When We Were Sane
The following essay originally appeared in the January 1992 issue of George P. Dietz’s Liberty Bell magazine, and is reprinted from the Revilo P. Oliver online archive.
The picture above is reproduced from the cover of Science News, 7 September 1991, where it appears without identification or explanation to call attention to an article about the effect of excessive use of cocaine on the foetus of pregnant women. It is obviously an advertisement that appeared in many newspapers in the 1890s or early 1900s and was also issued as a handbill printed in colors.
The advertisement comes from a time when cocaine,[1] a tincture prepared from the leaves of the coca plant, was carried in stock by all pharmacies and available to any purchaser. It was generally used as an analgesic and local anaesthetic in ophthalmology and dentistry, where compounds of it are still employed. The cocaine drops here advertised were undoubtedly effective and infallibly relieved toothache; a small vial of them was certainly worth the cost, fifteen cents (real money, not the intrinsically worthless trading stamps printed by the fraud called the Federal Reserve). If the drops were now available, I would suggest that you keep some on hand.
As everyone knows, a seven-percent solution of cocaine was taken intravenously by Sherlock Holmes when he had no absorbing problem to occupy his mind; in two or three of the stories Dr. Watson mildly remarks that habitual reliance on cocaine may be deleterious to health. Cocaine is also a stimulant, like chocolate, that provides energy and temporarily replaces food; the leaves of the coca[2] plant are chewed (with a little powdered lime) by the natives in Chile, Peru, and Bolivia, giving them remarkable powers of endurance, and the leaves are probably necessary for hard labor at high altitudes in the Andes. Cocaine was used as a mild stimulant in the Edwardian Age.
As he remarks in his memoirs, Harry Elmer Barnes, when he worked as a clerk in a drug store to earn money for college, commonly sold cocaine to customers. So did countless other men employed in pharmacies. It was recommended by many physicians,[3] who naturally did not write prescriptions for a medicine available over the counter in every pharmacy and in many general stores. Proprietary tonics containing cocaine as the active ingredient were on sale everywhere and obtainable from Sears, Roebuck & Co. and other mail-order houses. Cocaine was also the active ingredient of a patented beverage, frankly called “Coca-cola,” that was then coming into general use and was especially commended and promoted by “temperance workers” as a pleasant and wholesome substitute for beer, wine, and whisky, which contained the diabolical and soul-destroying drug called alcohol.
Holy men were probably yapping about cocaine. They are always yapping about something in a disgruntled effort to regain the power and pleasure they had in the Great Age of Protestantism, when they could imprison sinners who danced, engaged in mummery, witnessed theatrical performances, celebrated Christmas,[4] or otherwise offended their strange God; when they could punish persons who laughed on Sunday by putting them in the stocks and exposing them to rotten tomatoes and similar missiles thrown in their faces by the jeering rabble, while God’s men chortled with satisfied righteousness.
As I vaguely recall — the point is not worth the effort of looking it up — in Massachusetts and Illinois the social reformers did procure legislation intended to make cocaine and similar drugs available only on prescription, to the profit of the medical profession (in those far-off days it was a profession, not a business). But in the years around 1900 the holy men and their sedulous apes, “do-gooders,” chiefly fat-headed women, were concentrating their efforts on routing Satan’s chief lieutenant, the Demon Rum, and on prohibiting use of the devil’s weed in the wicked form of cigarettes.[5] They did succeed in inducing prohibition of alcoholic beverages in five or six of the more rustic states[6] and in quite a few backward towns or similar localities, and in prohibiting cigarettes in Wisconsin, Kansas, and perhaps some other states in which Bible-banging was endemic.
As I have frequently pointed out before,[7] in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries opium was also on sale in all pharmacies, especially in the form of its tincture, laudanum, and kept on hand in many households, as is aspirin today, for the relief of insomnia, headaches, and arthritic or rheumatic pain. The most common derivative of opium, morphine, for injection by hypodermic syringe, was also freely available, recommended by many physicians as a sedative and anodyne, and was warmly commended by some reformers as a means of ending dependence on nasty alcohol. Chemists produced, by fairly intricate processes, other derivatives of morphine, which had a limited use.[8]
When cocaine, laudanum, and similar narcotics were comparatively inexpensive and available to everyone, there was no problem of “drug addiction.” That is a highly significant fact and worthy of your best attention.
