Part 9

The notion of the contentious and sanguinary struggle for existence finds its most pronounced popular expression in the existence of human war. It is a wide-spread opinion that war is necessary in the nature of things, and, in fact, it has been not only justified but glorified on this basis. We may here examine this contention briefly, and we may ask whether, in the case of human beings, there are other sufficient means of personal and social development than by mortal combat with one's fellows. We may ask whether the principle of enmity or the principle of fellow feeling is the more important and controlling.

We are not to deny or even to overlook the great results that have come from war. Virile races have forced themselves to the front and have impressed their stamp on society; the peoples have been mixed and also assorted; lethargic folk have been galvanized into activity; iron has been put into men's sinews; heroic deeds have arisen; old combinations and intrigues have been broken up (although new ones take their place). A kind of national purification may result from a great war. The state of human affairs has been brought to its present condition largely as the issue of wars.

On the other hand, we are not to overlook the damaging results, the destruction, the anguish, the check to all productive enterprise, the hatred and revenge, the hypocrisy and deceit, the despicable foreign spy system, the loss of standards, the demoralization, the lessening respect and regard for the rights of the other, the breeding of human parasites that fatten at the fringes of disaster, the levying of tribute, the setting up of unnatural boundaries, the thwarting of national and racial developments which, so far as we can see, gave every promise of great results. We naturally extol the nations that have survived; we do not know how many superior stocks may have been sacrificed to military conquest, or how many racial possibilities may have been suppressed in their beginnings.

Vast changes in mental attitudes may result from a great war, and the course of civilization may be deflected; and while we adjust ourselves to these changes, no one may say at the time that they are just or even that they are temporarily best. We are never able at the moment to measure the effects of the unholy conquest of peoples who should not have been conquered; these results work themselves out in tribulation and perhaps in loss of effort and of racial standards through many weary centuries. Force, or even "success," cannot justify theft.

But even assuming the great changes that have arisen from war, this is not a justification of war; it only states a fact, it only provides a measure of the condition of society at any epoch. It is probable that war will still exert a mighty even if a lessening influence; it may still be necessary to resort to arms to win for a people its natural opportunity and to free a race from bondage; and if any people has a right to its own existence, it has an equal right and indeed a duty to defend itself. But this again only indicates the wretched state of development in which we live. Undoubtedly, also, a certain amount of military training is very useful, but there should be other ways, in a democracy, to secure something of this needful training.

The struggle for existence, as expressed in human combat, does not necessarily result in the survival of the most desirable, so far as we are able to define desirability. We are confusing very unlike situations in our easy application of the struggle for existence to war. The struggle is not now between individuals to decide the fitter; it is between vast bodies hurling death by wholesale. We pick the physically fit and send them to the battle-line; and these fit are slain. This is not the situation in nature from which we draw our illustrations. Moreover, the final test of fitness in nature is adaptation, not power. Adaptation and adjustment mean peace, not war. Physical force has been immensely magnified in the human sphere; we even speak of the great nations as "powers," a terminology that some day we shall regret. The military method of civilization finds no justification in the biological struggle for existence.

The final conquest of a man is of himself, and he shall then be greater than when he takes a city. The final conquest of a society is of itself, and it shall then be greater than when it conquers its neighboring society.

Man now begins to measure himself against nature also, and he begins to see that herein shall lie his greatest conquests beyond himself; in fact, by this means shall he conquer himself,--by great feats of engineering, by completer utilization of the possibilities of the planet, by vast discoveries in the unknown, and by the final enlargement of the soul; and in these fields shall be the heroes. The most virile and upstanding qualities can find expression in the conquest of the earth. In the contest with the planet every man may feel himself grow.

What we have done in times past shows the way by which we have come; it does not provide a program of procedure for days that are coming; or if it does, then we deny the effective evolution of the race. We have passed witchcraft, religious persecution, the inquisition, subjugation of women, the enslavement of our fellows except alone enslavement in war.

