"About the time you fat, full-blooded and comfortable suckers called this convention to take into consideration the miserable condition of us dogs, a number of us dogs bad the (to you) sublime impudence to call a convention to take into consideration our own condition ; and we pride ourselves that we have reached a far broader and more practical conclusion than your worshipful body has come to. As you well know, there has been brewing amongst us a very deep discontent with our condition, and a very decided conviction that we knew exactly what was the matter with us, and how to mend it.

"Some of us had fathers who could remember the honored chieftain, Bull McMastiff, and the good times dogs had then, and they told us that old Mastiff used daily to say and repeat: "My dear dogs, beware of the fleas," and he prophesied that so surely as they abated their hatred of fleas, they would sink into poverty, meagreness and misery.

"And so it has been. When Bull McMastiff gave up the ghost, McPoodle, a bad-for-everything ruler, who, like most other beastly pests and nuisances, has lived to a most unconscionably great age, relaxed the stringency of our laws, and allowed the missionaries of the fleas to settle amongst us, and these missionaries went about amongst us preaching that McMastiff was an imbecile old fool, who did not know what was good for dogs; that the fleas were a much maligned and misrepresented class; that a few fleas - a nice judicious selection - on a dog, were not only no detriment, but a positive advantage to him; that they helped his general and particular health; that they purified a dog's blood, and enriched it with certain valuable elements, which all truly healthy dogs need, and that the few drops of blood they took as dividend, were a mere nothing in comparison to the service they rendered, that they could assure them that no dog could be said to be really and truly healthy and complete without at least some fleas upon him; yea, they went so far as to declare by Heaven and Holy Scripture, that fleas were divinely appointed to give life and joy and peace to dogs, and that the race of dogs would die off the face of the earth, if it were not for them; and they told of very many terrible instances where whole nations of dogs had utterly perished for want of a few fleas.

"And we dogs were idiots enough to believe the pious lies they told us, and we allowed you to become a part of our community ; and, very soon, it fell out that ye became the real, actual community, and we became your feeders, your providers, your most humble and obedient servants. We took yon to our bodies and very soon ye made them your own, and, puffed up with pride, ye came to imagine that ye only were the people, ye were the republic; ye called yourselves on all occasions, ' the country,' ' the nation.' Ye made war and peace, and did everything and got everything but the fighting and the paying. Ye got up centennials, bi, tri and quadri, of this, that and the other, which we poor starving dogs were bled to pay for and allowed to look at from a great distance. And the overgrown suckers of other nations sent their ' greetings' to you; and when they, to vary the monotony of their centen- nials and anniversaries of this, that and the other, got up a grand Jubilee Jamboree to commemorate the fiftieth year of the efforts of a fat and fuzzy old lady sucker, Queen flea of Kyhi-dom, and her prolific brood to bleed their dags to death, ye sent your greetings and prayers for God Almighty's blessings on their efforts ; and all this pious snobbery and robbery end jobbery, ye called 'drawing closer the bonds of international

" But us dogs, whom ye condescendingly permit to pay for all this, and allow to look at the glory of afar off, whom ye permit to read of the forty-course banquets ye feast at in our name, ye taught that we owed our very life to you, and that it was our duty to give up our daily blood to you, and give thanks to Almighty God that He had in boundless mercy so bountifully blessed us with fleas. And we dogs did so deeply fall into the idiocy and supineness generated by immemorial usage and custom, that we came to regard this division of us into masses and classes, sucked and suckers, robbed and robbers, workers and idlers, starved and overfed, as of natural order and divine appointment.

"That is, most of us did. There were a few who refused to wag the adulatory tail of approval of this system. We ceased not to howl and bark day and night our discontent. And for this ye called in dogs of Belial to witness against some of us, saying, they did blaspheme God and the Law, and then ye carried them forth and stoned them with stones, or hanged them with ropes till they died. And ye threw mud at us in the name of the Lord, and went and told the hungriest and leanest and foolishest dogs amongst us that we were 'Socialists,' 'Sedition-ists,' and 'Anarchists;' and they, not knowing in their heart what those words meant, did therefore hound us and mob us and persecute us for endeavoring to restore to them the liberty they had lost. Oh, they accused us of disturbing their rest; of trying to make them discontented; of imperilling their positions with their natural superiors, the fleas; of trying to subvert the natural order of suckers and sucked, and of trying to bring on the day of judgment and the destruction of the universe. Poor fools!

"But one day,two or three of the hungriest of us wandered away out of town, and lay down under a tree in a solitary place to think and weep out the sadness of our hearts; and as we wept and meditated, behold an Angel appeared unto us and saluted us. And we, shaking with terror, said, ' Who art thou?' and he said, ' I am Plain Common Sense, the rarest Angel of all that visit the earth ; Heaven hath appointed me Messenger-in-Particular to the hungriest of the hungry.