It is enough. The ancient gulf scooped by human conceit between man
and the other animals has been effectually and forever filled up.
The human species constitutes but one branch in the gigantic arbour
of life. And all the merit and all the feeling and all the
righteousness of the world are not, as we have been accustomed to
aver, congested into this one branch. And all of the weakness and
deformity are not, as we have also been anxious to believe, found
elsewhere. The reluctance of wrinkles and deformities to appear in
the pictures of men, and of strength and beauty to appear in the
representations of the other races of the earth, is to be accounted
for by the highly elucidative fact that man is the universal
portrait-painter. There is no one to tell man what he is and how he
strikes others, and hence he is the ‘paragon of creation’—the
inter-stellar pet, half clay and half halo—the image and pride of
the gods—the flower and gem of the eternal spheres. Man is the
only professional linguist in the universe. And it is fortunate for
him that he is. For, if he were not, his auditories would be
compelled to carry to his perceptive centres a great many sentiments
he now never hears. He would be likely to hear a good deal said, and
said with a good deal of feeling, about perpendicular
brigand—grandiloquent kakistocrat swelling with
self-righteousness—rhetorical hideful wrapped in pillage and
gorged with decomposition—a voluble and sanctimonious squash with
two sticks in it. The definition of man as it appears in the
dictionary of the donkey probably runs something like this: ‘_Man_
is an animal that walks on its hind-legs, invents adjectives with
which to praise itself, and displays its greatest utility in proving
that all sharks are not aquatic.’ We know what a lion looks like
when painted by a man, but human eyes have never yet been allumined
by the sardonic lineaments of a man painted by a lion. Being boiled
alive in order to look well as corpses in store-windows, and having
wooden pegs thrust into our muscles and left there to rot for a week
or two to keep us in our agony from doing something desperate—we
know what these experiences are like when they are delegated to
lobsters, and we take no more serious part in them than to insure
their infliction, but we are too fervent barbarians to bother our
heads about what they are like from the crustacean point of view.
Let us be candid. Men are not all gentle men and humane, and not-men
are not all inhuman. There are reptiles in broadcloth, and there are
warm and generous hearts among those peoples who have so long
suffered from human prejudice and ferocity. Let us label beings by
what they are—by the souls that are in them and the deeds they
do—not by their colour, which is pigment, nor by their
composition, which is clay. There are philanthropists in feathers
and patricians in fur, just as there are cannibals in the pulpit and
saurians among the money-changers. The golden rule may sometimes be
more religiously observed in the hearts and homes of outcast
quadrupeds than in the palatial lairs of bipeds. The horse, who
suffers and serves and starves in silence, who endures daily wrongs
of scanty and irregular meals, excessive burdens and mangled flanks,
who forgets cruelty and ingratitude, and does good to them that
spitefully use him, and submits to crime without resistance,
misunderstanding without murmur, and insult without resentment, is a
better Christian, a better exemplar of the Sermon on the Mount, than
many church-goers, in spite of the creeds and interdictions of men.
And the animal who goes to church on Sundays, wearing the twitching
skins and plundered plumage of others, and wails long prayers and
mumbles meaningless rituals, and gives unearned guineas to the
missionary, and on week-days cheats and impoverishes his neighbours,
glorifies war, and tramples under foot the most sacred principles of
morality in his treatment of his non-human kindred, is a cold,
hard-hearted _brute_, in spite of the fact that he is cunning and
vainglorious, and towers about on his hinders.
There are lessons that may be learned from the uncorrupted children
of Nature—lessons in simplicity of life, straightforwardness,
humility, art, economy, brotherly love, and cheerfulness—more
beautiful, perhaps, and more true than may sometimes be learned from
the stilted and Machiavellian ways of men. Would you learn
forgiveness? Go to the dog. The dog can stand more abuse and forgive
greater accumulations of wrong than any other animal, not even
excepting a wife. About the only thing in the universe superior to
the dog in willingness to undergo outrage is the human stomach.
Would you learn wisdom and industry? Go to the ant, that tireless
toiler of the dust. The ant can do that which no man can do—keep
grain in a warm, moist atmosphere without sprouting. Would you learn
art? Go to the bee or to the wild bird’s lodge. The art of the
honeycomb and of the hang-bird’s nest surpasses that of the cranny
of the savage as the Cathedral of St. Peter exceeds the cottage.
Would you learn socialism, that dream of poets and the hope and
expectation of wise men? It is actualised around you in thousands of
insect communities. The social and economic relations existing in
the most highly wrought societies of bees and wasps are
fundamentally the ideal relations of living beings to each other,
but it will require millenniums of struggle and bloodshed for men to
come up to them. Would you learn curiosity—not the curiosity that
gossips and backbites, but the curiosity of the explorer and
searcher after knowledge? Go to the monkey. The monkey has been
known to work two hours, without pause, utterly unconscious of
everything but its purposes, trying to open a fettered trunk
lock.[1] Would you learn sobriety? Go not to the gilded hells of
cities, where men die like flies in gin’s vile miasma. Go to the
spring where the antelope drinks. Would you learn chastity? Go not
to the foul dens and fiery chambers of men. Go to the boudoir of the
bower-bird, or to the subterranean hollow where the wild wolf rears
her litter.
Man is not the surpassingly pre-eminent individual he so actively
advertises himself to be. Indeed, in many particulars he is
excelled, and excelled seriously, by those whom he calls
‘lower.’ The locomotion of the bird is far superior in ease and
expedition to the shuffling locomotion of man. The horse has a sense
which guides it through darkness in which human eyes are blind; and
the manner in which a cat, who has been carried in a bag and put
down miles away, will turn up at the back-door of the old home next
morning dumfounds science. The eye of the vulture is a telescope.