Here I come particularly to a consideration of the struggle for existence. Before I enter on this subject, I must pause to say that I would not of myself found an argument either for war or against it on the analogies of the struggle for existence. Man has responsibilities quite apart from the conditions that obtain in the lower creation. Man is a moral agent; animals and plants are not moral agents. But the argument for war is so often founded on this struggle in nature, that the question must be considered.

It has been persistently repeated for years that in nature the weakest perish and that the victory is with the strong, meaning by that the physically powerful. This is a false analogy and a false biology. It leads men far astray. It is the result of a misconception of the teaching of evolution.

Our minds dwell on the capture and the carnage in nature,--the hawk swooping on its prey, the cat stealthily watching for the mouse, wolves hunting in packs, ferocious beasts lying in wait, sharks that follow ships, serpents with venomous fangs, the vast range of parasitism; and with the poet we say that nature is "red in tooth and claw." Of course, we are not to deny the struggle of might against might, which is mostly between individuals, and of which we are all aware; but the weak and the fragile and the small are the organisms that have persisted. There are thousands of little and soft things still abundant in the world that have outlived the fearsome ravenous monsters of ages past; there were Goliaths in those days, but the Davids have outlived them, and Gath is not peopled by giants. The big and strong have not triumphed.

The struggle in nature is not a combat, as we commonly understand that word, and it is not warfare. The earth is not strewn with corpses.

I was impressed in reading Roosevelt's "African Game Trails" with the great extent of small and defenseless and fragile animal life that abounds in the midst of the terrible beasts,--little uncourageous things that hide in the crevices, myriads that fly in the air, those that ride on the rhinos, that swim and hide in the pools, and bats that hang in the acacia-trees. He travelled in the region of the lion, in the region that "holds the mightiest creatures that tread the earth or swim in its rivers; it also holds distant kinsfolk of these same creatures, no bigger than woodchucks, which dwell in crannies of the rocks, and in the tree tops. There are antelope smaller than hares and antelope larger than oxen. There are creatures which are the embodiment of grace; and others whose huge ungainliness is like that of a shape in a nightmare. The plains are alive with droves of strange and beautiful animals whose like is not known elsewhere." The lion is mighty; he is the king of beasts; but he keeps his place and he has no kingdom. He has not mastered the earth. No beast has ever overcome the earth; and the natural world has never been conquered by muscular force.

Nature is not in a state of perpetual enmity, one part with another.

My friend went to a far country. He told me that he was most impressed with the ferocity, chiefly of wild men. It came my time to go to that country. I saw that men had been savage,--men are the most ferocious of animals, and the ferocity has never reached its high point of refined fury until to-day. (Of course, savages fight and slay; this is because they are savages.) But I saw also that these savage men are passing away. I saw animals that had never tasted blood, that had no means of defense against a rapacious captor, and yet they were multiplying. Every stone that I upturned disclosed some tender organism; every bush that I disturbed revealed some timid atom of animal life; every spot where I walked bore some delicate plant, and I recalled the remark of Sir J. William Dawson "that frail and delicate plants may be more ancient than the mountains or plains on which they live"; and if I went on the sea, I saw the medusae, as frail as a poet's dream, with the very sunshine streaming through them, yet holding their own in the mighty upheaval of the oceans; and I reflected on the myriads of microscopic things that for untold ages had cast the very rock on which much of the ocean rests. The minor things and the weak things are the most numerous, and they have played the greatest part in the polity of nature. So I came away from that far country impressed with the power of the little feeble things. I had a new understanding of the worth of creatures so unobtrusive and so silent that the multitude does not know them.

I saw protective colorings; I saw fleet wings and swift feet; I saw the ability to hide and to conceal; I saw habits of adaptation; I saw marvellous powers of reproduction. You have seen them in every field; you have met them on your casual walks, until you accept them as the natural order of things. And you know that the beasts of prey have not prevailed. The whole contrivance of nature is to protect the weak.

