Chapter XV: The Poet of the Cosmos 316 (5)

Myriads of different types of animal and vegetable life fit into the scheme of organic nature without conflict or hindrance, but when there is conflict, the strong prevail. The small and the gigantic, the feeble and the mighty, the timid and the bold, the frail and the robust--birds, insects, mice, squirrels, cattle--exist in the same landscape and all prosper. Only when there is rivalry do the feeble go to the wall, which means only that their numbers are kept down. The cats do not exterminate the mice and rats, nor do the hawks and owls exterminate the other birds; they are a natural check on their undue increase. Nature’s checks and balances are all important. When species subsist upon species, as weasels upon rodents and hawks upon other birds, there seems to be some law that keeps the bloodthirsty in check. Why should there be so few weasels, since they appear as prolific as their victims? Why so few pigeon hawks, since the hawks have no natural enemies, while the trees swarm with finches and robins?

The conflicting interests in Nature sooner or later adjust themselves; her checks and balances bring about her equilibrium. In vegetation rivalries and antagonisms bring about adaptations. The mosses and the ferns and the tender wood plants grow beneath the oaks and the pines and are favored by the shade and protection which the latter afford them. The farmer’s seeding of grass and clover takes better under the shade of the oats than it would upon the naked ground. In Africa some species of flesh-eaters live upon the leavings of larger and stronger species, and in the tropics certain birds become benefactors of the cattle by preying upon the insects that pester them. Fabre tells of certain insect hosts that blindly favor the parasites that destroy them. The scheme has worked itself out that way and Nature is satisfied. Victim or victor, host or parasite, it is all one to her. Life goes on, and all forms of it are hers.

It is easy to see why the wild plants run out the cultivated ones--the latter are the result of artificial selection. No favor has been shown the wild ones, and hence only the most vigorous have survived. The cultivated plants always have a greater burden to bear than the wild ones, and man helps them to bear it, or, rather, he saddles it upon them. The cultivated races of man have burdens to bear also, much greater than the savage tribes, but this is more than made up to them by their superior brain power, which brain power again has come about in the struggle for existence. Wild tribes have also been under the discipline of natural selection, but by reason of some obscure factors of race or climate or geography they have not profited as have the European and Asiatic races. Their moral natures are more rudimentary.

Doubtless some obscure or unknown factors in the original germ-cells, far back in biological times, caused the divergence and splitting-up of animal forms, and gave to one an impulse that carried it higher in the scale of development than its fellows, just as the same thing happens in human families in our own times. Why some creatures are higher and some are lower, why some eventuated in the bird and some in toad and frog and snake and lizard, is one of the mysteries. In seeking the explanation of these things on natural grounds we are compelled to resort to the fertile expedient of conjecture, and pack the germ with many possibilities, each one depending for its development upon chance occurrence or conditions.

Besides this struggle with the environment there is the struggle of individuals and of species with one another--of oak with oak, of beech with beech, of plant with its kind, for the moisture and nutriment in the soil; of robin with robin for insects and fruit, of fox with fox for mice and rabbits, and of lion with lion for antelope and zebra. I say “struggle,” but it is rarely struggle in the sense of strife or battle, but in the sense of natural competition--the victory is to the most lucky and the most vigorous--the sharpest eye, the quickest ear, the most nimble foot; and those most favored by fortune win.

Under the law of variation some individuals have a fuller endowment of vital energy than others; under a severe strain and trial of whatever kind the favored ones will survive, while the others perish. Some men, some animals, can endure more hardships than others; under the same conditions all will not starve or freeze or fall exhausted by the wayside at the same time. In the vegetable world the same inequality in the gift of life exists, though not in the same degree. Some seeds will lie dormant in the soil longer than others of the same kind, and some kinds longer than others. Some seeds will not sprout after the second year, but a few may sprout after the third or even the fourth year. The stream of life is not of uniform depth and fullness; it is shallow in some places, and deep in others, as regards both species and individuals. In the natural competition which goes on all around us, the strongest, the fittest, win in the game, not necessarily by violence, but because, apart from the rôle played by chance, they carry more pounds of vital pressure. Not all acorns become oaks, probably not one in thousands; not all bird’s eggs become birds; occasionally one egg in the nest does not hatch, probably because of some defect in fertilization. Some nests are torn out of the trees by storms, or are robbed by crows or jays or squirrels; they were not well hidden. A large percentage of nests on the ground is destroyed by night prowlers or by day prowlers; chance again plays a great part here. Only a small fraction of the spawn of fishes hatches, and a still smaller percentage of the hatched ever reaches maturity. Fortune, good or bad, plays a great part with all forms of life. The acorn that becomes an oak owes much to chance--chance of position and soil, and chance of the vicissitudes of the woods and fields. Falling trees or branches, or the foot of a passing animal, may crush or deform it, or a squirrel or a raccoon devour it. Barring these accidents, it owes, or may owe, not a little to its inherent vitality--to its real oakhood.

