They too take a spoonful of the longed-for soup; they praise, they disparage, they advise. The whole thing is an agonizing give-and-take. There was a time when these people—those who now want nothing more than fewer lice, fewer beatings, and more swill, and pursue it with such self-abandon, desire concentrated in a single point of focus—would have given their dogs better food. This, too, is the result of experimentation through scientific barbarism. Hundreds of thousands made to stand on all fours will no longer strive to vanquish the beast within themselves.
