"THE UNBALANCING OF NATURE"
Hodge, C. F.
"The Unbalancing of Nature" Should Man-eating Tigers and Death-carrying House Flies and Other Enemies of Humanity Be Exterminated or Let Alone? By C. F. HODGE BY 1902 it was practically...
...On this page is a new contribution by Professor Hodge...
...The pessimists will always howl that it is all bad, and the optimists will be just as sure that life is growing better...
...He believed the fly was divinely created for a purpose, and expressed objections against its extermination...
...Some States are even beginning to pass laws permitting the sterilization of confirmed criminals and the hopelessly feebleminded...
...The campaign of education will bear fruit...
...The man who says, "Better let good enough alone," allows a mountain of manure to pile up at his back door...
...The flies that breed in the filth kill five of his six babies under two years of ago...
...The first step in man's dominion over any country is to knock the balance of nature in it galley west by cleaning out all the fierce wild beasts and venomous snakes that threaten the lives of his wife and children...
...Stirring the soil and planting a crop certainly is "disturbing the balance of nature...
...Better leave good enough alone...
...It has always been so, and it will be so to the end of time...
...God created the mosquitoes for a good purpose in the balance of nature, and they must not be interfered with...
...and called on the United States Public Health Service...
...Tigers were created to catch and eat all the little children, women, and men they could find, and raise more little tigers to eat more men, to raise still more tigers, and so on...
...This divine bill of human rights is equally a bill of human duties, and includes dominion over germs and flies and rats as well as over lions and tigers...
...That is, man is obliged to balance nature at every step to best serve human needs...
...They have been the inspiration and guide for many city campaigns...
...If we must give a reason, better say they are nature's foolkillers, and hope that they may do their work speedily and give us a race of people who will have sense enough to sufficiently disturb the balance of nature to keep vermin from eating them alive...
...During the past two years La Follette's has published from the pen of Professor C. F. Hodge of Clark University the two most important articles on fly extermination that have thus far appeared...
...This article is Professor Hodge's answer to that protest.—Editor's Note...
...Recently the editor of Nature and Culture received a letter from a subscriber protesting against the war on the typhoid house fly...
...I remember reading in a paper at the time that some one—probably a man who had objected to the former mosquito campaign-christened his baby daughter "Stego-tnyia Fasciata Wilson...
...By C. F. HODGE BY 1902 it was practically demonstrated that a certain kind of mosquito, Stegomyia calo-pus, inoculated yellow fever into man...
...The whole of agriculture is the most violent possible tipping the "balance" in man's favor, and with that first great disturbance of natural forces comes the necessity of holding the forces of nature to do his will against all comers...
...One aim of education is to allow as few people as possible who think and act in this way to grow up and bring babies into the world to be killed by flies...
...In 1905 an epidemic of yellow fever broke out in New Orleans...
...He says, "If you disturb that balance of nature, you will bring something much worse down on us...
...This season there is promise of greater success than ever before...
...The mosquitoes were exterminated from Havana, and for the first year in its history that city was free from Yellow Jack...
...Ditto wild cats, wolves, rats, bedbugs, mosquitoes, fleas, typhoid and tubercle germs...
...then those same pious ones yelled "Bloody Murder...
...AGAIN the time has come to wage war upon the deadly house fly...
...Killing the weeds is "unbalancing nature" again...
...But the pious people, who were at the time greatly in the majority in New Orleans, and who, everywhere, are sure they know all about why God created this or the other, rose up and said that they knew all about it...
...As he grows more enlightened, he learns that smaller and still smaller enemies are endangering human life, and he is equally in duty bound to go after them and clean them up...
...So the progressive people were obliged to abandon their impious plan to clean up the city...
...You can't convince him that if he had kept his place clean, "something worse might not have happened...
...Nature's Foolkillers" WHAT IS, and what is not, "disturbing the balance of nature...
...The notion that bedbugs, lice, mosquitoes, flies, rats, cats, English sparrows, diphtheria, typhoid, and tubercle germs were all created for some human good, is pure figment of the imagination of those idiotic enough to hold such views...
...Spraying Paris green over the field to kill the bugs is "disturbing the balance of nature" some more, and so on down the list...
...Progressive men in New Orleans immediately set to work to render their city safe against the dread disease...
...The reason for creation of man was to take this balance of nature, blood-red, in tooth and claw and "subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth...
...The popular interest in these articles has been gratifying and the demand for reprints of them has come from all parts of the country...
...The mosquitoes were promptly exterminated and, after considerable unnecessary suffering and loss of valuable life, the epidemic was stopped...
...All man was put in the world for, seems to be to balance nature to his uses...
Vol. 5 • April 1913 • No. 17
