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(F. R. Mackenzie)

A drunkard's turd (it has been justly observed), though obnoxious and repellent to the sensitive nostril, has charms for those vermin who are accustomed to feed on carrion and other putrefying offal. In like manner, the squalid condition of those scabious arabs so properly evicted from your ancestral home and adjoining estates, though abhorrent to the majority of mankind as a beggar's sores, has attractions for certain vile and odious creatures, coprophiliacs who delight in the contemplation of excreta. These depraved fellows, to disguise their morbid tastes, pass themselves off as humanitarians and moralists, though they are, in truth, snivelling, canting casuists who, being limited in vision as the squint-eyed, see the world as through a distorting mirror.

Knowing well that those who dip their fingers in filth are shunned by polite society, you have rightly ignored their malignant slanders, contenting yourself with depriving them of their living, where you could, and otherwise exposing their warped and villainous character. Since, however, noxious vapours, unless dispersed by a chill blast, spread and afflict the minds of the feeble, I have taken it upon myself, ma'am, with due humility, to pen these few words on your behalf.

I confess, nevertheless, that it is with ill-feigned disgust that I bring myself to write of those mendicant tatterdemalions who had the shameless effrontery to squat on your properties during the long, enforced absence of your family, and who still (thanks to your gracious forbearance) occupy some hovels within your precincts. There, these scarecrows offend the nostrils with their stench, the eye with their squalor, and the ear with the foul imprecations which they heap upon your person.

Their condition may be compared to that of jackals who, seeing their prey snatched from them, circle about, yapping, snarling and whining until they are dispatched by a contemptuous slap of the paw. In the manner of all curs, they dare to show their teeth, but only fear to use them, being well aware of that immutable law of nature which awards the spoils to the strong and the leavings to the weak.

These obdurate miscreants have, of late, constituted a public nuisance by accosting the unwary, like the Ancient Mariner, with their wails of injustice and privation.

"We have been dispossessed of our inheritance," they squawk, and cite, with a fallaciousness only equalled by their impudence, precepts of law to support their claim to the said properties on the grounds of uninterrupted tenure over many years. It is as though a colony of rats should lay claim to a granary, simply because generations of the pestilential creatures had battened on its wheat.

Their argument is the argument of the usurper the world over who, with palpable sophistry, ignores the prior entitlement of the legitimate owner — in your case, ma'am, a private contract sealed with the Lord of the Manor himself in the very mists of antiquity when the Wars of the Barons were fought. It may, indeed, be true that his Lordship did not personally affix his signature to the contract and, in any event, the document is lost, but the recorded testimony of your ancestors, backed as it has been by their manifold benefactions, is sufficient warranty for its acceptance in our community.

The objection has, admittedly, been raised by the malignant that you yourself have fallen somewhat short of fulfilling your side of the contract — to wit, that in return for these lands you should undertake the performance of diverse good works. To this it can justly be replied that nobody has proved herself more zealous in confounding his Lordship's enemies. It is well attested that he himself had no high regard for the destitute, frequently descending from his horse to flay the gaping posteriors of vagabonds with the broad-side of his sword; chopping off the hands of thieves (and what is your arab if not a thief?); and similarly docking other parts of the anatomy in the case of those who compounded their felony by fornicating with his dairy-maids and the like. On special occasions, it is recorded, such as Feast Days and Holy Days, he would hang a parcel of the knaves from his gibbet to entertain and instruct the others.

In this respect, ma'am, you have proved yourself the most admirable disciple of his Lordship, indefatigable in driving miserable wretches off your lands or reducing them to their proper status of hewers of wood and carriers of water; organizing beats to pepper them with shot; incarcerating the obstinate; and dashing out the brains of the recalcitrant on the stone steps of your cellars.

Those who fled from your righteous wrath complain that they were the victims of necessity. Yet, have not the wisest of moral philosophers pointed out that the man who leaps from a ship rather than risk having his throat slit by pirates performs an act of his own volition? The choice may be limited, as between the sword and the shark, yet these sapients assure us, with the most irrefragable proofs, that it is the very essence of the human condition that man — alone of all creatures — can exercise this wondrous faculty.

The serpent tongues, however, which daily grow more brazen, mouth the fashionable shibboleths of brutality, oppression, exploitation and discrimination. In their scurrilous broadsheets, they slyly insinuate that, in reducing these arabs to helotry, your conduct is comparable to those Boors who so abuse their blackamoors that (it is rumdured) they even flay their backs to provide skin for their ladies' purses. And in the matter of the rack and the thumbscrew, they find common ground between you and those tyrants of the Greek Isles who encourage the civic virtues among their subjects, in particular free speech, by the use of the bastinado and other refined forms of persuasion.