There was no problem (except in the clamor of the “unco’ guid”) because our racial ethos had not yet been nullified by our enemies and fools, and we skill retained, on the whole, the sanity of common sense.
It was known, of course, that the drugs in question could become addictive through excessive or continual use of them, but most things are addictive. Aspirin and all somniferent and “tranquilizing” medicines are notoriously addictive. Coffee, tobacco, and sweetmeats undoubtedly are, and sugar can produce a compulsive addiction.[9] Old men, who can remember a time when college athletics were an activity of actual undergraduates, instead of a business with ignorant but highly paid performers,[10] may have known young graduates who had become so addicted to daily exercise that they found it difficult and painful to adjust to sedentary employment.
All forms of addiction are psychic as well as physical, and craving for the sensations produced by the drug is probably more potent than the strictly physiological reaction of a body accustomed to it. Some of the most baneful addictions, indeed, produce no physical symptoms. A recent “survey” reports that Americans (including children) spend an average of seven hours a day staring at their boob-tubes, usually in a state of hypnotic trance, the consciousness receiving impressions without the intervention of thought. In its effect on our people, that form of addiction is far more baneful than the total of addiction to cocaine, heroin, marijuana, “crack,” and similar drugs.
In the era before there was a “drug problem,” it was known, of course, that some men and even women became ruinously addicted to cocaine and opium, just as a great many became hopelessly addicted to whisky or gin or even beer, but it was rationally assumed that, with a very few possible exceptions in extraordinary circumstances, the addicts were, in the words of the eminent British pharmacologist, Edward Morell Holmes, weak-willed “moral imbeciles” who were commonly also “addicted to other forms of depravity.” It was also rationally taken for granted that the sooner such individuals rid society of themselves, the better. Although sentimental women may squawk, that is simply true — a necessary truth enforced by biological processes and ignored only by nations that are themselves not fit to survive in the harsh reality of the natural world. That may seem cruel to persons addicted to lying to themselves about the real world, but it is the common sense that is apparent to everyone not hopelessly addicted to hallucinatory drugs or superstitions.
For example, in Trollope’s Doctor Thorne, perhaps the best volume in the Barchester series, Sir Louis, the son of the nouveau riche engineer, Scatchard, destroys himself with brandy — and a very good thing it is too, for everyone concerned.[11] A friend kindly sent me a whole sheaf of cuttings from newspapers in San Francisco and Sacramento that describe the prevalent and almost epidemic addiction to “crack” (synthesized amphetamines) and “ice” (crystallized methamphetamine), relatively cheap substitutes for cocaine and heroin. Assuming that the addicts interviewed or seen by the journalists were accurately described, it is sheer madness for a society to waste money in efforts to save such creatures from themselves. Despite the journalists’ obligatory efforts to conceal the facts of race, it was obvious that most of the addicts were animated garbage that should never have been admitted to, or subsidized in, this country, while a comparatively few were degenerates of our race.
A sane society, instead of wasting its resources on efforts to salvage such worthless wreckage, would tacitly encourage all such addicts to eliminate themselves as soon as possible, thus mitigating the most noxious and dangerous form of environmental pollution.
The nature of what is called “addiction” is generally misunderstood. The effects are largely determined by heredity, i.e., both by intellectual capacity, which is entirely genetic and only elicited or blighted by education, and by a genetically determined propensity to addiction.
De Quincy was brilliant, even as a boy; he became addicted to opium to relieve neuralgia when he was nineteen or twenty, but that did not prevent him from becoming one of the great and universally acknowledged masters of English literature. He was the master of his addiction, not enslaved by it. When it became harmful, he was able to discontinue the use of opium, to resume it later when he needed an anodyne to sorrow, and again to discontinue use of the pleasurable narcotic. There is no evidence that he sustained any demonstrable physical or mental injury from his use of opium.
Everyone knows instances of addiction to drugs that has unfortunate results. A friend of mine knows a business man who had a well established and prosperous local business until he became addicted to the use of cocaine. Now the business is on the verge of bankruptcy and the man himself will probably be convicted of murderous assault with a knife on a chance acquaintance.[12] You doubtless know of many similar instances.
We must, as rational men, ignore all of the hysteria aroused to promote Bushy’s fake “war on drugs,” which is designed, first, to destroy the few remaining legal provisions that should protect Americans from total servitude and to place them entirely at the mercy of Federal terrorists, and second, to aid the major merchants in the narcotic-drug industry, including “our” CIA,[13] many politicians in high office,[14] and, according to reports published from time to time in The Spotlight, Bushy himself, by suppressing unauthorized competition from independent dealers and cut-rate producers.
