After making an address on inspired millionaires one night before the Sociological Society in their quarters in John Street, I found myself the next day—­a six-penny day—­standing thoughtfully in the quarters of the Zooelogical Society in Regent’s Park.

The Zooelogical Society makes one feel more humble, I think, than the Sociological Society does.

All sociologists, members of Parliament, eugenists, professors, and others, ought to be compelled by law to spend one day every two weeks with the Zooelogical Society in Regent’s Park.

All reformers who essay to make over human nature, all idealists, should be required by law to visit menageries—­to go to see them faithfully or to be put in them a while until they have observed life and thought things out.

    A GREEN BENCH, THE ZOO, REGENT’S PARK, 1911.

For orienting a man and making him reasonable, there is nothing, I find, like coming out and putting in a day here, making one’s self gaze firmly and doggedly at the other animals.

We have every reason to believe that Noah was a good psychologist, or judge of human nature, before he went into the ark, but if he was not, he certainly would have come out one.

There is nothing like a menagerie to limber one up.

Especially an idealist.

Take a pelican, for instance.  What possible personal ideal was it that could make a pelican want to be a pelican or that could ever have made a pelican take being a pelican seriously for one minute?

And the camel with his lopsided hump.  “Why, oh, why,” cries the idealist, wringing his hands.  “Oh, why——?”

I have come out here this afternoon, in the middle of my book, in the middle of a chapter against the syndicalists, but it ill beseems me, after spending half a day looking calmly at peacocks, at giraffes, at hippopotamuses, at all these tails, necks, legs and mouths, at this stretch or bird’s eye view—­this vast landscape of God’s toleration—­to criticise any man, woman or child of this world for blossoming out, for living up, or fleshing up, or paring down, to what he is really like inside.

Possibly what each man stands for is well enough for him to stand for.  It is only when what a man says, comes to being repeated, to being made universal, to being jammed down on the rest of us, that the lie in it begins to work out.

Let us let everybody alone and be ready to find things out just for ourselves.

Here is this big, frivolous, gentle elephant, for instance, poking his huge, inquiring trunk into baby carriages.  He is certainly too glorious, too profound, a personage to do such things!  It does seem a little unworthy to me, as I have been sitting here and watching him from this park bench, for a noble, solemn being like the elephant—­a kind of cathedral of a beast, to be as deeply interested as he is in peanuts.

He looms up before me once more.  I look up a little closer—­look into his little, shrewd eyes—­and, after all, what do I know about him?