III. THE HIGHER PASSIONS 



XVIII 

 THE MORALS OF WILD ANIMALS 



THE ethics and morals of men and animals are thoroughly 

 comparative, and it is only by direct comparisons that 

 they can be analyzed and classified. It is quite possible 

 that there are quite a number of intelligent men and women 

 who are not yet aware of the fact that wild animals have moral 

 codes, and that on an average they live up to them better 

 than men do to theirs. 



It is a painful operation to expose the grinning skeletons in 

 the closets of the human family, but in no other way is it pos- 

 sible to hold a mirror up to nature. With all our brightness 

 and all our talents, — real and imitation, — few men ever stop 

 to ask what our horses, dogs and cats think of our follies and 

 our wickedness. 



By the end of the year 192 1 the annual total of human 

 wickedness had reached staggering proportions. From August 

 1914 to November 1918 the moral standing of the human race 

 reached the lowest depth it ever sounded since the days of the 

 cave-dwellers. This we know to be true, because of the increase 

 in man's capacity for wickedness, and its crop of results. After 

 what we recently have seen in Europe and Asia, and on the 

 high seas, let no man speak of a monster in human form as "a 

 brute;" for so far as moral standing is concerned, some of the 

 animals allegedly "below man" now are in a position to look 

 down upon him. 



It is a cold and horrid fact that today, all around us, and 

 sometimes close at hand, men are committing a long list of 



319 



