This Simian World

Last Sunday, Potter took me out driving along upper Broadway, where those long rows of tall new apartment houses were built a few years ago. It was a mild afternoon and great crowds of people were out. Sunday afternoon crowds. They were not going anywhere,—they were just strolling up and down, staring at each Other, and talking. There were thousands and thousands of them. “Awful, aren’t they!” said Potter. I didn’t know what he meant. When he added, “Why, these crowds,” I turned and asked, “Why, what about them?” I wasn’t sure whether he had an idea or a headache. “Other creatures don’t do it,” he replied, with a discouraged expression. “Are any Other beings ever found in such masses, but vermin? Aimless, staring, vacant-minded,—look at them! I can get no sense whatever of individual worth, or of value in men as a race, when I see them like this. It makes one almost despair of civilization.” I thought this over for awhile, to get in touch with his attitude. I myself feel differently at different time about us human-beings: sometimes I get pretty indignant when we are attacked (for there is altogether too much abuse of us by spectator philosophers) and yet at Other times I too fell like a spectator, an alien: but even then I had never felt so alien or despairing as Potter. “Let’s remember,” I said, “it’s a simian civilization