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This chapter begins lightly enough. Clover has seen the frivolous, lazy Mollie talking to a human being and \"allowing him to stroke your nose.\" Mollie\'s reaction to the accusation is pure comedy:
\"He didn\'t! I wasn\'t! It isn\'t true!\" cried Mollie, beginning to prance about and paw the ground.
Except for the horselike gestures, she behaves like an accused child. Soon after, she deserts the Farm for a human master who gives her sugar and ribbons. \"She appeared to be enjoying herself,\" say the pigeons who spotted her. They never mention Mollie again.
NOTE: We may wonder what this episode about Mollie has to do with the rest of the chapter, which deals with the growing conflict between Snowball and Napoleon, Snowball\'s expulsion from the Farm, and Napoleon\'s consolidation of personal power by means of his terrifying dogs. Perhaps Orwell is suggesting that Mollie got out while the getting was good.
During a winter of \"bitterly hard weather\" the Farm has moved one little step further along the road to inequality: \"It had come to be accepted that the pigs, who were manifestly cleverer than the other animals, should decide all questions of farm policy, though their decisions had to be ratified by a majority vote.\" Once again the narrator presents us with an accomplished fact.
Unfortunately, in reaching these decisions, Snowball and Napoleon clash about absolutely everything. Each shows a distinct political personality in the struggle:
At the Meetings Snowball often won over the majority by his brilliant speeches, but Napoleon was better at canvassing support for himself in between times.
Napoleon, the narrator tells us, is particularly good at getting the sheep to start bleating \"Four legs good, two legs bad\" at key points in Snowball\'s speeches. You can see how Orwell feels about members of the Communist Party who supported Stalin as he rose. But do Snowball\'s schemes, which he devises from reading some old agriculture magazines lying around the house, come off much better?
He talked learnedly about field-drains, silage, and basic slag, and had worked out a complicated scheme for all the animals to drop their dung directly in the fields, at a different spot every day, to save the labor of cartage.
The main issue between the two pigs is the great windmill project. Using old do-it-yourself books he found, Snowball has concocted a vast plan to build a windmill that would supply the Farm with free electricity. This in turn could operate farm machines. Napoleon, who \"produced no schemes of his own, but said quietly that Snowball\'s would come to nothing, and seemed to be biding his time,\" opposes the idea. The other animals admire Snowball\'s complicated drawings. As for Napoleon, who comes to examine them one day,
He walked heavily round the shed, looked closely at every detail of the plans and snuffed at them once or twice, then stood for a little while contemplating them out of the corner of his eye; then suddenly he lifted his leg, urinated over the plans, and walked out without uttering a word.
There is a real difference between Napoleon\'s and Snowball\'s ideas. Napoleon argues that they need to increase food production; they\'ll starve to death if they waste time on the windmill. \"Vote for Napoleon and the full manger\" is his slogan.
NOTE: You may appreciate the dispute more if you know that just after the Civil War, a hard-hit, backward Soviet Union faced a choice--fast, all-out industrialization (Trotsky\'s plan) or more attention to agriculture. A better-known difference between Trotsky and Stalin was the emphasis on spreading the Revolution to other countries (Trotsky) or on building socialism in one country (Stalin). Orwell dismisses this in one paragraph about the defense of the farm (by using pigeons to stir up rebellion on other farms or by arming themselves) and concentrates on the windmill; it\'s more fun to read about than pigeons.
In the middle of the decisive Meeting, when Snowball has shouted down the sheep and made \"a passionate appeal in favor of the windmill,\" showing them how the mill\'s electricity would \"operate threshing machines, ploughs, harrows, rollers, reapers, binders, besides supplying every stall with its own electric light, hot and cold water, and an electric heater,\" Napoleon stands up and, \"casting a peculiar side-long look at Snowball\" (the precise detail that helps fix the scene in our minds) gives out a strange \"high-pitched whimper.\" Nine huge dogs come bounding in and charge at Snowball. He just manages to escape with his life and get off the Farm.
Remember Napoleon\'s interest in the education of the nine puppies? His ferocious guard dogs are the result. Now, surrounded by his dogs, he announces to the \"silent and terrified\" animals that there will be no more Meetings. All farm questions will be settled at private meetings by a special committee of pigs, presided over by himself--no more time-wasting debates. Once again, as at public Meetings in the past, the animals--who are \"dismayed\"--just can\'t find the words to express themselves.
Even Boxer was vaguely troubled. He set his ears back, shook his forelock several times, and tried hard to marshall his thoughts; but in the end he could not think of anything to say.
Language seems to belong to the elite. Some of the other pigs try to protest. But for those four young porkers, the new dictator has a crushing argument: \"the dogs sitting around Napoleon let out deep, menacing growls, and the pigs fell silent.\" Police terror works. And so does Party discipline and conformity: \"the sheep broke out into a tremendous bleating of \'Four legs good, two legs bad!\' which went on for nearly a quarter of an hour and put an end to any chance of discussion.\"
It is not only power that is consolidated in this chapter, it is also a certain kind of language: the political Lie. The lie is prepared for by Squealer\'s speech explaining Napoleon\'s takeover, which is very similar to his hypocritical milk-and-apples speech in Chapter III, only much longer. First, the usual bit about Napoleon\'s \"sacrifice\" in taking on this extra work, then a popular antidemocratic argument that we all need the Leader to protect us against ourselves, against wrong decisions...
Suppose you had decided to follow Snowball, with his moonshine of windmills--Snowball, who, as we now know, was no better than a criminal?
No one has ever mentioned--much less proved--that Snowball is a criminal. How then could the animals \"know\" it? By the fact of his punishment, of course.
Still, \"somebody\" does object that he fought bravely at the Battle of the Cowshed. This leads to an insinuation that prepares the Lie, the rewriting of history: \"as to the Battle of the Cowshed,\" says Squealer, \"the time will come when we shall find that Snowball\'s part in it was much exaggerated.\" The \"watchword,\" Squealer concludes, is \"iron discipline\"--and the clincher, once again, is the threat that Jones may come back.
To swallow all this, the animals need faith. That is what Boxer--and apparently the others too--have, since he \"voiced the general feeling by saying\" what will be his second maxim: in addition to his private motto \"I will work harder,\" he now has \"Napoleon is always right.\"
At the Sunday ceremony that has replaced Meetings, the animals are now required to march past the skull of Major in a reverent way. As the substance of Major\'s teachings vanishes, he becomes revered as a saint in the new religion of Animalism.
The main function of these assemblies, however, is for the animals to receive their orders for the week. And soon \"the animals were somewhat surprised to hear Napoleon announce that the windmill was to be built after all.\" No reasons are given, even though great sacrifices will be demanded to build it. How can even Squealer find the words to justify this great switch?
Napoleon had never in reality been opposed to the windmill. On the contrary, it was he who had advocated it in the beginning, and the plan which Snowball had drawn on the floor... had actually been stolen from among Napoleon\'s papers. The windmill was, in fact, Napoleon\'s own creation.
Then why had he attacked the idea? \"He had seemed to oppose the windmill, simply as a manoeuvre to get rid of Snowball, who was a dangerous character\"... \"This,\" said Squealer, \"was something called tactics.\" He repeated a number of times, \"Tactics, comrades, tactics!\"
NOTE: The Lie is swallowed partly because of the animals\' need to believe in their leaders and partly because Squealer is a good propagandist, but mainly because force, or terror--in the form of the dogs--is on Napoleon\'s side. Orwell was, more than any other, the writer who saw the link in modern dictatorships between lying and terror.
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