The natural competition, or the struggle for existence among mankind, is of similar character, though on the whole less fortuitous. Coöperation, knowledge, altruism, have done much to eliminate the element of chance. An acorn becomes an oak where ten thousand other acorns fail, mainly by luck, while the child becomes the man mainly through the care and nurture of his parents and of the community in which he lives, but he reaches a position of power and prominence largely through his inherent capabilities. Fortune plays a part here also, as it did with Lincoln and Lee and Grant, but these men all had the native endowment upon which Fortune could build.

In the natural competition that goes on in every town and city, the success of one man over another is not, as a rule, the result of violence or wrong; men of high purpose and character in business and professional life add to the positive wealth and well-being of all; they often lift the whole community to a higher and better standard of living; the unfit profit by the achievements of the fit. The men who have added to the wealth and well-being of this country could be counted by the thousands. It is also true that the men who have accumulated their millions at the expense of others, by fraud and chicanery, or have diverted the earnings of others into their own coffers, could be counted by the thousands. It is this class of men who make the poor poorer. But did the achievements of such men as the late James J. Hill make the poor poorer? Such men add enormously to the wealth of the nation.

With all its discounts and set-backs, the natural struggle for existence has carried the whole race forward. Even business competition may be entirely beneficent. Two men open shops or houses in similar lines in the same town and one outstrips the other. Maybe his location is the better; one side of a street may be more favorable to success than the other side. Maybe he is more affable in manner, more thorough in his methods, more accommodating, more fair-minded, of sounder judgment--in fact, the better man in a beneficent sense.

On a broad view, throughout any country, this will be found to be true: success in business, in the professions, on the farm, in the manufactory, comes to those who deserve it. It cannot be otherwise. The world is thus made. Among the nations the same rule holds. England has earned all the power she has got. She is endowed with the gift of empire. Solid merit alone tells in the long run, as well among nations as among individual men. The worth of France rests upon solid qualities. The worth of Germany is inherent in the character of her people. That she has run to Krupp guns and Kaiserism during these later generations, and has coveted the land and the gold of her neighbors, is one of those human calamities analogous to tornadoes and earthquakes.

In the course of modern history, race supplants race, not so much by force of arms as by force of brain. The Europeans know how to utilize the natural forces and make the stars fight on their side. So far as they have done it by wars of conquest, they have violated the great moral law and the law of natural competition. All wars of conquest by civilized nations are wicked wars. They are becoming more and more odious to mankind, and are bound to become still more so, till they cease entirely. A century ago the conduct of Germany in the recent war would have shocked mankind far less than it has to-day. A century hence such an exhibition of the rule of the jungle among civilized peoples will be impossible. If Germany could ever come to be the dominant power in Europe, it would be through the law of natural competition. Her superior efficiency in the arts of peace, could alone give her the victory. It would have given her the victory in her own age had she been contented with its slow but sure operation.

III

The question of right and wrong must have emerged, so as to become a factor in the evolution of human society, very slowly--how slowly, we can never know. But it did emerge, and is still emerging more and more; first probably in the dealing of man with man, then in the dealing of families with other families. In the dealing of tribes with tribes in prehistoric times, the question of right and wrong played probably little or no part; might alone settled matters. In what we call the pagan world, among the early Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, the law of might in the dealings of one nation with another prevailed, and up to our own time the standard of international morality has been, and still is, far below the standard among individuals and neighborhood communities. Even in the United States there is a crying want of public conscience. The people are preyed upon by men they elect to serve them. The men or corporations that take pleasure and satisfaction in serving the public well and reasonably, or in giving a _quid pro quo_, are rare. Men who are blameless in their personal dealings with one another will, when formed into a board of directors or trustees, rob railroads, and squander money not their own. Capitalists will band together to rob the state through the construction of sham highways or flimsy public buildings. A public conscience is among all peoples of slow growth, and an international conscience is still slower. What part has it played in the history of Europe? Surely a very minor part. The Golden Rule has been turned into an iron rule of might over right times without number, by all the nations recently engaged in war.

As man’s moral consciousness has developed, the question of right and wrong has, of course, come more and more to the front; his relations to his fellows, his sense of justice, of truth, of fair dealing, have occupied him more and more. His savage instincts have been held more and more in check. The coöperation and sympathy and good-will which have brought about his present civilization would have been possible on no other terms. Without a sense of justice, of love of truth, of ideal right, where should we have been to-day? The fittest to survive among mankind were those races that had the moral consciousness most fully developed. This gave a might which led to a permanent supremacy--a beneficent might. A malevolent might is one that is founded upon superior brute or material strength alone. The law of the jungle or of the tornado or of the avalanche, introduced into human affairs and unchecked by the law of man’s moral nature, leads to wars of conquest, as it did to the World War.

