call down punishment on a
thunderstorm. It pleases our indolent brains to regard accidents
associated with dividends as the works of an inscrutable Providence.
It is not enough that Providence should be the author, at least
passively, of earthquakes and gales and tidal waves. He must also be
held accountable for every breakage of bones that occurs as the result
of our passion for saving money rather than life. Some day, I hope,
the distinction between Providence and the capitalist will be a little
clearer than it at present is. The confusion between the two has
hitherto led to the capitalist's being invested with a sacrosanctity
to which we offer up human sacrifices on a scale far surpassing
anything ever known in Peru or the dark places of Africa.

It would be folly however to prophesy a world from which disaster has
disappeared on the heels of the mastodon. One can do little more than
regulate disaster. We already regulate death by offering a strong
discouragement to murder. Pessimists may contend that, in a world
where so many deaths are taking place as it is, one or two more or
less can hardly matter. But all the advances the human race has ever
made have only been an affair of one or two--the distribution of one
or two women, of one or two privileges, of one or two pennies.
Consequently, even in a world where disasters grow as thick as trees,
we are bound to fight them so far as they can be fought. If we do not,
the wilderness will swallow us. One is usually consoled by the
leader-writers, after a disaster has taken place, by the reflection
that it has taught us certain lessons that will never, never be
forgotten. Unfortunately, we knew the lessons already. We do not want
to be taught our A B C over again by having the alphabet burned into
our flesh with a red-hot iron.

At the same time, the leader-writers do well in trying to arrive at
some philosophy of disaster. But the true philosophy of disaster is
one which will teach us to rage where raging will be of avail and to
endure where there is nothing for it but endurance. Most of us in
these days are content to have no philosophy at all, philosophy being
a name for serious thought about the universal disaster of death. To
read Montaigne, who lived blithely in conversation with death, is to
step right out of our modern civilisation into a wiser world. It is to
become an inhabitant of the universe instead of a rather inefficient
earner of an income. Montaigne tell