Man is but a single sector in the great circle of sentient life. The human species is one among a million or two of species inhabiting the earth. The… - J. Howard Moore

It ought to be perfectly clear by this time that the popularity and unpopularity of propositions in no way coincide with their truth and falsity. It makes no difference how true a proposition may be or how unreservedly it may finally be accepted by mankind, there is always a period in its early life when it is stoned and misunderstood. It has been so throughout the ages of the past; it is true to-day; and it will continue to be true as long as disparities in heroism and originality exist among men.

Kinship is universal. The orders, families, species, and races of the animal kingdom are the branches of a gigantic arbour. Every individual is a cell, every species is a tissue, and every order is an organ in the great surging, suffering, palpitating process. Man is simply one portion of the immense enterprise. He is as veritably an animal as the insect that drinks its little fill from his veins, the ox he goads, or the wild-fox that flees before his bellowings. Man is not a god, nor in any imminent danger of becoming one. He is not a celestial star-babe dropped down among mundane matters for a time and endowed with wing possibilities and the anatomy of a deity. He is a mammal of the order of primates, not so lamentable when we think of the hyena and the serpent, but an exceedingly discouraging vertebrate compared with what he ought to be. He has come up from the worm and the quadruped. His relatives dwell on the prairies and in the fields, forests, and waves. He shares the honours and partakes of the infirmities of all his kindred. He walks on his hind-limbs like the ape; he eats herbage and suckles his young like the ox; he slays his fellows and fills himself with their blood like the crocodile and the tiger; he grows old and dies, and turns to banqueting worms, like all that come from the elemental loins. He cannot exceed the winds like the hound, nor dissolve his image in the mid-day blue like the eagle. He has not the courage of the gorilla, the magnificence of the steed, nor the plaintive innocence of the ring-dove. Poor, pitiful, glory-hunting hideful! Born into a universe which he creates when he comes into it, and clinging, like all his kindred, to a clod that knows him not, he drives on in the preposterous storm of the atoms, as helpless to fashion his fate as the sleet that pelts him, and lost absolutely in the somnambulism of his own being.

Many races, owing to the manner in which life has been evolved, are by nature criminal, just like a lot of individual men and women. Their existence is a continual menace to the peace and well-being of the world. The fullness of their lives is dependent upon the emptiness and destruction of others. The mosquito and the tiger, the rattle-snake and the 'sportsman,' are criminals of this kind. The same thing is true of predatory animals generally.