GIFT OF 
 
umbug - Land 
 
 BEING THE REPORT OF 
 
 MENDEZ PINTO 
 
 Concerning a Man-like Creature 
 Inhabiting the Earth during the Seventeenth Eon 
 
 Submitted to the Regents of the 
 UNIVERSITY OF ALDEBARAN 
 Constellatio Taurii. MCMXVI 
 
 Weimar Press, ( Route 8, Box 45 ) Los Angeles, Cal, 
 Price 50c, postpaid, coin or exchange. 
 
I. PROEM* 
 
 Out of Tune in Nature. 
 
 II. THE MENTAL STRUCTURE OF THE HUMAN CREATURE 2 
 
 Not yet Dry behind the Ears. 
 
 III. His BRAIN-BOX 3 
 
 The Suckling of Cow-Milk and Barley-Water. 
 
 IV. HUMAN CONSCIENCE AND MORALITY 6 
 
 Who is Right? Nature's God or Man's Conscience? 
 
 V. HUMAN CRUELTY TO THEIR YOUNG 8 
 
 "Spare not the Rod." 
 
 VI. EDUCATION BY TORTURE 8 
 
 The Dull Boy and Squirrel-Lore 
 
 VII. THE HUMAN SOCIAL STRUCTURE 9 
 
 Under the Hangman's Banner. 
 
 VIII. HUMAN CHARACTERISTICS 12 
 
 Riding upon his Brother's Back. 
 
 IX. MAN'S WORST ENEMY Is MAN 13 
 
 Fencing in the North-Pole. 
 
 X. LOYALTY TO DELUSIONS 15 
 
 Looking for Work in Heaven. 
 
 XI. DISCORDANT SOCIAL INSTINCTS 17 
 
 Is Man a Mosquito, Bee, Ant, Bird, or Beaver? 
 
 XII. MAN'S CRUELTY TO His FEMALE 20 
 
 The Spittoon-Cleaner. 
 
 XIII. HUMAN BLOODTHIRSTINESS (THE WHITE PLAGUE) 21 
 
 From Paradise to Packinghouse. 
 
 XIV. HUMAN TRICKERY AND DECEITFULNESS 22 
 
 The Humane Society and the Judas-Kiss. 
 
 XV. THE CULT OF TORTURE 23 
 
 "Lex Taliones" and the CHRISTIAN HATE. 
 
 XVI. PROGRESSIVE DEGENERATION 24 
 
 From Head-Hunter to Bayonet Drill. 
 
 SXVII. PARASITISM 26 
 
 Feasting the Drones. 
 
 XVIII. MEN AT PLAY 27 
 
 What does the Mirror Tell? 
 
 XIX. DEBTS 27 
 
 What Moth and Rust Cannot Corrupt. 
 
 XX. THE INTELLECTUALS 28 
 
 Standing in Line for a Yoke. 
 
 XIX. THE GOSPEL OF TOIL 30 
 
 Canary-Song vs. the Boiler Factory. 
 
 XXII. NEMESIS 34 
 
 The Police-Judge and the Supreme Court of Nature. 
 
 XXIII. THE ECONOMY OF MORTAL LIFE 35 
 
 Immortals that Seek to Become Mortal. 
 
HUMBUG-LAND 
 
 BY MENDEZ PINTO. 
 
 I. PROEM 
 
 Out of Tune in Nature. 
 
 All the beasts of prey which at present inhabit the earth, are 
 divided into four tribes: black, yellow, brown and white. Of these 
 the white are the most numerous as well as the most destructive 
 and ferocious. 
 
 Belonging to the living creation, even these perverted creatures 
 have something in common with ourselves, the Immortals, for they 
 possess many faculties, both of mind and body, which may be 
 regarded as of the same order of nature, only less perfect and 
 refined. They exhibit some capacity to feel, for on occasion they 
 seem to act elated or depressed. Also, they have some gift of 
 reason, but their conclusions and inferences are either queer or 
 false. 
 
 No doubt our learned investigators are right that this plague 
 v of the earth is one of the latest products of animal evolution, for 
 no other class of creatures would appear so imperfect, so self- 
 contradictory, so unresponsive to instinct, so helpless, so deceitful, 
 so cunning, so depraved, so senseless, so brutal, so bloodthirsty, so 
 implacable an enemy of all that lives and grows, as these cox comb 
 creatures who call themselves human beings. It looks as if their 
 creation is the worst mistake which has happened to our mother 
 nature, but as with all other evil things, so man also bears within 
 himself the seeds of his ultimate destruction, and in that fair day 
 when there shall no longer be any blot upon the face of the earth 
 or sky, the memory of man will linger only in our museums as an 
 extinct monster of cruelty which had but a momentary existence in 
 the progress of evolution. 
 
 But while man remains, he is a great plague to all living things, 
 both to plants and animals, and were it not for our own ethereal 
 bodies, we Immortals also would suffer from his depradations. 
 Therefore, I was appointed by our honorable six hundred and 
 thirty-second assembly to make a complete study of this creature's 
 habits and life-history in order to see if we shall continue in our 
 practice to let all living things persue unhindered the course of their 
 existence, be it good or evil, or whether this plague, which in the 
 
 . 
 
... Pinto 
 
 last moons seems to increase so inordinately, should be hastened to 
 its destruction by our acts of higher wisdom. 
 
 I have therefore faithfully performed my task, according to the 
 confidence of our associates in me and submit herewith the follow- 
 ing report: 
 
 II. THE MENTAL STRUCTURE OF THE HUMAN 
 CREATURE 
 
 Not yet Dry behind the Ears. 
 
 The mental constitution of mankind is related to that of other 
 animals, but is of a more unstable and deleterious nature. Man's 
 instincts are still uncorrelated, for the time of his existence, com- 
 pared with other creatures, is very short. He has not yet gained 
 any real evolutionary experience, therefore his soul and mind still 
 grope in the dark and are the prey of every illusion and delusion 
 that thought and emotion are capable of. He cannot distinguish 
 between truth and falsehood, for his sense-perception is both limited 
 and deceptive, attuned to but a few octaves of sound and light. The 
 v eye of one man sees a thing red and the eye of another man sees 
 Xthe same thing green. Likewise, it is with his emotions. The same 
 \sentiment will stir one man into fury and leave another cold and 
 apathetic, which is a fruitful cause of his never-ending and stupid 
 quarrels. 
 
 Furthermore, man's sense of smell is nearly atroohied, and his 
 taste is perverted. So he is blind and deaf to all the great har- 
 monies of the universe, which every moment surge through our 
 being, for we Ethereals are attuned to the entire range of nature's 
 music. Our bodies are all eye, all ear, for we are made of light 
 and the luminiferous ether is the essense of our being. There 
 is nothing far nor near, nothing high nor low, nothing past nor 
 future, which does not register itself in our sensitiveness. For 
 each of us is part of the All that is and ever shall be and the course 
 of our being has run from immortality to that which is mortal, we 
 fall and we rise, we disappear and appear again and ecstacy is the 
 end of our being. 
 
 Not so is man. He conceives that he was born to plague him- 
 self with labor and weariness, and that the end of his being Is 
 sorrow and weeping and that he was created for toil and tribula- 
 tion. Therefore, he has so formed his social structure that the 
 many are slaves and the few are rulers and his virtues are obedience 
 and the carrying of burdens for others. His morality is like unto 
 that of dogs, who fawn upon the hand that beats them and whose 
 greatest happiness is their master's commendation. Their ambition 
 is to be good and faithful servants, who toil all day for their lord 
 and then wait upon him at table, glad to subsist upon the crumbs he 
 drops to the floor. For us Immortals, in whom the love of liberty 
 is so strong that we would perish sooner than perform a day's slave- 
 toil at the command of another, and who render obedience to none, 
 
Humbug-Land 3 
 
 save to truth and wisodm, it is difficult to conceive of the existence 
 of so slavish a race as is mankind, for there does not seem to be a 
 single human being but what he feels himself beholden to some 
 authority over him, yet all animals, outside of the dog-tribes, are 
 endowed with self -direction and repudiate every authority over 
 themselves save the urge of their own being, for liberty is among 
 the pristine gifts of life, but man was asleep when the goddess of 
 freedom passed by, and she departed in a dudgeon from the human 
 race because she was not wooed intently enough. 
 
 III. HIS BRAIN-BOX 
 The Suckling of Cow-Milk and Barley-Water. 
 
 When we put a human specimen upon the dissecting table the 
 first thing peculiar which strikes us and which mismatches man 
 from other animals, is his big head and overgrowth of brain. At 
 any rate, something is wrong in this brain-box, for it seems to inter- 
 fere continuously with the normal instincts which man has inherited 
 from the nobler animals which were his forbears. So he does not 
 drink water, which supports the life-processes of hia organism, but 
 he drinks alcohol to wreck his body; he stews himself in opium and 
 tobacco juice and drugs himself out of the little sense he naturally 
 might have had. It i this brain of his which makes him do all 
 the unnatural things of which he is guilty, which perverts every 
 truth of nature and makes him the subject of delusions and hysterias 
 and causes wars among them in which they blindly rush at each 
 other to destroy themselves. Nowhere in nature have ever appeared 
 such evils as the human brain has invented : murder, war, tyranny, 
 prison-houses, tortures and other crazes and manias unnumbered. 
 
 Physically, man is soon becoming the wreck he is striving so 
 hard to make of himself. His body is bony and crooked and shot 
 through with disease. He can no longer grow his own teeth, they 
 are made in a factory, and their women's breasts are dried up so 
 that they must feed their infants on cow-milk and barley-water. 
 Yet it is especially those whom they count great among themselves 
 which are the most degenerated and helpless. These great ones 
 cannot put sugar into their own coffee, but must have butlers stand- 
 ing behind their chairs while they eat, to wait upon them. Their 
 princesses cannot hook their own gowns, or keep clean their finger- 
 nails, or wash their own hair. More than one-half the members of 
 the white race does not know how to grow its own wheat, or vege- 
 tables, or fruit, so they eat embalmed beef out of tin cans and sip 
 soda-water colored with coal-tar dyes. Yet man is as pro\id of his 
 swell-head as a gobbler is of his wattles. He regards it almost as 
 the jewel of creation, the seat of his intelligence and reason. But 
 our scientists set no great store by either reason or intelligence or 
 brain-storms, for in all the wonderful achievements of the living 
 evolution, the human brain has had little or no part. It is not the 
 seat of instincts, which alone can be transmitted from parents to off- 
 spring, and instinct, not reason or intelligence, is the foundation- 
 
4 Mendez Pinto 
 
 stone of life. In man, the brain is the organ of self-consciousness 
 and conceit, aside from its physiological function of being the cen- 
 tral station of the sensori-motor-reflex. 
 
 Man is very proud that he can read and write by means of this 
 wonderful brain of his, so that when a road is properly sign-posted 
 he can find his way home. But a bird can travel a thousand miles 
 without a compass and a dog can smell his way home, and can scent 
 the track of man and animals without having to look it up in the 
 encyclopedia. Man greatly values the store of knowledge which 
 he has piled up in the books of his libraries, but three-fourths of 
 these tomes of wisdom are filled with arguments of his duty to 
 obey the decrees of his masters and respect the authority of those 
 ' set over him and to be content with his crust. We Immortals set 
 no store by such things, for we continually seek to widen the realm 
 of freedom and to add to the intensity and excitement of life. We 
 consider it worth while to scale the dizzy heights in order to see new 
 horizons, to climb the mountain peak for the exhilaration of tobog- 
 ganning down its side with the speed of lightning. Everywhere 
 the living world is playing with nature's forces to contrive a wilder 
 ride through space. 
 
 As for the rest of man's cold-stored knowledge I have found 
 nothing in his books which the flowers and trees, the birds or the 
 insects, did not know a thousand years before his time. Man thinks 
 his microscope and telescope, his X-ray and his flying-machine 
 achievements worthy of the gods. He admires his diamond dyes 
 and claims to have harnessed the forces of nature in steam and elec- 
 trical engines. But how insignificant are all these things when 
 compared with the achievements of the instincts of animals and 
 plants? Human intelligence can build a microscope, but instinct is 
 ' able to evolve the eye itself ; man can make an organ, but instinct 
 -' produces the ear. Instinct invented the flight of birds millions of 
 years before man invented a"n aeroplane, and the electric fish, by 
 instinct, grows an infinitely more effective battery than man pro- 
 duces. The instinct of plants can distil the most beautiful colors 
 out of the brown earth. The lowliest green algae, yea, every blade 
 of grass, or green leaf, can use the most available natural energy, 
 viz., the light of the sun, in the chemical factory of its organism. 
 Every green thing in nature is a wonderful factory run by sun- 
 motors, clean and bright, but man can only make smoke. 
 
 Man's knowledge, and the achievement of his reason, play no 
 ,part in the larger life of the cosmos, for they cannot be transmitted 
 from parent to off-spring. Reason is merely a by-product of evolu- 
 tion, of value only as a satisfaction of the wonder-instinct. 
 
