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The Pleasures of Ignorance by Robert Lynd
page 64 of 154 (41%)
being as an insect is always the first step in treating him without
remorse. It is a perilous attitude and in general is more likely to
beget crime than justice. There has never, I believe, been an empire
built in which, at some stage or other, a massacre of children among a
revolting population has not been excused on the ground that "nits
make lice." "Swat that Bolshevik," no doubt, seems to many
reactionaries as sanitary a counsel as "Swat that fly." Even in regard
to flies, however, most of us can only swat with scruple. Hate flies
as we may, and wish them in perdition as we may, we could not slowly
pull them to pieces, wing after wing and leg after leg, as thoughtless
children are said to do. Many of us cannot endure to see them slowly
done to death on those long strips of sticky paper on which the flies
drag their legs and their lives out--as it seems to me, a vile
cruelty. A distinguished novelist has said that to watch flies trying
to tug their legs off the paper one after another till they are twice
their natural length is one of his favourite amusements. I have never
found any difficulty in believing it of him. It is an odd fact that
considerateness, if not actually kindness, to flies has been made one
of the tests of gentleness in popular speech. How often has one heard
it said in praise of a dead man: "He wouldn't have hurt a fly!" As for
those who do hurt flies, we pillory them in history. We have never
forgotten the cruelty of Domitian. "At the beginning of his reign,"
Suetonius tells us "he used to spend hours in seclusion every day,
doing nothing but catch flies and stab them with a keenly sharpened
stylus. Consequently, when someone once asked whether anyone was in
there with Cæsar, Vibius Crispus made the witty reply: 'Not even a
fly.'" And just as most of us are on the side of the fly against
Domitian, so are most of us on the side of the fly against the spider.
We pity the fly as (if the image is permissible) the underdog. One of
the most agonising of the minor dilemmas in which a too sensitive
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