We humans are a strange lot. We are proud of our history although it tells of so many wars that there probably are only very few places in Europe that can boast with NOT having been a battlefield at one time or another. We highly appreciate virtue and cast it into elaborate forms like social conventions and religion, and yet, we seem to have inherited a rather vicious vein which strikes through ever again and results in incredible atrocities. The history of Penguin Island by Anatole France holds the mirror up to us showing plainly and in a rather cynical tone how our modern society was to became what it is and where it might lead us in the future.