 Man considers himself infinitely superior to all other creatures. 
 Of course, this is a vanity quite common among living things. Each 
 species considers itself the pinacle of creation and claims to have 
 mounted to the top rung of the ladder. So, for instance, think the 
 flea and cootie, who look upon man as infinitely beneath them, as 
 nothing more than their feeding-ground. And, in fact, they quite 
 successfully match their wit against man's. So, likewise, do num- 
 
Humbug-Land 5 
 
 berless bacilli, and the instinctive powers of these simple organisms 
 are by no means inferior to those of man. 
 
 If we are to consider one creature higher than another in the 
 scale of evolution, it is among the plants where Creation's highest 
 achievements are recorded. Sessile by nature, yet by their ingenuity 
 they send their offspring over the entire habitable globe, and they 
 leave no force of nature, nor psychic peculiarity of any animal, 
 unused, to accomplish their end. Some put their seeds into balloons 
 and send them drifting upon the clouds ; others shoot it from their 
 pods as with guns, but when animals appeared the plants immediately 
 made the whole animal kingdom their servant. For there is no 
 animal of any kind but what must perform unconscious service for 
 the plants, and whenever the wit of man or animals becomes pitted 
 against the instinct of the plant, the plant generally comes out ahead. 
 Numberless insects must be cupid's willing or unwilling messenger 
 whenever a pistil desires to mate with her prince charming of the 
 far-distant flower. They say that love knows no barrier, but it is 
 among the plants where the seemingly unsurmountable obstacles are 
 overcome in the most ingenious manner. Here is a cherry tree, 
 which wishes to establish its children in a new country hundreds 
 of miles distanct. It saw that the birds sitting in its branches could 
 fly through the air to that new country and straightway it deter- 
 mined to make them its servants. Even we Immortals do not yet 
 understand how the cherry tree's instinct learned so much about the 
 nature of birds. Many plants have discovered that most animals 
 have a sweet tooth, and whenever they want an animal to do any- 
 thing for them, they offer a morsel of sugar or honey. This is the 
 universal money of the plant-world, and it is always acceptable at 
 par in the animal kingdom. Does the flower in its gorgeous wedding 
 dress, sigh for a lover from afar? It offers a bit of nectar to 
 wasp, or bee, or butterfly, as payment for the prince's aeroplane ride. 
 
 But the cherry tree was chiefly solicitous for its offspring. 
 It did not want to start its children in barren soil, worn out by 
 the parent roots; it meant to plant them in a virgin paradise. So 
 it grew ripe red cherries, of exactly the flavor which the bird's 
 palate craved beyond anything in the world. The bird, eating the 
 cherry, would carry the stone in its stomach miles distant and 
 drop it upon new soil. We do not know how the cherry tree knew 
 so exactly the taste of the birds, nor how that red color was so 
 fascinating to them, nor how it learned the intricate chemical 
 process to distil the sweet pulp out of earth and air, nor whence 
 it gets its wonderful color. Evidently, it spared no pains in offer- 
 ing such royal feast. And this is the one thing in which plants are 
 always much fairer than animals. Though they make animals their 
 servants, they always pay handsomely for any service rendered, 
 while animals, and especially man, the most beastly of all animals, 
 simply destroy and spoil, and never give thought of fair return. It 
 is in retaliation for this wanton spoliation that the plants are com- 
 pelled to send the bacteria into the animal organism in order to 
 destroy the destroyer and make his carcass again available for 
 plant food. 
 
6 Mendez Pinto 
 
 But the cherry tree knows still more. While it offers the bird 
 , the juicy pulp, it embeds its offspring in a hard stone case, proof 
 against the powerful acids of the bird's stomach, yet open to 
 the water of the soil when germinating time comes. Moreover, so 
 long as the seed is still immature, it keeps its cherry green and so 
 horribly sour no bird will touch it. 
 
 All animals are parasites upon plants, and as a parasite cannot 
 easily reach to the perfection of its host, it is probably for this 
 reason that evolution has made so such less progress among animals 
 than it has made in the plant world. 
 
 Among animals, Insects have reached the highest perfection, 
 and among the Vertebrates the birds have reached a comparatively 
 high stage, while on the other hand, the Carnivora, such as lions, 
 tigers, wolves, dogs and man, occupy a compartively low plane. 
 
 In the world's evolutionary history, man has been of less account 
 than any other species, and it is not apparent that he is destined to 
 play any important role. The first universal ice-age would wipe 
 him out, if he does not before that time destroy himself by the 
 follies of his reason. In fact, the living world as a whole could 
 get along much better without him. So long as he remained an 
 uncivilized son of nature he did little harm. But in these last eons, 
 owing to his civilization, that vile product of the overgrowth of his 
 brain, he has become an intolerable plague in nature, denuding the 
 surface of the earth of every green tree, like an insect plague that 
 devours field and forest. But plagues do not last forever, and the 
 plant-world will not suffer extirpation by civilized man, but will 
 send the seeds of destruction into his own being. When he has 
 destroyed the paradise in which he was planted, his bones will rot 
 on the bare rocks, and the seeds of plants which have rested while 
 he chewed the forest into paper pulp, will celebrate a new resur- 
 rection day and grow upon his carcass. Then flowers once more 
 will bloom in a better world 
 
 IV. HUMAN CONSCIENCE AND MORALITY 
 Who is Right f Nature's God or Man's Conscience? 
 
 As a peacock is proud of its tail, so man is proud of his con- 
 science and of his morality. It is the strangest product of his brain- 
 box which tells him that it is wicked to play, to enjoy nature's 
 gifts of goodness, to bask in sun and air, to loiter by the brookside 
 and stroll among the meadow flowers or roam at will in the forest 
 temple and quaff the whole of the delight of life. Nature's com- 
 mandment to all creation is, "Six days shalt thou live and delight 
 thyself, and on the seventh shalt thou take thy fill of pleasure." 
 But man has changed this divine oracle and says, "Six days shalt 
 thou sweat and weary thyself, and on the seventh thou shalt hide 
 thyself from the wrath of Jehovah, and touch naught which might 
 delight thy soul, for in sackcloth and ashes shalt thou worship thy 
 
Humbug-Land 7 
 
 God," as if he were some tyrant whose sole satisfaction is in the 
 scourging of his slaves. Yet men exalt their conscience to be the 
 highest law of the universe. 
 
 I know of scarce anything akin to it in nature, except perhaps 
 among dogs, who feel remorse at their master's scolding, whether 
 it be just or unjust. The commands of the human conscience are 
 almost all directly contrary to the God-given natural instincts. For 
 conscience's sake men inflict all sorts of misery upon themselves, 
 but never seek to do that which is good in nature. For conscience's 
 sake they fast and scourge themselves, abstain from joy and pleas- 
 ure, bind themselves down to the burden of toil, and endure slavery, 
 but on the other hand, for conscience's sake, they never throw off 
 the master's yoke or seek the liberty which is theirs by birthright. 
 On the contrary, in the name of conscience, they sacrifice their chil- 
 dren to Juggernaut, to Moloch, to Jahve and to the Ogre of War. 
 For conscience's sake they swear to their own hurt and keep the 
 vows that do them harm. Truly, no such stupidity was ever before 
 heard of in creation. 
 
 In a similar manner the whole human code of morality is based 
 upon the idea of abstinence from that which is good and that the 
 endurance of suffering is the golden path to virtue. So men are 
 ever afraid lest there be too much feasting in life, too much laugh- 
 ter, too much play, too much dancing, too much frolic and sun- 
 shine, too much freedom, too much pleasure, too much vacation, 
 for it is only of these and other good things, that their conscience 
 upbraids them. It never condemns them for overwork, for fatigue, 
 for undernourishment, for dirt, for shabbiness, for pain, for tears, 
 for poverty, for lack of artistic attainment, for broken health and 
 wrinkles before their time, for lack of vision and travel and oppor- 
 tunity for sightseeing. Yet all these are high crimes and treason 
 against life and nature. For nature abhors the dwarfed and stunted 
 growths and mercifully blots out the maimed in the struggle for 
 existence, for it meant that its world should be fair, and without 
 spot and blemish. The capering colt, the prancing steed, exuber- 
 ance of health and beauty and glory of form and fullness of life, 
 are her goal. But man's morality insists upon starving both his 
 body and soul, so that he alone of all living things falls tar short 
 of what his natural endowments enable him to be. And from all 
 creation the indignant protest goes up to the Eternal Throne against 
 the race that has filled its days with pain and sorrow and knows 
 no sound but the wailing of self-inflicted misery and ever refuses 
 to so change its course of life that it may become part of heaven's 
 pean of joy and tumultuous happiness. 
 
 Yet there did appear One among them, to teach them the ways 
 of life, who did not fast as did the disciples of John and the 
 Pharisees, but who taught that life is a wedding feast and that it 
 were unbecoming for its guests to fast while the bridegroom is 
 with them (Mk. 2:18,19). But Him they did not heed: they choked 
 His voice in blood. 
 
8 Mendez Pinto 
 
 V. HUMAN CRUELTY TO THEIR YOUNG 
 "Spare not the Rod!' 
 
 Most animals show a very tender regard toward their young, 
 especially during the period of infancy. They devote the greater 
 part of their time to hunt food for them or else spend it in playing 
 with them in order to teach their offspring the sum-total of animal 
 lore which they possess, to train them in dexterity and all tricks 
 useful against their enemies, etc. Our learned sages have not 
 recorded anywhere that animals willingly harm or torture their off- 
 spring during the period of immaturity and growth. Since the 
 humans are an offshoot from some of the older animals they have 
 inherited many of the beautiful and noble virtues found in the 
 animal creation and so it comes that a young mother will grieve 
 as much as other animals do should her infant die. If, however, 
 the child lives, it is not long before she begins to abuse it. As soon 
 as the period of lactation is past, she begins to beat it with switches 
 or rods, or slaps it in anger or tortures it in order to break its 
 will and train it to slavish obedience. Even their sacred books 
 teach them to beat their children and not to spare the rod. Thus, 
 the life of the human infant is the most miserable of all animals, 
 even if it be born to the gold and purple, in a mansion, or a king's 
 palace, since among these great ones the mother considers it undig- 
 nified to suckle her own infant, she dries up her breasts, and turns 
 the child over to servants who naturally abuse it still more than 
 would its own parents. 
 
 VI. EDUCATION BY TORTURE 
 The Dull Boy and Squirrel-Lore 
 
 If by accident the lot of a human child should be so happy as 
 to have a mother as kind as the mothers of animal children, it only 
 lasts till the sixth or seventh year, for then the State steps in and 
 sends the child to school, and from that day till its death, happiness 
 and freedom will be considered a sin for the human being. Now, 
 we Immortals justly pride ourselves upon our educational svstems, 
 and I shall not have a little difficulty in making clear the difference 
 between our own and human schools, especially those of civilized 
 countries, for the uncivilized races are much less harsh and exact- 
 ^ ing toward their children than the Christian nations. With us, the 
 greater part of our time is devoted to our schools. In fact, giving 
 the gift of knowledge is one of the highest satisfactions of un- 
 created existence. But we have only one thought, viz., to make 
 happy our offspring. Our schoolhouses are our great play-houses, 
 and school-time is the play-time of our youth. And what feats of 
 skill and daring and agility they accomplish ! How they delight in 
 the race from the Sun to Pleiades, or to play hide and seek among 
 the planets! And as for knowledge, who could ever quench their 
 thirst? They hunt the Calculus as the woodland boy hunts the nests 
 
T 
 
 Humbug -Land 9 
 
 of birds and haunts of hare and squirrel, and they love to win in 
 mathematics as much as in chess or checkers. And history thrills 
 them like ghost stories, and science is the fairytale of their eager 
 minds. But if at any time we perceive that concerning some valua- 
 ble acquisition of knowledge their interest is not naturally awake, 
 we make a great secret of it, talk of it only in whispers amongst 
 A ourselves and give them to understand that these things are too 
 great and wonderful for mere youths to inquire into. We never 
 compel them to learn anything, never give them tasks of any kind, 
 nor ever make the taste of knowledge bitter and odious to them by 
 tests and examination papers. As if a cat-mother did not know the 
 progress of her kittens without a written examination sheet and 
 marks to create jealousy among her family! Instinct upon occasion 
 is short-sighted, but for mountain-high stupidity, look at a human 
 high school system. 
 
 For human schools are all the very opposite of ours. They are 
 fiendish torture houses, where children's bodies are put upon the 
 rack and their minds stupefied. They are compelled to sit still by 
 the hour, which to a child is no less torture than to hang up an 
 adult by the wrists. The stern teacher commands them to give 
 attention, but human, like other animal children, are attention all 
 over. If a dog saunters into the class room, or a cat jumps through 
 the window, or a spider lets himself down from the ceiling to find 
 an anchorage upon the teacher's lesson-book, even the stupidest 
 urchin will learn in five minutes what could not be drilled into him 
 by rote in six generations. He will be able to give the minutest 
 account of what happened and he can add thereto the most wonder- 
 ful embellishments of the imagination. And if the teacher would 
 let the dull boy show her his tricks and what he knows about his 
 dog and the fox and the squirrel in the woods, she would find an 
 amazing mass of knowledge which it would be hard for the head 
 of the class to equal. But I doubt that even we Invisibles, to whom 
 Mathematics is second nature, would be able to learn the multipli- 
 cation table, were it to be drilled into us as knowledge is crammed 
 into the human stomach. The things you are made to eat seldom 
 / taste good. Therefore, in civilized countries the open sesame of 
 truth is closed to the human young. Their only opportunity is the 
 underground class-room whisper and the tricks they are enabled to 
 play upon the teacher. 
 
