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.