admire a profession full of wrangle and chatter. But that is a
monkeyish way of deciding disputes, not feline.

We fight best in armies, gregariously, where the risk is reduced;
but we disapprove usually of murderers, and of almost all private
combat. With the great cats, it would have been just the other way
round. (Lions and leopards fight each other singly, not in bands,
as do monkeys.)

As a matter of fact, few of us delight in really serious fighting.
We do love to bicker; and we box and knock each other around, to
exhibit our strength; but few normal simians are keen about bloodshed
and killing; we do it in war only because of patriotism, revenge,
duty, glory. A feline civilization would have cared nothing for duty
or glory, but they would have taken a far higher pleasure in gore.
If a planet of super-cat-men could look down upon ours, they would
not know which to think was the most amazing: the way we tamely live,
five million or so in a city, with only a few police to keep us
quiet, while we commit only one or two murders a day, and hardly
have a respectable number of brawls; or the way great armies of us
are trained to fight,--not liking it much, and yet doing more killing
in wartime and shedding more blood than even the fiercest lion on his
cruelest days. Which would perplex a gentlemanly super-cat spectator
the more, our habits of wholesale slaughter in the field, or our
spiritless making a fetish of "order," at home?


It is fair to judge peoples by the rights they will sacrifice most
for. Super-cat-men would have been outraged, had their right of
personal combat been questioned. The simian submits with odd