It is certain that Matter has not evolved a finer race of men than the Caucasian; and it is certain that the Caucasian has not evolved a finer breed than the Greeks, the Romans or the English. Maugre the new louse--doubtless a most belated and strangely involved occurrence, comparable to our war of the Heptarchy in South Africa more than a thousand years behind the time--upon our earth the evolution of species has ceased, except tentatively by unnatural selection under the control of man. Unnatural is here a most relative term: I do not forget that man is himself as much a force of nature as a climate, or a season of the year, or any other environment. Since in the Caucasian races of men Matter has become capable of full self-consciousness, although it has not attained it yet, no further evolution of life in an ascending scale is possible; therefore man cannot become more human than he is. A fuller self-consciousness will not achieve a greater humanity: on the contrary, as I intend to show, a fuller self-consciousness entails a deeper integration, a closer involution of man's inhumanity.
Man is inhuman, and cannot be other than inhuman, the metaphysic or metaphor illustrative being--The Universe as a Will to an impossible Divinity by way of an impossible Humanity. The skeleton of man is a most inhuman thing; a skull is most inhuman; bones are as inhuman as rocks. The flesh of man is inhuman; it is not distinguishable from the flesh of swine. His sight, hearing, taste, appetites, functions, are inhuman, being appropriaments of all mammalia. Four important things he has which, by their quality, differentiate him from the other animals--his thumb, his posture, his brain, and his larynx; and these, the insignia of man, are the special vehicles of a most profound inhumanity for which the catfish and the wolverine, were they in power, would wipe the present lord of creation from the face of the earth as utterly unfit to live. His commanding posture, his opposable thumb, his spacious convoluted brain, and his voice of terror and command, have enabled man to invent, elaborate, and apply to man all the tortures of his imagined Hell. The cat plays with the mouse, but that is the feline culinary art; and the mouse is shortly killed. Nor is the mouse fastened; it has to the last a chance of escape; and often the mouse gets away after a rousing game in which the stake was its life. The spider weaves a web, and the insect is caught; here the prey is fastened, but it is for food, and often a stout fly will break the net, and at the worst he is soon despatched. It was man who conceived the exquisite idea of fastening people in order to hurt them at his will and pleasure. Not a mammoth cat, insane and hunger-clung, ties up men and flogs them underground to cook them quickly instead of employing the longer, less brutal, and customary method with the mouse: it is man who does this to man, and not for food, but upon principle. Not a Titanic spider, but man, rove the strappado and stretched the rack in order to hurt men in body, mind, and soul, in every organ, nerve and sinew, joint and muscle, repeatedly and for long periods without killing them: it was man who did this, and not because he was starving and this the only way to secure and prepare food, but in many cases only because there was between him and his victims a difference of opinion upon an entirely immaterial point. It was not a pack of wolves, having captured more game than they could dispose of, and being quite sated with flesh and wanton with blood, who chained up men and women and burned them alive: it was men who did this to men as a religious duty. As soon as their queen has been pleased, and the future of the hive is assured, the working-bees destroy the drones. If merciful economy be a human attribute, the bees are more human than men. Those who cannot work, and those for whom there is nothing to do, the natural and artificial drones among men, are interned in lunatic asylums, homes for incurables, prisons, poorhouses. The cost of these would, I suppose, provide old-age pensions for all the workers. The lethal chamber of the bee is the porch of his straw-built citadel. Recently a humane man of science, with courage and public spirit--so rare in England now!--inquired for the lethal chambers of men. These are they: our asylums, prisons, poorhouses; but the death we supply is slow--so slow: why, one pleasant meal of five courses, with wine, coffee, benedictine, and a cigar, would in one night dispose of all the old men in a certain _Home_ I know: indeed, they are living tombs rather than lethal chambers, these institutions of ours.