at would be the result? They would fight
valiantly at first, like wasps. But what if they began to fail?
Was not the wasp-king angry with them? Had not he deserted them?
He must be appeased; he must have his revenge. They would take a
captive, and offer him to the wasps. So did a North American tribe,
in their need, some forty years ago; when, because their maize-crops
failed, they roasted alive a captive girl, cut her to pieces, and
sowed her with their corn. I would not tell the story, for the
horror of it, did it not bear with such fearful force on my
argument. What were those Red Men thinking of? What chain of
misreasoning had they in their heads when they hit on that as a
device for making the crops grow? Who can tell? Who can make the
crooked straight, or number that which is wanting? As said Solomon
of old, so must we--"The foolishness of fools is folly." One thing
only we can say of them, that they were horribly afraid of famine,
and took that means of ridding themselves of their fear.

But what if the wasp tribe had no captives? They would offer
slaves. What if the agony and death of slaves did not appease the
wasps? They would offer their fairest, their dearest, their sons
and their daughters, to the wasps; as the Carthaginians, in like
strait, offered in one day 200 noble boys to Moloch, the volcano-
god, whose worship they had brought out of Syria; whose original
meaning they had probably forgotten; of whom they only knew that he
was a dark and devouring being, who must be appeased with the
burning bodies of their sons and daughters. And so the veil of
fancy would be lifted again, and the whole superstition stand forth
revealed as the mere offspring of bodily fear.

But more: the survivors of the conquest might, perhaps, escape, and
carry their wasp-fetish into a new land. But if they became poor
and weakly, their brains and imagination, degenerating with their
bodies, would degrade their wasp-worship till they knew not what it
meant. Away from the sacred tree, in a country the wasps of which
were not so large or formidable, they would require a remembrancer
of the wasp-king; and they would make one--a wasp of wood, or what
not. After a while, according to that strange law of fancy, the
root of all idolatry, which you may see at work in every child who
plays with a doll, the symbol would become identified with the thing
symbolised; they would invest the wooden wasp with all the terrible