is from this desire that
we unconsciously "feel" that we would like to "live" always, to get our
full measure of return; and since such is neither the lot nor the
privilege of our possession, it really makes no difference when we die
as far as personal satisfaction is concerned.

The fear that possesses us now in the matter of death will likewise and
with equal force possess us later, when we actually and without
ceremony must submit to the inevitable.

The desire that possesses a person to live now will, with equal
attraction, obsess him later.

Our desires and aspirations are never satisfied. What we may cherish to
accomplish to-day may be consummated and achieved, yet to-morrow another
something will demand our energies to be spent for further desires to be
accomplished.

When we are babies we desire to walk; when we walk, we desire to talk;
when we talk, we desire to grow; after we grow, we want to learn; after
we learn, we want to do and to expand--and our performance and expansion
are only curtailed by insolent death!

IX

The only justification there is to live, once conscious of the damnable
scheme of life, is the burning desire to do something to help mankind
bear the conditions and to make easier the burden of life for those who
are here and for those who are to come; for very often the greatest
benefactors of the race are so maligned and persecuted in their day that
only the future can render a just appreciation of their labor and their
value.

For without the improvement bestowed on life by the world's benefactors,
over the crudity of Nature, it were better that we remain in the bosom
of our wilder brothers, and hang from the trees by the length and the
strength of our tails. Aye, back and back and back, down every degree of
life until the time before the first cell of protoplasm from an
inanimate into an animate state started.

Why must we be made to suffer such dreadful torment before death, since
by eternal decree it is the common lot all must endure?

Death, puzzling, eternal death, is Nature's final stamp upon our fearful
struggle through life.

And the agony of death is more poignantly mental than physical, since
the mind, reviewing the acts of the past, anticipates with anxiety and
with picturesque vividness the wrongs, scandals, terrors, fears and
injustice of the future.

Since life is so replete with physical pains, no wonder our picture of
death is so horrible.

We see upo