All beings are ends; no creatures are means. All beings have not equal rights, neither have all men; but all have rights. The Life Process is the End—not man, nor any other animal temporarily privileged to weave a world’s philosophy. Nonhuman beings were not made for human beings any more than human beings were made for nonhuman beings. Just as the sidereal spheres were once supposed by the childish mind of man to be unsubstantial satellites of the earth, but are known by man’s riper understanding to be worlds with missions and materialities of their own, and of such magnitude and number as to render terrestrial insignificance frightful, so the billions that dwell in the seas, fields, and atmospheres of the earth were in like manner imagined by the illiterate children of the race to be the mere trinkets of men, but are now known by all who can interpret the new revelation to be beings with substantially the same origin, the same natures, structures, and occupations, and the same general rights to life and happiness, as we ourselves.
In their phenomena of life the inhabitants of the earth display endless variety. They swim in the waters, soar in the skies, squeeze among the rocks, clamber among the trees, scamper over the plains, and glide among the grounds and grasses. Some are born for a summer, some for a century, and some flutter their little lives out in a day. They are black, white, blue, golden, all the colours of the spectrum. Some are wise and some are simple; some are large and some are microscopic; some live in castles and some in bluebells; some roam over continents and seas, and some doze their little day-dream away on a single dancing leaf. But they are all the children of a common mother and the co-tenants of a common world. Why they are here in this world rather than some place else; why the world in which they find themselves is so full of the undesirable; and whether it would not have been better if the ball on which they ride and riot had been in the beginning sterilised, are problems too deep and baffling for the most of them. But since they are here, and since they are too proud or too superstitious to die, and are surrounded by such cold and wolfish immensities, what would seem more proper than for them to be kind to each other, and helpful, and dwell together as loving and forbearing members of One Great Family?
Act toward others as you would act toward a part of your own self.
This is The Great Law, the all-inclusive gospel of social salvation. It is the rule of social rectitude and perfection which has been held up in greater or less perfection in all ages by the sages and prophets of the human species.
Hear Confucius, the giant of Mongolia, and the idol and law-giver of one-third of mankind:
‘What you do not like when done to yourself do not do to others.’
And again he says:
‘Do not let a man practise to those beneath him that which he dislikes in those above him.’
Over and over again the illustrious master repeats these precepts to his disciples and countrymen.
In the Mahabharata, the great epic of the Sanskrit, written by Indian moralists in various ages, and representing the accumulated wisdom of one of the most marvellous of all peoples, we find these words: