“LIFE, AND THE END OF IT ALL”

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1610, 7 January 1903, Page 51

“LIFE, AND THE END OF IT ALL”

* f What is life?” The latest reply

to this enigma is provided by Carl Snyder in ‘'Harper’s Magazine” for November. Life, be declares, is simply “a series of fermentations”; and as it has been demonstrated that, under certain conditions, the destructive action of a ferment can be reversed, he is in hope of being abi to demonstrate the reversibility of the life process —in other words, to preserve youth, to prevent old age and to arrest death. While this fanciful but fascinating prospect for _the individual is engaging one writer’s attention, we find another considering the life of humanity as a race, and asking, “What is the end of it all ?” It is none other than Jerome K. Jerome who discourses on this serious theme in the “Windsor Magazine.” After drawing a graphic picture of primitive men, he supposes that “ten thousand centuries have flashed and faded,” and he proceeds thus :—The tribe has formed itself. The whole tiny mass moves forward, halts, runs backward, stirred always by one common impulse. Man has learnt the secret of combination, of mutual help. The city rises. From its stone centre spreads its power; the nation leaps to life; civilisation springs from leisure; no longer is each man’s life devoted to his mere animal necessities. The artificer, the thinker —his fellows shall protect him. Socrates dreams, Phidias carves the marble, while Pericles maintains the law, and Leonidas holds the barbarian at bay. Europe annexes-piece by piece the dark places of the earth, gives to them her laws. The Empire swallows the small State; Russia stretches her arm round Asia. In London we toast the union of the English-speaking peoples; in Berlin and Vienna we rub a salamander to the deutseher Bund; in Paris we whisper of a communion of the Latin races. In great things so in small. The stores, the }mge emporium displaces the small shopkeeper: the Trust amalgamates a hundred firms; the Union speaks for the worker. The limits of country, of language, are found too narrow for the new ideas. German, American, or English let what yard of coloured cotton you choose afloat from the mizzenmast, the business of the -h-uman race is their captain. One hundred and fifty years ago old Sam Johnson waited in a patron’s anteroom; to-day the entire world-.invites him to growl his table talk the while it takes its dish of tea. The poet, the novelist speak in twenty languages.” Universal brotherhood -—the f - deration of the world—is to he the end. Jerome says : —“Nationality —it is the County Council of the future. The world’s high-roads run turn-pike-free from pole to pole. One would be blind not to see the goal towards which we are rushing. At the outside it is but 'a generation or twooff. It is one huge murmuring Hiveone universal Hive just the -size of the round earth. The bees have been before us; they have solved, the riddle towards which we, in darkness, have been groping.” It is at least a pleasing thought to cherish at the beginning of a new year, and it can do no harm to believe, as Burns did, that “it’s coming vet, for a’ that!”