The
most trifling complaint becomes immediately infectious, and, during the
ravages of the pestilence, which this habit generates, ten thousand
lives a-day are the customary sacrifice to the habit of living in
cities.”--“But they die in the arms of those they love,” said Immalee,
whose tears flowed fast at this recital; “and is not that better than
even _life_ in solitude,--as mine was before I beheld you?”

“The stranger was too intent on his description to heed her. “To these
cities they resort nominally for security and protection, but really for
the sole purpose to which their existence is devoted,--that of
aggravating its miseries by every ingenuity of refinement. For example,
those who live in uncontrasted and untantalized misery, can hardly feel
it--suffering becomes their habit, and they feel no more jealousy of
their situation than the bat, who clings in blind and famishing
stupefaction to the cleft of a rock, feels of the situation of the
butterfly, who drinks of the dew, and bathes in the bloom of every
flower. But the people of the _other worlds_ have invented, by means of
living in cities, a new and singular mode of aggravating human
wretchedness--that of contrasting it with the wild and wanton excess of
superfluous and extravagant splendour.”

“Here the stranger had incredible difficulty to make Immalee comprehend
how there could be an unequal division of the means of existence; and
when he had done his utmost to explain it to her, she continued to
repeat, (her white finger on her scarlet lip, and her small foot beating
the moss), in a kind of pouting inquietude, “Why should some have more
than they can eat, and others nothing to eat?”--“This,” continued the
stranger, “is the most exquisite refinement on that art of torture which
those beings are so expert in--to place misery by the side of
opulence--to bid the wretch who dies for want feed on the sound of the
splendid equipages which shake his hovel as they pass, but leave no
relief behind--to bid the industrious, the ingenious, and the
imaginative, starve, while bloated mediocrity pants from excess--to bid
the dying sufferer feel that life might be prolonged by one drop of that
exciting liquor, which, wasted, produces only sickness or madness in
those whose lives it undermines;--to do this is their principal object,
and it is fully attained. The sufferer through whose rags the wind of
winter blows, like arrows lodging in every pore--whose tears freeze
before they fall--whose soul is as dreary as the night under whose cope
his resting-place must be--whose glued and clammy lips are unable to
receive the food which famine, lying like a burning coal at his vitals,
craves--and who, amid the horrors of a houseless winter, might prefer
its desolation to that of the den that abuses the name of home--without
food--without light--where the howlings of the storm are answered by the
fiercer cries of hunger--and he must stumble to his murky and strawless
nook over the bodies of his children, who have sunk on the floor, not
for rest, but despair. Such a being, is he not sufficiently miserable?”

“Immalee’s shudderings were her only answer, (though of many parts of
his description she had a very imperfect idea). “No, he is not enough so
yet,” pursued the stranger, pressing the picture on her; “let his steps,
that know not where they wander, conduct him to the gates of the
affluent and the luxurious--let him feel that plenty and mirth are
removed from him but by the interval of a wall, and yet more distant
than if severed by worlds--let him feel that while _his_ world is
darkness and cold, the eyes of those within are aching with the blaze of
light, and hands relaxed by artificial heat, are soliciting with fans
the refreshment of a breeze--let him feel that every groan he utters is
answered by a song or a laugh--and let him die on the steps of the
mansion, while his last conscious pang is aggravated by the thought,
that the price of the hundredth part of the luxuries that lie untasted
before heedless beauty and sated epicurism, would have protracted his
existence, while it poisons theirs--let him _die of want on the
threshold of a banquet-hall_, and then admire with me the ingenuity that
displays itself in this new combination of misery. The inventive
activity of the people of the world, in the multiplication of calamity,
is inexhaustibly fertile in resources. Not satisfied with diseases and
famine, with sterility of the earth, and tempests of the air, they must
have laws and marriages, and kings and tax-gatherers, and wars and
fetes, and every variety of artificial misery inconceivable to you.”

“Immalee, overpowered by this torrent of words, to her unintelligible
words, in vain asked a connected explanation of them. The demon of his
superhuman misanthropy had now fully possessed him, and not even the
tones of a voice as sweet as the strings of David’s harp, had power to
expel the evil one. So he went on flinging about his fire-brands and
arrows, and then saying, “Am I not in sport? These people(15),” said he,
“have made unto themselves kings, that is, beings whom they voluntarily
invest with the privilege of draining, by taxation, whatever wealth
their vices have left to the rich, and whatever means of subsistence
their want has left to the poor, till their extortion is cursed from the
castle to the cottage--and this to support a few pampered favourites,
who are harnessed by silken reins to the car, which they drag over the
prostrate bodies of the multitude. Sometimes exhausted by the monotony
of perpetual fruition, which has no parallel even in the monotony of
suffering, (for the latter has at least the excitement of hope, which is
for ever denied to the former), they amuse themselves by making war,
that is, collecting the greatest number of human beings that can be
bribed to the task, to cut the throats of a less, equal, or greater
number of beings, bribed in the same manner for the same purpose. These
creatures have not the least cause of enmity to each other--they do not
know, they never beheld each other. Perhaps they might, under other
circumstances, wish each other well, as far as human malignity would
suffer them; but from the moment they are hired for legalized massacre,
hatred is their duty, and murder their delight. The man who would feel
reluctance to destroy the reptile that crawls in his path, will equip
himself with metals fabricated for the purpose of destruction, and smile
to see it stained with the blood of a being, whose existence and
happiness he would have sacrificed his own to promote, under other
circumstances.