38 PROLEGOMENON. 



efforts to postpone forever the advent of the perfections 

 and felicities, Thus far shalt tlwu go, and no farther. 



Having waved a charitable and tender farewell (after 

 the cheap and accidental contracts of the hour) to the 

 parasites who flattered and fawned, sucked blood, and 

 then betrayed the confidence of friendship, to the knaves 

 who crawled in to plunder, and, like the frozen viper of the 

 fable, thawed to life, stung FIRST the breast that WARMED 

 THEM, to the ignoble and cruel, upon whose heads rests the 

 curse of ingratitude, to the oblique and sinister " slimy 

 things that crawl with legs/' who have been guilty of 

 treason to the amenities of life and assassination of the 

 holiest instincts of humanity, not to speak of flagrant 

 infractions of the laws of common honesty, consequently 

 whose moral elements are chaos, treachery, and death, the 

 consolation comes in the discovery of the angelic society 

 in which sufferers and victims of the machinations of evil 

 spirits are always found; that it is good to be hated by 

 the mean and cowardly, that rats and reptiles by affinity 

 love rats and reptiles, and bad men by attraction mix with 

 bad men, good with good. 



Then it is WELL for the obscure and humble, the vilified 

 and despitefully-used, to reflect that true benefactors and 

 lovers of the race have always been the targets for the 

 HATERS and the malignant; that all men cursed with the 

 self-sacrificing impulses of the soul and zeal for realizing 

 ideals must continue to suffer as the martyrs of faith, 

 science, and sentiment of all ages have done. 



The great and good Linnaeus, in his scientific labors 

 for the well-being of man, made the confession, "I must 

 surely admit that, as I have wandered [in scientific pur- 

 suits] through the forests of the world, the monkeys 

 [meaning ignorant and wicked men] have constantly 

 grinned, chattered their teeth, and laughed at my efforts, 

 even throwing stones and clubs at me : still was I happy, 

 knowing that I did a good thing, and that the world even 

 would approve, when it LEARNED TO UNDERSTAND." 



