I trust I make myself understood for there is more and worse to come.

This discussion is necessarily didactic and assertive for it is impossible to prove or disprove any of these postulates.  It is for that reason, and the lack of time that I cite no instances.  They would be merely illustrative and not probative, for the human intellect is unequal to any adequate inductive study of the subject, and human life is too short to classify, master and digest the data even if they could be assembled.  All that can be done is to state conclusions reached upon such observation and experience as is to each of us available and commend them to the judgment of others upon their observation and experience.  Whatever can be proved at all can be reduced to a syllogism but agreement upon premises is in this case impossible.

But some things we do know and among them is the awful fact that man is powerless before Nature which deals with man precisely as it deals with other forms of life.  Man can dodge Nature as the scale insect cannot, but higher forms of life can, and man the most effectively of all.  But in the end she will get every one of us.  Those will live happiest and longest who best know how to work with Nature and not against her.  And individualism and not collectivism, is Nature’s way.  If our own object is the greatest aggregate of human comfort, we should realize that the greatest possible aggregate can only be attained when each individual under the stimulus of self-interest gets the largest measure of comfort for himself.

In the dim future which we shall not see, this may lead to conclusions which one shudders to think of.  It may be that the time will come on this planet when in a decreasing population struggling for existence from the remains of an exhausted Nature, the greatest good of the greatest number will be found by the deliberate extinction of those least fit, that what is available may be reserved to those who can make best use of it.  Astronomers tell us there are probably dead worlds whose spectrums tell us that they are of the same material as our own planet and presumably once the abode of sentient beings, for it is unthinkable that of all the worlds which occupy space which has no confines, the small planet which we inhabit alone supports sentient life.  What tragedies darkened the last centuries of life in those dying worlds or what may happen to our own remote descendants happily we cannot know, but human experience does not enable us to conceive of any physical structure which does not ultimately resolve itself into its primal elements.  On our own planet we know of forms of once vigorous life which utterly perished by reason of physical changes which we cannot comprehend, and that high civilizations one after another have risen, flourished, faded and become extinct while yet our own world was young, and who shall say what is in store for our own civilization?

If this is gruesome why should one be asked to present a subject which cannot be adequately presented without showing what pygmies we are and how helpless in the grasp of an all-powerful Nature.