“We thank you for having sent us the Gospel of Earthly Contentment and Future Reward. As ye were the first, efficient and only cause of our discontent, the robbers of all our means of growth, physical comfort and intelligence, ye owed us something as a set-off; but seeing that ye offered us only a very far distant and uncertain intangibility of future recompense—that ye yourselves had no power to grant—while what ye took from us by FRAUD and mental chloroforming was something real, actual and of present tangible value, we have decided not to accept your promissory note that is to be redeemed some indefinite time in next eternity. We believe that NOW is the accepted time for those who toil to get their reward, and that NOW is the accepted time for all idlers and suckers to starve to death. We believe that it is blasphemy to neglect the earth that IS for a heaven that MAY BE.
“We believe that God is the God of JUSTICE and that he has punished us for doing ourselves the injustice of being robbed, and for doing you the unkindness and injustice of helping you to live in demoralizing idleness on unearned wealth.
“Therefore, out of pure love for ourselves, and a consuming anxiety for your welfare, we will take the full reward of our labor NOW, and turn over to you all the hopes and realities of future reward and glory which ye make so much of. Ye have taught us the ineffable blessedness of poverty and trust in God; of empty bellies and the contemplation of other-world bliss.
“Therefore, be it enacted, and it is hereby enacted, by us dogs now restored to our senses, that from the passage of this Act, i.e. NOW, ye fleas, suckers, robbers and poisoners, shall have all your privileges as idle drags upon our prosperity taken away from you, and ye shall henceforth be endowed and crowned with all those sacred and inalienable rights to starve and die, to sink or swim, which are now the great and particular endowment of dogs throughout the world.
“But in lieu thereof, and as a set-off, we make over to you in fee simple, and to your heirs and assigns forever, all those mansions in the sky, and the grounds thereto appertaining; all those sweet fields of Eden and the sweet rest to be found there; all those harps and crowns of gold, the robes and palms and glories and pleasures forever more, and all the sweetness and light and satisfaction, etc., etc., etc. These we give, grant and convey to you in the same disinterested spirit as that in which you bequeathed them to us.
“Go, then, in peace, and, rich in all the wealth of future hope, may you be happy. Heretofore, ye have taken our earthly things and pretended to give us in exchange heavenly things. We will now re-exchange them, and while ye are enjoying the strange new bliss of earning your earthly things, so there is nothing to prevent us, while enjoying our earthly rights, from looking forward to the good things of the future.”
And the fleas, at the pronunciation of this sentence, fell into a grievous terror, and bewailed the hard fate that had overtaken them; and said that life without wealth and leisure would be but penal servitude; and none of them seemed to take any comfort in this Heavenly Inheritance. Yea, some of them, at this reversal of fortune, went insane, and many of them saying, that if a “title clear to mansions in the skies” was all that was left of the wreck of their fortunes, they might as well be dead, took one tremendous jump and went out and drowned themselves.
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.