pain for the pleasure of inflicting it —only
man does that. Inspired by that mongrel Moral
Sense of his! A sense whose function is to distinguish
between right and wrong, with liberty to choose which
of them he will do. Now what advantage can he
get out of that? He is always choosing, and in
nine cases out of ten he prefers the wrong.
There shouldn’t be any wrong; and without the
Moral Sense there couldn’t be any. And
yet he is such an unreasoning creature that he is
not able to perceive that the Moral Sense degrades
him to the bottom layer of animated beings and is
a shameful possession. Are you feeling better?
Let me show you something.”
In a moment we were in a French village. We
walked through a great factory of some sort, where
men and women and little children were toiling in
heat and dirt and a fog of dust; and they were clothed
in rags, and drooped at their work, for they were
worn and half starved, and weak and drowsy.
Satan said:
“It is some more Moral Sense. The proprietors
are rich, and very holy; but the wage they pay to
these poor brothers and sisters of theirs is only
enough to keep them from dropping dead with hunger.
The work-hours are fourteen per day, winter and summer—from
six in the morning till eight at night—little
children and all. And they walk to and from the
pigsties which they inhabit—four miles each
way, through mud and slush, rain, snow, sleet, and
storm, daily, year in and year out. They get
four hours of sleep. They kennel together, three
families in a room, in unimaginable filth and stench;
and disease comes, and they die off like flies.
Have they committed a crime, these mangy things?
No. What have they done, that they are punished
so? Nothing at all, except getting themselves
born into your foolish race. You have seen how
they treat a misdoer there in the jail; now you see
how they treat the innocent and the worthy.
Is your race logical? Are these ill-smelling
innocents better off than that heretic? Indeed,
no; his punishment is trivial compared with theirs.
They broke him on the wheel and smashed him to rags
and pulp after we left, and he is dead now, and free
of your precious race; but these poor slaves here—why,
they have been dying for years, and some of them will
not escape from life for years to come. It is
the Moral Sense which teaches the factory proprietors
the difference between right and wrong—you
perceive the result. They think themselves better
than dogs. Ah, you are such an illogical, unreasoning
race! And paltry—oh, unspeakably!”
Then he dropped all seriousness and just overstrained
himself making fun of us, and deriding our pride in
our warlike deeds, our great heroes, our imperishable
fames, our mighty kings, our ancient aristocracies,
our venerable history—and laughed and laughed
till it was enough to make a person sick to hear him;
and finally he sobered a little and said, “But,
after all, it is not all ridiculous; there is a sort
of pathos about it when one remembers how few are
your days, how childish your pomps, and what shadows
you are!”