IV

The expounders of the benefits of war write and speak about it as if it were some system of hygiene or medicine or gymnastic training that a people could practice in and of themselves; whereas wars of conquest do not begin and end at home. There are two parties to such a war. If it is a benefit to the victors, what is it to the defeated? I am speaking, of course, of material benefits. The benefits that come from heroism and self-denial are of another order. If the lamb inside the lion is a benefit to the lion, what is it to the lamb? If Germany reaped advantage by her invasion of Belgium, what did Belgium reap? But the fate of the other party is the last question that would ever occur to the Prussian military mind. If the doctrine of frightfulness began and ended at home, the world could not object. Because burned cities in modern times rise from their ashes in new beauty and power, shall we therefore seek to rejuvenate our cities by applying a match to them? Cities rise from their ashes because of their stored-up wealth and because of the arteries of commerce and industry that flow through them. Fire does not rejuvenate a dead tree nor a dead city, nor does war rejuvenate a people who are in a state of mortal ripening. It did not rejuvenate Rome in ancient times, nor Spain in modern times, and it does not appear to be rejuvenating Mexico very fast, nor any of the South American republics. All depends upon the stock you are trying to rejuvenate.

Lord Roberts is quoted as saying, just before his death, that war is necessary and salutary, and that it is the only national tonic that can be prescribed when peace begets degeneracy in an over-civilized people. He looked upon Germany as the greatest friend of the Allies when she declared war against them. But could there be any better proof that peace had not begotten degeneracy in England or France or Russia than the promptness with which these countries took up the challenge of Prussian militarism, and the fortitude and self-denial with which they gave it blow for blow?

Under the smiling face of peace, when the demand is made, the heroic element is always found to be slumbering. Every day, in the industrial and scientific fields, men prove themselves the same heroes that they do on the field of battle, and they prove it without the excitement and stimulus that war gives; and women prove it in times of peace and times of war.

The gospel of war as a national tonic in our time is a delusion and a snare. Are we to get up a war offhand because we think the nations need that kind of medicine? Blood-letting is a strange remedy for the depleted condition to which Lord Roberts refers. War sets up the victorious nation, but how about the defeated one? Have the defeats of Spain in the past two or three hundred years set her up? Have the defeats of Turkey redounded to her glory and power? Little doubt that this World War will bear fruit, but it will be a kind of fruit the combatant did not seek or expect.

The conclusion, then, that I arrive at is that a new rule of conduct for nations as for individuals, a new biological law, has come into being through man’s moral nature, his sense of right and wrong. There is no question of right or of wrong in the world of living things below man, and we can persuade ourselves that there is only by putting ourselves in the place of the struggling animal forces. And there is no question of right and of wrong in the human world till man’s consciousness of this difference has begun to dawn. In our day this consciousness is sufficiently developed to become the ruling factor in the conduct of national and international affairs, and must very soon put an end to all armed human conflicts. In saying this I am not exploiting a theory; I am trying to state an indisputable scientific fact.

X

TOOTH AND CLAW

I

To deny that Nature is cruel, in the strict sense of the term, were, to the majority of persons, like denying that blood is red, or that fire will burn. We use the term “cruel” loosely, and interpret the ways of Nature in terms of our own psychology.

If we are torn by thorns or stung by nettles or bitten by snakes or suffer from frost-bites or sun-stroke, we accuse Nature of cruelty, always assuming, in our conceit, that we are the lords of creation, and that things were made especially for us. We have no venomous snake that will bite us except in self-defense, nor any bee that will sting us except on the same grounds.

Even Darwin, in a letter to his friend Hooker, refers to the “clumsy, wasteful, blundering, slow, and horribly cruel works of Nature,” thus treating the All-Mother with scant respect.

Amiel cannot say, as he does say, that “Nature is unjust and shameless, without probity and without faith,” unless he makes her over into man or invests her with the human consciousness. Even the good Emerson accuses Nature of being unscrupulous. Did the Concord philosopher expect storms and frost and blight and thunderbolts to have scruples? Did he expect thorns and nettles and fleas and potato-bugs and grasshoppers and disease-germs to consider their ways?

A well-known philosopher and writer, Professor Jacks, of Manchester College, Oxford, in writing upon “Our Common Foe,” takes it for granted at the outset that Nature is cruel, and, moreover, that she is as cruel as the Germans showed themselves to be in the cruelest of all wars. “There is a cruelty in Nature,” he says, “and it has been reserved for our age to realize how immense is its range and how appalling its effects”; we realize it, he says, when we read the story of Germany’s treatment of her prisoners, the story of her submarines, and her conduct toward unoffending non-combatants generally.