These are the vilest slanders, the product of the fevered imagination of calumniators. With a temerity boundless as their insolence, they have paraded motley crews of arab hobbledehoys, some on crutches or swathed in bandages, others cast rati or lacking some minor part of the anatomy such as finger or toe nails, an eye or an ear, and have not scrupled to allege that the author of their misfortunes is no less a personage than yourself.

In other days, when the credulous rabble would have been sent off about their business with a cautionary lesson from the lash, these defamations would have properly been ignored. But in an age in which the opinion of the mob is accorded the same importance as ancient soothsayers attached to the entrails of chickens, you have been obliged, at no small inconvenience, to produce learned physicians to rebut these malign aspersions with certain proof that the injuries were selfinflicted, accidental or induced by hysteria. Their testimony, happily, and a liberal dispensation of alms, sufficed to assuage the inflamed breasts of the ignorant.

As for the malevolent comparison of yourself to a Boor, it is as fitting as that of a doctor of science to an unenligh tened savage. Your Boor, being not yet beyond the age of superstition, holds that the quintessential nature of man is dependent upon his colour — as though the quality of a hide were determined by its tan. You, 'ma'am, being of a scientific temper, know that it is the blood which distinguishes nature's aristocrats from her peasants. Have you not proclaimed for all the world to hear that any who can establish descent from your family tree, be they spawned in the estaminets of Amsterdam or bastardised in the darkest colonies of Afria, are welcome in your home?

Your proper rejection of the arab is, accordingly, not founded (as the Boor's is) on a debased doctrine of skin, but on the incontrovertible evidence of the most eminent physiologists that his blood is of a watery texture and defiled as the cloacae of a bawdy house. As infection, unless checked, spreads and contaminates the blood with its pus, the leucocytes driving out the red corpuscles, so your arab, breeding like a sand-fly in the desert, is like to become an uncontrollable contagion, a plague destroying the very bloodstream of our society.

We are bid, on the highest scriptural authority, to pluck out our eye if it offends; so, with a bleb on the body political, it must be cauterized with fire and excised with the knife. As it is right and necessary to banish the leper to a colony and the lunatic to an asylum, so must your arabs be " cabin'd, cribb'd and confln'd," before they overrun the countryside,, jostling gentlefolk off the highways and scavenging at their doors, as swine grub after truffles.

To the eugenic and ecological argument may be added the humane consideration that, for your arab, life, from the beginning of time, has been such an insupportable burden that release from it is a consummation devoutly to be wished. Thus, properly understood, any measures which hasten this desirable fate, whether fire or sword, plague or starvation, are to be welcomed on the most selfless, humani tarian grounds. A rabid dog is best put out of its misery, not only because of its danger to others, but on account of the agonies which it must itself endure. In these sentiments, ma'am, you have had throughout the support of all classes of our community — our Council leaders; those noble instruments of persuasion, the press and the pulpit; and even the performers on the stage, those sprightly wits who, as once they made mock of madmen in Bedlam, now provoke the greatest amusement with their merry quips about the bootless arab.

To all but those who, in the manner of Oedipus, have wilfully blinded themselves to reality, it is apparent that your arab is indolent, shiftless, poxridden, cowardly and treacherous, spawned in filth and bred, like maggots, in corruption. Did not these gamins, sunk as they were in torpor and apathy, permit your gardens to become over grown with bindweed, plantain, and dock; your herbaceous borders to run riot; the soil of your vegetable garden to turn as acid as the saliva in their mouths; and the fruit of your orchards to rot, like the medlar, before it became ripe?

By contrast, who is unaware of the manner in which you, ma'am, with the bountiful assistance of your esteemed Uncle, have transformed the threadbare grass into luxuriant lawns, irrigated the vegetable garden (selling the produce in abundance), and reaped the full harvest of the neglected orchards? If further 'argument were needed to establish your entitlement to these lands, it is to be found in this, the very first and unchallengeable law of property, namely, that developers shall inherit the earth.

Happily it is one that requires no pleading before our wise and far-sighted Councillors, those bankers, lawyers, accountants, estate agents and builders, who stand convinced to a man that the very foundations of our society's prosperity rest on the full exploitation of its resources. For them, as for you, ma'am, there is no law more sacred I than the Law of Return on Capital.

Indeed, when the matter has been debated in the Chamber, and the present fecundity of your estates cpmpared with their previous aridity, there has been universal approbation of the way in which, while promoting your own interests, you have furthered the general good. As one alderman put it with a nice wit: "When there are mouths to be fed, the man who does not cultivate his garden must be shown the pitch-fork."

As for the press, ma'am, its ovine and sycophantic espousal of your case can only be regarded with tolerant cynicism, as one despises a sheep while acknowledging its culinary and sartorial uses. These Grub Street grovellers, devoid of scruple as of understanding, ' write only what the highest bidder bids Ithem write; and your arab, who contributes nothing to the public purse, must reflect on this profound truth — unsavoury though it may be to him — that there is no taxation without , misrepresentation.