Part 14

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.

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.

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.