But the most mournful instance of provincial ethics afforded by the
inhabitants of the earth is not that furnished by the varieties of
the human species in their conduct toward each other, but that
afforded by the human race as a whole in its treatment of the
non-human races. Human nature is nowhere so hideous, and human
conscience is nowhere so profoundly inoperative, as in their
disregard for the life and happiness of the non-human animal world.
With the development of the representative powers of the mind, the
widening and mutualising of human activities, and the consequent
enlargement of the human horizon, the feeling of amity has spread
and intensified, until to-day, notwithstanding all that is true of
human sectionalism, the ethical systems of civilised peoples
include, theoretically at least, and more or less seriously, all
human beings whatsoever. Ethical consciousness has extended from
individual to family, from family to clan, from clan to tribe, from
tribe to confederacy, from confederacy to kingdom, from kingdom to
race, from race to species, until, in the case of many millions of
men, ethical feeling has reached, with greater or less vividness and
consistency, the anthropocentric stage of evolution. The fact that
an individual is a _man_—that is, that he belongs to the human
species of animals—entitles him in all civilised lands to the
fundamental rights and privileges of existence. The rights to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are believed to-day, by all
exalted minds, to be the inalienable properties of every _human_
being who comes into the world.
But, except by occasional individuals here and there whose emotions
are more civilised than the rest, or whose conceptions are more
ample and clear, ethical relations are not extended by human beings
beyond the bounds of their own species. Non-human millions are
_outsiders_. They are looked upon and treated by human beings as if
they were an entirely different order of existences, with entirely
different purposes and susceptibilities, from human beings. They are
not considered to be living beings at all, as human beings are, who
are here in the world to enjoy life and all that life holds that is
dear to a living being. They belong to the same class of existences
as the waves of the sea and the weeds of the field. They are looked
upon as mere _things_—mere moving, multiplying objects, without
the slightest equity in the world in which they find themselves.
They may be set upon, beaten, maimed, starved, assassinated, eaten,
insulted, deceived, imprisoned, robbed, tormented, skinned alive,
shot down for pastime, cut to pieces out of curiosity, or compelled
to undergo any other enormity or victimisation anybody can think of
or is disposed to visit upon them. It is enough almost to make
knaves shudder, the cold-blooded and business-like manner in which
we cut their throats, dash out their brains, and discuss their
flavour at our cannibalistic feasts. As Plutarch says, ‘Lions,
tigers, and serpents we call savage and ferocious, yet we ourselves
come behind them in no species of barbarity.’ Accustomed from our
cradle up to look upon violence and assassination, we have become so
habituated and hardened to these things that we perpetrate them and
see them perpetrated with the same indifference as that with which
we watch waves die on the beach. Human beings are, in fact
(‘paragons’ though they pretend to be), the most predatory and
brutal of all animals—the great bone-breakers and bone-pickers of
the planet.
It is scarcely possible, astounding as it is, to commit crimes upon
any beings in this world, except men. There are no beings in the
universe, according to human beings, except themselves. All others
are commodities. They are of consequence only because they have
thighs and can fill up the unoccupied places of the human
alimentary. Human beings are ‘persons,’ and have souls and gods
and places to go to when they die. But the hundreds of thousands of
other races of terrestrial inhabitants are mere ‘animals,’ mere
‘brutes,’ and ‘beasts of the field,’ ‘livestock’ and
‘vermin.’ Every crime capable of being perpetrated by one being
upon another is day after day rained upon them, and with an
equanimity that would do honour to the managers of an inferno. Human
beings preach as the cardinal rule of morality—and they seem never
to tire of its reiteration—that they should do unto others as they
would that others would do unto them; but they hypocritically
confine its application to the members of their own crowd,
notwithstanding there are the same reasons identically for extending
it to all creatures. The happiness of the human species is assumed
to be so much more precious than that of others that the most sacred
interests of others are unhesitatingly sacrificed in order that
human desires may all be fastidiously catered to. Even for a tooth
or a feather or a piece of skin to wear on human vanity, forests are
depopulated and the land filled with the dead and dying.
