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The Augean stables were cleansed by the Hercules of public opinion; and with the satisfied conscience and restored self-complacency procured by this act, the people at last settled down upon the conviction that Benedict and his boy had shared the fate of old Tilden that they had lost themselves in the distant forest, and met their death alike beyond help and discovery. Mr.
Then came the French as conquerors, who expelled the lawless intruders, perhaps themselves quite as deserving of the title; but they did a good work by clearing what had become an Augean stable of its worst filth, and partially restoring the choicest work of the Moorish builders.
The Augëan Stable, miscalled by him "The Public Works Department," and whose officials he coolly fastened upon the financial vitals of that long-suffering Colony, baffled even the resolute will of a Des Voeux to cleanse it. Poor Sir Sanford Freeling attempted the cleansing, but foundered ignominiously almost as soon as he embarked on that Herculean enterprise.
The Hydra had nine heads, of which the middle one was immortal. Hercules struck off its head with his club, but in the place of the head knocked off, two new ones grew forth each time. At length with the assistance of his faithful servant Iolaus, he burned away the heads of the Hydra, and buried the ninth or immortal one under a huge rock. Another labor was the cleaning of the Augean stables.
The true way to cleanse the Augean stables, as the old myth has it, was to turn the river into them. It would have been endless work to wheel out the filth in wheelbarrows loaded by spades: turn the stream in, and it will sweep away all the foulness. When the Ark comes into the Temple, Dagon lies, a mutilated stump, upon the threshold.
Whoever tries to forestall or appease him might better be at work in Augean stables; because, after all, we must admit that the facts of life are on his side. It is not intended that we shall be very comfortable. There is a terrible amount of total depravity in animate and inanimate things. From morning till night there is not an hour without its cross to carry.
"Or, shall I say, it is Hercules with the Augean stable to cleanse, of which every city is a stall, heaped with the dung of a century; with the Hydra to slay, whose hundred writhing heads of false belief, from old truth rotted into lies, spring inexhaustibly fecund in creeds, interests, institutions.
In that sense, if in no other, I have been a typical American, regarding my country as the happy hunting-ground of enlightened self-interest, as a function of my desires. Whether or not I have completely got rid of this romantic virus I must leave to those the aim of whose existence is to eradicate it from our literature and our life. A somewhat Augean task!
It might not look so pretty or picturesque as the present system, but it would be enormously more useful, and in the long run vastly more economical. I should like to see Kitchener put at the War Office with authority to sweep it out; Hercules in the Augean stable would be nothing to it." Chris laughed at the earnestness and vehemence with which the commander spoke. He went on.
He faced me with a look of quiet resolution. "I think I've been through all the buts. It's an infernal climate, of course, but then I am used to the East I know what precautions to take. And it would be a big thing to clean up that Augean stable." "But consider your wife and children " He met this with deliberation. "I have considered my children that's the point.
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