What worse thing could be said about Nature than that she is as bad as the Germans? It almost makes us suspect treachery and death in her summer breezes and her sunshine. Dr. Jacks seeks to justify his charge by averring that man is a part of Nature and that in him are summarized her good and her evil qualities. Of course, in a certain sense this is true. But in seeking to solve the problems of his life, man separates himself from the rest of Nature and holds himself amenable to standards of conduct that he does not apply to the orders below him. He regards himself as a superior being. He is a part of Nature, but of an emancipated and regenerated Nature. He is one with the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air only in his purely animal aspects. As a moral and spiritual being with a sense of truth and justice, of mercy and forgiveness, he stands on a higher plane. He cannot justify his conduct by an appeal to brute nature or to biological laws. His sins are more scarlet and his virtues more divine than those of his unmoral and unreasoning brute neighbors. His consciousness of right and wrong is the touchstone by which all his deeds are to be tried.

Tennyson’s agonizing line “Nature red in tooth and claw” tends, especially in the days of world-wide human carnage, to make one see the whole animal kingdom with blood-dripping claws and jaws. But it is not so. At its worst this “tooth and claw” business applies only to a fraction of wild life. The vast army of the seed-eaters, the plant-eaters, the fruit-eaters, upon which the flesh-eaters subsist, and which they help keep in check, is greatly in the ascendancy.

The whole truth of this matter of the cruelty of Nature may be put in a nutshell: Nature as seen in animal life is _sanguinary_, but only man is _cruel_. Only man deliberately and intentionally inflicts pain; only man tortures his victims, and takes pleasure in their agony. No other creature goes out of its way to inflict suffering; no other creature acts from the motive of cruelty or the will to give pain.

Nature kills, but does not torture. The biological laws are neither human nor inhuman; they are _un_human. If in following the rule that might makes right, the Germans sought justification by an appeal to biological laws, they fell below the beasts of the fields, because they are moral beings, and know good from evil.

Biological laws are not concerned about the moral law. Not till we reach man’s moral nature does this law have any validity; then it becomes a biological law, because it has survival value. Could the race of man ever have developed as we now see it without the conceptions of right and justice and the spirit of mutual helpfulness? As time passes, other things being equal, the most righteous and humanitarian nation will be the most powerful and the most progressive. The great strength of the Allied cause in the World War was that it was founded upon an ideal conception of international justice and comity. President Wilson set this forth in such wonderful completeness that it will shine in our political firmament for all time like a star of the first magnitude. And the weakness of the German cause was that it was based upon the spirit and the aims of the pirate and the highwayman.

When we speak of Nature’s cruelty we are obsessed with the idea that blood and death necessarily mean cruelty, whereas cruelty, as I have said, means an intentional infliction of pain or suffering. Is the surgeon cruel when he performs an operation? Do our own carnivorous habits imply cruelty? The slaughter-house is not a pleasant object to contemplate; the sight of blood disturbs most of us; its sight and smell excite even the unreasoning brutes. But it is the wanton shedding of blood that reacts unfavorably upon ourselves, and makes us indifferent to the suffering which blood so often implies. Life is a wonderful and precious gift, and we do not like to see it wantonly destroyed.

Professor Jacks speaks of “the hot, foul breath of Nature’s cruelty,” a sentence mild enough when applied to the Germans, but not justified when applied to universal Nature. We can hardly accuse the laws of matter and force of being cruel when they destroy us; if they were not true to themselves, what permanence would there be to life or to anything else? Fire and flood, the earthquake and the tornado, cause pain and death, gravity will crush us as soon as sustain us, but these forces are not cruel, because there is no will to inflict suffering; they are a part of the system of things upon which our life and well-being depend.

Nature, in the action of her mechanical and chemical forces as they go their way about us, is, as I have so often said, apparently as indifferent to man as to all other forms of life, but, to speak in the same terms of our human experience, something must have been solicitous about man or he would not be here in a world so well suited to his development and well-being. In the conflict of forces he has had to take his chances with other forms of life, but his powers of adaptation and invention far surpass those of all other creatures. Not an atom, not a pebble, will turn aside to save him from destruction. Unrelenting and unpitying Nature is the school in which his powers have been developed, and for him to call Nature “cruel” in her treatment of him is for a child to upbraid the parent whose guidance and discipline foster and safeguard the coming man. Could man have become man on any other terms?

Love is creation’s final law, though Tennyson seems to doubt it when he sees Nature “red in tooth and claw.” But tooth and claw do not necessarily imply cruelty, since the cruelest of all animals--man--has them not; they imply the dependence of one form of life upon another form, and are associated in our minds with that most heinous of all crimes, murder. It is Nature’s seeming indifference to life which causes us to charge her with cruelty. Our minds can take in but a fraction of the total scheme of things, and what we do take in we make a personal application of to ourselves. We humanize when we should generalize.

