e is, how it
works, how it can be had, and where it comes from, it might be more
worth our while to know than any other one thing in the world.

I would like to try to consider a few of the sources of this courage for
others.

CHAPTER XIV

SOURCES OF COURAGE FOR OTHERS--TOLERATION

After making an address on inspired millionaires one night before the
Sociological Society in their quarters in John Street, I found myself
the next day--a six-penny day--standing thoughtfully in the quarters of
the Zooelogical Society in Regent's Park.

The Zooelogical Society makes one feel more humble, I think, than the
Sociological Society does.

All sociologists, members of Parliament, eugenists, professors, and
others, ought to be compelled by law to spend one day every two weeks
with the Zooelogical Society in Regent's Park.

All reformers who essay to make over human nature, all idealists, should
be required by law to visit menageries--to go to see them faithfully or
to be put in them a while until they have observed life and thought
things out.

A GREEN BENCH, THE ZOO, REGENT'S PARK, 1911.

For orienting a man and making him reasonable, there is nothing, I find,
like coming out and putting in a day here, making one's self gaze firmly
and doggedly at the other animals.

We have every reason to believe that Noah was a good psychologist, or
judge of human nature, before he went into the ark, but if he was not,
he certainly would have come out one.

There is nothing like a menagerie to limber one up.

Especially an idealist.

Take a pelican, for instance. What possible personal ideal was it that
could make a pelican want to be a pelican or that could ever have made
a pelican take being a pelican seriously for one minute?

And the camel with his lopsided hump. "Why, oh, why," cries the
idealist, wringing his hands. "Oh, why----?"

I have come out here this afternoon, in the middle of my book, in the
middle of a chapter against the syndicalists, but it ill beseems me,
after spending half a day looking calmly at peacocks, at giraffes, at
hippopotamuses, at all these tails, necks, legs and mouths, at this
stretch or bird's eye view--this vast landscape of God's toleration--to
criticise any man, woman or child of this world for blossoming out, for
living up, or fleshing up, or paring down, to what he is really like
inside.

Possibly what each man stands for is well enough for him to stand for.
It is only when