cases. I have
taken from this man that trumpery thing which the race regards as a
Mind; I have replaced his tin life with a silver-gilt fiction; you
see the result--and you criticize! I said I would make him permanently
happy, and I have done it. I have made him happy by the only means
possible to his race--and you are not satisfied!" He heaved a
discouraged sigh, and said, "It seems to me that this race is hard to
please."

There it was, you see. He didn't seem to know any way to do a person
a favor except by killing him or making a lunatic out of him. I
apologized, as well as I could; but privately I did not think much of
his processes--at that time.

Satan was accustomed to say that our race lived a life of continuous and
uninterrupted self-deception. It duped itself from cradle to grave with
shams and delusions which it mistook for realities, and this made its
entire life a sham. Of the score of fine qualities which it imagined it
had and was vain of, it really possessed hardly one. It regarded
itself as gold, and was only brass. One day when he was in this vein
he mentioned a detail--the sense of humor. I cheered up then, and took
issue. I said we possessed it.

"There spoke the race!" he said; "always ready to claim what it hasn't
got, and mistake its ounce of brass filings for a ton of gold-dust. You
have a mongrel perception of humor, nothing more; a multitude of you
possess that. This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low-grade
and trivial things--broad incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries,
absurdities, evokers of the horse-laugh. The ten thousand high-grade
comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull
vision. Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these
juvenilities and laugh at them--and by laughing at them destroy them?
For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really
effective weapon--laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication,
persecution--these can lift at a colossal humbug--push it a
little--weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can
blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter
nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other
weapons. Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a
race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage."

We were traveling at the time and stopped at a little city in India and
looked on while a juggler did h