Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/26

22 of man's own zoölogical order. If mankind be entitled to a life in futurity, to be enjoyed either in eternal pleasure or in eternal pain, so then too are all the simians, and indeed, clear down the entire chain to include the very toad-stools and the amoebæ,— protoplasm. The simplest inductive reasoning upon the evidence in hand carries us at once and directly to such a conclusion. Hope and faith, when combined, constitute one thing,— incontrovertible facts, and evidence, and inductive reasoning constitutes, when based in truth, quite another thing. Hope and faith may both fail us even in affairs of the most supreme import,— if it be of any importance to any one that there be a life hereafter,— while conclusions founded on facts and truth and drawn from evidence based upon the same, are unalterable, regardless of what men or mice think of it, and will through all eternity remain immutable.

Man is the most conceited being in the entire world's menagerie,— and on what account, pray? Surely not because of his shape or his anatomy. No, not that, but only in consequence of his higher reasoning powers, which in the course of his psychological evolution, and his morphological and physiological adaptation, have advanced him to a stage in which he is fitted to annihilate utterly every other animal on the face of the globe — an operation he is accomplishing with a varying rapidity and swiftness truly interesting to contemplate. His civilization consists in replacing in nature much that formerly existed there, with his machines, his habitations and places of pleasure, his improved passageways and contrivances that subserve the ends of