Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/29

Rh the shallow rhetoricians who would force this conclusion upon us? Is it, indeed, true, that the Poet, or the Philosopher, or Artist whose genius is the glory of his age, is degraded from his high estate by the undoubted historical probability, not to say certainty, that he is the direct descendant of some naked and bestial savage, whose intelligence was just sufficient to make him a little more cunning than the Fox, and so much more dangerous than the Tiger? Or is he bound to howl and grovel on all fours because of the wholly unquestionable fact, that he was once an egg, which no ordinary power of discrimination could distinguish from that of a Dog? Or is the philanthropist or the saint to give up his endeavours to lead a noble life, because the simplest study of man's nature reveals, at its foundations, all the selfish passions and fierce appetites of the merest quadruped? Is mother-love vile because a hen shows it, or fidelity base because dogs possess it?"

In the work from which these rather long quotations have been taken, Professor Huxley answers these questions himself, and that too in a manner the conclusiveness of which leaves not the slightest doubt in the mind of any reasonable person as to their correctness. There are, however, still unnumbered thousands of people in the world who can afford to read these words with comfort and with decided advantage. They had their weight at the time, while today, inasmuch as the law of organic evolution is established, they are as true and as logical as any of the demonstrations in Euclid's geometry.

No thoughtful, reading and intelligent man or woman today believes that in the beginning mankind saw