finds it in the fact that it is a process of adjustment rather than a
contest in ambition.
The elimination of the unessentials and of the survivals of a lower
order of creation that have no proper place in human society, is the
daily necessity of the race. The human struggle should not be on the
plane of the struggle in the lower creation, by the simple fact that the
human plane is unlike; and those who contend that we should draw our
methods of contest from wild nature would therefore put us back on the
plane of the creatures we are supposed to have passed. If there is one
struggle of the creeping things, if there is one struggle of the fish of
the sea and another of the beasts of the field, and still another of the
fowls of the air, then surely there must be still another order for
those who have dominion.
_The struggle for existence: war_
We may consider even further, although briefly, the nature of the
struggle for existence in its spiritual relation. It would be violence
to assume a holy earth and a holy production from the earth, if the
contest between the creatures seems to violate all that we know as
rightness.
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:
"Beef, mutton, and pork, shred pies of the best,
Pig, veal, goose, and capon, and turkey well drest,
Cheese, apples, and nuts, joly carols to hear,
As then in the country, is counted good cheer."
In these days we should draw less heavily on the meats, for in the three
centuries we have gained greatly in the vegetable foods. Tusser did not
have the potato. But nevertheless, these materials are of the very bone
of the land. They grow up with the year and out of the conditions, and
they have all the days in them, the sunshine, the rain, the dew of
morning, the wind, the cold foggy nights, and the work of laborious
hands. Every one of them means something to the person who raises them,
and there is no impersonality in them. John's father drained the land
when yet he was a boy; the hedges were set; long ago the place was laid
out in its rotations; the old trees in the fields are a part of it;
every stall in the stables and every window-seat in the old house hold
memories; and John has grown up with these memories, and with these
fields, and with the footpaths that lead out over brooks and amongst the
herds of cattle. It is a part of his religion to keep the land well; and
these supplies at Christmas time are taken with a deep reverence for the
goodness that is in them, and with a pride in having produced them.
And Thomas Tusser, good husbandman, rejoiced that these bounties cost no
cash:
"What cost to good husband, is any of this?
Good household provision only it is.
Of other the like, I do leave out a many
That costeth a husbandman never a penny."
To farm well; to provide well; to produce it oneself; to be independent
of trade, so far as this is possible in the furnishing of the
table,--these are good elements in living. And in this day we are
rapidly losing all this; many persons already have lost it; many have
never known the satisfaction of it. Most of us must live from the box
and the bottle and the tin-can; we are even feeding our cattle from the
factory and the bag. The farmer now raises a few prime products to sell,
and then he buys his foods in the markets under label and tag; and he
knows not who produced the materials, and he soon comes not to care. No
thought of the seasons, and of the men and women who labored, of the
place, of the kind of soil, of the special contribution of the native
earth, come with the trademark or the brand. And so we all live
mechanically, from shop to table, without contact, and irreverently.
May we not once in the year remember the earth in the food that we eat?
May we not in some way, even though we live in town, so organize our
Christmas festival that the thought of the goodness of the land and its
bounty shall be a conscious part of our celebration? May we not for once
reduce to the very minimum the supply of manufactured and sophisticated
things, and come somewhere near, at least in spirit, to a "Christmas
husbandly fare?"
Yet, Thomas Tusser would not confine his husbandly fare to the Christmas
time. In another poem, he gives us "The farmer's daily diet," in which
the sturdy products are still much the same, secured and prepared by
those who partake. All this may be little applicable literally in our
present living, and yet I think it is easily possible, as certainly it
is very desirable, to develop a new attitude toward the table fare,
avoiding much unnecessary and insignificant household labor and lending
an attitude of good morality to the daily sustenance.
Much of our eating and feasting is a vicious waste of time, and also of
human energy that might be put to good uses. One can scarcely conceive
how such indirect and uncomfortable and expensive methods could have
come into use. Perhaps they originated with persons of quality in an
aristocratic society, when an abundance of servants must be trained to
serve and when distinctions in eating were a part of the distinction in
rank. But to have introduced these laborious and unintelligent methods
into hotels, where persons tarry for comfort and into homes that do not
need to maintain an extrinsic appearance, is a vain and ludicrous
imitation. The numbers of courses, with more service than food, that one
often meets at the table d'hote of the frequented hotels abroad, are
most exasperating to one who values time and has a serious purpose in
travel and a rightful care for the bodily apparatus. Here is the
performance--it was nothing more than a performance, consisting in
repeated changing of all the dishes, the removing of every fragment of
edibles, and in passing very small separate parcels of food--that it was
my lot to endure on an otherwise happy day in a hotel that had little
else to distinguish it:
Course 1. Dry bread (no butter).
Removal.
Course 2. Soup (nothing else).
Removal.
Course 3. Fish (very economical), with a potato on the side.
Removal.
Course 4. Veal, macaroni.
Removal.
Course 5. Spoonful of green beans (nothing else).
Removal.
Course 6. Beef and salad (fragmentary).
Removal.
Course 7. Charlotte Russe, bit of cake.
Removal.
Course 8. Fruit (slight).
Removal.
Course 9. Morsel of cheese, one cracker.
Removal.
Course 10. Coffee.
Relief.
The traveler knows that this species of time-wasting is not unusual;
certainly the food is not unusual and does not merit such considerate
attention, although it may profit by the magnification. All this
contributes nothing to human efficiency--quite the reverse--and
certainly nothing to the rightful gusto in the enjoyment of one's
subsistence. It is a ceremony. Such laborious uselessness is quite
immoral.
I am afraid that our food habits very well represent how far we have
moved away from the essentials and how much we have misled ourselves as
to the standards of excellence. I looked in a cookbook to learn how to
serve potatoes: I found twenty-three recipes, every one of which was
apparently designed to disguise the fact that they were potatoes; and
yet there is really nothing in a potato to be ashamed of. Of course,
this kind of deception is not peculiar to cookery. It is of the same
piece as the stamping of the metal building coverings in forms to
represent brick and stone, although everybody knows that they are not
brick and stone, rather than to make a design that shall express metal
and thereby frankly tell the truth; of the same kind also as the casting
of cement blocks to represent undressed rock, although every one is
aware of the deception, rather than to develop a form that will express
cement blocks as brick expresses brick; of the same order as the
inflating of good wholesome water by carbonic gas; and all the other
deceits in materials on which our common affairs are built. It is, of
course, legitimate to present our foods in many forms that we may secure
variety even with scant and common materials; but danger may lie in any
untruthfulness with which we use the raw materials of life.
So cookery has come to be a process of concealment. Not only does it
conceal the materials, but it also conceals the names of them in a
ridiculous nomenclature. Apparently, the higher the art of cookery, the
greater is the merit of complete concealment. I think that one reason
why persons enjoy the simple cooking of farmers and sailors and other
elemental folk, is because of its comparative lack of disguise, although
they may not be aware of this merit of it. We have so successfully
disguised our viands through so many years that it is not "good form" to
make inquiries: we may not smell the food, although the odor should be
one of the best and most rightful satisfactions, as it is in fruits and
flowers. We may smell a parsnip or a potato when it grows in the field,
but not when it is cooked.