THE UNIVERSAL BENEFICENCE 



her forests, or reforests her lands, in the most 

 roundabout, dilatory, and inefficient manner. No 

 plan, no system, no economy of effort or of material; 

 and yet she "gets there," because she is not limited 

 as to time or resources. She is in business with un- 

 limited capital and unlimited opportunities; she has 

 no competitors; her stockholders are all of one 

 mind, and all roads lead to her markets. The winds, 

 the streams, the rains, the snows, fire, flood, tornado, 

 earthquake, are all her servitors. She does not stick 

 for the best end of the bargain, the gain is hers who- 

 ever wins. 



But behold how she has endowed man to im- 

 prove upon all her slack and roundabout methods! 

 She enables him to cheat, and mislead, and circum- 

 vent her. He steals her secrets, he tames her very 

 lightnings, he forces her hand on a hundred occa- 

 sions; he turns her rivers, he levels her hills, he ob- 

 literates her marshes, he makes her deserts bloom as 

 the rose; he measures her atoms and surveys and 

 weighs her orbs; he reads her history in the rocks, he 

 finds out her ways in the heavens. He discovers the 

 most completely hidden thing in the universe, the 

 ether, and he has learned how to use it for his own 

 purposes; his wireless telegraphy turns it into a 

 news highway; above the seas, over the mountains, 

 and across continents, it carries his messages. 



In man Nature has evolved the human from the 

 unhuman; she has evolved justice and mercy from 



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