y else to do the dirty work. You and I are just like them.
There is no difference, except that we have eaten more and better. I am
eating them now, and you too. But in the past you have eaten more than I
have. You have slept in soft beds, and worn fine clothes, and eaten good
meals. Who made those beds? and those clothes? and those meals? Not
you. You never made anything in your own sweat. You live on an income
which your father earned. You are like a frigate bird swooping down upon
the boobies and robbing them of the fish they have caught. You are one
with a crowd of men who have made what they call a government, who are
masters of all the other men, and who eat the food the other men get and
would like to eat themselves. You wear the warm clothes. They made the
clothes, but they shiver in rags and ask you, the lawyer, or business
agent who handles your money, for a job."

"But that is beside the matter," I cried.

"Not at all." He was speaking rapidly now, and his eyes were flashing.
"It is piggishness, and it is life. Of what use or sense is an
immortality of piggishness? What is the end? What is it all about? You
have made no food. Yet the food you have eaten or wasted might have
saved the lives of a score of wretches who made the food but did not eat
it. What immortal end did you serve? or did they? Consider yourself and
me. What does your boasted immortality amount to when your life runs
foul of mine? You would like to go back to the land, which is a
favourable place for your kind of piggishness. It is a whim of mine to
keep you aboard this ship, where my piggishness flourishes. And keep you
I will. I may make or break you. You may die to-day, this week, or next
month. I could kill you now, with a blow of my fist, for you are a
miserable weakling. But if we are immortal, what is the reason for this?
To be piggish as you and I have been all our lives does not seem to be
just the thing for immortals to be doing. Again, what's it all about?
Why have I kept you here?--"

"Because you are stronger," I managed to blurt out.

"But why stronger?" he went on at once with his perpetual queries.
"Because I am a bigger bit of the ferment than you? Don't you see?
Don't you see?"

"But the hopelessness of it," I protested.

"I agree with you," he answered. "Then why move at all, since moving is
living? Without moving and being part of the yeast there would be no
hopelessness. But,--and the