Humanity dies, because it will not learn how to live." She had spoken these words with a quiet simplicity and earnestness that impressed him at the time as being almost child-like, considering the depth of thought into which she must have plunged, notwithstanding her youth and her sex--and on this morning of all others, this morning on which he had set himself a task for which he had made long and considerable preparation, he found himself half mechanically repeating her phrase--"Humanity dies because it will not learn how to live." There was no fatalism,--no fixed destiny in this; only the force of Will was implied--the Will to learn,--the Will to know.
"And why should not humanity die ?" he argued within himself--"If, in the long course of ages, it is proved that it will neither learn nor know,--why should it remain?
Room should be made for a new race! A clever gardener can produce a perfectly beautiful flower from an insignificant and common weed,--surely this is a lesson to us that it may be possible to produce a god from a man!" He bent his eyes lovingly on the case of small cylinders lying open before him;--the just risen sun brightened them to a glitter as of cold steel,--and for a moment he fancied they flashed upon him with an almost sinister gleam.
"Power of good or power of evil ?" he questioned his inward spirit--"Who can decide?
If it is good to destroy evil then the force is a good force--if it is evil to destroy good WITH evil, then it is an evil thing.

But Nature makes no such particular discriminations--she destroys evil and good together at one blow.

Why therefore should I--or anyone--offer to discriminate ?--since evil is always the preponderating factor.

When the 'Lusitania' was torpedoed neither God nor Nature interfered to save the innocent from the guilty--men, women and children were all plunged into the pitiless sea.

I--as a part of Nature--if I destroy, I only follow her example.