THE SUMMIT OF THE YEARS 



thought, and the things that delay it, or accelerate 

 it, are as impersonal as the tides and the seasons. 



The waste, the delays, the failures in human his- 

 tory, have been the same as in natural history. 

 Wars, famines, pestilence, storms, and convulsions 

 of nature have changed and delayed the course 

 of national and racial development. In a certain 

 limited sense, man is the architect of his own for- 

 tunes; in a larger sense, his communities and so- 

 cieties are under the law of organic evolution and 

 sub j ect to the failures and mishaps of natural bodies . 

 The business of Nature is carried on without any 

 reference to our ideas of prudence, or economic 

 principles, or parsimony of effort, or our measure of 

 success. Nature succeeds when one species destroys 

 another, or when an earthquake blots out races of 

 men. Nature does not balance her books in a day or 

 in ten thousand days, but some sort of balance is 

 kept in the course of the ages, else life would not be 

 here. Disruption and decay finally bring about their 

 opposites. Conflicting forces get adjusted and peace 

 reigns. If all forces found the equilibrium to which 

 they tend, we should have a dead world — a dead 

 level of lifeless forces. But the play of forces is so 

 complex, the factors that enter into our weather sys- 

 tem even,, are so many and so subtle and far-reach- 

 ing, that we experience but little monotony. There 

 is a perpetual seesaw everywhere, and this means 

 life and motion. 



86 



