How?

The beeches are as dainty as they are beautiful; and they do not like to get their feet wet.  So they would venture down the hill only as far as the dry ground lasts, and those who tried to grow any lower would die.  But the oaks are hardy, and do not care much where they grow.  So they would fight their way down into the wet ground among the alders and willows, till they came to where their enemies were so thick and tall, that the acorns as they fell could not sprout in the darkness.  And so you would have at last, along the hill-side, a forest of beech and oak, lower down a forest of oak and alder, and along the stream-side alders and willows only.  And that would be a very fair example of the great law of the struggle for existence, which causes the competition of species.

What is that?

Madam How is very stern, though she is always perfectly just; and therefore she makes every living thing fight for its life, and earn its bread, from its birth till its death; and rewards it exactly according to its deserts, and neither more nor less.

And the competition of species means, that each thing, and kind of things, has to compete against the things round it; and to see which is the stronger; and the stronger live, and breed, and spread, and the weaker die out.

But that is very hard.

I know it, my child, I know it.  But so it is.  And Madam How, no doubt, would be often very clumsy and very cruel, without meaning it, because she never sees beyond her own nose, or thinks at all about the consequences of what she is doing.  But Lady Why, who does think about consequences, is her mistress, and orders her about for ever.  And Lady Why is, I believe, as loving as she is wise; and therefore we must trust that she guides this great war between living things, and takes care that Madam How kills nothing which ought not to die, and takes nothing away without putting something more beautiful and something more useful in its place; and that even if England were, which God forbid, overrun once more with forests and bramble-brakes, that too would be of use somehow, somewhere, somewhen, in the long ages which are to come hereafter.

And you must remember, too, that since men came into the world with rational heads on their shoulders, Lady Why has been handing over more and more of Madam How’s work to them, and some of her own work too:  and bids them to put beautiful and useful things in the place of ugly and useless ones; so that now it is men’s own fault if they do not use their wits, and do by all the world what they have done by these pastures—­change it from a barren moor into a rich hay-field, by copying the laws of Madam How, and making grass compete against heath.  But you look thoughtful:  what is it you want to know?

Why, you say all living things must fight and scramble for what they can get from each other:  and must not I too?  For I am a living thing.