In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are Natures everyday performances.
Killing, the most criminal act recognised by human laws, Nature does once to every being that lives; & in a large proportion of cases, after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow-creatures.
If, by an arbitrary reservation, we refuse to account anything murder but what abridges a certain term supposed to be allotted to human life, Nature also does this to all but a small percentage of lives, & does it in all the modes, violent or insidious, in which the worst human beings take the lives of one another.
Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, & has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve …
All this, Nature does with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy & of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best & noblest indifferently with the meanest & worst; upon those who are engaged in the highest & worthiest enterprises, & often as the direct consequence of the noblest acts; & it might almost be imagined as a punishment for them.
She mows down those on whose existence hangs the well-being of a whole people, perhaps the prospects of the human race for generations to come, with as little compunction as those whose death is a relief to themselves, or a blessing to those under their noxious influence.
Such are Natures dealings with life.
Even when she does not intend to kill, she inflicts the same tortures in apparent wantonness.
In the clumsy provision which she has made for that perpetual renewal of animal life, rendered necessary by the prompt termination she puts to it in every individual instance, no human being ever comes into the world but another human being is literally stretched on the rack for hours or days, not unfrequently issuing in death.
Next to taking life (equal to it according to a high authority) is taking the means by which we live; & Nature does this too on the largest scale & with the most callous indifference.
A single hurricane destroys the hopes of a season; a flight of locusts, or an inundation, desolates a district; a trifling chemical change in an edible root, starves a million of people.
The waves of the sea, like banditti, seize & appropriate the wealth of the rich & the little all of the poor with the same accompaniments of stripping, wounding & killing as their human antitypes. Everything, in short, which the worst men commit either against life or property is perpetrated on a larger scale by natural agents.
Natures explosions of fire damp are as destructive as human artillery; her plague & cholera far surpass the poison cups of the Borgias.
Even the love of 'order' which is thought to be a following of the ways of Nature, is in fact a contradiction of them.
All which people are accustomed to deprecate as 'disorder' & its consequences, is precisely a counterpart of Natures ways.
Anarchy & the Reign of Terror are overmatched in injustice, ruin, & death, by a hurricane & a pestilence
