252 THE ROLL OF THE SEASONS 



is the exact measure of another's gain, has to deal 

 with more terrible and more unjust conditions. The 

 enemy of man is man himself. The tiger that eats 

 him or that drives him from his food is not an animal 

 of another make, but just a man of other opportuni- 

 ties. Neither his power nor his enmity is an actual 

 thing against which one can fight, but a convention 

 that he and the other victims of it must uphold and 

 try to believe that they like to uphold. We need not 

 say that it is so now. It has been so, and will be so 

 again. Man has endured slavery at the hands of his 

 fellow-men. He has been caught, fattened, and 

 eaten by those whom with better or worse luck he 

 would have fattened and eaten. He has been hived 

 by the thousand like bees, say, on the Rand or at 

 Kimberley, so that all the surplus the thousand could 

 produce should be enjoyed by a single over-man. 

 The game of death has been his, with not one chance 

 in a hundred of life. And even under these condi- 

 tions, consciously lacking justice or any sweetening 

 counterbalance, he has not been aware of suffering. 

 Why, then, need our greenfinch suffer when the hawk 

 takes it for a meal ? 



