What good, what use, what aim? What compensation for the throes of birth And death in all its frame? What conscious life hath ever paid its cost? Fro… - James Thomson

For it may be very plausibly urged on their behalf, that it is impossible to extinguish evil until the origin thereof has been discovered and destroyed. This great river of human Time (rivers were expressly created to feed metaphors, allegories, and navigable canals) which comes flowing down thick with filth and blood from the immemorial past surely cannot be thoroughly cleansed by any purifying process applied to it here in the present for the pollution, if not in its very source (supposing it has a source), or deriving from unimaginable remotenesses of eternity indefinitely beyond its source, at any rate interfused with it countless ages back, and is perennial as the river itself. This immense poison-tree of Life, with its leaves of illusion, blossoms of delirium, apples of destruction, surely cannot be made wholesome and sweet by anything we may do to the branchlets and twigs on which, poor insects, we find ourselves crawling, or to the leaves and fruit on which we must fain feed; for the venom is drawn up in the sap by the taproots plunged in abysmal depths of the past. This toppling and sinking house wherein we dwell cannot be firmly re-established, save by re-establishing from its lowest foundation upwards.

The Vegetarians may confidently reckon that the new perfect man will not kill and devour other animals, nay, will not kill and devour vegetables, if it is cruel and wrong to do so. Should he after serious moral reflection conclude that vegetable life is as sacred as animal, he will doubtless be clever enough to derive plenty of wholesome food from the mineral kingdom; and should he deem it wrong to ravage even this for so vulgar a purpose as filling his belly, he will doubtless be able to nourish himself without devouring anything at all.

The International League of Peace and Liberty, together with all other Peace Societies and Liberal Associations, Socialists, Communists, Internationalists, must feel assured that the new perfect man will not fight with his brother, for it will not be his "nature to," nor will he seek to oppress his brother, nor will it be possible to oppress himself; and they must also feel assured that when all mankind and womankind are perfect, all will be absolutely equal in every respect, that everybody will be delighted to share everything with everybody else, and that the earth wisely worked will produce far more than enough for the wants of her human children. Nor is it likely that this perfect man will rest content with merely making all human beings free and equal: his delicate moral sense will probably perceive that other animals have their inalienable rights no less than the human animal; that it is wicked to enslave horses, dogs, camels, elephants, reindeer, etc., for his pleasure and service; that it is criminal to rob the cow of her milk and the hen of her egg, thus defrauding the calf and preventing the life of the chick; that it is a shameful abuse of superior power to interfere in any way with that mode of life to which the nature of each animal impels it.