There are two basic facts that we must recognize.
Almost all of the transport and vending of cocaine, heroin, etc. (as distinct from the financiers and directors of the wholesale business) is performed by members of the sacrosanct “minorities,” i.e., our racial enemies, most of them imported into the United States by the international conspiracy described by Ivor Benson in the October issue of Liberty Bell. A very large proportion of those drugs are purchased by the same biological trash. There is no point in talking about this major part of the present “drug problem” so long as Americans elect to live in a garbage dump. If, by some miraculous interposition, the Americans should someday decide to clean house, the problem would disappear. If they do not, they will prove that the boobus Americanus is not a viable species of animal life, and again the problem will be nugatory. It need not, therefore, concern us here.
Our only legitimate interest is in members of our own race.
We must begin by sharply distinguishing natural drugs, principally cocaine, opium, morphine, and cannabis (hashish, marijuana),[15] of which the effects have long been generally known and should be anticipated by anyone who uses them, and the thousands of synthetic drugs now in use, of which the total effects are unknown even to the experts who have pronounced them “safe” on the supposition that men and mice are physiologically equal, which are generally and often recklessly administered by physicians and psychiatrists to trusting patients who are usually not informed of even the expected effects and have no real chance to decide for themselves whether they want the medication with the risks it may involve. Some of these synthetic drugs (e.g., lysergic acid diethylamide) are also sold clandestinely to gullible customers or surreptitiously given to persons whom it is wished to destroy. We are now talking only about the natural and well-known drugs.
When the effects of a drug are common knowledge, use of it in a free society should depend only on the decision of each individual. If, unlike modern Americans, we value personal liberty, either as a matter of racial principle or as a biologically salubrious method for improvement of the race, we should observe with drugs, as with other articles of commerce, the rule that the purchaser must decide for himself whether he wants the article and can afford the price.
Intelligent persons should know what they are doing when they purchase the drug. They may, of course, be mistaken about themselves or have inherited some mentally crippling genetic deficiency, and there will undoubtedly be persons in whom the results of their freedom of choice will be pathetic for themselves or for persons near to them, just as it now is in the case of alcohol. But that, however much it may make sentimentalists jabber and sob, is precisely what a rational society should not only permit but want.
We live in a universe in which all organic life is a rare and utterly insignificant epiphenomenon, meaningless on the scale of the majestic and eternal movements of stars and galaxies. It is only to the animals it has produced that organic life has any importance, but it is the whole of life to them.
We organisms live in a hostile world. The meanest bug lives (unconsciously, we assume) in constant fear of predators, and scuttles for safety when it senses danger. Birds, those tiny and pretty descendants of minuscule dinosaurs, live only by constant vigilance, and even so domesticated and stupefied creatures as chickens will be thrown into panic by the shadow of a hawk flying high above them. The rabbit survives because he is perpetually afraid and flees at the first suspicion of hostile intent. Wolves explore a region cautiously before attacking their prey. The human genus is not at all different, except that it has by intelligence obtained the ability to destroy most of its non-human enemies, and is menaced chiefly by predators of its own genus, often of the same species.[16]
There is only one supreme law of life: the survival of the fittest, with its corollary, the extermination (or, through a hazardous compassion, subjugation) of the unfit. The Athenian envoys at Melos stated an obvious truth: “Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.”
The only possible error in that dictum will come from incorrect estimates of strength.
The survival of all species depends on success in eluding or resisting their active or potential enemies, for practical purposes, almost all other species. The lower species, such as rats and rabbits, survive and in favorable circumstances advance their species by being enormously prolific, breeding at an amazing rate.[17] (This is also true of the lower species of human animals.)[18] The higher species rely on cunning and strength. Most of them further ensure their survival by forming associations for mutual protection: herds, packs, bands, tribes.
