* * * *

"Ye may kill for yourselves and your mates and your cubs, as they need
and ye can,
But kill not for pleasure of killing, and seven times never kill man."

You may spend the remainder of your life attacking that formula of
animal nature if you please, but you will find it at last still truth.
Man kills not only the beasts, but his own species for pleasure, or in
sheer wantonness of cruelty. He loves killing as an exercise; he loves
it as a spectacle; he loves it as the origin of his greatest emotion.
When that there is merely a brutish criminal to be hanged, human
beings crowd the converging roads to the spectacle as centuries ago
they crowded to the Colosseum. And it is to be recorded to the credit
of wild beasts that no traveler ever yet came upon a battlefield that
they had strewn with the dead bodies of their own kind.

Lest it be contended that this is a psychological portrait of the mass
of mankind caricatured by bitter cynicism, let us examine the aspect
of its physiology. The whole brain of an average Caucasian makes up
fifty ounces of the 140 pounds weight of his body. There are thus 137
pounds of fleshly necessity to three pounds of intellectual
possibility--forty-six parts of heavy dough to one part of leaven. The
difference in the brain weight of races, and which decides the
question of intellectual superiority, is about two ounces. The
difference in the brain weight of individuals of the same race,
indicating mental superiority is about two ounces. Now as the brains
of individuals of all races must in proportion be equally occupied
with the execution of those functions which we call instinct and those
acts that may be called merely automobile (since they are the results
of training and constant imitation, and have utterly no relation to
intellectuality or mental initiative), it may be fairly assumed that
the spiritual essence of races and individuals exists in a little
grayish pulp-like lump of brain weighing two ounces out of an average
bodily weight of 140 pounds. In the mass of humanity, then, there is
one part possible to flower into the noble perceptions of spiritual
and intellectual life, to 1,120 parts of dull, uniform, automatic
animalism.

What chance has this solitary microbe of spiritual and intellectual
light against the swarming bacteria of animalism? That single microbe
is merely a possibility. It may be mutilated, it may be dwarfed, it
may fai