“Millions of creatures, beautiful exceedingly, scour over the desert plains of explored Africa; in its unknown regions, millions more may be supposed to feed, and gambol, and die. What is the use of them? If you come to that, what was the use of the Emperor Theodore, or the King of the Cannibal Islands, or any other potentate who remains utterly unimpressed when we threaten ‘to break off diplomatic relations’? “Myriads of insects wheel about us in the sun’s declining rays every summer’s evening. Again, what is the use of them? What is the use of the dragon-fly, the bumble-bee, the speckled toad, the blue-nosed monkey, the unicorn, the wild elephant,—or, indeed, the Ojibbeway Indians?” Here, contrary to his custom, “Bones” interrupted me in full career. “One moment,” said he, with his courteous grin. “Allow me to point out that yours is inadmissible, as being simply an _argumentum ad absurdum_. It would hold equally good with Léotard, Mr. Beales, or any other public exhibitor—nay, you might advance it for suppression of the Lord Mayor or the Archbishop of Canterbury.” He bowed reverentially while he mentioned the last-named dignitary; and I confess I was inclined to admit the truth of his remark. “Then I waive the question,” I replied, “as regards the brute creation, though I think I could find something to say, too, about the weasel sucking rabbits, the heron gobbling fish, the hawk striking its quarry, or the hounds running into their fox. But we will suppose that the whole animal world, from the angler’s lob-worm to the costermonger’s donkey, is enjoying its paradise _here_, and return to our own kind, their sorrows, their sufferings, and, natural consequence of sorrow and suffering, their sins.” He shook his skull gently, and muttered something in his spinal vertebræ about “a cart” and “a horse,” but I took no notice, and proceeded with dignity— “I have learnt my Latin Grammar, and almost the only one of its precepts I have not forgotten impresses on me that— ‘Spades turn up wealth, the stimulant of crime.’ I suppose you will not dispute that the root of all evil is money?” “Most emphatically,” he exclaimed, and his articulations rattled with startling vehemence. “Most emphatically I deny the position. A man may roll in wealth and be none the worse for it. On the contrary, poverty, but for the unremitting labour it demands, would be far more conducive to crime than a sufficiency, or even a superfluity of means. No; the real enemy with whom every man has to contend confronts him in the morning at his glass, and sticks persistently to him throughout the day. The source of most unhappiness, the cause of all ill-doing, the universal origin of evil, is _not_ money, but self——”