carcasses, they had shamelessly given themselves up to ancestral
cannibalism. They were thus enabled, seeing the thousand of millions of
Chinese destroyed and buried beneath the snow, to give full vent to
their prolific instincts. Alas! who knows if our own descendants will
not one day be reduced to this extremity? In what promiscuity, in what a
slough of greed, falsehood and robbery were these unfortunates living!
The words of our language refuse to depict their filth and coarseness.
With infinite pains they raised underground diminutive vegetables in
diminutive beds of soil they had brought thither together with
diminutive pigs and dogs.... These ancient servants of mankind appeared
very disgusting to our new Christopher Columbus. These degraded beings
(I speak of the masters and not of the animals, for the latter belong to
a breed that has been much improved by those who raised them) had lost
all recollection of the Middle Empire and even of the surface of the
earth. They heartily laughed when some of our _savants_ sent on a
mission to them spoke to them of the firmament, the sun, the moon and
the stars.... They listened, however, to the end of these accounts, then
in an ironical tone they asked our envoys: "Have you seen all that?" And
the latter unfortunately could not reply to the question, since no one
among us has seen the sky except the lovers who go to die together.

Now, what did our settlers do at the sight of such cerebral atrophy?
Several proposed, it is true, to exterminate these savages who might
well become dangerous owing to their cunning and to their numbers, and
to appropriate their dwelling-place after a certain amount of cleaning
and painting and the removal of numerous little bells. Others proposed
to reduce them to the status of slaves or servants in order to shift on
to them all our menial work. But these two proposals were rejected. An
attempt was made to civilize and to render less savage these poor
cousins, and once the impossibility of any success in that direction had
been ascertained the partition was carefully blocked up.

VII

THE AESTHETIC LIFE

Such is the moral miracle wrought by our excellence which itself is
begotten of love and beauty. But the intellectual marvels which have
issued from the same source, merit a still more extended notice. It will
be enough for me to indicate them as I go along.

Let us first speak of the sciences. One might have thought that from the