CHAPTER XVIII.
Virtue and Victuals.—The Conductometer.—Terrible Fate of Those Who Teach Unrevealed Religion and Blasphemously Attempt to Save Bodies Rather Than Souls.
IN spite, however, of the efforts of the mighty crowd of Vice Suppressors, Sin Killers, and Depravity Squelchers, putters down of this, that and t’other, and preventers of t’other, that and this, the depravity of the dogs went on increasing. The poor dogs were harassed on all sides and suffered a grand battue, but the Church and the salaried barkers on whose behalf the battue was undertaken, bagged very little of the game; hundreds slipped through the well-organized ranks of the beaters and clubbers and got themselves away to out-of-the-way holes and corners where they perversely went down and down and down in the depths of depravity. They had grown utterly disheartened in the everlasting and ferocious struggle for a living; and in spite of the good missionaries who told them they must walk in the Fear of God, they grew reckless and said the Fear of God fills no bellies, that the Fear of God was all very well when you had a good pile of good victuals laid by in the kennel, but when you hadn’t, the Fear of Hunger was the only Fear it was incumbent upon a poor dog to fear.
The good missionaries were much shocked, of course, with such manifestation of disregard for what they called “higher things” and begged of them to read the little tract called the “Way of Life,” but these depraved dogs did grievously and irreligiously retort that Victuals was the only “Way of Life” they cared for, and did turn their tails and depart, and they were no more heard of in Good Society.
But there were divers perverse dogs that would neither walk in the “Way of Life” and the “Fear of God,” nor go down in the depths of depravity. By the merest good luck they managed to feed fairly well, and this, they said, was the only reason why they did not become as depraved as their fellow dogs.
These were very philosophical dogs in their way. They boldly declared that the foundation and nine tenths of the superstructure of all the virtue and good conduct in the world is plenty of good honest victuals; and that that particular form of irregular conduct in dogs called Crime is neither vice nor wickedness, necessarily, but is, mostly, Nature’s blind and instinctive rebellion and protest against the deprivation, by Law, of victuals and other natural rights. Therefore, said they, as the conduct called Crime is the direct creation and result of Law, it is very funny that the Law should disown and declare it illegal.
These philosophical dogs had constructed what they called a Conductometer, by which they illustrated the working of their theory.
This was an ordinary living dog whose stomach had been made visible through the said dog having accidentally, one day, got in line with a thing called a “gun” in the hands of an animal of the human species called a “Sport,” who had “touched it off” just for fun, and blown a hole in the poor dog’s ribs.