Chapter 4-6

6.

From the scientific point of view, it is but a single step from the eating of captive cattle, horses, sheep, hares, rabbits, deer, hogs, etc. to the eating of captive men.

It may grate upon unstrung nerves to be harshly told these gruesome facts in straight language. However, calm, sensible readers must unreservedly admit that Man is not a pretty, harmless, little cherub; not even a ‘lamb,’ but the fiercest, most ferocious, most cunning, and most bloodthirsty of all the vertebrates. He is the fighting, roving, pillaging, lusting, cannibalistic animal, par excellence, the King of the Great Carnivore. When he takes his walks abroad, the ‘wild beasts’ of the field and the birds of the air, even the most courageous of them, are stricken dumb. Shuddering they fly from his shadow(or his odor down the wind) hiding in trembling and quaking with terror.

It is man’s destructive energy, not his altruism, that makes him absolute monarch of all he surveys, and yet, how feeble he is if compared to the powers of Nature that gave him being? No other beast will stand and face him, except if it cannot run away, not even a snake, a tiger, or a wolf.

Structurally, men are fashioned for purposes of inflicting and suffering pain. Every human anatomy is an elaborate nerve and bone infernal machine, a kind of breathing, perambulating Juggernaut, a superb engine of lethal immolation that automatically stokes its furnace fire with its victims.

Men rush upon each other (or upon their prey) with hoarse war-shouts and bloodshot eyes, as prowling beasts of the deserts and jungles do. Man banquets upon his quarry with greediness, snarling, and growling with ferocious triumphant delight, just like unto wolves; but he loves to act the hypocrite, turn up the whites of his protesting eyes to ‘heaven’, weep crocodile tears over his mangled, bleeding, and palpitating carrion. How exultantly he lilts his Te Deum, his Kyrie Eleison, his Et in terra pax, his Glorias, and Alleluias, while with blood-clotted jaw and distended paunch he licks his gaping wounds?
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As the painted Redskin chants his vengeful ghost-song; so the furious Paleface whoops his double-leaded editorial. As the hungry lion roars at midnight on African karoo, or in Himalayan jungle, so the piratical Anglo-Teuton roars his “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, his “Brittania Rules the Waves”, or his “Watch by the Rhine.” Exactly as the Moslem fanatic yells “Allah Akbar”, while slicing up hated “Christian dogs”, so the vicious Englishman thunders forth his “Hip, Hip, Hurrah!” while driving an elegant bayonet dagger into the liver of “wicked heathens”, whose property he there after annexes, as a matter of course; for ‘business is business, don’t you know.’

Man’s anatomy, external and internal, his eyes, his teeth, his muscles, his blood, his viscera, his brain, his vertebra; all speak of fighting, passion, aggressiveness, violence, and prideful egoism.

Even the component elements of a human body are themselves in a constant state of internecine warfare. Our bony framework and pulsating tissues, are vast campaigning grounds, whereon microscopical animalculae in countless myriads, fight out their ephemeral lives, as we ourselves do, with tooth and claw. When one swarm of microbes, germs or spores conquer (in the struggle for sustenance) disease, or death supervenes to us, as the case may be. When rival hosts vanquish, then our flesh, nerves, bones, and blood become their happy hunting grounds, and our health returns, at least until the bacilli-battalions have finally eaten us out; or have been, themselves, conquered and exterminated by fiercer swarms.

It is not improbable that this earth itself is a living breathing organism and that Tribes of Man are microbes and blood sucking vermin (on it’s outer cuticle) imagining themselves ‘the whole thing.’ Just as itch creating parasites burrow themselves into out own hide, so (in our own turn) we may be unpleasant parasites, burrowing in the hide of some nobler and grander Being.