Professor Garner, who has penetrated the mystery of the sibilants
and gutturals with which monkeys prefer to converse, is said to
entertain the glittering hope that by means of his discoveries these
contemporary ancestors of ours may be elevated to civilization. The
prospect is fascinating exceedingly. It opens to conjecture an almost
limitless domain of human interest. It illuminates, with a light as of
revelation, numberless paths of endeavor leading to glorious goals of
achievement.
The crying need of our time is more civilization. We have made a rather
lamentable failure in the attempt to elevate certain of the lower
races, such as the Chinese, the Sabbatarians and the Protectionists;
and to still others we have imparted only dim and transient gleams
of our great light. Some, indeed, we have civilized so imperfectly
that they might almost as well have been left in outer darkness; for
example, the Negroes of the South. Our utmost efforts—aided, in many
instances, by the shotgun, the bloodhound and the fagot-and-stake—have
given a faulty result, and many of these obdurate persons remain, as
the late Parson Brownlow would have said, “steeped to the nose and
chin in political profligacy,” voting the Republican ticket whenever
permitted. For four centuries we have hunted the Red Indian from cover
to cover, and he is not a very nice Red Indian yet, some of his vices
and superstitions differing widely from our own. The motorcarman,
shutting his eyes to the glory and advantage of enlightenment, still
urges his indocile apparatus along the line of least insistence; and
the organist from the overseas practices his black art at the street
corner, inaccessible to reclamation. A hundred urban tribes might be
named among civilization’s irreclaimables, without mentioning any of
the religious sects. At every turn the gentleman who is desirous of
making-over his faulty fellow-men encounters a baffling apathy or a
spirited hostility to change.
Possibly the higher quadrumana may prove more pregnable to light and
reason—more willing to become as we. Perhaps when we can all talk
Monkey we shall be able to set forth the advantages of our happy
state more graphically than we have succeeded in doing in any of
the tongues—including our own—known to the wicked and stiff-necked
generations mentioned. In that sparkling speech we may, for
example, make it clear that a condition in which nine-tenths of the
reformed monkeys will live a life of toil and discomfort, holding
their subsistence by the most precarious tenure, is conspicuously
subserviceable to that chastened and humble frame of mind which is
so joyously different from the empty intellectual pride that comes
of pelting one another with cocoanuts and depending from branches
by prehensile tails. Perhaps in the pithecan vocabulary is such
copiousness that we can easily set forth the unspeakable profit of
living a long way from where we want to go at a considerable peril
to life and limb—which is what steam and electricity enable us to
do. We may reasonably hope to be able to convince the gorilla of the
futility of his habit of beating his breast and roaring when in the
presence of the enemy; the history of a few of our great battles,
carefully translated into his noble tongue, will make him first endure,
then pity, then embrace our more effective military methods, to the
unspeakable benefit of his heart and mind. Adequately civilized, the
gorilla will beat his enemy’s breast and let that creature do the
roaring.
Certain advantages of urban life—an invention of civilization—ought to
be comparatively easy of exposition in an attractive way. The practice
of abolishing the hours of rest by means of lights and rattling
vehicles; of generating sewer-gas and conducting it into dwellings;
of loading the atmosphere with beautiful brown smoke and assorted
exhalations before taking it into the lungs; of drinking whisky, or
water from cow pastures; of eating animals that have been a long time
dead,—of all these and many other blessings of civilization the monkeys
can acquire knowledge, desire and, eventually, possession. Doubtless we
shall have some small difficulty in explaining the advantages of the
incaudate state (for civilization implies renunciation of the tail),
the comfortableness of the stiff hat and shirt collar (for civilization
entails clothing), the grace of the steel-pen coat, the beauty of the
skin-tight sleeve and the sanitary effect of the corset; but if the
monkey language, unlike that of the Houyhnhnms, supplies facilities
for “saying the thing that is not” we shall eventually convince our
arboreal pupils that black is not only white but a beautiful écru
green.
The next step will naturally be the investing them with citizenship and
the right to vote according to the dictates of the bosses. When by that
investiture they have been duly instated in “the seats of power,” the
monkeys will form one of the most precious of our political elements,
though hardly distinguishable from some of the political elements
with which we are now blest. Their enfranchising will be no radical
innovation; it will merely make the political pile complete—though the
possible defection of the philosopher element in the near future may
somewhat mar the symmetry of the edifice until the gap can be stopped
by enfranchisement of dogs and horses.
Even if all this is but the gorgeous dream of a too hopeful optimism,
it is nevertheless good to know that Professor Garner can understand
Monkey. If we fail to persuade the monkeys forward along the line of
progress to our advanced position it will be pleasant to have from them
an occasional word of cheer and welcome as we are led back to theirs.