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.”