AN OUTLOOK UPON LIFE 



fertilize the soil that is to grow the bread of other 

 multitudes; thousands but make a bridge of their 

 dead bodies over which other thousands are to pass 

 safely to some land of promise. The feeble, the 

 idiotic, the deformed, seem to suffer injustice at 

 the hands of their maker; there is no redress, no 

 court of appeal for them; the verdict of natural 

 law cannot be reversed. When the current of life 

 shrinks in its channel, there are causes for it, and 

 if these causes ceased to operate, the universe 

 would go to pieces ; but the individual whose mea- 

 sure, by reason of these causes, is only half full 

 pays the price of the sins or the shortcomings of 

 others ; his misfortune but vindicates the law upon 

 which our lives are all strung as beads upon a 

 thread. 



In an orchard of apple trees some of the fruit is 

 wormy, some scabbed, some dwarfed, from one 

 cause and another; but Nature approves of the 

 worm, and of the fungus that makes the scab, and 

 of the aphid that makes the dwarf, just as sincerely 

 as she approves of the perfect fruit. She holds the 

 stakes of both sides; she wins, whoever loses. An 

 insect stings a leaf or a stem, and instantly all the 

 forces and fluids that were building the leaf turn to 

 building a home for the young of the insect; the 

 leaf is forgotten, and only the needs of the insect 

 remembered, and we thus have the oak gall and 

 the hickory gall and other like abnormalities. The 

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