THE CIVILIZATION THAT IS POSSIBLE. 81
blessing a pain and a curse, and every year drives more and more to seek unbidden refuge in the gates of death. For, a permanent tendency to inequality once set up, all the forces of progress tend to greater and greater inequality.
All this is contrary to Nature. The poverty and misery, the vice and degradation, that spring from the unequal distribution of wealth, are not the results of natural law ; they spring from our defiance of natural law. They are the fruits of our refusal to obey the supreme law of jus- tice. It is because we rob the child of his birthright ; because we make the bounty which the Creator intended for all the exclusive property of some, that these things come upon us, and, though advancing and advancing, we chase but the mirage.
When, lit by lightning-flash or friction amid dry grasses, the consuming flames of fire first flung their lurid glow into the face of man, how must he have started back in affright ! When he first stood by the shores of the sea, how must its waves have said to him, "Thus far shalt thou go, bat no farther " ! Yet, as he learned to use them, fire became his most useful servant, the sea his easiest highway. The most destructive element of which we know that which for ages and ages seemed the very thunderbolt of the angry gods is, as we are now begin- ning to learn, fraught for us with untold powers of use- fulness. Already it enables us to annihilate space in our messages, to illuminate the night with new suns ; and its uses are only beginning. And throughout all Nature, as far as we can see, whatever is potent for evil is potent for good. "Dirt," said Lord Brougham, "is matter in the wrong place." And so the squalor and vice and misery that abound in the very heart of our civilization are but results of the misapplication of forces in their nature most elevating.
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