And so the law teaches him that his actions must be of a certain quality, both with respect to external Nature and his fellowmen, or that he must pay a penalty.
Thus he comes to man's estate, and law has been to him an educator and a good one. He has learned that Nature's law means punishment every time it is violated, and that man's law, whatever it may attain to, _aims_ at the same object as Nature's law.
But neither his education nor his contact with law ends with his youth. Hitherto he has obeyed blindly for fear of the penalty. He now obeys intelligently, and connected with the penalty to be incurred by disobedience is the reward to be obtained through obedience. He finds that every act, every thought, of his brings him in direct contact with law. He can not elude it by standing still, for no man can stand still. He must go forward, or backward. This is an inexorable law; with progress, improvement; without progress, what? Rest? Repose? No! Deterioration. No man can stand still in this universe for a day without losing something. The man who means to do anything in life must go forward; if he falters, another goes ahead; and then he learns that the penalty of faltering is failure.
Nature works no special miracles in any one's favor. Nature works no miracles, anyway. The sun and the moon did _not_ stand still at Joshua's command!
No riches and influence can buy exemption from Nature.
Law says to the poor man who is dependent on his daily toil: "You have only yourself to rely upon. Take care of your health; be temperate, honest and industrious, for sickness, imprisonment, idleness, mean to you death."
It says to the rich man: "Inherited wealth has exempted you from _daily_ labor of body, but it has not earned for you rest. Go to work; do something, or your mind and body will be enfeebled; your sympathies will disappear; you will become dry as the summer's dust; you will sink into a nonentity."
The whole cry of Nature's law is onward and upward. Evolution is the word--there is no God about it. It is not alone the survival of the fittest--that is only a part of the process. It is the fittest of one generation becoming something better and higher for the next.
It is the fashion now to say that the struggle for existence becomes yearly more fierce, but that is not so. The truth is that those who struggle become with each survival fitter to struggle, and that for which they struggle is placed one step forward. Men used to want thousands and hundreds of thousands; now, they want millions and hundreds of millions. They used to want general knowledge; now, they are all specialists, and cry out that life is too short. Steam used to content them; now, electricity does not satisfy them, and they are grasping at the possibilities of the mighty currents of air caused by the revolutions of the earth itself.