When man is no longer bred and trained as a fighting animal, the master and overtaker, and in whom the best secrets of the world find interest, he ceases to be a Man, and becomes a Thing. True, the Thing still fights, for war is everlasting, and can never be shed; but his fighting is now ignoble instead of noble, debauchery rather than a virtue, his shame instead of his glory. The very struggle for existence, which, in the Natural World, raised him from a jellyfish to a lion, and from a lion to a man, becomes his undoing in the reactionary eddy of Civilization; and he degenerates from a lion to a fox, from a fox to a jackal, and from a jackal to a viper.