THE DEVIL. And is Man any the less destroying himself for all this boasted brain of his?
Have you walked up and down upon the earth lately? I have; and I have examined
Man's wonderful inventions. And I tell you that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but
in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and
machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. The peasant I tempt
to-day eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand
years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a thousand centuries as
the fashion of a lady's bonnet in a score of weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he
carries a marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden
molecular energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers far
behind. In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the
like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had wanted money
instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious
bicycles: 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 littleness of Man. Nowadays the chronicles describe
battles. In a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and explosive
shells until one body runs away, when the others chase the fugitives on horseback and
cut them to pieces as they fly. And this, the chronicle concludes, shows the greatness
and majesty of empires, and the littleness of the vanquished. Over such battles the
people run about the streets yelling with delight, and egg their Governments on to
spend hundreds of millions of money in the slaughter, whilst the strongest Ministers
dare not spend an extra penny in the pound against the poverty and pestilence through
which they themselves daily walk. I could give you a thousand instances; but they all
come to the same thing: the power that governs the earth is not the power of Life but of
Death; and the inner need that has nerved Life to the effort of organizing itself into the
human being is not the need for higher life but for a more efficient engine of destruction.
The plague, the famine, the earthquake, the tempest were too spasmodic in their action;
the tiger and crocodile were too easily satiated and not cruel enough: something more
constantly, more ruthlessly, more ingeniously destructive was needed; and that
something was Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows, and the
electrocutor; of the sword and gun; above all, of justice, duty, patriotism and all the other
isms by which even those who are clever enough to be humanely disposed are
persuaded to become the most destructive of all the destroyers.
