The most aggressive and warlike nation upon the globe has at last got its eyes open to the evils of militarism, and has bought its emancipation at a heavy price. Tyranny and oppression are finally doomed by the nature of man. Nature’s ways are roundabout, and often regardless of cost. The chaos and waste and suffering in Europe to-day are in keeping with her spendthrift methods. She knows that the most turbulent and muddy stream will clear itself and quiet down. The track of the cyclone through the forest will in time entirely disappear. Evil perishes, the good increases more and more. God is not so bad as we paint him, and we have no need of a devil. All is good. Gravity would glue our feet to the ground and we have to defeat it every time we lift a foot, and yet how could we walk or work without gravity? The bad, or the evil, dogs one’s footsteps, but it teaches us circumspection, and to beware of dangerous paths. How easy to put one’s finger on this or that and say, “Here are positive evils!”--all diseases, smallpox, infantile paralysis, influenza, and so on--but they are only remote contingencies, and, on the whole, most of us find life good. There are good germs and there are bad germs, but the good vastly predominate. And the bad germs are only bad from our point of view. Our doors and windows let in the cold or the heat, as the case may be. We have them on these conditions. Fruits and grains nourish us, but they may injure us also. In 1916 my naturalist’s faith prompted me to write thus of the World War: Two world forces are at death grips in this war. In terms of government it is autocracy against democracy; in terms of biology it is the unfit against the fit; in terms of man’s moral nature it is might against right. Whatever triumph Prussian aggressiveness and ruthlessness may meet with, they must in time meet with defeat, else Evolution has miscarried, and its latest and highest product, man’s moral nature, is, in its survival value, but dust and ashes. II There is positive good and there is negative good. We may say of health that it is a positive good, and of sickness that it is a negative good, because it reveals to us the conditions of health. In disease the body is struggling to regain its health--to recover and retain its normal condition. Its well-being is the result of a certain balance between contending forces. What we call the hostile forces appear only as the result of wrong living. The lower animals have none of our distempers because they live according to nature. Cattle do not get rheumatism by lying upon the wet, cold ground, nor pneumonia from exposure to cold and storm. In the freedom of the fields and woods it is quite certain that they would never become infected with tuberculosis. I doubt if the wild dog or the wolf ever have dog distemper, or if wild horses ever have crib-bite. Disease, as we know it, is a product of civilization.