OUTLAND BORN.

So you have been to London Town,
And what saw you the while?
"A maze of winding city ways

And houses mile by mile,

Where throbs the pulse of half the world

In that gray Northern isle."

Nay, heard ye not nor saw ye nought? And is there nothing new?

Are London streets still paved with gold?

Is that old story true?

Oh you have heard the Bow Bells ring, And what said they to you?

Nay, make not of my ignorance
A traveller's sorry jest;
Did ye not see the "Golden Hind"

On Thames' broad mother breast? Did ye not mark her white sail stir With longing for the West!

Nay, what's the price of England's pride?

And what the news from Spain? Had ye no glimpse in fair Whitehall

Of Nell o' Drury Lane?

Are there no ghosts in London Town To wake the past again?

Does London stretch no kindred hand?
Hath she no voice for you?
No message to you, blood and bone,
Of that wherefrom we grew?—
Oh saw ye not the Guards go out
That fought at Waterloo?

Can ye not hear the hollow hoof,
Not mark the nodding crest?-
Oh London Town! Oh London Town!
Your very stones attest-

And through the dawn those solemn ghosts

Ride slowly, four abreast!

I see the dancing harbor lights.
I breathe the garden smells,
But fairy faint I seem to hear
The chime of Abbey bells,
And faintly far, but visioned clear,
The dome o'er London swells.

Oh you are back from London Town,
Where I may never go,

And all these things were yours to

We are celebrating this year the centenary of Darwin's birth and the jubilee of the publication of the Origin of Species. It is well that we should recognize these dated days, though the complacency with which we assume credit for "our Mr. Darwin" or "our Mr. Shakespeare," salutary enough in itself, is not without a touch of humor. We are all Darwinians to-day, and we have travelled far from the time when the disciple of Darwin, who was also the heir of Goethe and Lamarck, was classed with the fool who said in his heart "there is no God." Men remember-not without amusement-Disraeli's diatribe before the Oxford Diocesan Society some five years after the appearance of Darwin's famous work. "I hold," he said, "that the highest function of science is the interpretation of Nature, the interpretation of the highest nature is the highest science. What is the highest nature? Man is the highest nature. But I must say that when I compare the interpretations of the highest nature of the most advanced, the most fashionable, of modern schools of modern science-when I compare that with older teachings with which we are familiar-I am not prepared to say that the lecture-room is more scientific than the Church. What is the question which is now placed before society with a glib assurance which to me is most astounding? That question is this: is a man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence these new-fangled theories. I believe they are foreign to the conscience of humanity, and I say more-that even from the most intellectual point of view, I believe the severest metaphysical analysis is opposed to such conclusions." Those

who smile over the remembrance of the invective of a party politician addressed to an ecclesiastical audience forget that thirteen years later the influence of one of the most distinguished scientists that Germany has produced, Rudolf Virchow, not only combated with relentless animosity the theories of Darwin, but attempted, and, in the case of the two chief German States, succeeded in excluding the dangerous doctrine of evolution from the schools and in forbidding the teaching of Darwinian ideas. But, as I have said, we are all Darwinians today, and Bishops in lawn sleeves expound the doctrines of evolution which fifty years ago conjured up before the affrighted mind of Disraeli terrible pictures of "young ladies lisping atheism in gilded saloons." But while most fairly educated people accept the Darwinian theory or hypothesis in its main outlines, it is very doubtful if the practical lessons involved in acceptance of the theory of evolution are more clearly understood to-day than they were in the time of Disraeli and Virchow. Among the many grave problems that confront this generation, none is more perplexing and more universally debated than that of poverty and unemployment with all their attendant difficulty. Yet very few even attempt to understand the nature of the problem, as it reveals itself in the light of the doctrines of evolution. The late Henry George, of whose name and principles the present Chancellor of the Exchequer seems to be the residuary legatee, stated what he imagined to be the problem in a once popular work entitled Progress and Poverty. It is quite possible that Mr. Henry George had never read a word of Darwin, and, in any case, his book, which gave an enormous fillip to So

cialism, was written as if the doctrine of evolution had never been mooted. Mr. Henry George contemplated the world and saw, or imagined he saw, that only in the great and crowded centres of life did the problem of poverty in its most appalling form present itself. In the backwoods and in unappropriated territory there might be a terrible struggle, but there was no poverty. Having satisfied himself that this was an exhaustive record of social phenomena, he proceeded to ask himself what factor present in the one case and absent in the other accounts for the prevalence of poverty in the crowded city and its comparative rarity in the backwoods. The answer revealed itself to him in the magic monosyllable "rent." Private ownership of land was responsible for all the social evils to which mankind is heir, and by nullifying private ownership by taxing rent out of existence, the great problem of modern humanity would be solved. It is strange that a doctrine which misstated all the principal phenomena it attempted to explain, and which begged all the questions it was supposed to answer, should have commanded, even for a moment, the wide influence it enjoyed in its day, and which in an attenuated form it still exercises. To invest its phantasy with an artificial plausibility, the author of Progress and Poverty was constrained to assume the equality of mankind, to ignore the existence of the struggle for life, and to strip capital of all the functions attributed to it by every school of economy. So simple and so devoid of history did he consider the human problem, that he thought by transporting a handful of the heirs of all the ages to a desert island, hitherto undisturbed by the presence of man, he could reconstitute society on its primitive and innocent basis and in an Eden unpolluted by the serpent "rent," could find a Ciritas