The Germans willfully turned their backs upon the natural biological law of righteousness or rightness, and their punishment has been swift and adequate. They made a religion of cruelty, as man alone has exhibited it, and cultivated the will to destroy and defame till mankind, with one accord, bestowed upon them their ancestral name, the Huns. They went forth to burn and pillage and murder, and, so far as lay in their power, to destroy the very earth of the peoples they sought to conquer. They summoned to their aid all the diabolical forces of which chemistry is capable, and if they could have controlled the seismic and meteorological forces as well, who doubts that they would have made a desert, blackened with fire and torn by earthquakes, where dwell the nations that opposed them?

The spirit they showed in the World War, and the nefarious crimes of which they were guilty, make it a serious question whether or not they should not be forever cast out from the family of civilized nations; whether, indeed, they should not be completely wiped off the map as a nation, and their power for further evil forever destroyed.

“There is no place in the world of the future,” says Dr. Jacks, “for a people whose policy is tainted by the instinct for cruelty.”

If Nature were as cruel as the Germans are, if the same lust for blood and suffering had run in her veins, if she had, in the same spirit of riot and wantonness, destroyed her own creatures and laid waste her own provinces, would you or I, or any one else, have been here to pass judgment upon her doings?

There is blood and death in the jungle, but no lust of pain; but in the German prisons, and in the path of Germany’s armies, there was the deliberate infliction of suffering and agony for their own sakes, so that for generations to come the name of Germany will stand for all that is selfish, cruel, unchivalrous, ignoble, insulting, and bestial in human history. The Prussian officer spat in the face of his prisoners of a like rank, and followed this with insulting epithets and blows, seeking in every way to bring them down to his own bestial level. The Prussian nurse brought to a wounded British soldier the glass of water he begged for, held it close to his face then poured it on the ground, handing him the empty glass.

II

Nature has an anæsthetic of her own which she uses in taking life. The carnivorous animals inflict far less pain than appearances would seem to indicate. Tooth and claw usually overwhelm by a sudden blow, and sudden blows benumb and paralyze. Violence in this light is the handmaiden of Mercy. If the surgeon could perform his operations in the same sudden and violent manner, an anæsthetic would rarely be needed. Livingstone was conscious of but little pain when in the jaws of a lion, and its prey no doubt feels as little. The human criminal, electrocuted or hung or beheaded, probably experiences but little physical suffering. Any one whose life has been suddenly imperiled by a railway or a runaway accident knows how blessed is the blankness which comes over his mind at the most critical moment; the suddenness and intensity of his alarm blots out consciousness, and he retains no memory of just what happened. The soldier in battle may be seriously or fatally wounded and not be aware of it till some time afterward. A crushing or tearing blow disrupts the machinery of sensation. It is only when we put ourselves in the place of the mouse with which the cat is playing that we pity it; it does not experience the agony we should feel under like conditions; it is usually unwounded; it does not know what awaits it and its comparative freedom of movement soothes its alarm.

Dr. Jacks speaks of the bloody work of the struggle for existence, but the struggle for existence is largely a bloodless struggle of adaptation. Through it, every creature sooner or later finds its place, finds where it fits into the scheme of things. Through it the mouse finds its place, and the lion its, and man has found his. Living bodies are not ready-made, so to speak, like the parts of machinery; they are constantly in the making, and their making is a process of transformation. The horse, as we know him, was millions of years in the making; so was the elephant; so was man; so was every other form of life. The struggle for existence as a whole is cruel only so far as all discipline and all insensible modifications and adaptations under the pressure of environment are cruel; it is good in the guise of evil; it is the stern beneficence of impartial law. The greater the power of adaptation, the more fit is the animal or plant to survive, and this power of adaptation is mainly what distinguishes living bodies from non-living. Inanimate bodies tend to adjust themselves to one another through mechanical laws; animate bodies tend to adapt themselves to one another and to their environment through vital law.

The struggle for existence is for the most part a struggle with inanimate nature--with climate, soil, wind, flood. A peaceful struggle is going on all around us at all times, among men as among animals and plants: a struggle to live, to compel Nature to yield us the things needed for our lives. It is not often competition--an effort to win what another must lose; it is an effort to seize and appropriate the elements that all may have on equal terms, by the exercise of strength, industry, wit, prudence. Life is predaceous only to a limited extent. In the wilds, in the jungle, one form devours another form, but nature compensates. A fuller measure of life is given to those forms that are the prey of other forms; they are more prolific. The rats and mice are vastly more prolific than the weasels or the owls that feed upon them; the rabbits have ten young to one of their enemy, the fox; the lesser birds greatly outnumber the hawks; the little fishes that are the food of the big fishes swarm in the sea.

Probably no species is ever exterminated by its natural enemies. These enemies only keep it in check. The birds keep the insects from ruining vegetation, which is the source of all food. Slay all the lions in Africa, and probably the struggle for existence of the antelope tribe would soon be harder than it is now. Hence the animals of prey are a good gift even to the animals they prey upon. The plus of the breeding instinct of the latter would in time result in overpopulation and in famine.

