This Simian World | Page 4

real friendships
than we. The real friendships among men are so rare than when they
occur they are famous. Friends as loyal as Damon and Pythias were, are

exceptions. Good fellowship is common, but unchanging affection is
not. We like those who like us, as a rule, and dislike those who don't.
Most of our ties have no better footing than that; and those who have
many such ties are called warm-hearted.
The super-cat-men would have rated cleanliness higher. Some of us
primates have learned to keep ourselves clean, but it's no large
proportion; and even the cleanest of us see no grandeur in
soap-manufacturing, and we don't look to manicures and plumbers for
social prestige. A feline race would have honored such occupations. J.
de Courcy Tiger would have felt that nothing /but/ making soap, or
being a plumber, was compatible with a high social position; and the
rich Vera Pantherbilt would have deigned to dine only with manicures.
None but the lowest dregs of such a race would have been lawyers
spending their span of life on this mysterious earth studying the long
dusty records of dead and gone quarrels. We simians naturally admire a
profession full of wrangle and chatter. But that is a monkeyish way of
deciding disputes, not feline.
We fight best in armies, gregariously, where the risk is reduced; but we
disapprove usually of murderers, and of almost all private combat.
With the great cats, it would have been just the other way round. (Lions
and leopards fight each other singly, not in bands, as do monkeys.)
As a matter of fact, few of us delight in really serious fighting. We do
love to bicker; and we box and knock each other around, to exhibit our
strength; but few normal simians are keen about bloodshed and killing;
we do it in war only because of patriotism, revenge, duty, glory. A
feline civilization would have cared nothing for duty or glory, but they
would have taken a far higher pleasure in gore. If a planet of
super-cat-men could look down upon ours, they would not know which
to think was the most amazing: the way we tamely live, five million or
so in a city, with only a few police to keep us quiet, while we commit
only one or two murders a day, and hardly have a respectable number
of brawls; or the way great armies of us are trained to fight,--not liking
it much, and yet doing more killing in wartime and shedding more
blood than even the fiercest lion on his cruelest days. Which would
perplex a gentlemanly super-cat spectator the more, our habits of
wholesale slaughter in the field, or our spiritless making a fetish of
"order," at home?

It is fair to judge peoples by the rights they will sacrifice most for.
Super-cat-men would have been outraged, had their right of personal
combat been questioned. The simian submits with odd readiness to the
loss of this privilege. What outrages him is to make him stop wagging
his tongue. He becomes most excited and passionate about the right of
free speech, even going so far in his emotion as to declare it is sacred.
He looks upon other creatures pityingly because they are dumb. If one
of his own children is born dumb, he counts it a tragedy. Even that
mere hesitation in speech, know as stammering, he deems a misfortune.
So precious to a simian is the privilege of making sounds with his
tongue, that when he wishes to punish severely those men he calls
criminals, he forbids them to chatter, and forces them by threats to be
silent. It is felt that his punishment is entirely too cruel however and
even the worst offenders should be allowed to talk part of each day.
Whatever a simian does, there must always be some talking about it.
He can't even make peace without a kind of chatter called a peace
conference. Super-cats would not have had to "make" peace: they
would have just walked off and stopped fighting.
In a world of super-cat-men, I suppose there would have been fewer
sailors; and people would have cared less for seaside resorts, or for
swimming. Cats hate getting wet, so men descended from them might
have hated it. They would have felt that even going in wading was sign
of great hardihood, and only the most daring young fellows, showing
off, would have done it.
Among them there would have been no antivivisection societies:
No Young Cat Christian Associations or Red Cross work:
No Vegetarians:
No early closing laws:
Much more hunting and trapping:
No riding to hounds; that's pure simian. Just think how it would have
entranced the old-time monkeys to foresee such a game! A game where
they'd all prance off on captured