Baboons, who are more intelligent than apes, have evinced an amazing capacity for survival by forming bands governed by an oligarchy of old and experienced males, who, like true aristocrats, sacrifice themselves when necessary to ensure the survival of their subjects. Among apes, the orang-outang are thorough-going individualists, meeting others of their species only for seasonal copulation, and they flourished in territory that permitted their survival. Among the early species of proto-human anthropoids, some species, such as the “Proconsul” and the Gigantopithecus, probably followed the “life-style” of the orang-outang in less favorable territory and became extinct. The anthropoids (including, almost certainly, the Australopithecus) that eventually evolved into the Homo erectus and several species of Homo habilis that were ancestors of the corresponding species now called human,[19] lived and hunted in packs or bands and thus, by making protection the common responsibility of all, flourished and constantly expanded the territory of their respective species.
Mammals (including men) that survive by forming groups must nevertheless prevent deterioration of the individual members of the herd. There is always some attrition, some loss of progeny, by accident or what we may call thoughtlessness. One of the most pathetic incidents in nature — pathetic to Aryans, to whose racial sense of compassion it should be more moving than niggers starving in Ethiopia — is sometimes seen among the larger species of deer. A young doe, in oestrus for the first time, rashly presents herself to the old monarch of the herd, and when he covers her, her young legs break beneath his weight, and she is left, helpless, to bemoan her first sexual pleasure until she starves or a predator eats her or an Aryan mercifully puts a bullet in her head.[20] Some children, even children of parents who do not evade their responsibility, will always ingeniously find ways venturesomely to destroy themselves, and nothing can be done about that, although “do-gooders” are always plotting legislation, having learned nothing from the well-known fairy tale about the king who tried to prevent his daughter from becoming Sleeping Beauty by destroying all the spindles in his kingdom.
Quite different is the biological necessity of preventing deterioration of the species through the blunder of preserving degenerate offspring. A wolf bitch will fight to the death to protect her pups, but she will also herself destroy one of her few offspring if she senses that it is in some way inferior. The fearsome complexity of human genetics ensures the birth, in every social and ethnic class, of children who are irremediably defective. A rational society will destroy at birth children that are misshapen or maimed or psychically degenerate. It is sheer idiocy, example, anxiously to preserve the life of a Mongoloid idiot to afflict its hapless parents and be a burden on society for a lifetime, wasting not only money and the time of many persons who would otherwise perform useful tasks, but constantly blighting the lives of the unfortunate man and woman who inadvertently brought it into being.
The preservation of a race depends on maintaining the quality of the individuals in it, and especially on preventing the inferior from perpetuating their inferiority by producing progeny.
While a wealthy society can, as a luxury, indulge the storgê, the amiable weakness of mothers, who wish the preservation of even an hopelessly inferior child,[21] the society cannot permit the inferiority, whether physical or mental, to be perpetuated, unless it has succumbed to the death-wish inherent in an alien and poisonous religion.
What is true of children is even more true of adults. A civilized society necessarily protects its individual members from domestic and foreign violence, physical or economic, but it cannot protect individuals from themselves and exhibits its own deterioration when it madly tries to do so. Persons who do not have the intelligence and moral stamina to govern their own lives when they are free to do so should not perpetuate their genetic weakness and thus weaken the race as a whole. There are often good reasons for blunders in many matters, from matrimony to fiduciary relations, through inexperience, deceit, or fallacious appearances, but certainly the resort to drugs of well-known efficacy involves a decision for which the individual must bear the sole responsibility. Slavish addiction is proof of unfitness for civilized liberty and hence unfitness for civilized society.
In the modem world the old virtues, physical strength and prowess in combat, have lost their racial importance, but the corollary is the greatly increased importance of intelligence and moral strength.
Elimination of the unfit is the first requisite for the survival of a nation or race. To neglect this duty is knowingly to violate the inexorable law of nature that ordains the survival of the fittest, but a civilized society, by collectively assuming responsibility for the survival of its members, protects individuals from a need to fight for themselves, and thus permits the thoughtless to entertain illusions about the world and to imagine that the precarious security given them by the nation is something that occurs automatically and that they can abuse and exploit at will.
From a biological standpoint, however, the American people have long been mad. They not only insanely reject the eugenics necessary for survival, but enthusiastically promote every dysgenic device and procedure, not only by the mongrelization called “Integration,” but by selective breeding for inferiority.
Driven by cunning enemies and our own shysters and fools, our nation became crazed with the Christians’ frantic denial of reality, sullen hatred of reason and all excellence, and mad doting on whatever is debased, diseased, deformed, and degenerate.
