dition to whatever older facts he
has picked up, will wish to know all the news of all the world. If he
felt any true concern to know it, this would be rather fine of him: it
would imply such a close solidarity on the part of this genus. (Such a
close solidarity would seem crushing, to others; but that is another
matter.) It won't be true concern, however, it will be merely a blind
inherited instinct. He'll forget what he's read, the very next hour, or
moment. Yet there he will faithfully sit, the ridiculous creature,
reading of bombs in Spain or floods in Thibet, and especially insisting
on all the news he can get of the kind our race loved when they
scampered and fought in the forest, news that will stir his most
primitive simian feelings,--wars, accidents, love affairs, and family
quarrels.

To feed himself with this largely purposeless provender, he will pay
thousands of simians to be reporters of such events day and night; and
they will report them on such a voluminous scale as to smother or
obscure more significant news altogether. Great printed sheets will be
read by every one every day; and even the laziest of this lazy race
will not think it labor to perform this toil. They won't like to eat in
the morning without their papers, such slaves they will be to this
droll greed for knowing. They won't even think it is droll, it is so in
their blood.

Their swollen desire for investigating everything about them, including
especially other people's affairs, will be quenchless. Few will feel
that they really are "fully informed"; and all will give much of each
day all their lives to the news.

Books too will be used to slake this unappeasable thirst. They will
actually hold books in deep reverence. Books! Bottled chatter! things
that some other simian has formerly said. They will dress them in
costly bindings, keep them under glass, and take an affecting pride in
the number they read. Libraries,--store-houses of books,--will dot
their world. The destruction of one will be a crime against
civilization. (Meaning, again, a simian civilization.) Well, it is an
offense to be sure--a barbaric offense. But so is defacing forever a
beautiful landscape; and they won't even notice that sometimes; they
won't shudder anyway, the way they instinctively do at the loss of a
"library."

* * * * *

All this is inevitable and natural, and they cannot help it. There even
are ways one can jus