Assassination is the commonest and most fashionable of human
pastimes. Jaded systems are regularly recuperated by massacre. Men
arm themselves—men who roar about ‘rights,’ and even ministers
of mercy—and go out on killing expeditions with as little
compunction as savages put on war-paint. They come back from their
campaigns of crime like the cut-throats of old Rome, trailing their
victims as trophies, and expecting to be hailed as heroes for the
hells they have established. Barbarians preponderate, and morality
is turned inside out. Cruelty is lionised, and broad-mindedness is
rewarded with a sneer. Compassion is a disease, and to be
fashionable is to be a fiend. If non-human peoples had no nerves and
no choice of emotions, and were utterly indifferent to life, they
could scarcely be treated more completely as personal nonentities.
The denial by human animals of ethical relations to the rest of the
animal world is a phenomenon not differing either in character or
cause from the denial of ethical relations by a tribe, people, or
race of human beings to the rest of the human world. The
provincialism of Jews toward non-Jews, of Greeks toward non-Greeks,
of Romans toward non-Romans, of Moslems toward non-Moslems, and of
Caucasians toward non-Caucasians, is not one thing and the
provincialism of human beings toward non-human beings another. They
are all manifestations of the same thing. The fact that these
various acts are performed by different individuals and _upon_
different individuals, and are performed at different times and
places, does not invalidate the essential sameness of their natures.
Crimes are not classified (except by savages or their immediate
derivatives) according to the similarity of those who do them or
those who suffer from them, but by grouping them according to the
similarity of their intrinsic qualities. All acts of provincialism
consist essentially in the disinclination or inability to be
universal, and they belong in reality, all of them, to the same
species of conduct. There is, in fact, but one great crime in the
universe, and most of the instances of terrestrial wrong-doing are
instances of this crime. It is the crime of _exploitation_—the
considering by some beings of themselves as _ends_ and of others as
their _means_—the refusal to recognise the equal, or the
approximately equal, rights of all to life and its legitimate
rewards—the crime of acting toward others as one would that others
would _not_ act toward him. For millions of years, almost ever since
life began, this crime has been committed, in every nook and quarter
of the inhabited globe.
_Every being_ is an _end_. In other words, every being is to be taken
into account in determining the ends of conduct. This is the only
consistent outcome of the ethical process which is in course of
evolution on the earth. This world was not made and presented to any
particular clique for its exclusive use or enjoyment. The earth
belongs, if it belongs to anybody, to the beings who inhabit it—to
_all_ of them. And when one being or set of beings sets itself up as
the sole end for which the universe exists, and looks upon and acts
toward others as mere means to this end, it is usurpation, nothing
else and never can be anything else, it matters not by whom or upon
whom the usurpation is practised. A tyrant who puts his own welfare
and aggrandisement in the place of the welfare of a people, and
compels the whole people to act as a means to his own personal ends,
is not more certainly a usurper than is a species or variety which
puts its welfare in the place of the welfare of all the inhabitants
of a world. The refusal to put one’s self in the place of others
and to act toward them as one would that they would act toward him
does not depend for its wrongfulness upon who makes the refusal or
upon whether the refusal falls upon this or that individual or set.
Deeds are right and wrong in themselves; and whether they are right
or wrong, good or evil, proper or improper, whether they should be
done or should not be done, _depends upon their effects upon the
welfare of the inhabitants of the universe_. The basic mistake that
has ever been made in this egoistic world in the judging and
classifying of acts has been the mistake of judging and classifying
them with reference to their effects upon some particular fraction
of the inhabitants of the universe. In pure egoism conduct is judged
as good or bad solely with reference to the results, immediate or
remote, which that conduct produces, or is calculated to produce, on
the _self_. To the savage, that is right or wrong which affects
favourably or unfavourably _himself_ or his _tribe_. And this
sectional spirit of the savage has, as has been shown, characterised
the moral conceptions of the peoples of all times. The practice
human beings have to-day—the practice of those (relatively) broad
and emancipated minds who are large enough to rise above the petty
prejudices and ‘patriotisms’ of the races and corporations of
men, and are able to view ‘the world as their country’ (the
world of _human_ beings, of course)—the practice such minds have of
estimating conduct solely with reference to its effects upon the
human species of animals is a practice which, while infinitely
broader and more nearly ultimate than that of the savage, belongs
logically in the same category with it. The partially emancipated
human being who extends his moral sentiments to all the members of
his own species, but denies to all other species the justice and
humanity he accords to his own, is making on a larger scale the same
ethical mess of it as the savage. The only consistent attitude,
since Darwin established the unity of life (and the attitude we
shall assume, if we ever become really civilised), is the attitude
of _universal gentleness and humanity_.
