Facing the entrance sat Grumsquutzy, in his robes of office and surrounded by an armed guard.  At a little distance stood two great black slaves, each bearing a scourge of thongs.  All about them the floor was slippery with blood.  While I wondered at all this two policemen entered, having between them one whom I recognized as a professional Friend of the People, a great orator, keenly concerned for the interests of Labor.  Shown the inscription and unable or unwilling to answer, he was given over to the two blacks and, being stripped to the skin, was beaten with the whips until he bled copiously and his cries resounded through the palace.  His ears were then shorn away and he was thrown into the street.  Another Friend of the People was brought in, and treated in the same way; and the inquiry was continued, day after day, until all had been interrogated.  But Grumsquutzy got no answer.

A most extraordinary and interesting custom of the Uggards is called the Naganag and has existed, I was told, for centuries.  Immediately after every war, and before the returned army is put to death, the chieftains who have held high command and their official head, the Minister of National Displeasure, are conducted with much pomp to the public square of Nabootka, the capital.  Here all are stripped naked, deprived of their sight with a hot iron and armed with a club each.  They are then locked in the square, which has an inclosing wall thirty clowgebs high.  A signal is given and they begin to fight.  At the end of three days the place is entered and searched.  If any of the dead bodies has an unbroken bone in it the survivors are boiled in wine; if not they are smothered in butter.

Upon the advantages of this custom—­which surely has not its like in the whole world—­I could get little light.  One public official told me its purpose was “peace among the victorious”; another said it was “for gratification of the military instinct in high places,” though if that is so one is disposed to ask “What was the war for?” The Prime Minister, profoundly learned in all things else, could not enlighten me, and the commander-in-chief in the Wuggard war could only tell me, while on his way to the public square, that it was “to vindicate the truth of history.”

In all the wars in which Ug has engaged in historic times that with Wug was the most destructive of life.  Excepting among the comparatively few troops that had the hygienic and preservative advantage of personal collision with the enemy, the mortality was appalling.  Regiments exposed to the fatal conditions of camp life in their own country died like flies in a frost.  So pathetic were the pleas of the sufferers to be led against the enemy and have a chance to live that none hearing them could forbear to weep.  Finally a considerable number of them went to the seat of war, where they began an immediate attack upon a fortified city, for their health; but the enemy’s resistance was too brief materially to reduce the death rate and the men were again in the hands of their officers.  On their return to Ug they were so few that the public executioners charged with the duty of reducing the army to a peace footing were themselves made ill by inactivity.