_homines caudati_. Overwhelming to me and stunning was the ignominy
of this horrible discovery. Lord M. had not overlooked the natural
question--In what way did men get rid of their tails? To speak the
truth, they never _would_ have got rid of them had they continued to
run wild; but growing civilization introduced arts, and the arts
introduced sedentary habits. By these it was, by the mere necessity
of continually sitting down, that men gradually wore off their tails.
Well, and what should hinder the Gombroonians from sitting down?
_Their_ tailors and shoemakers would and could, I hope, sit down, as
well as those of Tigrosylvania. Why not? Ay, but my brother had insisted
already that they _had_ no tailors, that they _had_ no shoemakers;
which, _then_, I did not care much about, as it merely put back the
clock of our history--throwing us into an earlier, and therefore,
perhaps, into a more warlike stage of society. But, as the case stood
now, this want of tailors, &c., showed clearly that the process of
sitting down, so essential to the ennobling of the race, had not
commenced. My brother, with an air of consolation, suggested that I
might even now, without an hour's delay, compel the whole nation to
sit down for six hours a day, which would always "make a beginning."
But the truth would remain as before, viz., that I was the king of a
people that had tails; and the slow, slow process by which, in a course
of many centuries, their posterity might rub them off,--a hope of
vintages never to be enjoyed by any generations that are yet heaving
in sight,--_that_ was to me the worst form of despair.

Still there was one resource: if I "didn't like it," meaning the state
of things in Gombroon, I might "abdicate." Yes, I knew _that_. I might
abdicate; and, once having cut the connection between myself and the
poor abject islanders, I might seem to have no further interest in the
degradation that affected them. After such a disruption between us,