Freedom!  What to a living creature is freedom?  How completely has it dominated the life history of every creature that ever crawled upon the earth?  Trace our cellular pedigree, descend our family tree to its rootlets, our amebic ancestors, and the craving for more freedom is manifest in the soul of even the lowest, buried in darkness and slime.  When the first clever bit of colloidal ooze, protoplasm as the ameba, protruded a bit of itself as a pseudopod, it achieved a new freedom.  For, accidentally or deliberately, it created for itself a new power—­the ability to go directly for food in its environment, instead of waiting, patiently, passively, as the plant does, for food to just happen along.  Therewith developed in place of the previous quietist pacifist, quaker attitude toward its surroundings, a new religion, a new tone:  aggressive, predatory, careerist.

That adventure was a great step forward for the ameba—­a miracle that freed it forever from the danger of death by starvation.  But latent in that move were all the terrible possibilities of the tiger, the alligator, the wolf and all the varieties of predaceous beast and plant, parasitism and slavery.  The device that enabled the ameba to change its position in space of its own will, and so increased its freedom immeasureably, meant the generation of infinite evil, pain, suffering and degradation for billions in the womb of time.

THE BREEDING OF INFERIORITY

Human history, being a continuation of vertebrate history, is full of similar instances.  The invention of the stock company, for example, furnished a certain relative freedom to hundreds, a certain amount of leisure to think and play, and independence to travel and record, and immunity from a daily routine and drudgery.  In turn, it bore fruit in miseries and horrors multiplied for millions, like those of the child lacemakers of Mid-Victorian England, who were dragged from their beds at two or three o’clock in the morning to work until ten or eleven at night in the services of a stock company.

A corporation is said to have no soul.  The struggle for freedom of every living thing has no conscience.  Throughout the living world, from ameba to man, parasitism and slavery together with their by-products, physical and spiritual degeneracy, appear as the after effects of the more vital individual’s efforts to remain alive and free.  The origins of slavery may be seen in the parasitisms of the infectious diseases which kill man.  The change from parasitism to slavery was an inevitable step of creative intelligence.  In the transition evolution made one of those breaks which it indulges in periodically as its mode of progress.