[This is, in fact, the page immediately prior to the excerpt shared on October 4th. Yes, as may be implicitly obvious, today I've gone back to the beginning of chapter 4, to make minor revisions throughout 4 and 5, again.]
Torn from the pages of the second edition.
The cardinal, of course, is willing to go much further, but having never eaten human flesh, his reasoning has more of an abstract air than the raven's speech before: "Modern humans are the masters of many tools, and yet your tools become terrible things once you've come to see yourselves as serving a role defined by these instruments. The law creates the lawyer, and then he lives his whole life in service to the law. 'What a terrible tool!', you think, as if you could liberate the lawyer by tearing up the law. How little you can imagine what dangerous people these same lawyers will become once you've deprived them of their law: a workman without his tools soon discovers that he still has claws."
The blue jay, hopping on his perch, now warns: "Destroy the bureaucracy, and you still have a society ruled by bureaucrats. Destroy the belief and the believers remain."
The raven presses his old argument even further: "Even if your civilization provides nothing but a veneer painted over barbarism, you need to learn to appreciate the veneer! You see little difference between bureaucrats and barbarian kings, but as soon as the bureaucrats return to barbarism, you'll appreciate the progress of a thousand years that dragged them down from their thrones, deprived them of their dueling swords, and taught them to care for the technicalities of the law, romanticizing the arbitrary procedures of limited government."
"Only a fool blames the highway for the brutality of the highwaymen: demolish the road beneath them, like pulling the carpets out of an abattoir, and what have you got? A gang of killers, all the same."