DING DONG LIBERTY BELL.—LIBERTY BELLS CHEAPER THAN LIBERTY.
RIGHT in the midst of all this universal starvation and death, when
every scrap of liberty had been taken from the dogs, and not one dare
open his mouth to say his soul or body was his own, the Board of Public
Safety suggested to the Bamboozling Committee that now would be the most
appropriate time, in the eternal fitness of things, to get up an extra
special bamboozlement that should forever fix and clinch in the minds of
the dogs the idiotic delusion that they were free.
So the ever-ready Bamboozling Committee ran together and summoned to
their sitting all the glib-tongued fat fleas and salaried barkers they
could find; and President Chancy Mountebank Dephool Flea arose and said,
“Dear Friends: The state of our town and country is very satisfactory
just now. Never in its whole history was there such a beautiful blending
and harmony of the interests of dogs and fleas as now. Our upper class
fleas are doing marvellously well. Thanks to God, dividends are large
and frequent, owing to the fact that very many of the middle-class
fleas, who alienated altogether too much blood that rightfully belonged
to us, have died off. The dogs everywhere have been reduced to know
their place, thanks to the efforts of our brethren, Carnivorous and
Phrique—to whom our all-wise God gave the strength of his arm in
the hour of their sore need—and of our friends, Rosy Pretty Flower,
Pennzy Pattyson, Webbfoot, Gold Jay, and our faithful, paunch-bellied
police dogs. And the efforts of these our brethren, have been most
ably seconded by the preachments and ‘Thus-saith-the-Lords’ of our
dearly beloved brother Tee de Little Wit Blatherskite and his fellow
fat-salaried barkers, and, above all, by the subtle finesse of our most
dearly beloved faithful servant the Great Many Headed Daily Press. Yes,
brethren, we are indeed highly favored of God in having three such
invaluable aids to the subjugation of the dogs as the police, the Church
and the Great Daily Press—one to persuade them physically, and the
others to blind them with spiritual dust, blandishments, seductions and
lies.”
Here the Reverend Blatherskite and the Great Many Headed Daily Press
both closed their eyes, and piously murmured, “To God be all the glory;
we are unprofitable servants; we have only done that which it was our
duty to do.”
“Yes, brethren,” continued Dephool Flea, “peace and plenty everywhere
abound. Everywhere Liberty has been established on foundations that
shall nevermore be shaken; and I think, as we owe a tremendous debt of
gratitude to God for these manifold mercies, we could not show it better
than by getting up to his glory a grand old final something or other in
honor of Liberty, Freedom, Deliverance and all that—a regular sneezer,
you know, a tip-top, _ne plus ultra_ sort of bamboozle that shall beat
all creation.”
Up jumped then the Great Many Headed Daily Press and said: “I have
it. What these dogs need now, above all things, is more stuff about
Liberty. Ye cannot work this theme too much. It is the liberty stealer’s
and the tyrant’s best guise, you know——”
“I object,” interrupted a fat flea, excitedly, “to the use of the terms
‘liberty stealer’ and ‘tyrant’ as applied to us.”
“Order, order;” commanded President Dephool Flea. “Of course we all know
well enough what we are after, but I suggest to our beloved servant, the
Great Many Headed, that, all things considered, it _would_ be better
not to call ourselves by our right names even here in our privacy. It
will subserve our great cause better to try to believe, ourselves, the
bamboozling lies we tell the poor fool dogs. To bamboozle ourselves a
little enables us to appear more sincere and serious to them. Therefore
the Great Daily Press will please not tell the truth even here.”
“I beg leave to withdraw the offensive truth, then,” said the Great
Gee Whizz. “As I was saying, that Statue business was a grand stroke
of dog bamboozlement, over which ye fleas ought to laugh to your dying
day. Then keep it up. Give these dogs plenty of Liberty talk, Liberty
sentiment, and Liberty fakes to celebrate and shout over, and ye can
bind them with as many slavish bonds as ye may choose to put upon them.
Set them to make the heavens ring with Liberty’s acclaim, and while they
are busy with that, ye can filch all their rights away. Do ye hear me?”
And all the Bamboozlers answered, “Aye, we hear.”
“Very good then,” said the Many Headed, “dogs have one great weakness,
and that weakness is their silly love of noise and show. All history
shows, and all our experience proves, that nothing fetches dogs so
quick as noise, racket, din and gaudy show. Low, coarse, undiscerning
simpletons, they are all animal sensibility, and have not yet developed
the ability to pick truth from error, reality from show, and fraud out
of its fine garments of honesty; gumps and boobies, they are pleased
with a rattle and tickled with a straw.
“Work then, therefore, along the line of their strongest weakness. Give
them noise to make, and plenty of it; something to make an idiotic din
with; something to make them happy and shout. Let us make them a Bell,
a big Bell, an enormous Bell; and we will call it a Liberty Bell. And
so bewitched and superstitionized are they now with everything that is
called Liberty that without more ado they will fall down and worship
it. Then we will set them all to hammer on it, and the noise of the
hammering thereof will please the poor idiots immensely; and then with
our solemnest visages, we will call the noise the Proclamation of
Liberty; at which bewitching words they will all fall down and worship
again. So shall their befoolment, imbecilitation and enslavement be
clinched and confirmed for ever, and ye fleas shall reign supreme, and
suck their blood for ever and ever, Amen.”
