26 Supplement 1918 



Even without the high-pressure development, in the last 

 four years, of instruments of death the final stage cannot be 

 far distant and the nature of it is no longer in doubt. Every- 

 thing must go down before the White Man excepting what he 

 desires for selfish purposes to preserve. This is no longer a 

 speculation ; it is a necessity. In a short time, it may be in the 

 lifetime of an infant born to-day, the wealth of beautiful living 

 things that has lived and developed during countless ages will 

 be as strange to it as the fossils that are dug out of the earth 

 are to us to-day. 



The world will be dominated, if not exclusively inhabited, by 

 the White Man and the animals which he has domesticated, their 

 parasites and their vermin. 



In order to reckon the time which it takes to exterminate a 

 creation by the instruments and methods of civilisation, our 

 ordinary units of days, months and years are sufficient. When, 

 however, we attempt to estimate the time covered by the 

 development and persistence of a creation before it came in 

 contact with civilisation, we find that we are in want of an 

 adequate unit. 



If we make the unit one thousand years, great as this may 

 seem to us, we cannot say with certainty that a hundred or a 

 thousand or a hundred thousand or perhaps even a million of 

 these units would be an excessive estimate of the time which 

 would cover the development and persistence of the great 

 African fauna on its own ground. But we know that one 

 hundred of our years ago its extermination had hardly begun 

 and we see that it is now nearly complete. 



If we demand a reason for this sudden annihilation of almost 

 all that is beautiful on the earth, we are told that the advance 

 of civilisation demands it and has the power to effect it. But, 

 as a reason, this can satisfy no one. If, however, we are asked: 

 What, if anything, could have prevented it? the answer is ready. 

 If the steam-engine had not been invented and developed as 

 it has been, the organic life of the world would still be continuing 

 its progress up the gentle incline of development, and creation 

 would have lost nothing of its beauty. 



Had the steam-engine been invented and developed a 