The things that are preyed upon are more joyous and contented than their enemies. The carnivorous animals are solitary and morose; the birds of prey are the same. The chipmunk seems to have a much better time than the weasel, the bluebird than the owl that lines its nest with blue feathers. One might envy the song sparrow, or the vesper sparrow, or the robin, but never the shrike nor the sharp-skinned hawk that pursues them. The eagle is a grand bird, but evidently the lark is much the happier. The jay devours the eggs and the young of the smaller birds, but these birds greatly outstrip him in the race of life. The murderers evidently have less joy in their lives than the murdered. The crow rarely sheds blood, and, compared with the hawk, he is a happy-all-the-year-round vagabond.

Nature has made the wild creatures fearful of their natural enemies, and has endowed them with means to escape them; then she has equipped these enemies with weapons and instincts to defeat this (her own) purpose. She plays one hand against another. Wild life is divided into two warring camps, and, as in our own wars, new devices for defense on the one hand are met with new devices of attack on the other. The little night rodents have big and sharp eyes, but the owl that preys upon them has big and sharp eyes also, and his flight is as silent as a shadow. You see, Nature is impartial; she has the good of all creatures at heart. If it is good for the hawk to eat the bird, it is good for the bird to be equipped with swift wings and sharp eyes to evade the hawk. A little more advantage on either side and the game would be blocked--the birds would fail or the hawks would starve. As it is, “the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong.” Nature keeps the balance. Action and reaction are equal. The skunk and the porcupine have little or no fear; neither have they much wit. Their weapons of defense are nearly always ready, and that of the porcupine acts automatically; that of the skunk is a little more deliberate and inflicts less pain, but gives great discomfort and discomfiture.

Nature keeps one form in check with another form, and thus, like a wise capitalist, distributes her investments so that the income is constant. If she put her funds all in mice and birds, the cats and owls would soon starve; if she put them all in woodchucks, the pastures and meadows would soon fail the herds. And this reminds me how man often disturbs the balance of nature; the clearing-up and the cultivation of the land have held in check the natural enemies of the woodchucks--foxes and owls--at the same time that they have greatly increased the woodchuck’s sources of food-supply, so that in some sections these rodents have become a real pest to the farmer. The same changed conditions appreciably favor the meadow mice, and they, too, seem to be on the increase. But this increase again may stimulate the increase of the mice-hunting hawks, and thus the balance be maintained. Herein lies the danger of introducing new forms of wild life in a country--their natural enemies are not always on hand to check them. The mongoose has overrun Jamaica and has not yet found an adequate natural enemy. Introduced into this country, it would be an incalculable calamity, though in time it would doubtless meet with a natural check. Our weasels, related to the mongoose, are prolific, and seem to have few natural enemies, and yet they do not unduly increase; it seems as if some unknown hand must stay them. They prey upon all the smaller rodents and find them easy victims, yet these rodents are vastly more numerous than the blood-suckers. I often see marks upon the snow where the muskrat and the rabbit have fallen before them, and yet one sees scores of these animals to one weasel or mink.

How our domestic animals would suffer if they had the gift of ideation and knew what awaited them! Pope anticipated me when he wrote:

“The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy reason could he skip and play?

“Pleased to the last he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.”

If the horse only knew his own strength, and knew that he had “rights,” would there not soon be a horse rebellion? Would the swine and the cattle fatten in their pens and stalls if they knew what is before them? Animals suffer no mental anguish either over the past or concerning the future; they live in the present moment; no future looms before them, no past haunts their memories. Their pain is brief, their joy is unconscious; they live to feed and breed; they slay without penalties, and they are slain without remorse; they find their place and live their day, and Mother Nature reaps the harvest.

Would we have a world without struggle or pain or friction of any kind? Good means ease, leisure, security; but it means something more: it means achievement, victory, the overcoming of evil, the development of power, the making of the world a better place to live in, and much more. Is Nature a tyrant because we have to earn our living? Because we have to plow and plant and hoe? Because flood and fire will destroy us, and the winds rack us, if we loose our grip? We have life on these terms; they are the conditions that beget and sustain life. A world void of evil, as we use the word, would be a world void of good also, a negative world. Without death there can be no life; without struggle there can be no power.

XI

MEN AND TREES

I do not see that Nature is any more solicitous about the well-being of man than she is, say, about the well-being of trees. She is solicitous about the well-being of all life, so far as the conditions of life favor its development and continuance--men and trees alike. But all have to run the gantlet of some form of hostile forces--the trees one kind, man another. What I mean is that evil in some form waits upon all--hindrances, accidents, defeat, failure, death.