Dei which would represent the supreme and final achievement of triumphant democracy. It is not strange that a man of imagination should have devoted himself to such a task, for Mr. George only walked in a welltrodden path, but what is astounding is that a generation which professed to have accepted the main principles of the doctrine of evolution should have treated Mr. George's fancies as a serious scientific contribution to a stiff work-a-day problem. Very different from this is the real problem, as revealed to us in the light of the theory of evolution. That doctrine teaches us that change in all cosmic phenomena, organic and inorganic alike, is from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from the relatively simple to the absolutely complex or, to put it in everyday phraseology, from equality to inequality. Oken, the German naturalist, allegorically and picturesquely enunciated the problem thus: "Chaos was represented by the creative act consisted in the introduction of and―.”

;

It would be interesting to know whether the seeds of Darwin's famous theory were already germinating in his mind when he started, at the age of twenty-three, on his memorable voyage in the Beagle, or whether the human phenomena he observed during his travels suggested the theory. There is to be found in his log-book, written up in the course of his travels, a passage which has a striking bearing upon a feature of the doctrines of evolution, that he never subsequently developed-I mean, the social and political feature. He was describing the character of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego visited by the Beagle in 1834. His belief that the Fuegians represented the most backward stages of humanity was perhaps inaccurate, but the existence of a still less developed type does not militate against the

importance of his observations. "The perfect equality among the individuals composing the Fuegian tribes must for a long time retard their civilization. As we see those animals whose instinct compels them to live in society and obey a chief are most capable of improvement, so it is with the races of mankind. Whether we look at it as a cause or a consequence, the more civilized always have the most artificial government. For instance, the inhabitants of Otaheite, who, when first discovered, were governed by hereditary kings, had arrived at a far higher grade than another branch of the same people, the New Zealanders, who, although benefited by being compelled to turn their attention to agriculture, were Republicans in the most absolute sense. In Tierra del Fuego, until some chief shall arise with power sufficient to secure any acquired advantage, such as the domesticated animals, it seems scarcely possible that the political state of the country can be improved. At present even a piece of cloth given to one is torn into shreds and distributed, and no one individual becomes richer than another. On the other hand it is difficult to understand how a chief can arise till there is property of some sort by which he might manifest his superiority and increase his power." This obiter dictum of a man of rare powers of observation, seeking knowledge as a naturalist, and not as a politician or a philosopher, is worth all the carefully-selected examples of interested theorists anxious to find facts to square with their creed. Darwin recorded the phenomenon, commented on it and passed it by, never, so far as I know, to refer to it again. Yet it would be difficult to find a more illuminating confirmation of the doctrine of political and social evolution, or one more fatal to the gratuitous assumptions of Mr. Henry George and his school.

The two fundamental laws which govern-using the word conventionally -the organic world are those of heredity and adaptation, to which correspond two primordial instincts, philoprogenetiveness and self-preservation. In the physical world their equivalent is the centrifugal and centripetal forces. The resultant of the co-operation and antagonism of these laws is the process which we know as evolution. Heredity may be called the Tory and adaptation the Radical principles of Nature and it may be observed in passing that the simpler and more immature the condition of organisms the more easy and rapid is the process of evolution, and, on the other hand, the more complicated and developed the stage reached the slower and more difficult is the process of adaptation. What we mean by environment is the aggregate of all the phenomena of every description affecting, but external to the organism itself. Adaptation to the environment would imply the possibility of ultimate perfection if the environment were constant. But as the environment itself is always changing, and is modified by the very process of adaptation, the prospect of perfection-that is, of complete adaptation--can be only described by the figure of an asymptote, a line that continually approaches nearer and nearer to some curve, but only meets it in infinity. Of the two forces heredity may be said to be the more powerful in this respect, that any arrest in the process of adaptation is followed by a reaction, or what is known as recurrence to type.1 What follows, then, is the phenomenon known as the struggle for life or the survival of the fittest. The struggle is between the organism and its environment, including in the latter all external elements antagonistic to the existence of the or1 On this point, however, see Huxley's "Darwiniana." Vol. II. of "Collected Essays," pp. 425 and seq.