Excerpt from Social History of the Races of Mankind: Second Division: Oceano-Melanesians Man is an animal, and though he may presumptuously consider himself highly civilised and refined, yet he is more cruel, more blood thirsty, and more murderous than the most ferocious wild beasts of the forest. The tiger, the lion, the hyena and the wolf only start out in search of prey when impelled by hunger; and they never attack and kill their own species. But man, who claims to be the masterpiece of creation, who hypocritically wraps himself up in a mantle of morality and religion to cover his iniquities and his atrocious crimes man who pretends to have been made in the image of God, destroys at one blow thousands of his fellow beings with triumphant exultation and transports of joy; not for the purpose of satisfying the inexorable necessities of nature, but with the object of gratifying his fiendish passion of hatred and revenge, and of appropriating by rapine, plunder, military contributions and extortions ill-gotten treasures and conquered provinces, thus trampling the rights of the inhabitants in the dust, and dooming helpless widows and abandoned orphans to the misery and wretchedness of poverty and destitution. It is contrary to every principle of morality and true religion to engage in any kind of warfare for any purpose whatever except in self-defence, and it is somewhat strange that nations, who call themselves Christians, should wage wars of conquest against each other; while nominally at least they adore the same God, and ought to be governed by the moral principles taught in the Sermon on the Mount which they consider as a divine revelation; and yet the match is ready to be lighted at the first favourable Opportunity to ignite the explosive materials heaped up at the expense of the sweat and labour of the poor, and the accumulated wealth of the rich; they constantly talk of peace with the nefarious design of preparing for war, which has no other object but that of sacrificing hundreds of thousands of young men the flower of the nation, who are made the victims of insane ambition and of the criminal follies of the governing powers. The religion of these Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Protestant nations is not. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.