Would we have a world without struggle or pain or friction of any kind? Good means ease, leisure, security; but it means something more: it means achievement, victory, the overcoming of evil, the development of power, the making of the world a better place to live in, and much more. Is Nature a tyrant because we have to earn our living? Because we have to plow and plant and hoe? Because flood and fire will destroy us, and the winds rack us, if we loose our grip? We have life on these terms; they are the conditions that beget and sustain life. A world void of evil, as we use the word, would be a world void of good also, a negative world. Without death there can be no life; without struggle there can be no power. XI MEN AND TREES I do not see that Nature is any more solicitous about the well-being of man than she is, say, about the well-being of trees. She is solicitous about the well-being of all life, so far as the conditions of life favor its development and continuance--men and trees alike. But all have to run the gantlet of some form of hostile forces--the trees one kind, man another. What I mean is that evil in some form waits upon all--hindrances, accidents, defeat, failure, death. The trees and the forests have their enemies and accidents and set-backs, and men and communities of men have analogous evils. Trees are attacked by worms, blight, tornadoes, lightning, and men are attacked by pestilence, famine, wars, and all manner of diseases. Every tree struggles to stand upright; it is the easiest and only normal position. Men aspire to uprightness of thought and conduct, but a thousand accidental conditions prevent most of them from attaining it. One tree in falling is likely to bring down, or to mutilate, other trees, as the moral or business downfall of a strong man in a community is quite sure to bring evil to many others around him. Trees struggle with one another for moisture and sustenance from the soil, and for a place in the sun, as men do in the community, and the most lucky, or the most fit, survive. Nature plans for a perfect tree as she plans for a perfect man, but both tree and man have to take their chances with hostile forces and conditions amid which their lot falls, so that an absolutely perfect oak or elm or pine is about as rare as a perfect man. Of course Nature has endowed man with mental and spiritual powers which she has not bestowed upon trees. These powers give man an advantage over trees, but not the same advantage over men--his own kind of tree--because his fellows are similarly endowed. His struggle with his own kind is as inevitable as the struggle of trees with their kind, with this advantage in favor of the trees: theirs is always a peaceful competition, it never takes the form of destructive wars. Trees of opposite kinds will draw away from one another; a pine will draw away from a maple or an oak, not, I suppose, because of any natural antagonism, but because it is less mobile and its tender but