Professor Jacks speaks of “the hot, foul breath of Nature’s cruelty,” a sentence mild enough when applied to the Germans, but not justified when applied to universal Nature. We can hardly accuse the laws of matter and force of being cruel when they destroy us; if they were not true to themselves, what permanence would there be to life or to anything else? Fire and flood, the earthquake and the tornado, cause pain and death, gravity will crush us as soon as sustain us, but these forces are not cruel, because there is no will to inflict suffering; they are a part of the system of things upon which our life and well-being depend. Nature, in the action of her mechanical and chemical forces as they go their way about us, is, as I have so often said, apparently as indifferent to man as to all other forms of life, but, to speak in the same terms of our human experience, something must have been solicitous about man or he would not be here in a world so well suited to his development and well-being. In the conflict of forces he has had to take his chances with other forms of life, but his powers of adaptation and invention far surpass those of all other creatures. Not an atom, not a pebble, will turn aside to save him from destruction. Unrelenting and unpitying Nature is the school in which his powers have been developed, and for him to call Nature “cruel” in her treatment of him is for a child to upbraid the parent whose guidance and discipline foster and safeguard the coming man. Could man have become man on any other terms? Love is creation’s final law, though Tennyson seems to doubt it when he sees Nature “red in tooth and claw.” But tooth and claw do not necessarily imply cruelty, since the cruelest of all animals--man--has them not; they imply the dependence of one form of life upon another form, and are associated in our minds with that most heinous of all crimes, murder. It is Nature’s seeming indifference to life which causes us to charge her with cruelty. Our minds can take in but a fraction of the total scheme of things, and what we do take in we make a personal application of to ourselves. We humanize when we should generalize. The Germans willfully turned their backs upon the natural biological law of righteousness or rightness, and their punishment has been swift and adequate. They made a religion of cruelty, as man alone has exhibited it, and cultivated the will to destroy and defame till mankind, with one accord, bestowed upon them their ancestral name, the Huns. They went forth to burn and pillage and murder, and, so far as lay in their power, to destroy the very earth of the peoples they sought to conquer. They summoned to their aid all the diabolical forces of which chemistry is capable, and if they could have controlled the seismic and meteorological forces as well, who doubts that they would have made a desert, blackened with fire and torn by earthquakes, where dwell the nations that opposed them?