evangelist in Lisbon," would address the meeting. "Funds
are urgently needed to carry on this good work," concluded the notice. So
he lay well back in the shade of the hedge, and thought whether some sort
of an article could not be made by vindicating the terrible Yahoos; one
might point out that they were in many respects a simple and
unsophisticated race, whose faults were the result of their enslaved
position, while such virtues as they had were all their own. They might
be compared, he thought, much to their advantage, with more complex
civilizations. There was no hint of anything like the Beit system of
publishing in existence amongst them; the great Yahoo nation would surely
never feed and encourage a scabby Houyhnhnm, expelled for his foulness
from the horse-community, and the witty dean, in all his minuteness, had
said nothing of "safe" Yahoos. On reflection, however, he did not feel
quite secure of this part of his defense; he remembered that the leading
brutes had favorites, who were employed in certain simple domestic
offices about their masters, and it seemed doubtful whether the
contemplated vindication would not break down on this point. He smiled
queerly to himself as he thought of these comparisons, but his heart
burned with a dull fury. Throwing back his unhappy memory, he recalled
all the contempt and scorn he had suffered; as a boy he had heard the
masters murmuring their disdain of him and of his desire to learn other
than ordinary school work. As a young man he had suffered the insolence
of these wretched people about him; their cackling laughter at his
poverty jarred and grated in his ears; he saw the acrid grin of some
miserable idiot woman, some creature beneath the swine in intelligence
and manners, merciless, as he went by with his eyes on the dust, in his
ragged clothes. He and his father seemed to pass down an avenue of jeers
and contempt, and contempt from such animals as these! This putrid filth,
molded into human shape, made only to fawn on the rich and beslaver them,
thinking no foulness too foul if it were done in honor of those in power
and authority; and no refined cruelty of contempt too cruel if it were
contempt of the poor and humble and oppressed; it was to this obscene and
ghastly throng that he was something to be pointed at. And these men and
women spoke of sacred things, and knelt before the awful altar of God,
before the altar of tremendous fire, surrounded as they professed by