War with the Newts

by Karel Čapek

‘Come on, man, no such thing as devils. And if there were they’d look like Europeans.

Toby doesn’t feel like work. Yes, sir, he was a clever one,’ the captain explained admiringly. ‘The clever ones never like working. He was always plotting something, Toby was. What’s the use, even among lizards there are great inequalities.

‘Look, Pat, I’d like to give you twelve francs for that Mass. But you’re a rascal and’11 spend it on booze.’ ‘Jensy, I wouldn’t lay such a sin upon myself. But hold it, so you can trust me I’ll give you an IOU for those twelve francs. OK?’ ‘That would do,’

‘And which of us should keep this document?’ ‘You, of course, you idiot,’ the Swede said without hesitation. ‘That’s so you don’t forget that you’ve received the money.’ Mr Dingle spent those twelve francs on drink at Le Havre, and instead of sailing to Ireland he sailed to Djibouti. In short, the Mass has not yet been said, and in consequence no higher power has intervened in the natural course of events.

One of the favourite occupations of the human mind is to speculate how the world and mankind will look in the distant future, what technological miracles will have been accomplished, what social problems solved, and what progress made by science and social organisation, and so on.

people never regard anything that serves and benefits them as mysterious; only the things which damage or threaten them are mysterious.

‘If our civilisation is to survive it must be the learning of all. We cannot peacefully enjoy the gifts of our civilisation or the fruits of our culture while all around us there are millions and millions of wretched lower creatures deliberately kept in an animal state.

The more conservative of the population denied the existence of any legal or public problems: the Newts were simply the property of their employers who were responsible for them and who were liable for any damage that might be caused by the Newts.

especially in the American press, reports cropped up from time to time of girls who claimed to have been raped by Newts while bathing. In consequence, there occurred increasingly irequent instances in the United States of Newts being caught and lynched, mostly by burning at the stake.

But we’ll remain neutral. Somebody’s got to be neutral so they can supply arms and the like to the others.

The tragedy of the human race is being played out, Wolf Meynert began. Let us not be blinded by feverish enterprise or technological prosperity; these are but the fever patches on the cheeks of an organism already marked by death. Never has mankind experienced a greater upsurge to its life than today; yet find me one person who is happy, show me one class that is content, or one nation that does not feel threatened in its existence.

Typical terminal symptoms. Moral agony.

is or was man ever capable of happiness? Man certainly, as indeed every living creature - but not mankind. Man’s whole tragedy lies in the fact that he was forced to become mankind,

Herd together horses, wolves, sheep and cats, foxes and deer, bears and goats; shut them into one enclosure and compel them to live together in that nonsensical crowd which you call the social order, and to observe common rules of life; it will be an unhappy, dissatisfied, fatally divided herd, in which not one of God’s creatures will feel at home.