combined, are noble,--but a quality carried to excess defeats
itself. Kings who won't lift their scepters must yield in the end;
and, the worst of it is, to upstarts who snatch at their crowns.


I fancy the elephants would have been gentler masters than we: more
live-and-let-live in allowing other species to stay here. Our way
is to kill good and bad, male and female and babies, till the few
last survivors lie hidden away from our guns. All species must
surrender unconditionally--those are our terms--and come and live
in barns alongside us; or on us, as parasites. The creatures that
want to live a life of their own, we call wild. If wild, then no
matter how harmless we treat them as outlaws, and those of us who
are specially well brought up shoot them for fun. Some might be our
friends. We don't wish it. We keep them all terrorized. When one
of us conquering monkey-men enters the woods, most animals that scent
him slink away, or race off in a panic. It is not that we have
planned this deliberately: but they know what we're like. Race by
race they have been slaughtered. Soon all will be gone. We give
neither freedom nor life-room to those we defeat.

If we had been as strong as the elephants, we might have been kinder.
When great power comes naturally to people, it is used more urbanely.
We use it as parvenus do, because that's what we are. The elephant,
being born to it, is easy-going, confident, tolerant. He would have
been a more humane king.


A race descended from elephants would have had to build on a large
scale. Imagine a crowd of huge, wrinkled, slow-moving elephant-men