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.”

Chapter 6

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!”