The trees and the forests have their enemies and accidents and set-backs, and men and communities of men have analogous evils. Trees are attacked by worms, blight, tornadoes, lightning, and men are attacked by pestilence, famine, wars, and all manner of diseases. Every tree struggles to stand upright; it is the easiest and only normal position. Men aspire to uprightness of thought and conduct, but a thousand accidental conditions prevent most of them from attaining it. One tree in falling is likely to bring down, or to mutilate, other trees, as the moral or business downfall of a strong man in a community is quite sure to bring evil to many others around him. Trees struggle with one another for moisture and sustenance from the soil, and for a place in the sun, as men do in the community, and the most lucky, or the most fit, survive. Nature plans for a perfect tree as she plans for a perfect man, but both tree and man have to take their chances with hostile forces and conditions amid which their lot falls, so that an absolutely perfect oak or elm or pine is about as rare as a perfect man. Of course Nature has endowed man with mental and spiritual powers which she has not bestowed upon trees. These powers give man an advantage over trees, but not the same advantage over men--his own kind of tree--because his fellows are similarly endowed. His struggle with his own kind is as inevitable as the struggle of trees with their kind, with this advantage in favor of the trees: theirs is always a peaceful competition, it never takes the form of destructive wars. Trees of opposite kinds will draw away from one another; a pine will draw away from a maple or an oak, not, I suppose, because of any natural antagonism, but because it is less mobile and its tender but more rigid branches cannot stand the buffetings of the more mobile and flexible deciduous trees. Pine loves to associate with pine, and spruce with spruce. The spirit, the atmosphere of a pine or a hemlock forest, how different from that of a beech or a maple! Most trees tend to associate themselves together in large bodies, as did primitive man, and civilized man, too, for that matter. The conifers are more clannish than the deciduous trees.

Are not a generation of leaves and a generation of men subject to about the same laws of chance? The baby leaves have their enemies in insects that devour them, in blight that withers them, in frost that cuts them short, and when they are matured, how the winds buffet them (Nature doesn’t temper the wind to the tender leaf), how the gales lash them, how the hail riddles them! If they had powers of thought, what a struggling, agitated, unstable world they would think themselves born into! When a summer tempest strikes a maple- or an oak-tree, the strain and stress of the foliage is almost painful to witness. Yet when the tempest subsides, hardly a leaf is torn or detached, and when autumn comes, the ranks of the vast army of the leaves are but little thinned, and the great majority of leaves ripen and fall to the ground unscathed. They have come through the campaign of life and have experienced many ups and downs, and yet, on the whole, they have each had an active and useful life. The leaf-rollers have made their nests in a few of certain kinds of them, the leaf-cutters have made holes in certain other kinds, the gall insects have made their nurseries at the expense of still other kinds; but all these things amount to a small fraction of the whole. When a plague of forest worms comes and strips the maples or the beeches, or a plague of elm-beetles strips the elms, and the invasion of a foreign deadly fungus kills all the chestnuts, these calamities are paralleled by the plagues that in past times have swept away large numbers of human beings and depopulated whole countries, or by epidemic diseases, such as infantile paralysis, that now and then rage over widespread areas.

Go and sit down in our mixed beech, maple, birch, and oak woods and witness the varying fortunes of the trees. How many of them have had misfortunes of one kind or another! How few, if any, have reached their ideal! How many are diseased or dying at the top or decaying at the root! Some have been mutilated by the fall of other trees. Youth and age meet and mingle. Some trees in their teens, as it were, are very thrifty; others are old and decrepit. In fact, the fortunes of the individual trees are much like those of men and women in a human community--struggle, competition, defeat, decay, and death on all sides. All, or nearly all, the evils that afflict men have their counterpart in the evils that afflict the trees of the forest. When some species of forest worm threatens the destruction of our beech or maple forests some other form of insect-life steps in and puts an end to their increase, and the plague vanishes. The gypsy and the brown-tailed moths which have so ravished the groves and forests of the Eastern States will doubtless in time be held in check by their natural enemies. The plague of tent caterpillars that got such headway in New York State that it threatened to become a public calamity was effectually checked by the cold and rain of the May of 1917. Not one tent caterpillar have I seen during the past three years. The plague of currant-worms was checked in the same way. Sooner or later any excess is sure to be corrected. But so far as we can see, such things as the chestnut blight and hickory blight must rage like a fire till they have spent themselves and there are no more chestnut- or hickory-trees to be destroyed. Throughout the course of the biological history of the globe, both plants and animals have dropped out in some such way, and new forms come in--come in through the slow action of the evolutionary impulse.

The Providence I see at work in the case of the trees does not differ at all from the Providence I see at work in the case of men. It is one and the same, and that one is as I have so often said, wholesale, indiscriminating, regardless of individuals, regardless of waste, delays, pain, suffering, failure, yet insuring success on a universal scale, the scale of centuries and geologic periods. Our standards of time compared with Nature’s standards are like our interplanetary spaces compared with the inconceivable abysses of the sidereal heavens--minutes compared to centuries. Our little family of planets moves round the fireside of our little sun--a small chimney-corner in the vast out-of-doors of astronomic space, where suns and systems and whole universes of worlds drift like bubbles on the sea. Give Nature time enough, and the world of to-day, or of any day, becomes an entire stranger to you. Orion will no longer stalk across the winter skies, the pole-star will no longer guide your ships, if, indeed, there remains any ocean for your ships to sail upon.

