What do we learn from the Chicago slaughter-houses and the Gold-beetle’s feasting? This: the man of lofty morals is nowadays a rather rare exception. Under the skin of the civilized being we nearly always find the ancestor, the savage contemporary with the Cave-bear. True humanity does not yet exist; it is being very gradually formed by the leaven of the centuries and the lessons of conscience; it is progressing towards better things with heart-breaking slowness. It was only yesterday that slavery disappeared, the foundation of the ancient community, and that people perceived that a man, even though black, is really a man and as such deserving of consideration. What was woman in the old days? What she still is in the East: a pretty little animal without a soul. The question was discussed at great length by the scholars. The great seventeenth-century bishop Bossuet [90] himself, looked upon woman as the diminutive of man. The proof lay in the origin of Eve: she was the superfluous bone, the thirteenth rib which Adam had in the beginning. It has at last been admitted that woman possesses a soul similar to our own and even its superior in tenderness and devotion. She has been permitted to educate herself, which she does with a zeal at least equal to that of her rival. But the law, that gloomy cavern which is still the lurking-place of so many barbarities, continues to regard her as incompetent, as a minor. The abolition of slavery and the education of women are two enormous strides upon the path of moral progress. Our grandchildren will go further. They will see, with a clear vision, capable of piercing every obstacle, that war is the most absurd of our eccentricities; that conquerors, fighters of battles and despoilers of nations are execrable scourges; that a hand-shake is better than a rifle-bullet; that the happiest people is not that which possesses the most artillery but that which labours in peace and produces abundantly; and that the amenities of existence do not positively clamour for frontiers, beyond which the vexatious custom-house-officer awaits us, searching our pockets and plundering our luggage. They will see all this, our grandsons, and many other wonders which to-day rank as crazy dreams. Whither will it lead us, this ascent? Towards the blue skies of the ideal? To no very great height, I fear. We are afflicted with an indelible taint, a sort of original sin, if we may give the name of sin to a state of affairs in which our free will plays no part. We are built that way and we cannot help it. It is the taint of the belly, that inexhaustible source of brutality.