were shot down in the very noon
of life, hearts were broken, little children started in life lamentably
handicapped; young girls were brought to a life of shame; old women died
in the heart of life for lack of food. In that little, isolated group of
human insects, misery, death, and anguish spun like a wheel of fire.
BUT THE WHEAT REMAINED. Untouched, unassailable, undefiled, that mighty
world-force, that nourisher of nations, wrapped in Nirvanic calm,
indifferent to the human swarm, gigantic, resistless, moved onward in
its appointed grooves. Through the welter of blood at the irrigation
ditch, through the sham charity and shallow philanthropy of famine
relief committees, the great harvest of Los Muertos rolled like a
flood from the Sierras to the Himalayas to feed thousands of starving
scarecrows on the barren plains of India.
Falseness dies; injustice and oppression in the end of everything
fade and vanish away. Greed, cruelty, selfishness, and inhumanity are
short-lived; the individual suffers, but the race goes on. Annixter
dies, but in a far distant corner of the world a thousand lives are
saved. The larger view always and through all shams, all wickednesses,
discovers the Truth that will, in the end, prevail, and all things,
surely, inevitably, resistlessly work together for good.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Octopus, by Frank Norris
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