All societies, by the very nature of heredity, produce waste products, and their health depends on prompt and efficient disposal of them. No society can stop up its sewers and survive for long. The crazed Christian ascetics of the early centuries often pleased their sadistic god by immuring themselves in narrow cells in which they existed with the accumulating mass of their own excrement,[22] but we may be sure their lives were mercifully short. The same is true of a society that does not provide for the removal of its own tares and dregs.
Now that we have long since passed the point of no return, it is much too late, of course, to revert to the rational policy of Victorian times and earlier. What will happen after the catastrophic collapse and end of the United States, no one can predict, and hence no one can deny hope that our now delirious race may somehow survive and regain its vitality. But would that we had remained sane when there was no “drug problem”!
Notes
[1] Cocaine (C17H21NO4.) is sometimes called benzoylmethyl ecgonine by persons who, for some reason, wish to avoid the common term.
[2] Coca (Erythroxylon coca), the source of cocaine, must not be confused with another South American plant, cacao (Theobroma cacao), the source of chocolate, a drug which produces similar but much milder effects.
[3] It was also enthusiastically recommended by the Kike who did so much to convince the world that the Jews’ sexual obsessions were a function of human nature. Freud was himself an addict of the drug he recommended; see his Cocaine Papers, which are available in a good English translation that I cannot locate on my shelves at this moment. Carl Jung was, I believe, the first to denounce the inherent fallacy of the Freudian hoax: “It is an unpardonable mistake to accept the conclusions of a Jewish psychology as generally valid.” (Two Essays on Analytical Psychology = Collected Works, Vol. VII [= Bollingen Series, Vol. XX] (2d ed., New York, Pantheon Books, 1966), p. 152.
[4] You will recall that John Evelyn in his diary describes the incident in which he and some close friends, who had foregathered to celebrate secretly the traditional rites of Christmas, were denounced by some spy or informer, and were surprised and caught, flagrante delicto, by a file of soldiers who arrested them for criminal merriment.
[5] It should be noted that tobacco was evil when used in cigarettes, but not when used in cigars, which were smoked by politicians who would not have tolerated curtailment of their own favorite means of relaxation, and not when smoked in pipes or used as snuff, for there was a limit to the meddling that farmers and the like would endure from dervishes. Cigarettes were comparatively expensive and chiefly smoked by college students and other fashionable young men, although they were also used in private by some women who were so immoral they put powder on their shameless faces.
[6] Maine, Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and perhaps others. In some states the prohibition was frankly intended only to keep liquor out of the hands of niggers and Indians and often of the White proletariat also. The Puritans of New England had such fits of do-gooding in the early part of the century, but promptly repented, and around the 1880s some states, including Illinois, temporarily lapsed into such legislative foolishness, but soon came to their senses. Everyone remembers the insanity of national Prohibition, enacted by holy men and do-gooders, who, as often happens, were in alliance with ambitious criminal syndicates and the Communists, eager to establish a precedent for subversion of the nation and the enslavement of free men. Oklahoma, even after 1933, tried to exclude spirituous liquors from the state, and I can remember having entered the state in an automobile of which the trunk was weighted down with cases of bottled cheer for an acquaintance who lived in that desert. That is an adequate commentary on the whole folly of legislated uplift.
[7] Especially in Liberty Bell, July 1987, pp. 9-11; February 1990, pp. 11-14.
[8] What is now the best known and most widely used derivative, diacetylmorphine, was developed by the Bayer Corporation, which became the foremost producer of drugs to alleviate pain and comparable distress. The corporation marketed with great success both acetylsalicylic acid, for which it devised the trade name “aspirin,” and diacetylmorphine, to which it gave a name with commendatory connotation, “heroin.” The latter was specifically approved and recommended by the American Medical Association as an alternative to morphine, especially when hypodermic injection was to be avoided. See David F. Musto, The American Disease: the Origins of Narcotics Control (New Haven, Connecticut; Yale University Press, 1973).
[9] I was once acquainted with a young Englishwoman from a good county family, an undergraduate in one of the Oxford women’s colleges, who could make a two-pound box of chocolate creams evaporate faster than a drop of ether. She could have been a pretty blonde, but at seventeen or eighteen she was already uncomely and unpleasingly pudgy, having sacrificed face and figure to her bulimia. She was said to be doing passable work in her college, but her mentality, possibly affected by her vice, was apparent in her denigration of her family’s social position and her poise as an “intellectual” who (c. 1930) told everyone, “I’m awffy keen about Laybah; ahen’t you?”
