The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 09: Tangential ViewsBierce, Ambrose
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The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 09: Tangential Views
Bierce, Ambrose
American essays; American literature
The crying need of our time is more civilization. We have made a rather
lamentable failure in the attempt to elevate certain of the lower
races, such as the Chinese, the Sabbatarians and the Protectionists;
and to still others we have imparted only dim and transient gleams
of our great light. Some, indeed, we have civilized so imperfectly
that they might almost as well have been left in outer darkness; for
example, the Negroes of the South. Our utmost efforts—aided, in many
instances, by the shotgun, the bloodhound and the fagot-and-stake—have
given a faulty result, and many of these obdurate persons remain, as
the late Parson Brownlow would have said, “steeped to the nose and
chin in political profligacy,” voting the Republican ticket whenever
permitted. For four centuries we have hunted the Red Indian from cover
to cover, and he is not a very nice Red Indian yet, some of his vices
and superstitions differing widely from our own. The motorcarman,
shutting his eyes to the glory and advantage of enlightenment, still
urges his indocile apparatus along the line of least insistence; and
the organist from the overseas practices his black art at the street
corner, inaccessible to reclamation. A hundred urban tribes might be
named among civilization’s irreclaimables, without mentioning any of
the religious sects. At every turn the gentleman who is desirous of
making-over his faulty fellow-men encounters a baffling apathy or a
spirited hostility to change.
Possibly the higher quadrumana may prove more pregnable to light and
reason—more willing to become as we. Perhaps when we can all talk
Monkey we shall be able to set forth the advantages of our happy
state more graphically than we have succeeded in doing in any of
the tongues—including our own—known to the wicked and stiff-necked
generations mentioned. In that sparkling speech we may, for
example, make it clear that a condition in which nine-tenths of the
reformed monkeys will live a life of toil and discomfort, holding
their subsistence by the most precarious tenure, is conspicuously
subserviceable to that chastened and humble frame of mind which is
so joyously different from the empty intellectual pride that comes
of pelting one another with cocoanuts and depending from branches
by prehensile tails. Perhaps in the pithecan vocabulary is such
copiousness that we can easily set forth the unspeakable profit of
living a long way from where we want to go at a considerable peril
to life and limb—which is what steam and electricity enable us to
do. We may reasonably hope to be able to convince the gorilla of the
futility of his habit of beating his breast and roaring when in the
presence of the enemy; the history of a few of our great battles,
carefully translated into his noble tongue, will make him first endure,
then pity, then embrace our more effective military methods, to the
unspeakable benefit of his heart and mind. Adequately civilized, the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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