Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/87

did not anticipate, the actual nisus of organic life. And how has Nature always achieved the death and destruction of all she creates? First and chiefly, by the needs of hunger, which inevitably make her children either preyers or prey, which make them all the enemies of other forms of life, and threefold the enemies of their own. Some have limited, or striven to limit, by their combinations the horrible ferocity of this. Men, for their part, starting from simple aggregations, have advanced to civilised cities, nations, races. But we have always failed, just as the others have always failed, in every grade of organic life and being, because we never could make our combination at once complete enough within, and powerful enough without. China alone, by a crude but resolute effort after an unscientific State Socialism, has shown the world something of what can be done in the way of racial perpetuity, which is the power of organised racial homogeneity. With us Assyria waxes and wanes before Babylon; Babylon is lost in Persia; Persia goes down before Greece; Greece before the conqueror of Carthage; Rome before the Goths. The weary, heart-sick tale of the ignorant human spider, continuously spinning his continuously ruined web, goes on from age to age, and sardonic and savage Nature, still unsated, contemplates our insane and fratricidal strife, never more