and presumably once the abode of sentient beings, for it is unthinkable
that of all the worlds which occupy space which has no confines, the
small planet which we inhabit alone supports sentient life. What
tragedies darkened the last centuries of life in those dying worlds or
what may happen to our own remote descendants happily we cannot know,
but human experience does not enable us to conceive of any physical
structure which does not ultimately resolve itself into its primal
elements. On our own planet we know of forms of once vigorous life which
utterly perished by reason of physical changes which we cannot
comprehend, and that high civilizations one after another have risen,
flourished, faded and become extinct while yet our own world was young,
and who shall say what is in store for our own civilization?

If this is gruesome why should one be asked to present a subject which
cannot be adequately presented without showing what pygmies we are and
how helpless in the grasp of an all-powerful Nature.

And the application of it all is that when Nature's sole and universal
stimulus to progress is the love of self which she has implanted in
every soul, it is folly to assume that we can better Nature's work by
substituting for the universal stimulus to effort a more or less
fleeting emotion which takes hold of but a very few and persists with
but a still smaller number. Whatever scheme of collectivism we may
establish, we know in advance that every member of the collective group
will continuously strive to get for himself to the utmost limit
regardless, if it could be discovered, of what is rightfully due. And a
plan of Society which each member of Society is striving to subvert is
doomed from its birth.

And the fourth count in the indictment of Socialism is that it is