wer and such restraint, combined, are
noble,--but a quality carried to excess defeats itself. Kings who won't
lift their scepters must yield in the end; and, the worst of it is, to
upstarts who snatch at their crowns.

* * * * *

I fancy the elephants would have been gentler masters than we: more
live-and-let-live in allowing other species to stay here. Our way is to
kill good and bad, male and female and babies, till the few last
survivors lie hidden away from our guns. All species must surrender
unconditionally--those are our terms--and come and live in barns
alongside us; or on us, as parasites. The creatures that want to live a
life of their own, we call wild. If wild, then no matter how harmless
we treat them as outlaws, and those of us who are specially well
brought up shoot them for fun. Some might be our friends. We don't wish
it. We keep them all terrorized. When one of us conquering monkey-men
enters the woods, most animals that scent him slink away, or race off
in a panic. It is not that we have planned this deliberately: but they
know what we're like. Race by race they have been slaughtered. Soon all
will be gone. We give neither freedom nor life-room to those we defeat.

If we had been as strong as the elephants, we might have been kinder.
When great power comes naturally to people, it is used more urbanely.
We use it as parvenus do, because that's what we are. The elephant,
being born to it, is easy-going, confident, tolerant. He would have
been a more humane king.

* * * * *

A race descended from elephants would have had to build on a large
scale. Imagine a crowd of huge, wrinkled, slow-moving elephant-men
getting into a vast elephant omnibus.

And would they have ever tried airships?

The elephant is stupid when it comes to learning how to use tools. So
are all other species except our own. Isn't it strange? A tool, in the
most primitive sense, is any object, lying around, that can obviously
be used as an instrument for this or that purpose. Many creatures use
objects as _materials_, as birds use twigs for nests. But the step that
no animal takes is learning freely to use things as instruments. When
an elephant plucks off a branch and swishes his flanks, and thus keeps
away insects, he is using a tool. But he does it only by a vague and
haphazard association of ideas. If he once became a conscious user of
tools he