The hound will track his master along a frequented street an hour
behind his footsteps, by the imponderable odour of his soles. The
catbird, without atlas or geographic manuals, will find her way back
over hundreds of trackless leagues, season after season, to the same
old nesting-place in the thicket. Birds, thousands of them, journey
from Mexico to Arctic America, from Algiers and Italy to
Spitzbergen, from Egypt to Siberia, and from Australia and the
Polynesian Islands to New Zealand, and build their nests and rear
their young, year after year, in the same vale, grove, or tundra.
The nightingale, who pours out his incomparable lovesong in the
twilight of English lanes during May and June, winters in the heart
of Africa; and some birds nest within the Arctic Circle and winter
in Argentina. Some of the plovers travel the entire length of the
American land mass every summer, from Patagonia to the Arctic
Circle, in order to lay three or four pale-green eggs, and see them
turn to birdlings by the shores of the Hudson Sea. Many animals have
the power to foretell storms, and man, though he can weigh worlds,
is ever glad to profit by their superior sense. When herons fly high
above the clouds, when sea-birds dip and sport in the water and the
bittern booms from the marshes, when swallows fly low and the sow
repairs her bed, when horses scamper and cattle sniff the air, when
ravens beat the air with their wings, make noises, and flock
together, when the swan raises her eggs by additions to her nest and
the prairie-dog scratches the dirt up around its hole, when beetles
are not found in the air and caterpillars mass in their webs, when
bees remain near their hives and ants carry their eggs to their
innermost abodes, when frogs croak more loudly from their watery
retreats and fishes seek the safety of the unharried deeps—look
out for foul weather! Man has not the sweetness of the song-sparrow,
the innocence of the fawn, nor the high relative brain capacity of
the tomtit and the fice.
Many animals have powers by which they are able to act in concert at
times, vast numbers of them moving in unison over immense areas by
signals or intuitions which man can neither imitate nor understand.
Such are the mysterious migrations of the Norway lemming and of many
birds and insects, and such were the memorable stampedes of the
bison hordes on the American plains in years gone by. Kropotkin saw
on the Siberian steppes one autumn ‘thousands and thousands’ of
fallow deer come together from an area as large as Great Britain at
a point on the Amur River in an unprecedented exodus to the lowlands
on the other side.[2] How these scattered thousands knew when to
start so as to arrive at the river at the same time, and how they
knew the direction to travel and found their way so well, are
mysteries which man can as yet only wonder at. More marvellous
yet—more marvellous, perhaps, than the concurrent action of any
other animal, for it implies the most accurate time-keeping
extending over many years—are the annual festivals of the
_palolo_, an annelid living among the interstices of the coral reefs
of some of the islands of the South Pacific. About three o’clock
on the morning following the third quarter of the October moon,
these worms invariably appear on the surface of the sea, swarming in
great numbers. Just after sunrise their bodies begin to break to
pieces, and by nine o’clock no trace of them is left. On the
morning following the third quarter of the November moon they appear
again, but usually in smaller numbers. After that they are seen no
more till the next October. This annual swarming is a phenomenon
connected with reproduction, the ova escaping from the broken bodies
of the females and, after being fertilised by the free-floating
sperms, sinking down among the coral reefs and hatching into a new
generation. ‘Year after year these creatures appear according to
lunar time. And yet in the long-run they keep solar time. They keep
two cycles, one of three and one of twenty-nine years. In the
three-year cycle there are two intervals of twelve lunations and one
of thirteen lunations. These thirty-seven lunations bring lunar time
somewhat near to solar time. But in twenty-nine years there is
enough difference to require the addition of another lunation; the
twenty-ninth year is therefore one of thirteen instead of twelve
lunations. In this way they do not change their season in an entire
century. So unfailing is their appearance that in Samoa they have
given their name to the spring season, which is called “the time
of the palolo.”’
Instead of the highest, man is in some respects the lowest, of the
animal kingdom. Man is the most unchaste, the most drunken, the most
selfish and conceited, the most miserly, the most hypocritical, and
the most bloodthirsty of terrestrial creatures. Almost no animals,
except man, kill for the mere sake of killing. For one being to take
the life of another for purposes of selfish utility is bad enough.
But the indiscriminate massacre of defenceless innocents by armed
and organised packs, _just_ _for pastime_, is beyond
characterisation. The human species is the only species of animals
that plunges to such depths of atrocity. Even vipers and hyenas do
not exterminate for recreation. No animal, except man, habitually
seeks wealth purely out of an insane impulse to accumulate. And no
animal, except man, gloats over accumulations that are of no
possible use to him, that are an injury and an abomination, and in
whose acquisition he may have committed irreparable crimes upon
others. There are no millionaires—no professional, legalised,
lifelong kleptomaniacs—among the birds and quadrupeds. No animal,
except man, spends so large a part of his energies striving for
superiority—not superiority in usefulness, but that superiority
which consists in simply getting on the heads of one’s fellows.
And no animal practises common, ordinary morality to the other
beings of the world in which he lives so little, compared with the
amount he preaches it, as man.
Let us be honest. Honour to whom honour is due. It will not emaciate
our own glory to recognise the excellence and reality of others, or
to come face to face with our own frailties. We _are_ our
brother’s keeper. Our brethren are they that feel. Let us
universalise. Our thoughts and sympathies have been too long
wingless. _The Universe is our Country_, and our Kindred are the
Populations that Mount. _It is well_—it is eminently well, for it
is godlike—_to send our Magnanimity to the Dusts and the Deeps_,
_our Sunrises to the Uttermost Isles_, _and our_ _Charity to the
Stars_.
1. Romanes: _Animal Intelligence_; New York, 1899.
2. Kropotkin: _Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution_; New York, 1902.