We have wrongly visualized the "struggle." We have given it an intensely human application. We need to go back to Darwin who gave significance to the phrase "struggle for existence." "I use this term," he said, "in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny." The dependence of one being on another, success in leaving progeny,--how accurate and how far-seeing was Darwin!

I hope that I speak to naturists and to farmers. They know how diverse are the forms of life; and they know that somehow these forms live together and that only rarely do whole races perish by subjugation. They know that the beasts do not set forth to conquer, but only to gain subsistence and to protect themselves. The beasts and birds do not pursue indiscriminately. A hen-hawk does not attack crows or butterflies. Even a vicious bull does not attack fowls or rabbits or sheep. The great issues are the issues of live and let-live. There are whole nations of plants, more unlike than nations of humankind, living together in mutual interdependence. There are nations of quiet and mightless animals that live in the very regions of the mighty and the stout. And we are glad it is so.

Consider the mockery of invoking the struggle for existence as justification for a battle on a June morning, when all nature is vibrant with life and competition is severe, and when, if ever, we are to look for strife. But the very earth breathes peace. The fulness of every field and wood is in complete adjustment. The teeming multitudes of animal and plant have found a way to live together, and we look abroad on a vast harmony, verdurous, prolific, abounding. Into this concord, project your holocaust!

The daily fare

Some pages back, I said something about the essential simplicity in habit of life that results from the nature contact, and I illustrated the remark by calling attention to the righteousness of simple eating and drinking. Of course, the eating must be substantial, but the adventitious appetites accomplish nothing and they may be not only intemperate and damaging to health but even unmoral. Yet it is not alone the simplicity of the daily fare that interests me here, but the necessity that it shall be as direct as possible from the ground or the sea, and that it shall be undisguised and shall have meaning beyond the satisfying of the appetite.

I was interested in Tusser's "Christmas husbandly fare," notwithstanding some suggestion of gluttony in it and of oversupply. There is a certain vigor and good relish about it, and lack of ostentation, that seem to suggest a lesson.

It was more than three centuries ago that native Thomas Tusser, musician, chorister, and farmer, gave to the world his incomparable "Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry." He covered the farm year and the farm work as completely as Vergil had covered it more than fifteen centuries before; and he left us sketches of the countryside of his day, and the ways of the good plain folk, and quaint bits of philosophy and counsel. He celebrated the Christmas festival with much conviction, and in the homely way of the home folks, deriving his satisfactions from the things that the land produces. His sketches are wholesome reading in these days of foods transported from the ends of the earth, and compounded by impersonal devices and condensed into packages that go into every house alike.

Thomas Tusser would celebrate with "things handsome to have, as they ought to be had." His board would not be scant of provisions, for he seems not to have advised the simple life in the way of things good to eat; but he chose good raw materials, and we can imagine that the "good husband and huswife" gave these materials their best compliments and prepared them with diligence and skill. Not once does he suggest that these materials be secured from the market, or that any imported labor be employed in the preparation of them.

"Good bread and good drink, a good fire in the hall, Brawn, pudding, and souse, and good mustard withal."

Here is the whole philosophy of the contented festival,--the fruit of one's labor, the common genuine materials, and the cheer of the family fireside. The day is to be given over to the spirit of the celebration; every common object will glow with a new consecration, and everything will be good,--even the mustard will be good withal. What a contempt old Tusser would have had for all the imported and fabricated condiments and trivialities that now come to our tables in packages suggestive of medicines and drugs! And how ridiculously would they have stood themselves beside the brawn, pudding, and souse! A few plain accessories, every one stout and genuine, and in good quantity, must accompany the substantialities that one takes with a free hand directly from the land that one manages.

It surprises us that he had such a bountiful list from which to draw, and yet the kinds are not more than might be secured from any good land property, if one set about securing them: