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The victorious animals tossed all bits, nose rings, dog chains and castrating knives down the well. Then they tiptoed into the farmhouse, gazed with awe at the luxury of feather mattresses, the Brussels carpet and a lithograph of Queen Victoria. The animals voted unanimously that the farmhouse should be preserved as a museum. Some hams, found hanging in the kitchen, were reverently buried.
Comrades Napoleon and Snowball announced that Animalism had been reduced to Seven Commandments, which would henceforth be the unalterable law of Animal Farm. These were painted on the side of the barn. At 30 yards, any animal that could read (chiefly the pigs) could read that "All animals are equal." Later Comrade Snowball reduced the principles of Animalism to one line: "Four legs good, two legs bad."
Gee Up, Comrade! "The pigs did not actually work, but directed and supervised the others. With their superior knowledge it was natural that they should assume the leadership. Boxer and Clover would harness themselves to the cutter or the horserake ... and tramp steadily round and round the field with a pig walking behind and calling out 'Gee up, comrade!' or 'Whoa back, comrade!' . . ."
Every animal seemed satisfied except a cynical old jackass named Benjamin, the only animal who could read as well as the pigs. When asked how he liked the dictatorship of the animals, he merely observed: "Donkeys live a long time."
The bulk of Animal Farm describes the slow rise to absolute power of Comrade Napoleon and the gradual transmogrification of the pigs. Comrade Snowball proposed to industrialize Animal Farm by building a stone mill. Comrade Napoleon declared the plan nonsense. He drove
Comrade Snowball off the farm. Then Napoleon took over the plan to build the mill. While the animals starved and slaved under the slogan, "I will work harder," the pigs moved into Jones's farmhouse, and the glorification of the Leader (as Comrade Napoleon was now called) became systematic. Hens were sometimes heard to say: "Under the guidance of our Leader, Comrade Napoleon, I have laid five eggs in six days." The Beasts of England song was no longer sung; the rage now was a rhyme called Comrade Napoleon:
Friend of the fatherless!
Fountain of happiness!
Lord of the swill-bucket! Oh, how my soul is on
Fire when I gaze at thy
Calm and commanding eye,
Like the sun in the sky,
Comrade Napoleon!
The Seven Commandments on the barn wall had been reduced to one. To the slow-witted work animals Benjamin, the donkey, read the new Commandment: ALL
ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.
The Author. Tall, pale, chronically ailing George Orwell, 42, leads an unspectacular domestic life in the suburbs of London. A critic, essayist and novelist (A Clergyman's Daughter), Orwell contributes (in Britain) to his schoolmate Critic Cyril Connolly's highbrow monthly Horizon and to the leftist Tribune. In the U.S. his London Letter to Manhattan's Trot-skyoid quarterly Partisan RevIew has contained some of the war's most trenchant reporting on British politics, the Home Guard (Orwell was a member), black-market shenanigans, etc.