70 Evolution of Life and Form. 



where man is so passionately set on a line of action 

 that is against his real progress, when he so deter- 

 minately sets his desires on objects that hold him 

 back and delay his evolution, that the only mercy 

 that the Gods can show him is to break his form in 

 pieces, and give him as it were a new start for the 

 evolving of himself the life. Sometimes I have 

 felt, as I have gone through some of the miseries 

 of our great cities in the West, when, in the 

 pursuance of my duty, I have gone with breaking 

 heart through the slums of eastern and southern 

 I/ondon, or through those of Glasgow, or 

 Edinburgh, or Sheffield, as I have noted the types 

 of men and women around me, as I have seen the 

 human almost veiled by the brute, and humanity 

 degraded well-nigh beyond possibility of recogni- 

 tion, that no appeal for help was fitting save one 

 that would set free that imprisoned life. I have 

 felt that nothing save the destruction of the forms 

 could give any hope for those imprisoned within 

 them ; that for those men and women, as they were, 

 degraded, brutal, drunken, profligate, their very 

 forms with the impress of the animal, the best 

 mercy that God could show them would be an 

 earthquake that would swallow the whole great 

 city and set free the lives pent hopeless within 

 it. For not one life would be lost, not one life 



