But church and school did not tell me, and has never told its pupils, that all other life on the earth was as precious as my own, and had an equal right to fight for its existence. It is true I was told that never a sparrow falls that God does not see it, but it is also true that, for six years, my state urged its children to kill sparrows for a bounty of two cents a head. I found no course in school or college that attempted to teach me that the spark of life animating my own body was no different from the sparks which animated all other living things. Both religion and school instilled into me that I was next in place to God. All other life, from the life of trees and flowers to that of beasts and birds, was put on earth for my special benefit. No other life had a right to exist unless the human egoist saw fit to let it live. And all this simply because human life happened to be the most powerful life, and cleverest in the art and science of destroying other life. I wonder what would happen if for ten generations the churches and schools would teach their little children and their grown-ups that there is a heaven for flowers and trees and birds and butterflies just as surely as there is a heaven for man! What would happen if the teaching of the Great Truth of nature began in the kindergarten, and went on through the lives of men and women, growing stronger in the race as generation added itself to generation? It is something to think about in these days when, in our madness for a faith, we are reviving ghosts and phantom voices and are frightening our children again with the diseased and weird belief that the spirits of the dead can come back to us. We want something that is clean and healthy and inspiring, something that is beautiful to contemplate, and which is not an overwhelming insult to that Great Power of the universe of which we are so small a part--and in the kindergarten we could plant the seed of that thing, so that, through the school and the church and all life, it would continue to grow stronger with each generation, until, at last, man would shake off that deadliest of all his enemies, his own egoism and self-conceit. Then, and not until then, will he find contentment and peace and happiness in the brotherhood of all other life that is about him. But I seem to be evading the issue--my own confession as a monumental egoist and a killer. I have said that my parents were egoists, like all their forefathers before them. Yet the world never held a better mother than mine. I do not except any who may sit in heaven at the present time. And my father, as a man, was far better than his son will ever be. He was a gentleman of the old school, living, as he died, an example of courage and fearlessness and honor to all who knew him. Yet did these two splendid people, like all other parents, foster and cultivate my egoism from the beginning. They did it unconsciously, blindly, as hundreds of millions of other parents are doing to-day.