second generation, you will see barefooted boys riding bareback on a
mule, with their hair sticking out of the top of their sombreros, with
a rooster under each arm, going to a cock-fight on Sunday."

You have got to have the soil; you have got to have the climate, and
you have got to have another thing--you have got to have the fireside.
That is one excuse I have for us.

The next excuse is that I think we came up from the lower animals.
Else how can you account for all this snake and hyena and jackal in
man? Now, when I first heard that doctrine, I didn't like it. I felt
sorry for people who had nothing but ancestors to be proud of. It
touched my heart to think that they would have to go back to the Duke
Orangutan or the Duchess Chimpanzee. I was sorry, and I hated to
believe it. I don't know that it is the truth now. I am not satisfied
upon that question; I stand about eight to seven. I thought it over.
I read about it. I read about these rudimentary bones and muscles. I
didn't like that. I read that everybody had rudimentary muscles coming
from the ear right down here (indicating); that the most intellectual
people in the world have got them. I say, "What are they?"
"Rudimentary muscles." "What kind of muscles?" "Muscles that your
ancestors used to have fully developed." "What for?" "To flap their
ears with."

Well, whether we ever had them or not, I know of lots of men who ought
to have them yet. And finally I said, "Well, I guess we came up from
the lower animals." I thought it all over; the best I could, and I
said, "I guess we did." And after a while I began to like it, and I
like it better now than I did before.

Do you know that I would rather belong to a race that started with
skull-less vertebrae in the dim Laurentian seas, wiggling without
knowing why they wiggled, swimming without knowing where they were
going; but kept developing and getting a little further up and a little
further up, all through the animal world, and finally striking this
chap in the dug-out. A getting a little bigger, and this fellow
calling that fellow a heretic, and that fellow calling the other an
infidel, and so on. For in the history of the world, the man who has
been ahead has always been called a heretic. Recollect this! I would
rather come from a race that started from that skull-less vertebrae,
and came up and up and up, and finally produced Shakespeare, who found
the human intellect wallowing in a hut,