A DESPERATE TALE
AN ANARCHIST
That year I spent the best two months of the dry season on one of
the estates--in fact, on the principal cattle estate--of a famous
meat-extract manufacturing company.
B.O.S. Bos. You have seen the three magic letters on the advertisement
pages of magazines and newspapers, in the windows of provision
merchants, and on calendars for next year you receive by post in the
month of November. They scatter pamphlets also, written in a sickly
enthusiastic style and in several languages, giving statistics of
slaughter and bloodshed enough to make a Turk turn faint. The "art"
illustrating that "literature" represents in vivid and shining colours
a large and enraged black bull stamping upon a yellow snake writhing
in emerald-green grass, with a cobalt-blue sky for a background. It
is atrocious and it is an allegory. The snake symbolizes disease,
weakness--perhaps mere hunger, which last is the chronic disease of the
majority of mankind. Of course everybody knows the B. O. S. Ltd., with
its unrivalled products: Vinobos, Jellybos, and the latest unequalled
perfection, Tribos, whose nourishment is offered to you not only highly
concentrated, but already half digested. Such apparently is the love
that Limited Company bears to its fellowmen--even as the love of the
father and mother penguin for their hungry fledglings.
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