hey were never
suffered to do more than simply to register the decrees of the central
power. Duespeptos was king only in name,--_roi faineant_. Gaster was
the power behind the throne,--the Mayor of the Palace,--the great
Grand-Vizier. Nought went merrily, for he ruled with a rod of iron.
Every day his strange freaks set the empire topsy-turvy. Every day there
was growling and ill-feeling at his whimsical tyranny,--but nothing
more. Secession was as impossible as in the day of Menenius Agrippa.

Looking at it another way, Gaster might be called the object-glass
through which Duespeptos looked out upon the world,--a glass always
bubbly, distorted, and cracked, generally filmy and smoky, never
achromatic, and decidedly the worse for wear. I think that the world
thus seen must have had a very odd look to him. His most fitting
salutation to each fellow-peptic, as he crossed the field of vision,
would have been the Chinese form of greeting: "How is your stomach? Have
you eaten your rice?" or, perhaps, the Egyptian style: "How do you
perspire?" With him, the peptic bond was the only real one; all others
were shams. All sin was peptic in origin: Eve ate an apple which
disagreed with her. The only satisfactory atonement, therefore, must be
gastric. All reforms hitherto had profited nothing, because they had
been either cerebral or cardiac. None had started squarely from Gaster,
the true centre. Moral reform was better than intellectual, since the
heart lay nearer than the head to the stomach. Phalansteries,
Pantisocracies, Unitary Homes, Asylums, Houses of Refuge,--these were
all mere makeshifts. The hope of the world lay in Hygeian Institutes.
Heroes of heart and brain must bow before the hero of the stomach.
Judged by any right test of greatness, Graham was more a man than was
Napoleon or John Howard. He that ruled his stomach was greater than he
who took a city. Beranger's Roi d'Yvetot, who ate four meals a day,--the
Esquimaux, with his daily twenty-pound quantum of train-oil, gravy, and
tallow-candles,--the alderman puffing over callipash and callipee,--the
backwoodsman hungering after fattest of pork,--such men as these were no
common sinners: they were assassins who struck at the very fountain of
life, and throttled a human stomach. Pancreatic meant pancreative.
Gastric juice was the long-sought elixir. The liver was the lever of the
higher life. Along the biliary duct led the road to glory. All the
essence of character, l