What has the future in store for us? One dares not think of it. Piling at the roots of our mountains, picrate on dynamite, panclactite on fulminate and other explosives a thousand times more powerful, which science, ever in progress, will not fail to invent, shall we end by blowing up the planet? Thrown into confusion by the shock, will the ragged splinters of the terrestrial clod whirl away in vortices like that of the asteroids, the apparent ruins of a vanished world? This would be the end of all great and noble things, but it would be the end also of much that is ugly and much that is pitiful. In our day, with materialism in full sway, we have physics working precisely at demolishing matter. It pulverizes the atom, subtilizing it until it disappears, transformed into energy. The tangible and visible mass is only appearance; in reality all is force. If the knowledge of the future succeeded in harking back on a large scale to the primordial origins of matter, a few slabs of rock, suddenly disintegrated into energy, would dislocate the glove into a chaos of forces. Then Gilbert’s [44] great word-picture would be realized: “Et d’ailes et de faux dépouillé désormais, Sur les mondes detruits le temps dort, immobile.” [45] But do not rely overmuch on these heroic remedies. Let us take Candide’s [46] advice and cultivate our garden; let us water our cabbage-patch and accept things as they are. Nature, a ruthless wet-nurse, knows nothing of pity. After pampering her charges, she takes them by the foot, whirls them round her head and dashes them to pieces against a rock. This is her way of diminishing the burden of her excessive fertility. Death, well and good; but of what use is pain? When a mad Dog endangers the public safety, do we speak of inflicting atrocious sufferings upon him? We put a bullet into him; we do not torture him: we defend our own lives. In the old days, however, the law, with a great parade of ermine and red gowns, used to draw and quarter criminals, to break them on the wheel, to roast them at the stake, to burn them in a brimstone shirt: it pretended to expiate the crime by the horror of the torture. Morality has made great strides since then; in our time, a more enlightened conscience compels us to treat the wrong-doer with the same clemency that we show to the mad Dog. We put an end to his existence without any stupid refinements of cruelty. It even seems as though a day would come when legal murder will disappear from our codes: instead of killing the criminal, we shall strive to cure his infirmity. We shall fight the virus of crime as we fight that of yellow fever or of the plague. But when may we expect to see this absolute respect for human life? Will it take hundreds and thousands of years to come into being? Possibly. Conscience is so slow in emerging from its slough.