its ultimate chance of achievement; their hardships
will always distress and preoccupy minds,--fine, generous minds,--that
might have done great things if free: that might have done something
constructive at least, for their era, instead of being burned out
attacking mere anodyne-problems.

Nature will do what it can to lessen the strain, providing an
appropriate remedy for their bad behavior in plagues. Many epochs will
pass before the simians will learn or dare to control them--for they
won't think they can, any more than they dare control propagation. They
will reverently call their propagation and plagues "acts of God." When
they get tired of reverence and stop their plagues, it will be too
soon. Their inventiveness will be--as usual--ahead of their wisdom; and
they will unfortunately end the good effects of plagues (as a check)
before they are advanced enough to keep down their numbers themselves.

Meanwhile, when, owing to the pressure of other desires, any group of
primates does happen to become less prolific, they will feel ashamed,
talk of race suicide, and call themselves decadent. And they will often
be right: for though some regulation of the birth-rate is an obvious
good, and its diminution often desirable in any planet's history, yet
among simians it will be apt to come from second-rate motives. Greed,
selfishness or fear-thoughts will be the incentives, the bribes.
Contrivances, rather than continence, will be the method. How
audacious, and how disconcerting to Nature, to baffle her thus! Even
into her shrine they must thrust their bold paws to control her.
Another race viewing them in the garlanded chambers of love, unpacking
their singular devices, might think them grotesque: but the busy little
simians will be blind to such quaint incongruities.

Still, there is a great gift that their excess of passion will bestow
on this race: it will give them romance. It will teach them what little
they ever will learn about love. Other animals have little romance:
there is none in the rut: that seasonal madness that drives them to
mate with perhaps the first comer. But the simians will attain to a
fine discrimination in love, and this will be their path to the only
spiritual heights they can reach. For, in love, their inmost selves
will draw near, in the silence of truth; learning little by little what
the deepest sincerity means, and what clean hearts and minds and what
crystal-clear sight it demands. Such int