“You have been born,” he said, which was true.  “There was, it follows, a time when you had not been born.  As we reckon time, it was probably some millions of ages.  Of this considerable period you are unable to remember one unhappy moment, and in point of fact there was none.  To a Lalugwump that is entirely conclusive as to the relative values of consciousness and oblivion, existence and nonexistence, life and death.  This old man lying here at my feet is now, if not dreaming, as if he had never been born.  Would not it be cruel and inhuman to wake him back to grief?  Is it, then, kind to permit him to wake by the natural action of his own physical energies?  I have given him the advice for which he asked.  Believing it good advice, and seeing him too irresolute to act, it seems my clear duty to assist him.”

Before I could interfere, even had I dared take the liberty to do so, Gnarmag-Zote struck the old man a terrible blow upon the head with his mace of office.  The victim turned upon his back, spread his fingers, shivered convulsively and was dead.

“You need not be shocked,” said the distinguished assassin, coolly:  “I have but performed a sacred duty and religious rite.  The religion (established first in this realm by King Skanghutch, the sixty-second of that name) consists in the worship of Death.  We have sacred books, some three thousand thick volumes, said to be written by inspiration of Death himself, whom no mortal has ever seen, but who is described by our priests as having the figure of a fat young man with a red face and wearing an affable smile.  In art he is commonly represented in the costume of a husbandman sowing seeds.

“The priests and sacred books teach that death is the supreme and only good—­that the chief duties of man are, therefore, assassination and suicide.  Conviction of these cardinal truths is universal among us, but I am sorry to say that many do not honestly live up to the faith.  Most of us are commendably zealous in assassination, but slack and lukewarm in suicide.  Some justify themselves in this half-hearted observance of the Law and imperfect submission to the Spirit by arguing that if they destroy themselves their usefulness in destroying others will be greatly abridged.  ‘I find,’ says one of our most illustrious writers, not without a certain force, it must be confessed, ’that I can slay many more of others than I can of myself.’

“There are still others, more distinguished for faith than works, who reason that if A kill B, B cannot kill C. So it happens that although many Lalugwumps die, mostly by the hands of others, though some by their own, the country is never wholly depopulated.”

“In my own country,” said I, “is a sect holding somewhat Lalugwumpian views of the evil of life; and among the members it is considered a sin to bestow it.  The philosopher Schopenhauer taught the same doctrine, and many of our rulers have shown strong sympathetic leanings toward it by procuring the destruction of many of their own people and those of other nations in what is called war.”