We're the worst killers

After a New Hampshire deer hunt in 1910

‘‘Our permanent enemy is the noted bellicosity of human nature. Man, biologically considered, and whatever else he may be in the bargain, is simply the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own species. We are once for all adapted to the military status. A millennium of peace would not breed the fighting disposition out of our bone and marrow, and a function so ingrained and vital will never consent to die without resistance, and will always find impassioned apologists and idealizers.’’

— William James (1842-1910), psychologist, philosopher and Harvard professor, in The Atlantic Monthly. He was the brother of novelist Henry James.

William James and Josiah Royce, near James's country home in the Chocorua area of Tamworth, N.H., in September 1903. James's daughter Peggy took the picture. On hearing the camera click, James cried out: "Royce, you're being photographed! Look out!’’ Royce (1855-1916) was a close friend of James as well as a philosophical antagonist and a Harvard professor.

Mt. Chocorua, with its famous vaguely Matterhornish top. It has long been a favorite subject for painters.

'Minor Matterhorn' overlooking 'agricultural failure'

Mt. Chocorua.

"Written over the great New Hampshire region at least, and stamped, in particular, in the shadow of the admirable high-perched cone of Chocorua, which rears itself, all granite, over a huge interposing shoulder, quite with the allure of a minor Matterhorn -- everywhere legible was the hard little historic record of agricultural failure and defeat. It had to  pass for the historic background, that traceable truth that a stout human experiment had been tried, had broken down. One was in presence, everywhere, of the refusal to consent to history, and of the consciousness, on the part of every site, that this precious compound is in no small degree being insolently made, on the other side of the continent, at the expense of such sites. The touching appeal of nature, as I have called it therefore, the 'Do something kind for me,' is not so much a 'Live upon me and thrive by me' as a 'Live with me, somehow, and let us make out together what we may do for each other -- something that is not merely estimable in more or less greasy greenbacks.'''

-- Henry James from his book The AmerIcan Scene (1907)