 VII. THE HUMAN SOCIAL STRUCTURE 
 
 Under the Hangman's Banner. 
 
 Nothing is so amazing to the student of the wonderful variety 
 of life in its manifold evolutionary expression, as is the structure of 
 the human social organism. It is the one great anomaly in Nature. 
 For everywhere in the world, except among men, there is freedom 
 and liberty and the unquestioned right to self-expression. No plant, 
 no tree, no flower, no animal, whether it be fish, fowl, or worm or 
 
10 Mendez Pinto 
 
 cattle, or beast of prey, owes obedience to anything but its own 
 nature and instinct, but man conceives that his whole life is subject 
 to authority, whether it be Totem, or Ancestor, or God, or King, or 
 State or Custom, or what not, he conceives himself beholden to 
 some superior autocracy whose will and decree reigns over him and 
 to whom his subjection is absolute. So it is interesting to see a 
 group of men who find life too crowded where they were born, go 
 forth to seek more room. The first thing they do when they come 
 into a new country is to select one or more of their number to be 
 their rulers, then they build a jail, or stockade, or prison and erect 
 a gibbet therein, in order that their rulers can put in jail those who 
 do not obey their decrees and hang by the neck "till they are dead," 
 any who dispute their authority. This is the most astonishing 
 thing which I have found in all my travels to and fro through the 
 earth and up and down in the universe, that never there can be 
 found a human social unit anywhere without its hangman, and 
 never anywhere in the earth below or the heavens above can you 
 find any other social organism with either prison-house or gibbet. 
 For all other human traits there are analogies in nature among the 
 other social groups, such as birds, ants, bees, cattle, wolves, etc., 
 but the hangman is the characteristic distinction of human society 
 from that of animal society. 
 
 Every social organism needs co-ordination and order. It must 
 be able to cast off, or bring into harmony, anti-social tendencies or 
 individuals, in order to function and persist. It must find ways to 
 subdue those who would arrogate to themselves an undue portion 
 of the feeding-ground, who would set themselves up above their 
 fellows, who would feed at public expense, who would rob or kill 
 their neighbor, or who would drag down the group from the pur- 
 suit of lofty ideals to maurauding expeditions upon fellow groups, 
 for in the end every maurauder in nature dies out. In short, any 
 social group, in order to live, must be able to control and cast out 
 social disease and evil-doing. And so every animal society pro- 
 tects itself by removing in one way or another, or rendering harm- 
 less, the anti-social member, yet it knows only too well that mere 
 refusal to run with the herd, or refusal to bark at the moon with 
 the mob, are not crimes. Therefore, so long as the individual does 
 not kill or steal, or injure the life of the herd, its liberty is re- 
 spected and is left to its own devices. If, on the other hand, the 
 individual member persists in doing injury, there is no vengeance, 
 no torture, no prison, but only swift and effective removal. The 
 ant and bee colonies and even mosquito swarms, which live an 
 infinitely more complex social life than does man, accomplish this 
 by their natural instincts, or by the mere withdrawal of the benefits 
 of the social order, or disfellowship of the refractory individual. 
 It is only human society which coerces, keeps prison-houses and 
 torture chambers as the festering sores and breeding places of anti- 
 social hatred and crime. 
 
 Every herd has its social customs and habits which it does not 
 allow to be broken. Every flock of birds is as touchy about its 
 
Humbug-Land 11 
 
 coat of feathers as the French people are about their flag-worship. 
 The creed of other animal societies requires that all must srnell 
 alike, but none of them know any other penalty for the trans- 
 gression of their statutes, than exclusion from the joint-action of 
 the herd. If the contrari-minded will not keep the tune, they are 
 not allowed to join the band. If they cannot keep step, they are 
 not allowed in the procession, if they do not want to march in 
 line, they are left to walk by^ themselves. Here the matter ends. 
 The majority goes its way, the minority is left to itself. If it 
 repents, it is restored to membership. If it persists, it is left un- 
 molested to pursue its own course. No animal majority ever forces 
 its will upon an individual or coerces the minority, they know 
 nothing of the autocratic compulsions of human democracies. 
 
 In the bird and ape-families, and elsewhere, upon occasion, the 
 young are made to conform to the law of the tribe by the superior 
 strength of the parent. The fledgling is instantly snatched from 
 danger by main force if it does not heed the warning-cry quickly 
 enough, or give up the poisonous morsel between its teeth, but no 
 animal society ever inflicts punishment, nor ever subjects even the 
 most wilful individual to torture or degradation. But men are 
 opposite to animals in this respect, they are without any sense of 
 that which is fitting. Democracies punish everything that does not 
 run with the common herd by the same torture, viz., imprisonment, 
 whether it be the greater wisdom of its prophets and philosophers 
 or the delinquencies of defectives and perverts. The Christ and 
 the thief are nailed to the same cross. Socrates and the murderer 
 drink the same cup of hemlock. Galileo and the foot-pad are 
 thrown into the same dungeon. Animal societies use force to pre- 
 vent the immature from endangering their own lives or the safety 
 of the group to their enemies. But human punishments have no 
 such benevolent purposes: they intend to inflict harm and injury 
 upon its victims, to starve the body of the prisoner, deprive him of 
 his liberty, degrade his honor, kill his self-respect, prick his flesh 
 and wound the image of God that is within him, to deprive his 
 family of the bread-winner, heap contumely upon his wife and 
 children, tear him limb from limb or hang him by the neck, in 
 order to secure Christian justice. Now a mad dog and a raving 
 maniac both endanger the life of the herd, and force "without stint 
 and limit" must be used to restrain them or render them harmless, 
 but what fiendish good can torture accomplish? We Immortals 
 know that nature is "red in tooth and claw" and We hope that 
 more evolutionary experience in the coming eons will mitigate 
 more and more the short-comings of the ignorance of the Creative 
 World-Instinct, but at such an abortion as human "justice" we 
 stand aghast. 
 
 Animals live together in voluntary communities. All those who 
 do not wish toi join the big stysryr, are free to stay outside. There 
 is no place on the earth, where a deer, or antelope or hartebeest 
 may not roam at will, there are no boundaries in the sky that a 
 bird may not cross, but men are tied to the land by their sovereigns, 
 
12 Mendes Pinto 
 
 and they may not travel from one land to another without a humble 
 petition for a passport. The life of the individual in the human 
 herd is exceedingly circumscribed and hedged in. The police will 
 drag him to jail for loafing on week-days and working on Sabbath- 
 days, he is taxed for building a house, or raising a crop of wheat, 
 he must pay a fee for mating, and must not beget children without 
 a license, and they hold an inquest over him if he commits suicide. 
 
 Each country has its own idolatries. In Tndia they fall down 
 before Buddha, in Japan they do obeisance to the Emperor's like- 
 ness. In Europe they take off their hats to their flags. In Turkey 
 and Arabia they revere the Crescent and hate the Infidel, in Chris- 
 tian lands they worship the cross and hate the Turks, but in all 
 places they put to death those who do not worship the local fetish. 
 
 But stranger still. Among animals all sparrows are allowed to 
 chirp the same chirp, no matter in what part of the world they 
 happen to live. All dogs are allowed to bark dog-fashion, whether 
 in Berlin or Cairo, and all sheep may bleat the sheep-language 
 whether in Spain or in Canada. Not so civilized man. He must 
 speak a different language according to the longitude and latitude 
 of the place. It is forbidden to speak Danish in North Germany 
 or French in South Germany. Nor can any man, under pain of 
 imprisonment, speak Prussian in Elsass, or sing German in America, 
 or talk American in Mexico or South America. By edict, punish- 
 able by mob-violence, the Russian language is seditious in the 
 United States, neither it is safe to travel in Soviet countries with 
 French or American Bibles. And whenever they have a war, the 
 race and nationality of peoples is changed by the diplomats at the 
 Peace Table. 
 
 VIII. HUMAN CHARACTERISTICS 
 Riding upon his Brother's Back. 
 
 The whole human structure is permeated with this doctrine of 
 the absolute authority of the autocrat. Even in democracies the 
 usual punishment for the assertion that "all men are born free and 
 equal" is twenty years imprisonment at hard labor, whereas all 
 animal societies are free. Animal government is derived solely from 
 mutual agreement, the "consent of the governed," and they never 
 coerce those who do not give their consent. It is, of course, the 
 autocrat's duty to rule. In the great Shitirb Monarchy, this office 
 is hereditary, but in the Nacirema Dominion they elect a new 
 autocrat every fourth winter. To "rule" means to make people do 
 things they do not wish to do, to collect taxes, exact tribute, set 
 tariffs and customs upon the food of the poor and require obeisance 
 to overlords and genuflections to the judges. It is, of course, only 
 human beings that have degenerated so far as to desire to be rulers 
 over their fellow-creatures, for no other beings ever took pleasure 
 in making their kith and kin uncomfortable or inflict authority upon 
 fellow-members of the same herd. It is only man that takes pleas- 
 ure in the misery of his fellow-beings. Animals rejoice in being 
 
Humbug-Land 13 
 
 equals among each other, there is neither high nor low in the 
 animal herd, neither slave nor master. But in Humbugland nobody 
 cares to be rich unless the many are poor, and nobody cares to be 
 king except there be millions of subjects and slaves. It is con- 
 sidered the highest human achievement to tread something or some-: 
 body under foot. Nobody is happy unless he can sit upon some- 
 body's neck and suck the blood of those under him. Yet this 
 human race is endowed with enough knowledge to secure plenty, 
 both of food and for every enjoyment that their organism is capable 
 of, without transgressing the laws of nature. Animal communities 
 have their natural enemies, so has man, but man's worst enemy by 
 far is man. 
 
 IX. MAN'S WORST ENEMY IS MAN 
 Fencing in the North-Pole. 
 
 It never seems to have occurred to men for once to open their 
 eyes and look about themselves and take an example from the older 
 animal civilizations which gained the wisdom of eons when man 
 was still unknown upon the face of the earth. Innumerable animal 
 societies have existed for untold mUleniums without ever having 
 elected a hangman over them. They might have seen a herd of 
 buffaloes defending themselves against attack, when all the strong- 
 est males arrange themselves on the outer circle to ward off the 
 enemy. But in human battles their kings and generals and all the 
 mighty ones stay far away from the fighting line. They live with 
 their courtesans and drink wine, while they send their soldiers into 
 the trenches and death. And if their subjects do not win, then they 
 flee from their armies or their country as did Bonaparte Napoleon 
 and the Hohenzollern William. But if the fighters win, then all 
 the glory goes to the general, no matter how needlessly he sacrificed 
 his regiments, and even in the triumphal march the common soldier 
 is left to lick the dust. In the animal herd it is always the oldest 
 and the unattached males that are called upon to sacrifice them- 
 selves in defense of the group, but in the human herd the old men 
 always drive the young into slaughter. In the animal herd the old 
 males volunteer and bear the brunt of the battle, but in the human 
 herd the old men conscript the very flower of youth for the death 
 duty, and thus in war, even though victorious, the human herd 
 loses its best life-blood. It conscripts its finest specimen as bullet- 
 stoppers in order to shield the old, the rapacious and the profiteers. 
 The noble young men die in battle, the defectives are saved to 
 propagate the race, thus even victory becomes the nation's grave of 
 its manhood and liberty. 
 
 Again, if they had searched after truth, men migh have seen 
 how the bee-hive and the ant-colony prosper without slavery, with- 
 out prisons and without torture cells. And they might have seen 
 that in nature, though often the strong take advantage of the weak, 
 and that while often the Big Hog drives the weaker one from the 
 trough, yet the weaker may still eat while the stronger is asleep. 
 
14 Mendes Pinto 
 
 But under the human system by its lawg and decrees, the king can 
 punish while asleep, or while drunk, and can, by the passport regu- 
 lations and extraditions, reach the fugitive slave in the uttermost 
 ends of the earth. In animal society the power of oppression on 
 the part of the strong is strictly limited to the individual's physical 
 strength, but in human society a ruler may set his hoof upon a 
 whole nation. So their insane idea that each human life is subject 
 to the autocrat, instead of being by nature free, is the root-evil of 
 human society and the cause of its unparalleled misery in creation. 
 In all its aberrations, Nature has produced only one slave-race, 
 which is mankind. 
 
 While man has tried to enslave many animals, he has never 
 been able to put them under such yoke as he does his own kin. 
 The horse and ox will pull his plow only so long as he himself 
 follows after, but a capitalist can get thousands and thousands of 
 human beings to toil for him in his factories while he goes to 
 foreign countries and squanders the fruit of their toil. Animals 
 yield only to superior force, they do not allow themselves to be 
 enslaved by law, or custom, or tradition, as do the humans. 
 