“Bravo! Bravo!” cried all the fleas in chorus. “Good! Grand! give ’em
a Bell, poor imbeciles; anything to please ’em; noise is cheap, and
Liberty metal costs less than Liberty itself.”
And the suggestion of the Great Many Headed Gee Whizz seemed good unto
the Committee, and they made him Minister Plenipotentiary in the matter.
And he went and sent his Circulators abroad amongst the dogs, to tell
them that a grand new pleasure had been devised for them; that _their_
prosperity, _their_ glory, _their_ independence, _their_ National
Wealth, their unexampled LIBERTY, were all agoing to be celebrated
with a Bell, a big Bell, a nonpareil Bell, that should weigh _thirteen
thousand pounds_, and, with gorgeous ceremonies, should be baptized
a LIBERTY BELL, to the honor of God and the glory of themselves; and
the show would be worth going many miles to see; and every Tom, Dick,
Harry and Jack was agoing to hammer on it, in honor of everything and
everybody, at every hour of day and night; and the noise of it would be
beau-u-u-tiful, and it would be so loud, and there would be such a lot
of it that the heavens would be just full of it; that all the angels
would knock off their regular business and make a great holiday to
listen to it; and we should all prostrate ourselves and tell God what a
wise thing he did when he passed by all the other dogs in the world and
picked US out to be the recipients of such wealth and glory and Liberty
as he had deluged us with.
And the dogs were delighted with the prospect of so much glory, and paid
great attention to do as they were told.
Then in due time, the Great Daily Press announced that the Bamboozling
Committee had appointed themselves, in the name of the dogs, to devise a
Bell and to superintend all the ceremonies.
Then they proclaimed abroad that as all, both dogs _and_ fleas, were
the recipients of Heaven’s blessings of wealth and Freedom, and as this
Bell was to be an emblematic Bell, all, both dogs _and_ fleas, must
contribute something towards the making of it; so that when its voice
should be hammered out, it should be the voice of _all_. Therefore every
one must bring a bit of metal of some sort and cast it into the fire.
And on a day appointed, the fleas and the dogs were gathered around
the melting pot; and the fleas, being very wealthy, sent in, with much
ostentation, gold and silver, and nickel, which they called Liberty
Metal, and which with prayer was cast into the fire; and the dogs, being
very poor, went about and scratched up old bits of junk tin, and iron
and brass, and brought them, and with prayer cast them into the fire;
then all the salaried barkers said grace over the melting mass; and the
ever-ready Tee de Little Wit Blatherskite, explained that the emblematic
meaning of this unifying fusion of all these heterogeneous elements,
was that we all, though fleas and dogs, poor and rich, small and great,
white and black, weak and strong, were really only _one_, having all
interests in common, and that as in this grand composite Bell, the glory
of each component part was merged in the glory of the whole, so the
glory of each in this nation—poor and rich, top and bottom—was merged
in the glory of the whole of us; in short, the E Pluribus Unum of the
Bell typified the E Pluribus Unum of _us_.
[Illustration]
And all the podgy and paunch-bellied fleas, at this lucky discovery
of the beautiful hidden meaning of the fusing mass, set up a great
asthmatic shout of praise, which contagious example caused the dogs to
give out delirious howls of joy, too. For although it would have puzzled
the smartest of them to discover the real actualities of the glorious
things thus typified, they could see that the typification in the pot
was all real and made a very fine show.
Then a herald came forth and proclaimed aloud that the potful was
cooked enough, and was about to be solemnly poured out—the grandest
libation to Liberty the world had ever seen—and that the Committee of
Arrangements had decreed that as an appropriate ceremony, accompanying,
all the dogs stand on their heads and kick their hind legs in the air,
to signify Freedom and defiance to all the world.
And at a signal the great ladleful was tipped over, and the white hot
stream ran into a great mould; the fleas shouted “Te Deum,” and fell
down in as flat adoration as their rotund carcases allowed, the salaried
barkers shed from their closed eyes great salt drops of ecstasy; the
dogs stood on their heads and flourished their hind legs, and the
Great Many Headed Gee Whizz stepped forth and announced that Liberty,
glorious, heaven-born Liberty, had put on her metallic petticoat.
Now, some of the dogs who were so weak that they could not, and a few
who were dull of comprehension and said they did not see the connection
between standing on their heads and Liberty, objected to reverse
themselves. Whereupon the police dogs drew their williamsticks and
belabored them therewith, saying this was Liberty Day, and the beautiful
show was not agoing to be spoilt by a lot of pesky dogs doing as they
liked. They had got to stand on their heads and flourish; them was the
orders, and, by Hokey, any dog that refused that day to honor Liberty,
Freedom and Independence, was agoing to be made to; and what did they
mean by refusing to be free, like everybody else?
And when those dogs replied that a Liberty that did not allow them to
stand on their feet in a natural manner was tyranny, the police dogs
smote them a smite on the jaw, and told them to shut up and do like the
others; and on their refusal, they clubbed them out of the crowd, which
hissed condemnation of their offence.