Page:Melville Davisson Post--The Man of Last Resort.djvu/299

Rh than all the merchants learned in the customs of trade,—than all the jurists learned in the wisdom of the law? Was she better able?

Carper pointed out that she lived in an atmosphere of purity high above the din of the fight for life; a land of refined right, refined justice, refined honor, magnificent, but not the world. The world had no perfect code; it was no perfect place; it was not intended to be so, else it would have been so made. It was an indifferent place, governed by the inexorable law of the survival of the fittest, wherein men struggled for footing and the comforts of life. One must conform to conditions as they were, or go to the wall. It was folly, it was idiocy, it was madness to do otherwise.

Trade was like nature—pitiless. There was no measure of consideration for the weakling or the fool. The fight was bitter, remorseless, subject to dangerous shifts. If one was caught and broken, the blame was with the sorry scheme of things, and this a Divine Intelligence maintained, and men could not question that Divine Intelligence. This condition of the world might not be purest or happiest, but