“What now is thine opinion of the Commandment?” they asked.
“Oh, the unutterable wickedness of Theft and Crime,” he replied, “it is abominable; it is damnable; no law can be too stringent and severe against it; and any one guilty of breaking the Law ought to be hanged, drawn and quartered, and fed to the beasts of the field and the buzzards and vultures of the air as a prey and as a warning to others. Oh! The very contemplation of Crime makes me shudder; do, oh do, change the painful subject;” and a strong spasm of pain thrilled his frame from nose to tail.
But when they allowed his supply of stomach furniture to run low, the glow of most beautiful intelligence went out of his eye, the most reposeful calm came off his frame, the heavenly peace went off his countenance, and the propensity to hold forth, like a fat-salaried barker, on Contentment and Trust in God, left him.
And when his supply registered one degree below zero, they asked him “What is thine opinion of the Commandment ‘Thou Shalt not Steal?’”
And he replied, absent-mindedly, “Steal? Steal? Well; it is not right—to be caught at it.”
But as it fell lower and lower, the dimness of his moral vision increased, until at the lowest—the starvation point—his eyes glared and bulged with a ferocious insanity; and when asked then, “Is it wrong to steal? What is the difference between meum and tuum?” he viciously cursed and snarled and snapped at his questioners, and replied that he did not comprehend their idiotic jargon, he wanted something to eat.
All which, these philosophers said, demonstrated that Vice, Crime and Sin (so called) are merely symptoms of Want and Poverty, and vacuity of the alimentary canal; and they boldly asserted that a good sound Gospel of Comfort and Plenty, earnestly preached would do more in five minutes to cleanse the earth of sin and fill it with righteousness, than all the barkings of all the salaried barkers, and all the sin suppressing machinery of clubs and ropes in the world would do in five thousand years.
And when these words came to the ears of the salaried barkers and the Sin Suppressors they were greatly scandalized, and said they had never heard such blasphemous and ungospel talk. It was actually bringing into contempt the sacred machinery of vice squelching, which had been incorporated by the State, hallowed by the Church, and had grown through long years and by the expenditure of great wealth and invention, to the proportions of a National Institution, and a great Vested Interest. It was actually insinuating, most wickedly, that there was a short, simple and direct way of attaining an object, which was a gross insult to the memory of the heaven-anointed Clubstocks, Elder Berrys, Blatherskites and other sanctified ones whose genius had invented the present elaborately involuted, convoluted, conglomerated and roundabout way of getting at it. But, above all, it was a direct blow at the livelihood of thousands of good and moral dogs who were given employment, at good feed, to operate the machinery, who would, if this new-fangled and highly irreligious Gospel of Victuals were adopted, be thrown completely—yes, completely, brethren—out of work.
So the Vice Squelchers and the barkers and the eminent fleas had some of these new gospellers arrested; and they set certain lewd Dogs of Belial to witness against them that they had blasphemed Religion, and had plotted a great plot to kill off the fleas, and inaugurate an awful Society and Civilization of Flealess Dogs.