are brought to a higher development if we drink from the unsounded depths of 

 nature's fountains. In the more just appraisement of values where the afifairs 

 of men are appraised as they should be ; in the formation of that judgment we 

 miss so often ; in calmness ; in that moderation producing temperate habits ; in 

 the development of ideals and the placing of them on a firm foundation ; in the 

 stimulating of the imagination; in the desire for universal justice and the fear- 

 less demand that the right shall prevail, nature ever exerts an unmeasured, in- 

 calculable beneficence. Let none say that these necessary faculties can be 

 ignored in the struggle for existence. Let no man contend that he is a ''prac- 

 tical business man" when, indeed, he stands at the very front of that blind 

 army of impractical men. 



But there is one thing against which resolute nature ever protests. She 

 will respond to none who believe in making machines of men; she will meet 

 no man half way or any of the way who maintains that other men should not 

 be free as himself. The spirit of nature study has this fundamental, eternal 

 commandment that the unjust burdens must be lifted from the spirit; that all 

 shackles and chains, whether of industrial slavery, or otherwise, must be loosened 

 from those they wrongly bind, until it can be said that all men and women, all 

 the children in our care, are free beings just as they were designed to be. This 

 is the one anarchy, upheld even by too many churchmen false to God and their 

 brothers, that some shall be free while a multitude groans because they are 

 struck down by a shameful social system; that some men shall be blessed by 

 good homes and abundance while many of their brothers are thus denied. The 

 voice of nature rises with a stern awfulness in its reiterated mandate that there 

 must of a necessity be universal justice instead of the hell which the taskmasters 

 have wrought. These abominations nature constantly abhors as unChristian : 

 unwholesome competition in place of brotherly co-operation; unlawful capitalism 

 that is a gangrene in society; the frightful wrong of permitting so much of the 

 wealth to be centered in the hands of a few instead of distributing that wealth 

 to benefit all classes, that very wealth which is really provided by nature herself 

 for mankind and not merely for one little group of selfish men. The black crimes 

 of society produce the misery that disintegrates society; hence all such sins are 

 in opposition to nature, and no man, no woman who willingly tolerates these vile 

 conditions can ever know what the true love of nature means. Once we have a 

 more widespread, sincere nature study, then there will follow a more just order, 

 a really Christian formation of the commonwealth — and that sort of common- 

 wealth is yet to come into existence. In the day when fairness prevails, when 

 love is not hindered or thwarted, the little warped human beings who protest 

 over the change from injustice to justice; from misery to a more ideal state, 

 will be swept aside as easily, with as little consideration as a twig is swept over 

 the brink of the mighty Niagara. For mankind cannot give the right loyalty 

 to nature and still remain a stumbling block in the path of a better order of 

 society. The love of nature is forever a power beating down selfishness, that 

 materialistic creed of degeneration which produces only sorrow ; the love of 



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