they are toys
compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing
in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in
his weapons. This marvellous force of Life of which you boast is a force
of Death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness. What is
his religion? An excuse for hating ME. What is his law? An excuse for
hanging YOU. What is his morality? Gentility! an excuse for consuming
without producing. What is his art? An excuse for gloating over pictures
of slaughter. What are his politics? Either the worship of a despot
because a despot can kill, or parliamentary cockfighting. I spent an
evening lately in a certain celebrated legislature, and heard the
pot lecturing the kettle for its blackness, and ministers answering
questions. When I left I chalked up on the door the old nursery
saying--"Ask no questions and you will be told no lies." I bought a
sixpenny family magazine, and found it full of pictures of young men
shooting and stabbing one another. I saw a man die: he was a London
bricklayer's laborer with seven children. He left seventeen pounds
club money; and his wife spent it all on his funeral and went into
the workhouse with the children next day. She would not have spent
sevenpence on her children's schooling: the law had to force her to let
them be taught gratuitously; but on death she spent all she had. Their
imagination glows, their energies rise up at the idea of death, these
people: they love it; and the more horrible it is the more they enjoy
it. Hell is a place far above their comprehension: they derive their
notion of it from two of the greatest fools that ever lived, an Italian
and an Englishman. The Italian described it as a place of mud, frost,
filth, fire, and venomous serpents: all torture. This ass, when he was
not lying about me, was maundering about some woman whom he saw once in
the street. The Englishman described me as being expelled from Heaven
by cannons and gunpowder; and to this day every Briton believes that
the whole of his silly story is in the Bible. What else he says I do not
know; for it is all in a long poem which neither I nor anyone else ever
succeeded in wading through. It is the same in everything. The highest
form of literature is the tragedy, a play in which everybody is
murdered at the end. In the old chronicles you read of earthquakes and
pestilences, and are told that these showed the power and majesty of God
and the lit