TOOTH AND CLAW 



frost and blight and thunderbolts to have scruples? 

 Did he expect thorns and nettles and fleas and 

 potato-bugs and grasshoppers and disease-germs to 

 consider their ways? 



A well-known philosopher and writer, Professor 

 Jacks, of Manchester College, Oxford, in writing 

 upon "Our Common Foe," takes it for granted at 

 the outset that Nature is cruel, and, moreover, that 

 she is as cruel as the Germans showed themselves to 

 be in the crudest of all wars. "There is a cruelty in 

 Nature," he says, "and it has been reserved for our 

 age to realize how immense is its range and how ap- 

 palling its effects"; we realize it, he says, when we 

 read the story of Germany's treatment of her pris- 

 oners, the story of her submarines, and her conduct 

 toward unoffending non-combatants generally. 



What worse thing could be said about Nature 

 than that she is as bad as the Germans? It almost 

 makes us suspect treachery and death in her sum- 

 mer breezes and her sunshine. Dr. Jacks seeks to 

 justify his charge by averring that man is a part of 

 Nature and that in him are summarized her good 

 and her evil qualities. Of course, in a certain sense 

 this is true. But in seeking to solve the problems of 

 his life, man separates himself from the rest of Na- 

 ture and holds himself amenable to standards of 

 conduct that he does not apply to the orders below 

 him. He regards himself as a superior being. He is a 

 part of Nature, but of an emancipated and regener- 



159 



