isn't it so? What do we work, and fight, and hate
for? What do we spend our lives worrying to beat the other feller for?
Why do we set our noses into other folks' affairs and worry them to
death to think, and act, and feel the way we do? And all the while it
don't matter a thing. Of course we're fools. We'll hand over when the
time comes, and the old world'll roll on, and it's not been shifted a
hair's-breadth for our having lived, in spite of the obituaries the
news-sheets hand out like a Sunday School mam at prize time. Say, here,
it's no use fooling ourselves. Life's one great big thing that don't
take shape by reason of our acts. What's the civilisation we love to pat
ourselves on the back for? I'll tell you. It's just a thing we've
invented, like--wireless telegraphy, or soap, or steam-heat; and it
hands us a cloak to cover up the evil that man and woman'll never quit
doing. Before we made civilisation a feller got up on to his hind legs
and hit the other feller over the head with a club; and if he was hungry
he used him as a lunch. Now we don't do that. We break him for his
dollars and leave him and his poor wife and kids hungry, while we buy a
lunch with the stuff we beat out of him. Why do we work? For one of two
elegant notions. It's either to fill ourselves up with the things we've
dreamt about when appetite was sharp set, and hate to death when we get,
or it's to satisfy a conceit that leaves us hoping and believing the
rest of the world'll hand us an epitaph like it handed no other feller
since ever it got to be a habit burying up the garbage death produces.
Why do we fight and hate? Because we're poor darn fools that don't know
better, and don't know the easy thing life would be without those
things. And as for settin' our noses into the affairs of other folk,
that's mostly disease. But it isn't all. No, sir. There's more to it
than that," he laughed. "If it was just disease it wouldn't matter a
lot, but it isn't. There isn't a fool man or woman born into this world
that doesn't reckon he or she can put right the fool notions and acts of
other fools. And when the other feller persuades them the game's not the
one-sided racket they guessed it was, then they get mad, and start
groping and scheming how to boost their notions on to a world that's
spent a whole heap of time fixing things, mostly foolish, to its own
mighty good satisfaction. I say right here we're fools if we aren't
crooks, which is the exception.