[10] Not long ago a nigger coach in a large university was accustomed to offer $80,000, a sports-model automobile, and, by implication, a copious supply of White whores to long-legged and long-armed niggers whom he wanted to hire to play basketball for his institution. Some of his prospects were so stupid that they boasted of the offer to everyone they knew and tried to use it to obtain more largesse from other “educational” institutions, so there was a minor scandal that took a little while to hush up, but I am told that the practice in now virtually universal.
[11] The novel is realistic (except for the probability that Sir Louis also had vices of which Victorian readers were determined to remain ignorant), and you need only consider how doleful would have been the catastrophe, had not Sir Louis removed himself from a world that he encumbered. You may take this as an instance of what happened many times in Victorian society, almost always with benefit to innocent and decent persons, though sometimes with regrettable hardship or sorrow to others.
[12] My friend had not thought of inquiring whether the business man had sought help from a psychiatrist, who may have used the synthetic drug that was recently identified as causing homicidal mania in men. The effects on women are quite different. In the only case of which I have heard, a middle-aged woman, employed as a clerk and cashier caught in one of the “health maintenance” schemes now widely promoted, was given “Prozac” by the psychiatrist to whom she was sent by the clinic; the results were wrinkling and premature aging of the face, inability to stand for any considerable length of time, frequent lapses of memory, and sporadic mental confusion approaching incoherence. When a threat of a suit for malpractice frightened the psychiatrist into releasing the victim, she recovered from all the effects of the drug in a few weeks on a diet that included an abundance of vitamins and necessary minerals.
[13] See Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Brooklyn, Lawrence Hill [= Chicago Review Press], 1991.)
[14] Len Martin, in his Godfathers of North Dakota (Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, Pro-American Press, 1987), quotes sworn testimony by Daniel Murray, who averred that he served as messenger for the Attorney General of North Dakota, carrying shipments of cocaine and occasionally marijuana from Florida for the huge criminal organization headed by the Governor of the state. The drugs were only a small part of the total corruption of government, including judges, lawyers, banks, and politicians, in a state which most of us consider agrarian and so probably retaining some of the whilom virtues of our people. It is, however, lousy with Jews. Cf. the mention of the Dakotas in Instauration, December 1987, p. 23.
[15] The total effects of marijuana are still in dispute, and some “conservatives,” such as William F. Buckley, advocate making it again generally available. It has been in use in the United States for a long time. It was around 1930, as I recall, that the leader of a small dance band told me that White men could not reproduce the nigger noise then in vogue for dancing without deranging their nervous systems by use of marijuana to produce the necessary reflexes. The current efforts to stop the production of marijuana by employing armies of vagrant spies to detect and uproot plants of Cannabis sativa forces the United States to rely on imports for an indispensable industrial material (hemp).
[16] It is time that we stop the nonsense of pretending that while there are several species of each of the other anthropoids, there is only one species of anthropoids that can talk. That notion was based on anatomical similarities, with many details forced into the same pattern, ignoring the far greater psychic differences between races and even between ethnic groups.
[17] My older readers will remember that this was the subject of a humorous and often reprinted tale, “Pigs is Pigs,” about an express agent and a consignment of guinea pigs.
[18] The nigger (mulatta) professor (!) who plays a stellar role in the Senatorial circus now performing in Washington (to distract attention from important issues) was one of the thirteen offspring in a household typical of her race.
[19] By us, not by Jews, in whose vocabulary, fixed by God’s Word in the Holy Talmud, only members of their own strange race are human, whereas other races (ethnê, gentiles, goyim) have only the status of domestic animals.
[20] This capacity for compassion is peculiar to our race and unintelligible to all others. A lady who was a palaeozoölogist once confessed to me that when she examined the carcass of a female mammoth, frozen and preserved in arctic tundra, and found that the pregnant mammoth had died while chewing flowering shrubs in her mouth, she burst into tears. One must honor her for her racial integrity.
[21] You, no doubt, have often wondered at the perversity of the maternal instinct that so commonly appears when the mother of six or seven children dotes on the worst of the lot, often with gross injustice to its betters.
[22] Perhaps the best-known example is portrayed in Hroswitha’s Conversio Thaidis metetricis (i.q. Pafnutius), derived from the early Christian tale, which, by the way, was also the source of Anatole France’s exquisitely ironic Thaïs.
