e, in Skitzland, never removes the stomach.
Every man has to feed himself; and the necessity for finding food,
joined to the necessity for buying clothes, is a mainspring whereby the
whole clockwork of civilized life is kept in motion. Now, if a man
positively can not feed and clothe himself, he becomes a pauper. He then
goes to the Workhouse, where he has his stomach filled with a cement.
That stopping lasts a life-time, and he thereafter needs no food. His
body, however, becomes yellow by the superfluity of bile. The
yellow-boy, which is the Skitzland epithet for pauper, is at the same
time provided with a suit of clothes. The clothes are of a material so
tough that they can be worn unrepaired for more than eighty years. The
pauper is now freed from care, but were he in this state cast loose upon
society, since he has not that stimulus to labor which excites industry
in other men, he would become an element of danger in the state. Nature
no longer compelling him to work, the law compels him. The remainder of
his life is forfeit to the uses of his country. He labors at the
workhouse, costing nothing more than the expense of lodging, after the
first inconsiderable outlay for cement wherewith to plug his stomach,
and for the one suit of apparel.

When we came out of the workhouse, all the bells in the town were
tolling. The superintendent told me that I had sadly frittered away
time, for I had now no more than half an hour to live. Upon that I
leaned my back against a post, and asked him to prepare me for my part
in the impending ceremony by giving me a little information on the
subject of executions.

I found that it was usual for a man to be executed with great ceremony
upon the spot whereon his crime had been committed. That in case of
rebellions or tumults in the provinces, when large numbers were not
unfrequently condemned to death, the sentence of the law was carried out
in the chief towns of the disturbed districts. That large numbers of
people were thus sometimes discharged from a single market-place, and
that the repeated strokes appeared to shake, or crack, or pierce in some
degree that portion of the sky toward which the artillery had been
directed. I here at once saw that I had discovered the true cause of
earthquakes and volcanoes; and this shows how great light may be thrown
upon theories concerning the hidden constitution of this earth, by going
more deeply into the matter of it than had been done by any