And it was so that the dogs grew unable and unwilling to think of anything but the horrible and ever enlarging vacuum in their insides, and of what to fling into it.
So the plague was stayed.
CHAPTER XXV.
Demonstrates That All is Not Success That Succeeds, and That an Overdose of Physic is as Bad as a Disease.—All Work and No Play Makes the Dogs, Not Only Dull, But Ferocious.—Devising Bamboozlements.—Chancy Mountebank Dephool Flea and His Bamboozling Committee.
TRULY the plague of thinking was stayed, but a peril took its place which the over-jubilant fleas had overlooked. For the dogs, by reason of the intensifying of their hunger by the Cornering of all the means of life by the Sacred Trustees, began to develop a hunger madness that took on the form of blind and unthinking violence.
Now that the fleas had succeeded so well in keeping the dogs’ thoughts down in their stomachs, and out of their heads, the dogs acted from stomach alone, and in a way most disappointing and discouraging to the fleas. They had ceased to think, certainly, but what they lacked in thought they made up in feeling, and went blindly at anything that might appease their awful hunger. They tore and killed and ate one another, and, in their indiscriminating rage, ate even some fleas; and so meagre and skinny did they become that their yield of blood very sensibly diminished, insomuch that thousands of little fleas shrivelled up and died, and divers of the eminent and large fleas grew slack around the paunch.
In this extremity the fleas sent again for the wise fleas, and said: “Alas! what shall we do? for the remedy is worse than the disease; we have cured the dogs of thinking and seditiousness, but thereby our Dividends have shrunk, and many of our beloved friends have died. Better had we taken the risk of sedition than have brought on this state of things. Your advice was not good.”