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I am in favor of cutting off her head." "So am I!" exclaimed Victoria, laughing. "Have you got a sword sharp enough to cut off the hydra's head? Then give it to me I will behead her." "The hydra believes she has a sword with which she might kill me. Listen to me. I was once in my life foolish enough to sign a paper which might prove dangerous to me in case it should be submitted to the emperor.
The boy Iolaus came; he killed the crab that had come to the Hydra's aid. Then Heracles laid hands upon the Hydra and drew it out of the swamp. With his club he knocked off a head and he had Iolaus put fire to where it had been, so that two heads might not grow in that place. The life of the Hydra was in its middle head; that head he had not been able to knock off with his club.
Now, from this heavenly descent of criticism, and the close analogy it bears to heroic virtue, it is easy to assign the proper employment of a true, ancient, genuine critic: which is, to travel through this vast world of writings; to peruse and hunt those monstrous faults bred within them; to drag out the lurking errors, like Cacus from his den; to multiply them like Hydra's heads; and rake them together like Augeas's dung; or else to drive away a sort of dangerous fowl who have a perverse inclination to plunder the best branches of the tree of knowledge, like those Stymphalian birds that ate up the fruit.
There were rumours of unknown deliverers, of a handful of brave men who had cut off the hydra's head; but no one seemed acquainted with the exact particulars, and the whole story appeared scarcely credible, until the company from the yellow drawing-room spread through the streets, scattering tidings, ever repeating the same narrative at each door they came to. It was like a train of powder.
After them beautiful Aventinus, born of beautiful Hercules, displays on the sward his palm-crowned chariot and victorious horses, and carries on his shield his father's device, the hundred snakes of the Hydra's serpent-wreath. These carry for war javelins and grim stabbing weapons, and fight with the round shaft and sharp point of the Sabellian pike.
The Golden Rule is a natural law as old as nature; for even in Hydra's life, unconscious discharge of duties to the race, and hence to others, is obligatory. And all these low types of organic associations evolved ages before the rules of human social order were vaguely recognized by the reflective self-consciousness of man, to be formulated as the science of ethics.
For, as fast as I cut off a head, two others grew in its place; and, besides, there was one of the heads that could not possibly be killed, but kept biting as fiercely as ever, long after it was cut off. So I was forced to bury it under a stone, where it is doubtless alive to this very day. But the hydra's body, and its eight other heads, will never do any further mischief."
His chance had come to him just when his optimism had begun to waver, with the hydra's heads multiplying beyond belief; and he proposed to show Alice especially, and Mr. Gorham incidentally, that he was no mere callow youth idly waiting by the wayside.
"Prove to me by facts the existence of your conspiracies, and I will commission you to help me destroy this hydra's head. Give me the proofs, and you shall be head of police again." Fouche bowed. "You shall have the proofs, general, to-day at once, provided that we thoroughly understand each other.
Their leaders have nothing to measure with, and are therefore ignorant of their own stature. But they are to be pitied or laughed at, not to be quarrelled with; they mean well with their nostrums, if they could only learn that they are cutting off a Hydra's head. This moderation towards those who are in error is one of the most characteristic features of Socrates in the Republic.
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