I only construct a fiction in a way that I feel will work _ and the devil take the hindmost.
3.
To see famine mainly as a divisive phenomenon, whereby some people fall behind and the devil takes the hindmost . . . is something that links, I think, my childhood memories and impressions of 1943 with the work I did in the decade following 1973.
4.
In conclusion ( of his own journal and of the book ), Ewing writes that history is governed by the results of vicious and virtuous acts precipitated by belief : wherefore " a purely predatory world shall consume itself " and " The devil take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost ", and imagines his father-in-law's response to his becoming an abolitionist, as a warning that Adam's life would amount to one drop in a limitless ocean; whereas Ewing's proposed reply is : " Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops ?"