290 The Life of the Spider 



express purpose. To protect the book, we have 

 none but farcical means. Place a few bricks 

 one atop the other ; join them with mortar ; 

 and the law will defend your wall. Build up 

 in writing an edifice of your thoughts ; and it 

 will be open to any one, without serious impedi- 

 ment, to abstract stones from it, even to take 

 the whole, if it suit him. A rabbit-hutch is 

 property ; the work of the mind is not. If the 

 animal has eccentric views as regards the 

 possessions of others, we have ours as well. 



' Might always has the best of the argument,' 

 said La Fontaine, to the great scandal of the 

 peace-lovers. The exigencies of verse, rhyme 

 and rhythm, carried the worthy fabulist further 

 than he intended : he meant to say that, in a 

 fight between mastiffs and in other brute con- 

 flicts, the stronger is left master of the bone. 

 He well knew that, as things go, success is no 

 certificate of excellence. Others came, the 

 notorious evil-doers of humanity, who made a 

 law of the savage maxim that might is right. 



We are the larvae with the changing skins, 

 the ugly caterpillars of a society that is slowly, 

 very slowly, wending its way to the triumph of 



