The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

THE BATTLE OF LIFE.

679

thing is up with bill, or beak, or tooth, or claw, or toilsome
hand, or sweating brow, to conquer the means of living."
We cannot look at the world as it is to-day, a scene of
vast and universal conflict, without believing it to be
organic, and the design of the Creator. We cannot study
history, and see how every step of progress made by the
human race has been won by the hardest efforts, and represents ages of conflict behind it, - how every great truth of
religion, or science, every social reform, and every noble interpretation of liberty has fought its way to supremacy in
the face of hindrance, detraction, persecution, and death,
and conclude that this has been accidental, or contrary to
the will of God. We cannot escape the deduction that the
world has been purposely constructed, not as a harmonious
machine, but as a vast realm of experience, where effort and
struggle, trouble and sorrow are appointed as the necessary
educators of the race; -and this, not through the malevolence, but the benignity of the Creator.
" There is a simple and central law which governs this
matter," says a scientific writer; " and that is this; every
definite action is conditioned upon a definite resistance, and
is impossible without it. We are only able to walk, because
the earth resists the foot, and are unable to tread the air
and water, because they deny the foot the opposition which
it requires. The bird and the steamer are hindered by air
and water, which presses upwards, downwards, laterally,
and in all directions. But the bird with its wings, and the
steamer with its paddle, apply themselves to this hindrance
to their progress, and overcome it. So, were not their
motion obstructed, progress would be impossible."
"The same law governs not actions only, but all definite
effects whatever. If the air did not resist the vibrations of
a resonant object, and strive to preserve its own form, the