l and dry tasks. Without
some such discipline, he fears that his boys will lack strength. The
other system believes they will learn more when their interest is
roused; and when their minds, which are mobile by nature, are allowed
to keep moving.

Or in politics: the best government for simians seems to be based on a
parliament: a talk-room, where endless vague thoughts can be expressed.
This is the natural child of those primeval sessions that gave pleasure
to apes. It is neither an ideal nor a rational arrangement of course.
Small executive committees would be better. But not if we are simians.

Or in industry: Why do factory workers produce more in eight hours a
day than in ten? It is absurd. Super-sheep could not do it. But that
is the way men are made. To preach to such beings about the dignity of
labor is futile. The dignity of labor is not a simian conception at
all. True simians hate to have to work steadily: they call it grind
and confinement. They are always ready to pity the toilers who are
condemned to this fate, and to congratulate those who escape it, or
who can do something else. When they see some performer in spangles
risk his life, at a circus, swinging around on trapezes, high up in
the air, and when they are told he must do it daily, do they pity
_him_? No! Super-elephants would say, and quite properly, "What a
horrible life!" But it naturally seems stimulating to simians. Boys
envy the fellow. On the other hand whenever we are told about factory
life, we instinctively shudder to think of enduring such evils. We see
some old workman, filling cans with a whirring machine; and we hear
the humanitarians telling us, indignant and grieving, that he actually
must stand in that nice, warm, dry room every day, safe from storms
and wild beasts, and with nothing to do but fill cans; and at once we
groan: "How deadly! What monotonous toil! Shorten his hours!" His work
would seem blissful to super-spiders,--but to us it's intolerable. The
factory system is meant for other species than ours.

Our monkey-blood is also apparent in our judgments of crime. If a crime
is committed on impulse, we partly forgive it. Why? Because, being
simians, with a weakness for yielding to impulses, we like to excuse
ourselves by feeling not accountable for them. Elephants would have
probably taken an opposite stand. They aren't creatures of impulse, and
would be shocked at crimes due to such causes; their fault is the
opposite one