‘The world is my country,’ said Thomas Paine, and every man,
woman, and child capable of appreciating the exalted sentiment
applauded. But ‘the world’ of the great freethinker was
inhabited by _men only_.
The following lines were written by Robert Whitaker, and first
printed in a San Francisco newspaper:
‘My Country is the world! I count
No son of man my foe,
Whether the warm life currents mount
And mantle brows like snow,
Or whether yellow, brown, or black,
The face that into mine looks back.
‘My Native Land is Mother Earth,
And all men are my kin,
Whether of rude or gentle birth,
However steeped in sin;
Or rich or poor, or great or small,
I count them brothers one and all.
‘My Flag is the star-spangled sky,
Woven without a seam,
Where dawn and sunset colours lie,
Fair as an angel’s dream,
The Flag that still unstained, untorn,
Floats over all of mortal born
‘My Party is all humankind,
My Platform, brotherhood;
I count all men of honest mind
Who work for human good,
And for the hope that gleams afar.
My comrades in the holy war.
‘My Country is the world! I scorn
No lesser love than mine,
But calmly wait that happy morn
When all shall own this sign,
And love of country, as of clan,
Shall yield to love of Man.’
Robert Whitaker, you are a grand improvement on the ‘jingo.’ But
you are still too small. There are conceptions as much more
prophetic and exalted than yours as your conception is superior to
that of the Figian.
Broad as he is who can look upon all men as his brethren and
countrymen—broad as he is compared with those groundlings called
‘patriots,’ who can see nothing clearly beyond the bounds of the
political unit to which they belong—he is not broad enough. He is
still a _sectionalist_, a _partialist_. He represents but a _stage_
in the process of ethical expansion. He is, in fact, small compared
with the _universalist_, just as the savage is small compared with
the philanthropist. ‘Mankind,’ ‘humanity,’ ‘all men,’
‘the whole human family’—these are big conceptions, too big
for the poor little nubbins of brains with which most millions make
the effort to think. But they are pitifully small compared with that
grand conception of kinship which takes in all the races that live
and move upon the earth. Smaller yet are these conceptions compared
with that sublime and supreme synthesis which embraces not only the
present generation of terrestrial inhabitants, but which extends
longitudinally as well as laterally, extends in time as well as in
space, and embraces the generations which shall grow out of the
existing generation and which are yet unborn—_that conception
which recognises earth-life as a single process, world-wide and
immortal, every part related and akin to every other party and each
generation linked to an unending posterity_.
Every individual, therefore, emancipated enough to judge of acts of
conduct according to their intrinsic natures and consequences rather
than according to some local or traditional bias, cannot help
knowing that the exploitation of birds and quadrupeds for human whim
or convenience is an offence against the laws of morality, not
different in kind from the offences denounced in human laws as
robbery and murder. The creophagist and the hunter exemplify the
same somnambulism, are the authors of the same kind of conduct, and
belong literally in the same category of offenders, as the cannibal
and the slave-driver. To take the life of an ox for his muscles, or
to kill a sheep for his skin is _murder_, and those who do these
things or cause them to be done are _murderers_ just as actually as
highwaymen are who blow off the heads of hapless wayfarers for their
guineas. If these things _seem untrue_ it is not because they _are_
untrue, but because those to whom they seem so _are unable to judge
conduct from the quadrupedal point of view_. If there were in this
world beings as much more clever than Caucasians as Caucasians are
more clever than cows and sheep, and these beings should regard
themselves as the darlings of the gods and should attach a
fictitious dignity and importance to their own lives, but should
look upon Caucasians as simply so much ‘beef’ and ‘mutton,’
these bleached terrorists of the world would in the course of a few
generations of experience probably become sufficiently illumined to
realise that current human conceptions of cows and sheep are not
only preposterous, but fiendish.