 This peculiar human social structure gives birth to many things 
 so exceedingly strange to us. All animals will freely partake of 
 the food which nature provided for them, and they take it wherever 
 they find it. Not so men. They never eat or drink anything, but 
 first pay tribute to someone for it. They can neither hunt nor fish 
 without license, neither gather fire-wood nor dig coal without pay- 
 ing fee or rent. The birds of the air eat freely of the fruit and 
 seeds as they list, but should you set down a strange man in a 
 civilized country and he had no money, he would not be able to 
 find a single thing with which to still his hunger. Everything there 
 is belongs to someone else. He cannot take a bath in ocean or 
 river, he cannot lay down in forest or meadow or by the roadside 
 for a night's rest without being arrested as a trespasser. From the 
 beginning of time men have done nothing but fenced off the earth 
 against each other, and latterly they even sent forth expeditions to 
 put barbed wire around the North Pole. 
 
 It is true, in common with us Invisibles, they have the divine 
 commandment, "Thou shalt not steal." In our realm this com- 
 mandment is the highest and the very foundation of our society, 
 the great safeguard of our liberty and happiness. But my report 
 will scarce be believed among us when I shall here chronicle the 
 very different interpretation given to this divine law by mankind. 
 With! us this law was made to protect the weak against the strong 
 and it says to the ruler "Thou shalt not take away the liberty of 
 thy people for any cause, neither shalt thou levy tribute upon them, 
 nor conscript the youth of the land to thy service," and to all 
 others it declares "Thou shalt not take anything which is thy 
 neighbor's, neither his wife, nor his children, nor his job, nor any 
 part of the product of his toil, nor his means of livelihood, neither 
 his sunshine, nor his holiday, nor any of nature's bounties, his free 
 access to the soil, to water and air, to oil and coal, to forest and 
 
Humbug-Land 15 
 
 meadow, to cotton and bread and wine, to warmth and shelter and 
 a hearthstone." 
 
 These humans, however, in their institutions for higher educa- 
 tion have departments, called Colleges of Law, which have for 
 their sole object the teaching of the perverse doctrine that the law, 
 "Thou shalt not steal," has application only to the poor man and 
 means "Thou shalt not eat of the fruit of the field, nor of the har- 
 vest which thou hast sown, without first paying tithe and tax and 
 land rent and duty. Thou shalt pay to the feudal lord for the 
 berries of the woodland which nature grew, and thou shalt not 
 pasture thy cow in the commons without paying thy lord, thou 
 shalt not touch anything which thy master has fenced in, thy labor 
 shall be decreed by thy master and thou shalt not protest against 
 thy yoke, but deliver the full number of bricks and pay the full 
 price for the straw needful to make them. Thou shalt pay for 
 the time-clock and the efficiency experts which thy master hath set 
 over thee and thou shalt not sigh for a change in the industrial 
 order." Human courts exist for the sole object to enforce this 
 doctrine. I know amongst us Invisibles these things are incredible, 
 but I have recorded only the naked facts and can only repeat what 
 I affirmed in the beginning, viz., that though the humans have some 
 power of reasoning, all their conclusions are perverted. 
 
 X. LOYALTY TO DELUSIONS 
 Looking for Work in Heaven. 
 
 This idea, that everything which man needs, belongs to some 
 one else and that rent or tribute is to be paid for its use, is deeply 
 ingrained in the whole mental make-up of the human tribe. To 
 animals every thing is free, to man no gift of God or nature is 
 free, the doctor even charges a fee for his birth, the priest for his 
 baptism, the State for his marriage, the undertaker for his funeral 
 and the real-estate agent for his grave. 
 
 What men regard as the best of their literature is built up on 
 this idea of loyalty to tribute paying, or respect for the landlord's 
 fences. There is, for instance, the story of the famous Hebrew 
 viceroy of Egypt, Joseph by name, who in seven years of plenty 
 highly taxed the farmers and compelled them to deliver large por- 
 tions of their crops into the royal warehouses. For this Pharaoh 
 considered him the wisest man in all Egypt. Then came the seven 
 years of famine, and the wisdom of Joseph reached still greater 
 heights. He sold back the grain to the same farmers from whom 
 he had taken it by force in the beginning; first at famine prices, 
 then when all their money was gone, he sold them grain for their 
 cattle and land, and when that was gone, he sold them grain for 
 their bodies and thus made every Egyptian a slave to Pharaoh. 
 Among animals, wherever there is need, there is the right to eat, 
 but among men whosoever is in need, pays blood-money. 
 
 Then there is the story of Archbishop Hanno of Mayence, who 
 
16 Mendee Pinto 
 
 had collected vast stores of wheat, taken from the peasants of his 
 domain as tithes. A famine came, the people had spent all their 
 money, but Hanno would not sell even at famine prices, he still 
 wanted more. Now his people were good Christian people, and 
 though their women and children were starving, they never touched 
 Hanno's wheat, but prayed to heaven to save them by a miracle. 
 Hanno's wheat was his, for he had taken it in the name of the 
 proper authority. The famine grew, and everywhere the children 
 died and at last it became so severe that even the rats were dying 
 of starvation. They found Hanno's wheat, and knowing nothing of 
 human laws, nor having any respect for Christian profiteers, they 
 ate his wheat. And when all the wheat was gone and they still 
 were hungry they came into Hanno's house. Then he fled to his 
 castle on a rock in the river Rhine, but the rats swam the river 
 and ate Hanno as well as his wheat. And this was the punishment 
 of God upon him for his hardness of heart. Thus justice was done, 
 but all the people died and the rats alone were saved. Men con- 
 sider themselves greatly superior to the animals in that they are 
 willing to die for an idea, whereas animals do not die until they 
 have to. 
 
 In a Sunday school library I came upon the story of a starving 
 mother who found a can of milk by the roadside that had dropped 
 from some delivery-wagon. This heroic mother dragged herself to 
 the police-station to restore the can of milk to the merchant instead 
 of giving it to her dying infant. Both the mother and child died 
 in the street later, and the churches and great merchants of that 
 city erected a statue to her honor. She was their most precious 
 saint, for they considered that her loyalty was maintained in the 
 face of great temptation. 
 
 We used to think that Kram Nawt, our great wit-snapper, was 
 trying to make sport of us, when he told us of the antics of these 
 humans when a company of poor people had died and landed in 
 Paradise. Here they found themselves in a wonderful garden, full 
 of trees and shrubs bearing the most luscious fruits. There was 
 sparkling wine flowing from the water-faucets, and there were 
 glimpses of beautiful angels, clothed only in sunlight. So they had 
 to shut their eyes continually lest they should behold unlawful 
 beauty. Therefore they kept their eyes mostly to the ground and 
 were looking for the signs to warn them off the grass and the 
 "No Trespassing" placards. But they did not find any of these, 
 nor could they discover the fences. After a while they became 
 very hungry, and the hungrier they became the more inviting 
 seemed the fruit-laden trees. They looked around for the armed 
 guards and the policemen, but they did not see any, though they 
 felt sure they were merely hiding behind the bushes to catch them 
 unawares. As they walked on, they came upon a wide, bright 
 street. They saw gold-pieces scattered everywhere as if the whole 
 U. S. Mint had been spilled over it, but their conscience reminded 
 them that they had just entered heaven, and they could not pos- 
 sibly begin life there by stealing or taking anything that was not 
 
Humbug-Land 17 
 
 theirs. Then they came to the market-place and there was every- 
 thing there that they had dreamed of might be found in their 
 Lord's castle down below. But there were no salesmen. They 
 passed booths upon booths with the most delicious viands and con- 
 stantly became hungrier and hungrier. They had no money and to 
 their consternation found there were not even pockets in their 
 heavenly robes. Never before had they realized how poor in the 
 midst of plenty is a man without money. As they grew faint they 
 dragged themselves back to the Gate of Paradise and asked Saint 
 Peter to let them out again as they were starving. "Starving in 
 heaven !" said Saint Peter to them, "did you not see all the trees 
 laden with fruit and all the tables set for a feast?" "Yes," they 
 said, "but we could not find the ticket-seller, neither have we any 
 money and are out of work." At this Saint Peter became angry 
 for he regarded it as an insult that anybody should look for work 
 in heaven. "You fools," he said, "in heaven everything is as free 
 as it is in nature itself, and if you have: not sense enough to open 
 your mouths when it rains pottage, I can do nothing for you." So 
 he kicked them out. 
 
 I myself thought that our great humorist was merely trying to 
 tell us a Munchhausen tale, but in the course of my investigations 
 in order to understand the machinery of the human mind, I at- 
 tended six semesters in the law course of the famous University 
 at Ogacich on lake Nagichim. That is what they teach there, not 
 in plain English, lest the Proletariat become restless, but in pidgin 
 Latin, and learned circumlocution. 
 
 XI. DISCORDANT SOCIAL INSTINCTS 
 Is Man a Mosquito, Bee, Ant, Bird or Beaver? 
 
 Man's social instincts are the most unstable and discordant of 
 all creatures. They are still in flux. Man not only does not know 
 how to live to best advantage, he does not even know how he 
 wants to live. So he has experimented with numerous forms of 
 social life, but owing to his monumental stupidity, has always 
 landed in some kind of slavery. All animals have developed a 
 social form of life best adapted to their physical organism and to 
 the best interests of their tribe. But when man was created, I 
 suppose Nature was tired and simply wiped the remnants of her 
 wonderful achievements in mortal creation, off the table. Out of 
 this conglomeration grew man, an unorganized mixture of both 
 good and bad, without any definite place or purpose in the world. 
 But each animal has found his proper place and he lives so as to 
 contribute his mite to the music of the spheres. Some animals are 
 almost solitary in habit, others are tribal, others live together in 
 flocks or herds, others in colonies, and some have elaborated the 
 most extensive communistic societies, like the ants, or bees, for 
 example. 
 
 In man, the gregarious instincts are probably the strongest, for 
 he cannot endure loneliness, nevertheless he also exhibits strong 
 
18 Mendez Pinto 
 
 individualistic tendencies. The communistic instinct is exceedingly 
 weak and little developed. Likewise the altruistic instinct is very 
 weak. No human creature ever sacrifices himself unquestioningly 
 for the welfare of the social group as does the ant or bee. He 
 never without compulsion gathers anything for the social store and 
 only will bequeath some of his property to the public in return for 
 being honored with a statue in the market-place or fame in the 
 history books. Men are exceedingly vain, they will spend fortunes 
 to compel posterity to read their epitaphs. But man does not even 
 respond to the altruistic motive as readily as does the bull for the 
 herd. The attachment to his children is scarce as strong as that of 
 the hen for her brood. Human mother-love stands on a very low 
 scale in nature. Most European mothers will allow their children 
 to be taken from them and thrown into jail or sent to the trenches 
 without sacrificing their life to protect them as does the hen for 
 her chick. Likewise the African mother allows the white robber to 
 carry her children into slavery without protecting them unto death. 
 But no matter how unequal the fight, nor what the odds, the animal 
 mother's young can only be taken from her over her dead body 
 unless she is tricked into trusting man's deceit. 
 
 Of all animals, man protects his offspring the least, he will 
 sacrifice them to his gods, to his religion, to his greed, to his lust. 
 The most heinous crime in animal society is for the parent to 
 snatch the food out of the mouth of its young, but man often lives 
 on the labor of his children. Society in its industrialism sucks the 
 blood of its young and mortgages the whole future of the coming 
 generation to its war-debts. The life of the human young is 
 dreary indeed. His playtime is stolen by the school, or turned into 
 gold by mine or factory, by sweatshop and spinnery, whereas the 
 youth of animals is an endless riot of fun and play-time. 
 
 The human society supports all manner of drones, such as 
 kings, generals, standing armies, military dignities, battleships, detec- 
 tives, lawyers, judges, beaurocrats without number, advertisers, 
 money-lenders, stock-jobbers, preachers, soothsayers, astrologers, 
 dream interpreters, and what not, who perform no economically 
 beneficial service. But human society is not like the bees, who each 
 fall kill off the greater part of the drones in order to keep their 
 proportion in endurable numbers and to get rid of the honey-eaters 
 in winter. 
 
 No doubt, if man ever should come to believe in liberty as his 
 natural right like that of any other animal, he would escape most 
 of his miseries. If human society should rid itself of its drones it 
 would save itself half of its labor. If it should awaken from its 
 toil-drunkenness and spend its time in social enjoyment, instead of 
 burrowing in the earth after gold or diamonds, or wallowing in the 
 dirt after gasoline, it might have something of the enjoyments of 
 the animal creation. 
 
 Still more, if every man would accept the responsibility for his 
 own life, carve out his own existence, as does every animal, instead 
 of lazily accepting wages or salary, shirking responsibility, and 
 
Humbug-Land 19 
 
 merely doing what he is told to do; he might hold high his head 
 and feel himself not unworthy of a place in creation. 
 
 Man is the worst parasite in nature, more than anything else 
 does he dread the duty of shifting for himself. Promise a man 
 that you will feed him, however poorly, and he will accept any 
 slavery you have a mind to impose upon him. In fact, there are 
 some among them, who preach as their Utopia the shifting of all 
 leadership and responsibility to the State and dream of the time 
 when the State will feed and house the whole tribe. Individual 
 initiative, of which the whole bird-world is bubbling over, casts 
 fear into the hearts of most men. The pioneering spirit is not 
 within them; if you will let him, he will suck the teat of charity 
 till his death without any exertion on his own part, but birds go 
 honey-mooning in the arctic circle and keep a summer-home in 
 Africa. Animals are too proud ever to ask alms of their fellows, 
 if on account of age or injury they can no longer shift for them- 
 selves, they lie down and die nobly and refuse to make themselves 
 a burden to their fellows or stand in the way of their happiness. 
 But human society is full of decrepits which beg alms of their 
 fellows. In nature no matured creature has a right to live that is 
 not able to support itself. The old are to give the young a boost, 
 after that it is their duty to die. No old member of the species 
 has any right to rob youth of the joy of its life. 
 
 Animals do not offer to sell their bodies or their liberties for 
 food or shelter. If they cannot find food by their own strength, 
 they die, they do not offer to work for wages. They sometimes 
 suffer enslavement from man, but only in yielding to superior force 
 or cunning. You cannot coax a horse into harness with a bundle 
 of hay as you can a man by holding out a meal-ticket. Neither do 
 animals sell their souls for a mess of pottage, as do the intellectuals 
 among mankind. 
 
 Should one attempt to take an average of man's conflicting in- 
 stincts which have fallen to him from various animal forbears, it 
 would seem that they could best be brought into harmony if 
 modelled after some form of social life among the birds. In bird- 
 societies food-getting, nest-building, home-making, etc., are all left 
 to the individual pair or family. They come together in large as- 
 semblies chiefly for mutual admiration, but upon occasion, as in the 
 case of the migratory birds, their journeys are undertaken in com- 
 pany. Or, as in the case of crows, food-hunting is sometimes under- 
 taken together, in jolly company, as when a whole flock swoops 
 down upon a plowed field, posts sentinels on the outskirts and 
 gives itself over to the feast. 
 
 This form of social life allows the widest scope for individual 
 self-expression, as well as securing the widest reward of social 
 pleasures in keeping company with its fellows. The sum total of 
 the joys of life in such a social structure is incomparably greater 
 than in a communistic ant-colony or the bee-hive. Among the 
 Mammals the beaver tribes have adopted a similar social structure 
 and they have reached a comparatively high civilization. In the 
 
20 Mendez Pinto 
 
 communistic bee-hive the workers contribute the sum total of their 
 labor to the good of the whole and only take a meagre portion for 
 themselves. In the bird-societies the individual labors only for 
 himself, his service to the flock is negligible, but all take the joys 
 of life together and sing each other's praises. The sound of praise 
 also seems sweet to man. So, if the race of man should ever be 
 accepted as one of the permanent orders of life in nature, his social 
 structure will probably settle somewhere between that of birds or 
 beavers, with some elements of the communistic societies. 
 
 XII. MAN'S CRUELTY TO HIS FEMALE 
 
 The Spittoon-Cleaner. 
 
 From the earliest times man has differed from all other animals 
 in his cruelty to his females. He has always treated woman as an 
 inferior, enslaved her and shifted the greatest burden of labor upon 
 her back. No male amongst the animals ever makes the female 
 serve him, or wait upon him, or procure his food, but in the human 
 race the female literally carries the male on her back as her life- 
 long tormentor. She must do all sorts of menial service for him, 
 cook his food, clean his spittoons and wash his linen. Even in early 
 tribal days man's brutality fell heavily upon woman, but in civilized 
 society woman's lot has become incomparably worse. In early days 
 woman was generally the bread-winner and as such enjoyed a con- 
 siderable economic independence. The old tribal hulk of a male, no 
 matter what his bragging in the market-place, could not get a good 
 meal, unless he was agreeable to his mate at home. In civilized 
 society woman is not considered the bread-winner, even though the 
 bulk of toil lies upon her shoulders, she is merely the servant of 
 man or the plaything of his lust, for marriage deprives woman of 
 her economic equality and independence. She has no share, nor 
 voice, or real partnership, in her husband's business, she is not even 
 allowed to spend her own earnings according to her own desires 
 without giving an account to her lord and master. Even in well-to- 
 do families a man does not pay his wife as much wages as he does 
 his butler or chauffeur. 
 
 In animal society all children are lawful, but in human society 
 only the children licensed by the State are legal. All others are 
 bastards and are violently persecuted both by social ostracism and 
 the State. They are disinherited by law and life-long contumely is 
 heaped upon them, even though nature has not condemned them 
 with endowments inferior to the children legalized by the State. 
 In human society woman becomes an outcast, not by doing violence 
 to her God-given instincts, but by merely forgetting to have rice 
 and old shoes thrown at her, while submission to a repulsive male 
 who has paid the wedding-fee is considered her acme of chastity. 
 It is not so in nature, for among animals sexual congress without 
 love and mutual desire is held the "unnatural crime" of which none 
 but man is guilty. There is no rape, no prostitution, no auction of 
 the sanctuary of the soul and no venereal disease among the 
 
Humbug-Land 21 
 
 animals. They are the fruits of the Christian civilization with its 
 wage-slavery, its poverty, its industrial exploitation, its compulsory 
 military service, its prisons and its holy crusades. 
 
 The highest law in the universe is the female mating-instinct. 
 Upon it depends the existence of the species and therefore nature 
 has endowed it with the most wonderful prescience and hedged it 
 in with the strongest safeguards. Woman, where she is free from 
 economic or social, or religious compulsion, does not willingly mate 
 with disease nor anything less than a god. Nature creates a super- 
 fluity of males in order that the female may have her choice of 
 the best. Everywhere in nature the right of the male is far below 
 that of the female, her universal law is "Women and children and 
 their welfare first." Everything else comes after, even man with 
 his sacraments and conceits. 
 
 XIII. HUMAN BLOODTHIRSTINESS (THE WHITE 
 PLAGUE) 
 
 From Paradise to Packinghouse. 
 
 Another erratic peculiarity of the human race is its wanton 
 cruelty and unbelievable bloodthirstiness. If a caterpillar or a worm 
 cross the path of one of these humans, it is immediately crushed to 
 death. Human children catch butterflies and tear them limb from 
 limb for sport. If accidentally they scare up a rabbit they imme- 
 diately chase it to death. If they find a bird's nest, they destroy 
 the eggs. Any flower that blooms they will pluck, they burn down 
 the forests: in short, they kill what they can for the mere sake of 
 killing. Their greatest sports are their hunting expeditions in which 
 they shoot numberless deer, rabbits, doves, quails, partridges, ducks 
 and geese. There is no living thing safe from their attacks any- 
 where. Their painters and poets glorify war and the chase. 
 
 The lairs of these humansi are filled with the skins of animals 
 and with cut flowers and broken branches as ornaments. Every-* 
 where they exhibit the trophies of their destruction. And their 
 women are no less cruel than the males. They think it great honor 
 to receive bundles of broken blossoms from their admirers and they 
 bedeck themselves with the carcasses of birds and the furs of other 
 animals. In times of war often they drive the men back into battle 
 and their great "women's magazines" in war-time represent the 
 blood-stained helmet of the enemy as the trophy most of all desired 
 by Christian maidens. Companies of young girls go out upon the 
 street to pin white feathers upon some other girl's lover in order 
 to force him into war. 
 
 Five hundred moons ago the Western continent was a paradise, 
 covered with forests and with steppes, the home of the buffalo and 
 beaver and deer and turkey. Then came the White Plague over 
 the country. They murdered the Red tribes, which had done little 
 damage in nature. They rooted up the forests and exterminated 
 the buffalo and beaver. Today the whole land is nothing but piles 
 of stones, barren rock, slag, puddles of oil, ugly sky-scrapers, 
 cement and coal-dust, barbed wire and iron rails. Their cities reek 
 with the stench of their slaughter-houses and their factories. 
 
22 Mendez Pinto 
 
 But most cruel they are to each other. All their gods are mon- 
 sters of cruelty which can be appeased only by human sacrifices. 
 Moloch had children for breakfast. To Jehovah, Jephtha sacrificed 
 his daughter, and in the Christian theology they even have a God 
 who would be appeased by nothing but the slaughter of his own son. 
 
 But most noticeable is their bloodthirstiness when the delusion 
 of war overtakes them. And it is the most civilized nations which 
 are the most bloodthirsty and stage the most extensive killings. 
 Their most approved way of fighting is hand to hand combat with 
 bayonets. The people at home are never satisfied until their sol- 
 diers thus meet the enemy. They must show him the cold steel. 
 No victory is accounted worth anything except that in which the 
 corpses can be counted by the tens of thousands. Civilized warfare 
 means man's disemboweling of each other with the bayonet, for 
 civilized peoples frown upon any method of warfare which makes 
 killing painless or is accomplished at long distance. Once upon a 
 time when they had a conference to make laws of war, it was 
 proposed to introduce methods of asphyxiation, this was howled 
 down as inhuman, because it would make the soldier's death pain- 
 less. No soldier can be considered a hero unless he has been 
 tangled up in the entrails of his antagonist. There used to be great 
 opposition to firearms in war, but they were finally permitted when 
 it was seen that a bullet, or a shell, could spatter human brains all 
 over the combatants. Likewise, when it was proposed to sink ships 
 secretly by electric currents, this raised a great outcry, for the 
 sailors would then find a painless grave in the sea. No method of 
 sea-warfare is permitted by civilized peoples save such as will blow 
 up the ships with shells that scatter the entrails of the sailors upon 
 the deck or scald them to death in the engine-room. 
 
 XIV. HUMAN TRICKERY AND DECEITFULNESS 
 The Humane Society and the Judas-Kiss. 
 
 Among all animals, the humans are the most faithless and 
 treacherous. Their whole life may be said to be a lie and a bundle 
 of deceit. No animal can ever trust man, for it will find him a 
 deceiver in the end. Even the dog, which trusts so implicitly, finds 
 that his master has a bullet for him. There is not any animal with 
 which man makes friend, whose head he will not finally cut off. 
 And he always does his killing deceitfully. He hold* out bits of 
 delicacies, but underneath it is his trap. If he would fight fair, 
 like the lion, the shark, or the tiger, other animals might take 
 proper precaution against him. But there is always a hook in his 
 bait. How many millions of fish has man lured to an untimely end 
 by his trickery! And he calls fishing fine sport. Everywhere he 
 uses soft words toward his fellow-animals, but there is murder in 
 his heart. He uses decoys and bell-wethers, to lead bird and sheep 
 into his snare and murder-machines. All his pretended kindness 
 towards animals is a Judas-kiss. 
 
 And he practices his trickeries upon plants as well as upon 
 animals. He plucks their flowers before they have set fruit and 
 stews them by the million in his retorts to steal their fragrance. 
 He stimulates or deprives them of their sexual organs and turns 
 them all into monstrosities. Pears, peaches and oranges he has so 
 
Humbug-Land 23 
 
 perverted that their seed is no longer able to propagate itself like 
 the wild species. Likewise he has abused numberless flowers, from 
 lily and anemone to rose and hollyhock. He has changed their 
 chaste, but wonderfully beautiful corollas, into hideous balls or 
 monstrous doubles. For man haa no eye for beauty and grace, he 
 is nothing but a beast of destruction upon the face of the earth. 
 
 As man's mind, so is his body, like unto his inner self, the 
 most hideous of creatures, especially that of the male. It is a 
 crooked heap of bones which he must hide under clothes lest his 
 degradation be seen. It is only for a few moons that even his 
 virgins possess bodies with lines of grace comparable to other 
 animals. Animals maintain the grace and beauty of their bodies 
 till the time of their death, but after the first matings man's grace 
 of form is gone and he wanders around upon the earth as a living 
 skeleton or scare-crow. 
 
 XV. THE CULT OF TORTURE 
 "Lex Taliones" and the CHRISTIAN HATE. 
 
 The Christian civilization is founded upon vengeance and the 
 intensive cult of torture. The hate of modern civilized peoples is 
 endless. The Barbarians scalped their victims, or roasted and ate 
 them. Later as men became more civilized, they used the rack, the 
 cross, the wheel, or quartered the captives of their justice, but 
 under all these circumstances death soon set free their victims from 
 any further suffering. But the prisons of civilized society torture 
 their victims for years and years on end, and if by chance one of 
 them should become sick, they send them to a hospital to nurse 
 them back to health in order that they may complete the number 
 of years of torture allotted to them. All the punishments of 
 civilized society are especially designed to -degrade and hack to 
 pieces the soul of man. Few are criminals at heart when they are 
 first sent to prison, but none ever escape except seared in soul and 
 mortally wounded in their better nature. The bloodlust of the 
 animal is hot and fierce, even the passion of the mob is but mo- 
 mentary, but the bloodlust of civilized society is cold and calcu- 
 lating and as relentless as religious animosity. The animal soon 
 forgets his hate and desire for revenge, but the Christian State 
 never forgets. If a man escapes from their prisons, flees to a new 
 country and lives the life of a model citizen for twenty years, as 
 soon as he is discovered he is thrown back into the dungeon. Men 
 hold nothing so sacred as the torture which they have decreed upon 
 their fellow-men. 
 
