Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/582

578 of his own life. The soldier will not longer yearn to reenact on a grand scale among the nations the war of members and of parts which his own body and mind sustain in youth, but will seek to overcome it in the body politic as in his own organism. Thus will be verified the saying of Scripture: "He that ruleth himself is greater than he that taketh a city." The priest will as gladly serve, as once he ruled, the state. He will rejoice more in being a servant of God than a ruler over men.

V. Struggle.—Man's struggle with the elements has been even more successful than that with his fellows. The hours of final triumph have often been delayed by his own carelessness and dishonesty alone. Beginning with the arrow he won the all-encircling air, with the dug-out, the inhospitable sea, with fire, the inclement sky, with the digging-stick the unyielding earth to his service, or, at least, to his unhurt.

Since his first conquest—as Gallouédec suggests—of the hill-side and of the little mountains, he has become master of the plains, and now morasses and bogs, deserts and huge mountains are fast yielding to his sway. He lords it over unfathomable chasms, dizzy heights and wind-swept ocean. He makes the desert blossom as the rose, and from the very bones of earth coins and fashions things whose beauty is everlasting. He has harnessed the lightning, housed the sunbeam, and both have become the servants of art and of science. Things terrible to his eye and his ear, nay, that shook him to the uttermost depths of his soul, when he first trod the earth, are his familiars now. He has made nature his servant instead of remaining her slave. Gallouédec hardly "exaggerates when he says that from the first man to the. Frenchman or the Englishman of to-day is not a whit less than the distance separating the formless block of marble from the statue produced out of it by the genius of the artist. And the future bids fair to outglorify the past. The conquered earth, once the mere hiding-place of the savage, or his prison, is becoming more and more his home. Nature, who once held him in bondage, after being his servant, turns to colleague and friend. With the passing of war and the lust of human slaughter man is beginning to feel at home in the world and in the universe. And now the empire of the sky is beginning to be his. The future years will see the results of the leisure which progress in man, who alone of all creatures possesses the power to utilize the past and to discern the future, has made possible. Man will live and labor, transform and create in the full sense, of his partnership in all about him, his slaves and servants having become his friends and co-laborers in the evolution of the cosmos. He will outdo Ulysses. He will become a part of all that he has met, and all that he has met will have become a part of him. Struggle will be succeeded by togetherness.