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At birth, there are some 30,000 to 200,000 of these, of which a good many atrophy during childhood so that there are no more than about 30,000 left at puberty. Of the 30,000, only an élite 400 actually mature between the ages of fifteen and forty-five.
But more sinister than the direct destruction of life is the spectacle of innumerable species profiting by a life, parasitic or predatory, at the expense of others. The parasites refute the vulgar prejudice that evolution is by the measure of man, progressive; adaptation is indifferent to better or worse, except as to each species, that its offspring shall survive by atrophy and degradation.
How soon they would die of atrophy, if they, who influence the public mind and mould public opinion, would tell but the simple truth about abolitionists. You say, that the abolitionists would have the slaves manumitted "without compensation and without moral preparation." I have already said enough on the point of "compensation."
The spirit of liberty and co-operation was already dead. The private citizen, debauched by the largesses and petty quarrels of his city, had become indolent and mean-spirited. He had begun to question the utility of religion, of patriotism, and of justice. Having allowed the organ for the ideal to atrophy in his soul, he could dream of finding some sullen sort of happiness in unreason.
He took to abusing modern writers, contending that it was no wonder that the writing of books was left exclusively to good-for-nothing subjects of the Empire, for the whole nation was suffering from cerebral atrophy. But his reasoning was of no avail; his business collapse was imminent; in a jiffy it was a hard reality.
There are plenty of torrents to be crossed in its journey; but their stepping-stones are measured by the stride of man, and not of woman. Women are more subject than men to atrophy of the heart. So says the great medical authority, Laennec. Incurable cases of this kind used to find their hospitals in convents. We have the disease in New England, but not the hospitals. I don't like to think of it.
It may be well doubted if the latter question will soon become troublesome. Empires are, like the Merry Monarch, an unconsciously long time in dying. Atrophy appears to spin out their existence. The process lasted with the Turk's predecessor at Byzantium six or eight centuries. For barely two, if we date from Sobieski instead of Don John of Austria, has it been going on with him.
The queen bids farewell to freedom, the light of day, and the calyx of flowers; the workers give five or six years of their life, and shall never know love, or the joys of maternity. The queen's brain turns to pulp, that the reproductive organs may profit; in the workers these organs atrophy, to the benefit of their intelligence.
We must beware of any organisation, be it internationalist or pacifist, which claims to subjugate and atrophy the living forces of man. The political ideal is a genuine federalism which shall respect individualisms. As the old saying has it: Let everything be after its kind! World-wide Democracy. In this matter the students display perfect unanimity, for they have absolute faith in democracy.
Interest in the vague sentimental fantasies of extra-mundane existence, in pathological or hysterical flights from the realities of our earthliness, will have through atrophy disappeared, for in that dawn men and women will have come to the realization, already suggested, that here close at hand is our paradise, our everlasting abode, our Heaven and our eternity.
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