 The old lex taliones of primtive society was "loaf lor loaf, eye 
 for eye, tooth for tooth," but civilized law is years of penitentiary 
 for stealing a loaf, and it is death for disobedience to military 
 service. Among primitive peoples society was satisfied with actual 
 justice, it strictly forbade the taking of vengeance (Lev. 19:17). 
 "Thou shalt not take vengeance. If a man cause a blemish in his 
 neighbor, as he hath done, so shall it be done to him: breach for 
 breach," etc. Restitution for the damage done was all that was 
 exacted (Lev. 24:19), but modern law is nearly all vengeance. 
 Even those merely accused of crime, must submit to the indignities 
 
24 Mendeg Pinto 
 
 of the police-systems, have their photograph and finger-prints taken 
 for the rogue's gallery. The whole administration of justice in 
 modern society is designed to trample a man's dignity into the mud 
 and inflict mortal wounds in his soul. Look at the lion in the cage, 
 proud monarch of the desert when free, but crushed and broken, 
 or furious and snarling, behind the bars. So no man can be put 
 behind the bars without suffering degradation of soul. There are 
 asylums for the feeble-minded, the defective and the perverted, to 
 keep them from doing harm, but a prison has no excuse except as 
 the fruit of hate and the desire to inflict torture. And civilized 
 society always seeks out the most fiendish ways of torture. To the 
 well-educated prisoner it denies newspapers, books and writing- 
 materials, allows him only a monthly or weekly letter. Such things 
 drive the dagger deepest into the sensitive soul. And the wife of 
 such an unfortunate can stand at the prison-gate and beg for a view 
 of her beloved, but the iron gate opens not and the wire screen 
 allows no loving touch from mate or child. Onei of old hath said, 
 "What God hath joined together, let no man part asunder," but the 
 first thing which Christian justice does is to part a loving wife from 
 her husband and decrees that her children shall grow up orphans 
 and that she and her loved ones shall fight the battle with poverty 
 alone. The Turk is harsh in his punishments, but it is easy to 
 bribe the Turkish jailer, a little greasing of the palm is sufficient to 
 make life endurable in Mohammedan prisons, but who can bribe 
 Christian justice to take a leaning towards mercy? It takes its 
 oath upon the Bible which says, "Judge not," and then proceeds to 
 tear the human soul limb from limb in those places where they 
 allow one man to sit in judgment upon another, which they proudly 
 call "Halls of Justice." Once upon a time the people wrested the 
 right of trial by jury from their rulers. Twelve men of their own 
 peers were to stand between the judge and the accused, but modern 
 juries exist only to listen to the judge's opinion of the law and to 
 O. K. his dictum. 
 
 XVI. PROGRESSIVE DEGENERATION 
 From Head-Hunter to Bayonet Drill. 
 
 The White Man's civilization is a progressive degeneration into 
 deeper and deeper brutality. In their days of Barbarism, the natural 
 animal instincts o* man still somewhat checked his brutality, but 
 these checks are lost in the white man's civilization. Animals have 
 an instinctive respect for the sacredness of life, which is altogether 
 absent from civilized men. Animals protect their offspring as long 
 as they can and shield the mother and her young from danger so 
 far as is in their power. In wild nature no pregnant mother ever 
 goes hungry, she is, in addition, nearly always immune from the 
 attack of the natural enemies of the species, but among civilized 
 races millions of mothers have neither sufficient food for them- 
 selves, nor for their infants, neither is their labor lightened in 
 cannery or department store, in cotton-mill or clothing factory. 
 Modern industrial society docks the wages and penalizes its wage- 
 slaves for child-bearing, for weddings and for funerals; the mills of 
 men have no time to stop that the purposes of God may be accom- 
 plished in the world. 
 
Humbug-Land 25 
 
 Likewise, modern warfare is infinitely more brutal in design 
 and spirit than the warfare of barbarians. This is the law of war 
 among the ancients: "And it shall be when ye draw nigh unto 
 battle .... the officers shall speak unto the people, saying, What 
 man is there that hath built a new house and hath not dedicated it? 
 let him go and return to his house, lest he die in battle, and another 
 man dedicate it. And what man is there that hath planted a vine- 
 yard, and hath not used the fruit thereof? let him go and return 
 unto his house, lest he die in battle and another man use the fruit 
 thereof. And what man is there that hath betrothed a wife, and 
 hath not taken her? let him go and return unto his house, lest he 
 die in the battle, and another man take her. And the officers shall 
 further speak unto the people, and they shall say, What man is 
 there that is fearful and fainthearted? let him go and return unto 
 his house." (Deut. 20:2-8.) The primitive tribe knew instinctively 
 that it could not afford to jeopardize its choicest youths in battle. 
 It sent home the lover to his sweetheart, the home-builder to his 
 hearthstone, it sent back all the idealists to whom the slaughter of 
 the trenches was repulsive, it spared all the refined and sensitive 
 souls, who shrunk from killing and left in the army only the super- 
 fluous males, those of murderous and bloodthirsty instincts. Thus 
 the ravages of war cut off only the bloodthirsty out of the tribe and 
 left the nobler-minded to propagate the race. But civilized peoples 
 are not content to let the bloodthirsty volunteer for combat, they 
 conscript into their armies all the peace-loving and better-minded 
 youth of the land, they tear away all lovers from their sweethearts, 
 their murder-trumpet bids the young home-builder cease his work 
 and commands the young husbandman to leave his plow, to join in 
 the dance of death. 
 
 So also, in olden times, the armies in the field often let their 
 chief braggadocios, their generals and kings, decide the battle in 
 single combat, as in the case of David and Goliath. Likewise, the 
 ancient king was required to lead his army into battle in person, he 
 must himself brave the greatest danger, or no soldier would fight 
 for him. In those days the human battle was still something like 
 the animal fights, a contest of valor, which degenerated into 
 butchery only in the heat of passion. Two herds of cattle will 
 fight when they meet, chiefly for the right of pasturage, yet they 
 do not insist on mortal combat, but man never thinks war worth 
 while, except by killing his fellow-man. His victory tastes bitter 
 to him till he can hear his brother's death-rattle. But the animal^ 
 which finds that he has killed a fellow-member of the herd, slinks 
 away conscience-striken and cannot be found for days, ihc oviiized 
 battle is simply an orgy of machine murder ordered by cowards 
 far from the danger-line. What modern general ever came within 
 twenty miles of a battle, or heard a bullet whistle or had a horse 
 shot from under him? Modern kings would not be quite so ready 
 to send their millions into war, were they themselves to face cannon 
 and musket and bayonet. 
 
 Some civilized peoples pride themselves upon, their right to 
 vote, but none of them possess the right to vote whether they shall 
 make war or not, even in democracies that is a right reserved ex- 
 clusively for their rulers. But in animal society no beast can send 
 
26 Mendez Pinto 
 
 another beast into battle. Only humans are subject to 4his death- 
 duty at the whims of their autocrats, but animals are not like men, 
 they are free. 
 
 In barbarous times the right to asylum was universal. The slave 
 could flee to another country and there he was protected. The laws 
 of hospitality required the host to protect the stranger against mob- 
 violence (Gen. 19:1-10) and the law of old Israel was "Thou shalt 
 not deliver unto his master a servant that is escaped from his master 
 unto thee: he shall dwell with thee, in the midst of thee, in the 
 place which he shall choose within one of thy gates, where it 
 pleaseth him best; thou shalt not oppress him" (Deut 23:15, 16), 
 but the modern nations deport and persecute all foreigners living 
 among them, there is nowhere on the earth a place of asylum for 
 the white man persecuted by the autocrat of the country that rules 
 over him. The American government will deliver up every subject 
 of the British king who has fled from his yoke. Thus do all the 
 nations with those who seek freedom. 
 
 XVII. PARASITISM 
 Feasting the Drones. 
 
 Not only is the whole human race altogether parasitic in nature 
 both upon plants and animals, but there is endless inter-racial para- 
 sitism, a thing totally unknown in the animal world. No animal 
 ever enslaves a member of its own species. Among the humans, 
 the rich are nothing but parasites upon the labor of the poor. Great 
 hordes of beaurocrats fasten themselves upon the highly developed 
 social structure. All these office-holders are useless to a real self- 
 functioning social order. When people get the law-making mania, 
 they must pay for it by an ever increasing crop of policemen, judges, 
 detectives, clerks, lawyers, court-printers, etc., for every new statute 
 to enforce it. 
 
 But one of the worst forms of parasitism is that among the 
 poorer people the old universally live upon their children. In all 
 well-developed animal societies there comes a time when the old 
 and young part company. Such a thing as the young supporting 
 the old is utterly unknown among them. An animal would die of 
 shame before it would eat the bread of its children. After caring 
 for their offispring the proper length of time, they absolutely leave 
 the young to their own enjoyment of life and never in any way 
 hinder or interfere with them or allow themselves to become a 
 burden. But in human society there is scarce a home among the 
 poor which does not harbor an old discontented woman or man, 
 who makes life miserable for the younger generation, or at any 
 rate is a heavy burden to support. But so great is ancestor-worship 
 among the humans that they profess it a great privilege to have 
 such an aged decrepit in their homes, for their religion is that 
 suffering is ennobling to the soul and cross-bearing a great privilege. 
 Yet human misery would no doubt be vastly less if the young 
 would let the old shift for themselves, as nature meant that they 
 should, for the promise of life is to youth, and old age has no right 
 to rob the young of a single ounce of it. 
 
Humbug-Land 27 
 
 XVIII. MEN AT PLAY 
 What does the Mirror Tell? 
 
 One of the queerest spectacles in the world is to watch civilized 
 man in his amusements. Their most popular entertainment is "jazz" 
 or vaudeville. The actors on the stage try to act crazy, pretend 
 they are animals, paint their faces black, or parade in war-paint. 
 Yet if one goes into an insane asylum, where people actually are 
 crazy, one looks in vain to see them do the crazy things that are 
 done on the stage. I have never seen a cow stand on her head, 
 but one can see multitudes of human actors try to stand on their 
 heads on the stage, attempting to spill out their brains. To crawl 
 on all fours, to roll on their belly, to hop on one foot, to kick the 
 moon: such are the things which get greatest applause in the 
 theatres of civilized peoples. Possibly because they unconsciously 
 behold there their real image : a dunce. Animals are great for play 
 and they delight in every sort of mimicry, but it is only man that 
 can play the fool and applaud himself for it. 
 
 XIX. DEBTS 
 What Moth and Rust Cannot Corrupt. 
 
 Every bird has his twig, the fox his hole and the myriad insects 
 have each their velvet-home in fee-simple and tax-exempt by free 
 endowment of Nature, but the son of man has not where to lay 
 his head, for the king and the landlord have stolen his birthright. 
 Animals have no debts, neither do they mortgage their winter- 
 stores, their future labor, their nest, nor their lairs. But among all 
 the self-mortifications which men indulge, they hold their debts pre- 
 eminently sacred. The greatest part of the machinery of human 
 government is taken up with the enforcement of debt-claims. Any 
 court will give to any Shylock his pound of flesh, though if the 
 merchant's or banker's speculations turn out badly, he may go into 
 bankruptcy and be freed of all future obligation. If the debtor 
 be a poor man, however, his debts will be a lien upon his wages 
 forever. 
 
 The French peasant who invested his money in the Panama 
 Canal lost it and the Americans reaped the benefit. But the French 
 banker who lent money to the Czar of Russia to maintain his rule 
 of the knout and to make war, can call upon the whole Christian 
 world to collect these debts for him from the Russian peasant. 
 The only absolutely safe investment on earth is in war-loans, for 
 nations are not suffered to go into bankruptcy and what the parents 
 cannot pay may be collected from the children and their children. 
 England is still paying interest on the Napoleonic war-debts and 
 the Americans will not get their Liberty out of bondage for many 
 generations, and the German children had better wait to be born 
 till after the Reparations have been paid. 
 
 In olden times the people delivered a tenth part of their 
 produce to the church as tithes, the king collected seven per cent 
 more and other dignitaries got the "little thithes," etc. In modefn 
 states the people pay seven per cent to the stock-jobbers, to keep 
 their stocks well watered and they pay from twenty to sixty per 
 cent tribute to their merchant-princes, their oil-kings and coal- 
 
28 Mendez Pinto 
 
 barons. The production cost of their articles of commerce is barely 
 one-third of what the consumer pays for them, the rest goes to 
 middlemen. Their age is the age of "business," the greatest tribute- 
 paying age the world has ever seen. 
 
 A thrifty young man among them invests his savings in a home. 
 But he must repair the wear of the building and finally, when it 
 becomes too old, replace it with a new one. In the course of time 
 his "capital" has disappeared by natural disintegration of the house. 
 And as a house wears out, so does machinery, and all of real capital 
 is thus wiped out by the ravages of time. But time can never wipe 
 out human obligations, at least not in Christian lands. The other 
 young man invested his savings in railroad stock, he and his heirs 
 and assigns can draw dividends forever, he does not have to renew 
 locomotives, rails or roadbed. He was wise; he did not lend the 
 railroad actual capital, he only lent the sign of it, viz., money, and 
 moth and rust cannot corrupt money. If the railroad business is 
 not good, the State pays him interest, even though his stock be 
 heavily water-logged. If railroading is good, he can collect "all the 
 traffic will bear." For all their public utilities men pay not only 
 the cost of service and depreciation of plant, but they must pay an 
 annual tribute to the stockholders. Though the pipes of the water- 
 system have long ago rusted out and been replaced out of the 
 pockets of the consumers, and the locomotives been replaced by 
 better ones, all this only progressively increases the obligation of 
 the public to pay more interest on the increased valuations. Modern 
 civilization thinks there is nothing equal to the private toll-railroads 
 for public travel. The old robber baron on the Rhine could not 
 collect a tithe of the tribute from the shipping of that river which 
 modern society so proudly pays to its privately owned railroads and 
 coal mines. But this private possession of the earth and the means 
 of livelihood is only a modern invention among men. Primitive 
 society held all land and all the natural resources in common, 
 precisely as do all animal societies. Among the un-christianized 
 Hebrews all land-titles came automatically to an end in the year of 
 Jubilee, which was every fiftieth year, and all money-debts ceased 
 automatically every seventh year. 
 
