“Nothing,” the Fiend-Orator was observing, “is more deplorable among the cultured races of the present day than the tendency to identify fiendhood, in the most sweeping fashion, with all manner of disreputable excesses, excesses which can only be alleged against us on the merest legendary evidence. Vices which are exclusively or predominatingly human are unblushingly described as inhuman, and, what is even more contemptible and ungenerous, as fiendish. If one investigates such statements as ‘inhuman treatment of pit ponies’ or ‘fiendish cruelties in the Congo,’ so frequently to be heard in our brother Parliaments on earth, one finds accumulative and indisputable evidence that it is the human treatment of pit ponies and Congo natives that is really in question, and that no authenticated case of fiendish agency in these atrocities can be substantiated. It is, perhaps, a minor matter for complaint,” continued the orator, “that the human race frequently pays us the doubtful compliment of describing as ‘devilish funny’ jokes which are neither funny nor devilish.”

The orator paused, and an oppressive silence reigned over the vast chamber.