous and ruinously exhausting fleas we have been carrying all these years.’ ‘Just so,’ said the Angel. ‘Now, take this phial, and what hungry dog’s eyes soever ye shall moisten with the fluid, shall instantly receive power to see through a ladder.’
“We thanked him, and implored him to tarry with us and abide and take something; but he was grieved, and said he was no police dog, and had several stars to visit before midnight. And he vanished from our sight.
“So we took the little phial, which was labelled, ‘Dilute Solution of Plain Common Sense; one drop, applied to the eyes of a very hungry dog, warranted to make him see through a flea,’ and tried it on every hungry dog we met; and the result was, as the Angel foretold, that every one was instantly restored to the most exalted sanity, and saw clear through the humbug of the whole dirty useless gang of you, your Bamboozling Committee, your Flags, Statues, and lying Patriotism, your blasphemy of Liberty, and cant of Freedom, and everything else that there is of you.
“All these dogs with me have had their eyes touched with the Solution, and the epidemic, as your fool Bamboozlers and Emdees call it, has run through three-fourths of Canisville, and the country roundabout.
“Now, therefore, we have come hither to propose a new modus vivendi, some way of living without you; but before we do that we desire to express to you our gratitude for all the kind things you have done and have this night proposed to do.