 XX. THE INTELLECTUALS 
 
 The Hand, the Stomach and the Tape-Worm. 
 Standing in Line for a Yoke. 
 
 In the ancient Greek and Roman Empires, as a rule only the 
 slaves could read and write and were educated, for knowledge is 
 not power, but it makes a better work-horse and therefore among 
 the civilized nations the educated classes always have had the least 
 power. The wage-slaves often combine and their unions some- 
 times become very powerful, but in an age of universal exploitation 
 the salary-slave is the meekest timber there is. As a class the in- 
 tellectuals use their knowledge not for their own benefit, neither 
 for that of the public good, all their knowledge is used exclusively 
 in the interest of their masters and according to the dictates of the 
 powers that rule. It is true, the salary-slave holds the wage-slave 
 in much contempt, as the church-mouse looks down upon its brother 
 in the field. The Intellectual is the special pet of the ruling in- 
 
Humbug-Land 29 
 
 terests, the blood-hound of Legree to bite the Proletariat He 
 would not hurt the hand that feeds him, nor unmask the robber 
 to the robbed. The Intellectual wears better clothes than the artisan, 
 but the artisan takes his family to the beach Saturday afternoons 
 in a flivver, when the Intellectual follows after on the trolley-car. 
 The artisan eats ham and eggs for breakfast, the Intellectual eats 
 health-bran, and, much sooner than the artisan, is the Intellectual 
 compelled to live off his children or his relations. Who ever heard 
 of a high-school teacher earning a salary equal to that of a plumber 
 or brick-layer? But the incongruity is not so much in their rewards 
 as in the nature of the relation of their work. The bricklayer and 
 plumber do honorable work, they create thinsrs useful to society 
 and they take their orders only from their equals, they work under 
 a boss who knows something of the trade, but the teacher in a 
 high school or university always takes his orders from an inferior. 
 The expert in history must teach, not the result of careful investiga- 
 tion, but such fables as the Loyalty League believes in. The scientist 
 must not arrive at Darwinian conclusions for the Board of Directors 
 are orthodox Christians. Then there is the host of public school 
 teachers, they are subject to school boards consisting of the lowest 
 politicians of the ward, who decide the amount of their salary in 
 Hinky Dink's saloon. One would think that those who give their toil 
 would have the sense to name the price for which thev will sweat, 
 but even the professor of Economics humbly petitions his Board of 
 Venerable lenoramusses for an increase in salary. The merchant, 
 though he toils not. neither does he spin, always sets his own price 
 for his cloth and other wares, but the farmer, the laborer, the clerk, 
 the manager and the teacher stand hat in hand humbly waiting upon 
 what crumbs their masters are willing to dole out. 
 
 It is on account of this lack of inder>endence and assertion of the 
 solidarity of their class that the lot of Intellectuals in all civilized 
 countries is so despicable. The common wage-worker merely gives 
 his muscle-power for his wage. If he likes his work, he may take 
 some pleasure in doine it well. But the Intellectual is hired chiefly 
 to prevaricate for the interests of his exploiters. As sales agent he 
 must praise the shoddy of his firm. As preacher or teacher he must 
 sanctify the current delusions of popular belief. As a lawyer he 
 must keep his crooked clients out of jail. As reporter and news- 
 writer, or editor, he must color and camouflage and manufacture the 
 news as suits the particular propaganda of the government or the 
 interests of the money-power. As magazine contributor he must 
 sugar-coat the poison of the chief advertiser. As advertising writer 
 he must convince the public that vinegar is sweet. In modern society, 
 as the wage-worker is paid to sweat, so the Intellectual is paid to lie, 
 for his master. The Intellectuals are the buttress of modern capital- 
 ism against the demands of the wage-slave for better conditions in 
 life. They must forever find new arguments that the hand must 
 feed the stomach of the social organism, but they must never men- 
 tion the tapeworm therein. The chief duty of the press and the pul- 
 pit is to teach the poletariat that a job is a blessing and that the 
 work-giver is a benefactor to mankind. The ass is stupid, but he 
 knows that the burden on his back is not his blessing, the horse does 
 not seek a rider, and the ox does not stand in line to beg for a 
 yoke, for animals are not fools like men. They who have heaven's 
 lamp should have shown the captives the way out of their prison. 
 
30 Mendes Pinto 
 
 but only He of Nazareth "proclaimed release to the captives, good 
 tidings to the poor, and healing for the bruised," all the rest have 
 betrayed the hopes of the poor. They have shackled the cry for free- 
 dom, they have used their knowledge to cheat the poor out of the 
 heritage of their toil. Indeed, tyranny and oppression, and injus- 
 tice, would soon come to an end among mankind if the Intellectuals 
 did not fortify it with their knowledge and their education. How 
 long could the merchant-princes carry on their business, the financial 
 magnates succeed in their schemes of plucking the public, the war- 
 makers put over their propaganda, if they could not hire the brains 
 of the Intellectuals? And why are the common people always so 
 helpless whenever they attempt to run a store or factory co-opera- 
 tively, except for the fact that the Intellectuals sabotage the enter- 
 prises of the people? 
 
 It is bad to eat one's bread with the salt of tears, it is worse to 
 eat it at the cost of the decay of the inner man, yet such is the lot 
 of the Intellectual in civilized society. He remains silent when he 
 knows he ought to speak. The horny-handed son of toil goes home 
 to his cottage at night, weary from overwork, but with a good con- 
 science, for his work at least hath not hurt his fellow-man, but the 
 Intellectual cannot earn his salary unless he keeps back part of the 
 truth from his unenlightened brother, he must lay his master's 
 snares to catch the unwary, he must poison the minds of children 
 with race hatred and military lust, in war-time he must be the 
 atrocity-monger of the nation. That mother is hard-hearted who 
 denies her children's cry for bread, but what of him that denies the 
 people's cry for truth, and all that suffering humanity did ask of the 
 Intellectuals during its six years of agony (four of war and two of 
 peace), was "O tell us only what you know," but they all, with one 
 consent, were silent. 
 
 XXI. THE GOSPEL OF TOIL 
 Canary-Song vs. the Boiler Factory. 
 
 Not only is the Christian civilization a great plague and destruc- 
 tion in nature, it is itself becomfng ever more ugly and deformed. 
 Nature cares only for that which is sleek and fat, for red cheeks and 
 ruddy lips. Wherever the bloom of health is gone she sends her 
 scavengers, the bacteria, to disintegrate the corpse. She wants no 
 coughing males, no narrow-hipped or flabby-breasted females. But 
 no creatures have ever so despised well-being, grace and comeliness 
 of body as the toil-drunken peoples of the White race. There are 
 few animals which do not spend more than half their time in preen- 
 ing their feathers, or smoothing their fur. Neglect of their toilet 
 always is a certain sign of disease among animals. The God of 
 Nature was an artist and he meant that his world should be exceed- 
 ingly beautiful, clean and healthy, but there are thousands upon 
 thousands of human wives who have never seen their husbands out 
 of their working clothes. There are millions of husbands who never 
 saw their wives in silk stockings or dancing frocks and party gowns. 
 
 The cult of beauty is one of the chief ends of the living creation. 
 Nature loves to grow flowers, she wants every woman to shine as the 
 rose and every man to be handsome as a god, but in a Chicago 
 slaughter-house, a Pittsburg steel- furnace, a Virginia mine, a New 
 
Humbug-Land 31 
 
 York sweat-shop, a Philadelphia department store, there bloom no 
 flowers : they all grind human flesh. In none of these places can the 
 human organism blossom put into its natural grace and lithesome- 
 ness. Modern civilization in its factories and workshops wallows in 
 unspeakable grime and filth, in dirt and dust, and bedlam din, but 
 nature is clean, and the dandelion seed sails in zephyr breeze, and 
 the forest air is pure and sweet, wherein dwell nature's children and 
 the young of birds and animals are at play, while the young of 
 humans pick coal at the tipple, tend cotton spindles or sit bent over 
 sewing machines or breathe second-hand air, dust and germs in 
 school or department store. But nature cares naught for the work 
 of man's hands, for pyramids and sky-scrapers and tombstones: 
 Adonis and Venus are her gods and goddesses. Youth, beauty, 
 laughter and play are her ends. When any creature spends more 
 time in work than in play, its race-life is near its end. Toil is the 
 suicide of the race, for nature is not willing that any of her children 
 should be condemned into work-beasts. Therefore all the peoples 
 which built great cities by the toil of its millions of slaves have 
 died as the curse of this toil. Egypt and Babylon, and Assyria and 
 Greece and Rome all were civilizations built upon the toil of slaves 
 and therefore nature has utterly wiped them out. And all the toil 
 of modern millions is only the feverish digging of its grave by the 
 white race. 
 
 The black race has never been afflicted with this toil-drunken- 
 ness, and though grievously oppressed by the white race since the 
 days of Pharaoh, it still survives, though Pharaoh is dead and the 
 desert sands blow over his tomb. The great CREATIVE INSTINCT in 
 the world planned the earth as a garden, a Paradise, where bride 
 and bridegroom should meet, for life, as the prophet of God hath 
 said, is meant to be an "eternal wedding-feast" and those who have 
 no time for feasting are unworthy of heaven's gift. The ancient 
 barbarians still remembered something of the laws of nature from 
 the time of their animal ancestors. They wrote into one of their 
 law-books thus, "When a man taketh a new wife, he shall not go 
 out in the host, neither shall he be charged with any business : he 
 shall be free at home one year, and shall cheer his wife whom he 
 hath taken." (Deut. 24:5.) 
 
 When Nature endowed the animal creation with freedom of 
 movement, she did a marvelous thing: every motion, every exertion 
 for the good of the organism she fortified with pleasurable sensa- 
 tions, with zest and delight in them, she made the way to well-being 
 at the same time the road of pleasure and delectation of life. But, 
 conversely, every act harmful to the organism's existence she 
 coupled with pain, with lassitude, with repugnance, with tiredness 
 and lack of interest. Nature not only gave food to the animal 
 world, she made it taste good in addition, and even the search for 
 food she accompanied with pleasing sensations, as also she added 
 joy to nest-building, to selection of roosting-place and the hunt for 
 shelter. Only that is good in nature which tastes good, feels good, 
 smells good, awakens curiosity, or offers any other satisfaction to 
 the numberless instincts with which living creatures are endowed. 
 
 But man heeds none of these things. His conscience lashes him 
 on to further toil when he is tired and keeps him at the same task 
 when he would rather do something else. He feels guilty to take 
 
32 Mendez Pinto 
 
 a holiday in the middle of the week. His churches appoint fast- 
 days on which man must touch nothing that does him good. Man 
 thinks the way to heaven is along the road of self-mortification. 
 Nature calls no evil good, calls no pain a blessing and endures no 
 other hardships than those which she cannot circumvent. 
 
 Man's hands have been endowed with a wide range ot creative 
 capacity, and while his artistic instinct is by no means equal to that 
 of plants or birds, he is pre-eminent in this among the mammals. 
 So he can enjoy much that many other creatures must go without. 
 Man can construct many things pleasing to behold, he can make 
 miniatures of everything around him, and this is a source of great 
 satisfaction. He can make numberless things with which to play, 
 wagons to ride on, skates to whirl on, ladders to climb up with, 
 ropes to swing on, boats to sail in and so forth. Now everything 
 is good in nature which widens the possibilities of play. Travel is 
 good if the goal be a holiday or an excursion, but travel is wicked 
 if the goal is work, or the accomplishing of some unwelcome task, 
 for nature has made every task that benefits life a welcome task, a 
 delight of exertion. 
 
 And if the white man would perform no more labor save such 
 as is pleasing to him while engaged in it, the earth could endure 
 him, for then it would still be green. The river-banks would not 
 be hideous with the offal of his mines and factories, the landscape 
 would not be disfigured with sign-boards and he would not plaster 
 down his cement where grass has the right to grow. 
 
 One of the few endowments of man which is not evil is his 
 creative instinct, for the exercise of this faculty is ennobling, but 
 the Christian civilization has nearly rooted out this natural endow- 
 ment of man. With what eager interest does the uncontaminated 
 boy whittle out a boat, and what zest there is in trying to make it 
 float, or what sacrifices does he not make to construct a toy engine, 
 or cart, or a pair of stilts, but modern civilization cuts off all this 
 natural creative activity of the boy and sends him to school, where 
 he is not allowed to do anything according to his bent, but where 
 his lessons are given him and teachers are never satisfied, unless 
 they can feel that their lessons are a real task. 
 
