at I may do, they will hire cigarettes
made and shirts washed. Then why should I deprive myself of velvet and
confections and cigarettes and clean shirts, if things are definitively
settled thus? This is the argument which I often, almost always, hear.
This is the very argument which makes the mob which is destroying
something, lose its senses. This is the very argument by which dogs are
guided when one of them has flung himself on another dog, and overthrown
him, and the rest of the pack rush up also, and tear their comrade in
pieces. Other people have begun it, and have wrought mischief; then why
should not I take advantage of it? Well, what will happen if I wear a
soiled shirt, and make my own cigarettes? Will that make it easier for
anybody else? ask people who would like to justify their course. If it
were not so far from the truth, it would be a shame to answer such a
question, but we have become so entangled that this question seems very
natural to us; and hence, although it is a shame, it is necessary to
reply to it.

What difference will it make if I wear one shirt a week, and make may own
cigarettes, or do not smoke at all? This difference, that some laundress
and some cigarette-maker will exert their strength less, and that what I
have spent for washing and for the making of cigarettes I can give to
that very laundress, or even to other laundresses and toilers who are
worn out with their labor, and who, instead of laboring beyond their
strength, will then be able to rest, and drink tea. But to this I hear
an objection. (It is so mortifying to rich and luxurious people to
understand their position.) To this they say: "If I go about in a dirty
shirt, and give up smoking, and hand over this money to the poor, the
poor will still be deprived of every thing, and that drop in the sea of
yours will help not at all."

Such an objection it is a shame to answer. It is such a common retort.
{158}

If I had gone among savages, and they had regaled me with cutlets which
struck me as savory, and if I should learn on the following day that
these savory cutlets had been made from a prisoner whom they had slain
for the sake of the savory cutlets, if I do not admit that it is a good
thing to eat men, then, no matter how dainty the cutlets, no matter how
universal the practice of eating men may be among my fellows, however
insignificant the advantage to prisoners, prepared for consumption, may
be my refusal to ea