The Natural Providence is not concerned about you and me. In comparison it is concerned only about our race, and not lastingly concerned about that, since races, too, shall go.

“Races rise and fall,
Nations come and go;
Time doth gently cover all
With violets and with snow.”

As I sit here under an old heavy-topped apple-tree on a hot midsummer day, a yellow leaf lets go its hold upon the branch over my head and comes softly down upon the open book I am reading. It is a perfect leaf, but it has had its day. The huge family of leaves of which it was a member are still rank and green and active in sustaining the life of the tree, but this one has dropped out of the leafy ranks. There are a few small dark spots upon it, which, I see with my pocket glass, are fungus growths, or else some germ disease of apple-tree leaves, perhaps, like pneumonia, or diphtheria, or tuberculosis among men. One leaf out of ten thousand has fallen. Was Fate cruel to it? From the point of view of the leaf, yes--could a leaf have a point of view; from the point of view of Nature, no. The tree has leaves enough left to manufacture the needed chlorophyl, and that satisfies the law. If all the leaves were blighted, or were swept off by insect enemies, or stripped by hail and storm, that were a calamity to the tree. But one leaf, though all the myriad forces of Nature went to its production, though it is a marvel of delicate structure and function, though the sun’s rays have beaten upon it and used it, and been kind to it, though evolution worked for untold ages to bring its kind to perfection--what matters it? It will go back into the soil and the air from which it came, and contribute its mite to another crop of leaves, and maybe it has rendered the molecules of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen of which it is composed more ready and willing to enter into other living combinations. And the fungus germs that have preyed upon it, they, too, have had their period of activity, and have justified themselves. Nature thus pits one form against another, and her great drama of life and death goes on. Are her stakes more in the one than in the other, since she favors both? Yes, she has more at stake in health than in disease. If disease always triumphed, all life would go out. Of course, in the sum total of things, the life of this old tree counts for but little, but if it failed to bear apples, its chief end would be defeated. Evil is limited; it is a minor counter-current, but it is just as real as the good; it is a phase of the good; we have evil because we first have good. Both are relative terms. We are prone to speak of good and evil as if they were something absolute, like gravity or chemical affinity. But are they any more absolute than heat and cold, or than big and little? What pleases us, and is conducive to our well-being, we call good, and its opposite we call evil. We are not to make our wants and dislikes, our pleasures and our pain, the measure of the universe, as we do mathematics and physics. We can think of things in terms of art and literature, of beauty or ugliness, or in terms of morality and religion, or we may think of them in terms of science and of exact knowledge. When we say they are good or bad, we are thinking of them in terms of morals or of religion; when we say they are beautiful or ugly, we are describing them in terms of æsthetics; when we say they are true or false, real or delusive, we are talking of them in terms of science.

This sere and prematurely ripened leaf appeals to my literary and imaginative faculties through its beauty and its symbolic character; it appeals to my understanding, my love of accurate knowledge, by reason of the blight that caused its fall.

Our going out of the world seems equally fortuitous and haphazard in infancy, youth, middle life, old age; before we have fairly lived, or after life has lost its value, or in the height of our powers, or in the decrepitude of old age: which shall it be?

The naturist sees all life as a whole. Man is not an exception, but part of the total scheme. The life principle is the same in him as in all else below him--the principle that organizes matter into countless new forms; that crosses and uses the mechanical and chemical forces, and begets numberless new compounds; that develops organs and functions, and separates the living world so sharply from the non-living. In the weed, the tree, and in man, the principle is the same. What has set up this organizing power and so impressed it that it goes on from lower to higher forms, and unfolds the whole drama of evolution through the geologic ages, is the mystery of mysteries. To solve this mystery, mankind invented God and acts of creation. But a God apart from Nature is to me unthinkable, and science finds no beginning of anything. It finds change, transformation, only. When or where did man begin? Where does the circle begin? Self-beginning--who can think of that? Can we think of a stick with only one end? We can think of a motion as beginning and ending, but not of substance as beginning and ending. When the metabolism of the body ceases, death comes. Do we think of life, or the organizing principle, as then leaving the body? It ceases, but does it leave the body in any other sense than that the flame leaves the candle when it is blown out? And is this any different in the case of man than it is in the case of a tree or a dog? We postulate what we call a soul in man, which we deny to all other forms of life--an independent entity which separates from the body and lives after it. But we run into difficulties the moment we do so. In the biologic history of man, when and where did the soul appear? Did the men of the old Stone Age, of whom Professor Osborn writes so graphically and convincingly, have it? Did the Piltdown man, the Neanderthal man, the Java man of Dubois, have it? Did our ancestral forms still lower down have it? Do babies have it? Do idiots and half-witted persons have it?