 The boy of civilized countries is greatly handicapped compared 
 with the boy among savages, who does not have to go to school. 
 The savage boy learns everything that his elders know in play or by 
 natural contact with them. He cuts his own bow and fashions his 
 own arrow and reaps the joy of making these things and acquiring 
 skill in their use, but the civilized boy has all his playthings bought 
 for him. The savage boy learns to know every track and foot-print 
 in forest and jungle, he knows the nature, the habitat, the whole 
 life-history of every bird and insect and animal about him. He 
 reads and understands the quiver of every leaf and the flutter of 
 every wing. The dawn, the sunset and the sky are open books to 
 him. But the civilized boy has to consult his wrist-watch to find 
 out whether the sun is setting or rising, he cannot tell whether the 
 moon is old or young, he is like the weather-bureau, which can pre- 
 dict a rain-storm or a clearing only on the day after it has happened. 
 
 Then when he is through school, the civilized boy enters the 
 factory or machine-shop, or he becomes a juggler of figures in a 
 
Humbug-Land 33 
 
 mercantile establishment, or a stacker of green paper in a bank: 
 the days of toy-boat and toy-housebuilding are over: the chance for 
 the exercise of the creative instinct has come to an end, except in 
 spare hours, to clutter up the patent-office with useless inventions. 
 
 In the days of the artisan guilds there was still much oppor- 
 tunity for the exercise of the creative instinct. The artisan had the 
 opportunity to make more than one kind of a chair or table, he 
 could experiment to some extent with the labor of his hands and 
 accordingly each age in the past produced its distinctive type of 
 architecture, furniture and art. But modern civilization is barren of 
 any art of its own, it has not created a single distinctive type of 
 furniture, but must live on Queen Anne, or Elizabeth. And as the 
 modern architect only draws blue-prints, but saws no board with his 
 own hands, and lays no mortar, so he can create nothing new: for 
 new creations arise only when hand and brain can work together. 
 The modern architect has produced nothing that can equal the 
 ancient Greek or Roman, or Moorish, or Gothic, nor even that of 
 the Chinese or Japanese or the Mission Fathers of California. All 
 he can do is to juggle the old styles and build a square box with 
 filigree like a skyscraper. He cannot even design a house with the 
 charm of the old English or Saxon cottage, and when the sands of 
 time have wept away the Christian civilization, neither Sphinx nor 
 Pyramid nor Coliseum will be left to tell the tale, nothing but mole- 
 hills, slag-heaps and gopher-tunnels in the mountains to give testi- 
 mony to the white man's progressive degeneration. 
 
 They say that the hog wallows in mud, but in all nature there 
 is nothing so grimy, so filthy, so dirty as the civilized nations. All 
 the animals always wear a fine clean coat of hair or feathers, they 
 have no working-clothes: they wear nothing but Sunday-suits, but 
 man goes dirty to work and comes home dirtier still. He is con- 
 sumptive and haggard, and bony and bent, eats his cold lunch out 
 of a dinner-pail while the birds have a jubilant feast of the crumbs. 
 While all nature is frolicking in the sun and jubilant with play and 
 laughter and song, man preaches the gospel of work, and ever more 
 work. And when he can think of nothing else to add to his burden, 
 he changes his railroad time table so as to throw the habits of a 
 whole community into confusion, or he re-routes his street-car lines 
 so that the poor cannot find their way to work. 
 
 However, it were none of our concern, and I should not dis- 
 course upon these things, if, in plotting toil, men only plagued 
 themselves, but because in their sweat and their sin of hard labor 
 they also plague the earth, we must consider their deeds in our 
 councils. We would not mind their wars, if only their own tribe 
 suffered, their corpses make good food for worm and for plant, and 
 their lives are a good deal more worthless in nature than they 
 imagine. If they want to throw their lives away, the world shall 
 be no poorer for it, if their sin stopped there. But all the trees 
 they cut down and shoot to pieces in war, all the birds they drive 
 from their homes in shrub and hedge, all the flowers they destroy, 
 all the innocent horses they kill and wound: these are the things 
 that are crying to heaven. If man's sin fell only upon himself, he 
 would receive his just reward, but whenever any creature fails to 
 fulfill its purpose in nature, fails to respond to the ends for which 
 it was created, the rest of creation always bears the greater penalty. 
 
34 , Mendez Pinto 
 
 And though nature is long-suffering and patient, her final decree of 
 extinction of the offending race is unalterable. Behold that work- 
 drunken boob with his axe, how he labors and nearly loses his 
 breath in trying to drag that noble tree into his paper-mill? His 
 aching back and stiff joints are his deserts, but the tree has paid 
 for man's sin with its life and therefore there is judgment coming 
 for man in nature. 
 
 So at the conclusion of my studies I walked over to the Great 
 Assize where Nemesis holds court in order to see how the Mighty 
 Ones of the earth are judged. 
 
 XXII. NEMESIS 
 The Police-Judge and the Supreme Court of Nature. 
 
 This court is not like the courts of men who say that justice 
 comes by maceration of the soul, for Nature is like unto the God 
 of the Preacher of the Sermon on the Mount, a Father that wishes 
 well to all his creatures, even men, who punishes none and causes 
 his sun to shine upon the good and the evil, who pardons the 
 Prodigal and is patient with the Elder statesmen. In nature there 
 is no retribution, but all must reap that which they sow, but no- 
 where in nature comes good out of evil, or virtue out of imprison- 
 ment and revenge. Nature blots out that which is unfit and con- 
 signs to oblivion the race that disregards the brotherhood of all 
 things that are alive, and he that wantonly plucks a flower or fells 
 a tree before its promise is fulfilled, is guilty of murder. 
 
 As I entered the great halls where the destiny of races and 
 species are fixed, I beheld Mother Nature bleeding from the wounds 
 which the Christian civilization had inflicted upon her, and upon 
 her bosom there lay the Goddess of Liberty, whose eyes the Chris- 
 tian Judges had gouged out. It was a sight from which I shrank, 
 but it is the duty of the scientist even to search into the mysteries 
 of putrefaction, yet the stench of Christian hypocrisy is well nigh 
 unbearable. In the name of him who commanded them to "love 
 their enemies," they preach a holy crusade of bloodshed. In the 
 name of him who preached "release to captives," they throw into 
 prison those who refuse to go with them to the killing, and in the 
 name of "Liberty" they hand-cuff those who hold dear the weal of 
 mankind and bow not to the worship of the War-Ogre. 
 
 First I saw a great multitude brought in, who were stained 
 with blood all over, for ,they had thrust their bayonets into the 
 bodies of their brothers who had done them no harm and whom 
 they had never seen before, but they had followed the mob to do 
 evil, or had been conscripted by the insane stampede, to provoke 
 death for the glory of their commanders. But though their hands 
 were red with murder, they were forgiven as sheep that had been 
 led astray by their shepherds. 
 
 But next came those that on earth were clothed in gold and 
 purple, much fewer in number, whose hands were not hardened in 
 toil, nor their bodies bent by labor, but their hearts were hard, 
 their souls shriveled and their springs of compassion dried up, these 
 stood naked in the deformity and ugliness of their inner self before 
 the awful Court of Nature. Great Rameses, king of Egypt and 
 Assyria, was there. He had sent his armies to battle while he lay 
 
Humbug-Land 35 
 
 e lap of courtesans. He had cut off the breasts of the virgins 
 his minions had made captive. Beside him stood the merchant- 
 princes, lords of ten-thousand wage-slaves, whose wages they had 
 kept so low, they could buy no silk for a wedding-dress, nor food 
 enough to bloom in youthful health, nor left them time for leisure 
 to dance with their lovers. He who darkens woman's wedding-day, 
 robs Nature of her Holy of Holies. Nature forgives all that is for- 
 given by woman's love, but he who robs a virgin of the bloom of 
 her cheeks, whether by rape or by hard work, hath never forgive- 
 ness anywhere. 
 
 Also I saw the judges judged, who had sent their fellow-men 
 to the dungeons and the gallows, and with them stood the detec- 
 tives and the stool-pigeons. And Judas was there, who betrayed 
 the Christ and he that betrayed the hopes of the world. 
 
 Lastly, I beheld a great company in robes of penitence and 
 ashes on their head. They had asked one Jesus of Nazareth to 
 make intercession for them. They had been the favored ones of 
 the race, for to them had been given the gift of knowledge that 
 they might be the light of the earth, but out of fear and cowardice 
 they had hid their light. And when the multitude became drunk 
 with madness to crush Liberty, they gave not their bodies to stand 
 in the breach to save the nation, for the stuff of martyrs was not 
 within them. 
 
 XXIII. THE ECONOMY OF MORTAL LIFE 
 
 Immortals that Seek to Become Mortal. 
 
 I have so far given a faithful report of man's shortcoming in 
 nature, but each creature also has its excellencies and in conclusion 
 I will mention some that attach to the human race. Indeed, man's 
 shortcomings are altogether due to his own stupidity and not to 
 any lack of natural endowment. Creative Nature ever tries some- 
 thing new and only time can tell whether her experiments prove 
 successful or not, and though it is very doubtful that man will 
 prove worthy to live, nevertheless, the human physical organism has 
 many advantages not possessed by other animals. 
 
 The human body is especially constructed for a great wealth of 
 pleasurable sensations. There is a far larger variety of foods which 
 taste good to man, than is possible to any other creature. Also, his 
 ear is well-developed and can send his whole being into a quiver 
 of musical ecstacy unknown even to the birds. Of all animals, man 
 alone seems to possess the capacity to dance to music, and when 
 this is combined with youthful sex-attraction, man is enabled to 
 drink heaven's strongest wine from lily-chalices. 
 
 Likewise, the human eye is fairly responsive to harmonies of 
 color and grace of form, and so coupled with his creative capacity, 
 he can enjoy the artistic satisfaction. 
 
 But the chief purpose of human life lies in its unprecedented 
 capacity for the enjoyment of sex-attractions. His whole body and 
 emotional nature are constructed with this end in view. Man can 
 love more intoxicatingly than any other creature and his chief duty 
 in life is to court woman, while woman's chief duty is to tempt or 
 charm man. 
 
36 Mendez Pinto 
 
 The greatest achievement of the Universal Mind is the evolu- 
 tion of mortal life. We Immortals have the everlasting life, but 
 things that never end, become monotonous, and unless some suns or 
 stars collide and explode in the universe, or some other catastrophe 
 happens, the eternal music of our existence runs to the same tune. 
 It is therefore a wonderful achievement for Evolution to have in- 
 vented mortal life with its endless varieties. It is mortality alone 
 which makes possible youth and the ecstacy of procreation. It is 
 upon the earth alone where Life is enabled continually to re- 
 experience the thrills of youth and of the nuptial rapture, by its 
 invention of death, for if the old did not die, soon there would be 
 no room for the young to be born and live. Similarly, the number 
 of individuals which may experience the sensation of youth and 
 hope is greatly increased by the device of allowing one species of 
 life to exist upon the ruins of another. Thus the whole animal 
 world subsists upon the ruins of the plant-world, and the more are 
 eaten after they have bloomed, the more room for others to bloom. 
 For all life is good while it lasts, at least} to animal and plant, and 
 man need not curse himself with labor that is irksome any more 
 than the rest of creation. It is therefore the most wonderful proof 
 of the unrivalled wisdom of the Creative Intelligence, not only to 
 remove the old by death, but in countless instances to make the old 
 generation serve as the supporter of the youth of another species, 
 for youth is the final goal of life, and so marvelously balanced is 
 life in nature that both the eater and the eaten obtain an equal 
 share of life's delight. To grow up, to climb through infancy to 
 adolescence, to unfold, to mature, to procreate: this is to quaff the 
 cup of existence of a million immortal years in a single hour, for 
 life is measured, not by years or eons, but by thrills and hopes, by 
 fear and dread, by vision and victory, and so nature has endowed 
 the human being with a cluster of raptures out of reach of most 
 other creatures. He may dance and kiss and flirt with his mate in 
 a thousand ways unknown to dove and orchid, and through his eye 
 he may see the world, not naked and gray as it is in reality, but in 
 the glory of the rainbow, for not cold facts, but color and illusion, 
 are the beautiful garments of truth. Over all that he sees and 
 hears and feels, over all the data of his experience, man may let 
 play the varying lights of poetic imagination, as a skillful stage- 
 manager drapes his dancers successively in all the hues of the 
 spectrum. 
 
 And if by chance man fall into undeserved misery and finds his 
 hope of further real living absolutely closed, he has been given the 
 means to commit suicide in less painful ways than is vouchsafed to 
 the animals. 
 
 It is true, every nook and cranny of the whole universe is 
 peopled with life, and there is no end to its form and no limit to 
 its days, but not anywhere in the heavens is there found a paradise 
 equal to that little earth which spins around the sun. All our ad- 
 venturous youths are hoping for an incarnation into plant, flower 
 tree or shrub or even into an animal, and no doubt we would a* 
 ardently long for the adventure of human life, could we be bu. 
 assured that we need not have to have man's brain, his conscience 
 and his slavish mind. 
 
 Haec dicit amicus humani generis. 
 
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