You are standing with this writer on the edge of a stagnant pool
in Northern Europe, fifty thousand years ago.
The trees are strange, the life is strange. There are certain
familiar things visible. For instance, on one side of the pool
there is an angry mammoth, with long hair and long tusks.
He is a huge, savage beast, monster of power with tiny, vicious
eyes, and a curled trunk of unlimited force.
You recognize his resemblance to the modern elephant, and you
feel at home.
In the middle of the pool, standing up to his waist in water,
there is another queer creature. He has long, red hair, and
through his lips you can see that in his rage he is grinding a
large set of teeth with the canine incisors abnormally developed.
He is a shaggy, savage-looking brute, with a bloody and an
apprehensive eye. You will recognize him as a human being.
As he stands in the pool there is a familiar slap of his right
hand on the back of his left shoulder--he has killed a mosquito.
That is the picture. We leave the mammoth, primitive man and the
mosquito to settle their troubles.
We call your attention to this. If you really witnessed that
scene you would have undoubtedly said to the red-eyed savage in
the pool:
"My friend, you can kill that mosquito easily, and possibly in
time you will kill all the mosquitoes. But that MAMMOTH is a
problem that you will not solve for a long time, if ever."
Had you known that the red-eyed human animal in the middle of the
pool was sent there by Providence to regulate the globe,
cultivate it, destroy the noxious forms of animal life, etc., you
would certainly have believed that that person would have got rid
of the mosquitoes long before getting rid of the mammoth.
As a matter of fact, the mammoth has gone, the woolly rhinoceros
of Northern Europe has gone, the sabre-toothed tiger prowls no
more. Even wolves have disappeared, and the mosquito is still
flourishing in his millions and billions.
We have only just learned that it is he who gives us malaria,
that it is he who spreads yellow fever and undoubtedly many other
diseases.
The human race, which in its earliest, incapable childhood easily
managed to dispose of the mammoth and his huge fellow-monsters,
still stands helpless before the little mosquito, deadliest of
VISIBLE animals on earth.
Is it not interesting to realize that the hardest work of the
human race, as of the individual, is the most minute work; that
the intellect, which easily copes with the heaviest and the
biggest problems, is baffled by the tiniest?
Ultimately, and perhaps soon, we shall send the mosquito, the
house-fly and the other buzzing pirates to join in the grave's
silence their big brothers--the mastodon and the rest.
Then our fight will begin against invisible animal life, against
the actual microbes of disease which the mosquito has been
carrying around and injecting into us. It is a long fight, but,
of course, we shall win it. ----
And is it not interesting, also, to reflect that in the moral, as
in the physical, battles of life man requires the longest time to
deal with his smallest enemies?
Morally we are still primitive savages. We are still combating
murder, arson, theft--like the cave-dweller fighting the
physical mammoth, we are fighting the mammoths of moral
deformity.
Eventually they will disappear. Murder will be unknown, and
theft, rendered unnecessary by decent social organization, will
have disappeared also.
At that time we shall be fighting the smaller and more dangerous,
more elusive and more persistent moral troubles--HYPOCRISY,
CONCEIT, UNCHARITABLENESS. These are the mosquitoes and flies
of the world of immorality that will pursue us when the big
fellows--murder and theft--shall have been killed off.