lmost forgets
how to speak. Day and night he hears no sound except the melancholy,
monotonous bleat, bleat of the sheep. It becomes intolerable. The animal
stupidity of the herd enters into him. Gradually he loses his mind. They
say that he is locoed. The insane asylums of California contain many
shepherds.

But the word locoed has come to have a wider application than to the poor
shepherds or the horses and cattle that have eaten the loco. Any one who
acts queerly, talks strangely, is visionary without being actually a
lunatic, who is what would be called elsewhere a "crank," is said to be
locoed. It is a term describing a shade of mental obliquity and queerness
something short of irresponsible madness, and something more than
temporarily "rattled" or bewildered for the moment. It is a good word,
and needed to apply to many people who have gone off into strange ways,
and behave as if they had eaten some insane plant--the insane plant being
probably a theory in the mazes of which they have wandered until they are
lost.

Perhaps the loco does not grow in Russia, and the Prophet of
Discouragement may never have eaten of it; perhaps he is only like the
shepherd, mainly withdrawn from human intercourse and sympathy in a
morbid mental isolation, hearing only the bleat, bleat, bleat of the
'muxhiks' in the dullness of the steppes, wandering round in his own
sated mind until he has lost all clew to life. Whatever the cause may be,
clearly he is 'locoed'. All his theories have worked out to the
conclusion that the world is a gigantic mistake, love is nothing but
animality, marriage is immorality; according to astronomical calculations
this teeming globe and all its life must end some time; and why not now?
There shall be no more marriage, no more children; the present population
shall wind up its affairs with decent haste, and one by one quit the
scene of their failure, and avoid all the worry of a useless struggle.

This gospel of the blessedness of extinction has come too late to enable
us to profit by it in our decennial enumeration. How different the census
would have been if taken in the spirit of this new light! How much
bitterness, how much hateful rivalry would have been spared! We should
then have desired a reduction of the population, not an increase of it.
There would have been a pious rivalry among all the towns and cities on
the way to the millennium of extinction to show the least number of
inhabitants; and tho