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ganism. amongst them not only alien enemies, but the rivalry of cognate species. Under purely natural conditions that is, conditions not artificially modified by man, the consequence or penalty of failure is extinction either of the species or of the individual. The prize of successful adaptation is survival, and to use a sporting phrase, the reduction of the handicap in the next contest. If, then, the great problems involved in fitness and unfitness could be left, as it is popularly said, to Nature they would settle themselves. Such organisms as could no longer adapt themselves to their environment would disappear, as the wolf and the bear have disappeared from England, as the buffalo is rapidly vanishing from the prairies, and as the fox would be extinct at home if it did not suit the interests or caprices of sportsmen to preserve him. The unfit would go, just as, in spite of Mr. Henry George, the weakling and the incapable perishes in the backwoods and starves in the shadows of the great cities. And by unfit it must always be understood that inability to cope with the special environment of the moment is meant. "Dirt" said the great Lord Derby, "is matter out of place." In like manner, poverty is or may be skill and labor out of place. An Aristotle or a Newton, an Eschylus or a Shakespeare would pay the penalty of unfitness if isolated in the backwoods, where the the sturdy man of muscle would triumph, just as the latter must hopelessly fail if he had to make a livelihood by his brains in the atmosphere of a great intellectual centre. Man is not exempt from the operation of the laws which govern organic life, but to man alone it is given so to modify his environment as to alter for good or evil the operation of these natural laws. And, indeed, in the early stages of the history of man the heir of all the ages differed from

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his humbler animal brethren only in degree of powerlessness to triumph over the laws of his environment. To many it will come as an appalling shock to learn that disease, physical unfitness in its most aggravated form, is, so far as it is not a simple instrument of destruction but a perpetuation of weakness and inferiority, mainly the result of man's interference with the operations of natural laws. truth, for it is now hardly disputed, has nowhere been more forcibly insisted upon than in the remarkable Romanes Lecture delivered at Oxford in 1905 by Sir E. Ray Lankester, which has since been republished under the title of Nature's Insurgent Son. "In the extra-human system of Nature," he says, "there is no disease, and there is no conjunction of incompatible forms of life such as man has brought about on the surface of the globe. In extra-human Nature the selection of the fittest necessarily eliminates those diseased or liable to disease. Disease, both of parasitic and congenital origin, occurs as a minor phenomenon. The congenitally diseased are destroyed before they can reproduce; the attacks of parasites great and small either serve only to carry off the congenitally weak, and thus strengthen the race, or become harmless by the survival of those individuals which, owing to peculiar qualities in their tissues, can tolerate such attacks without injury, resulting in the establishment of immune races. It is a remarkable thing-which possibly may be less generally true than our present knowledge seems to suggest that the adjustment of organisms to their surroundings is so severely complete in Nature apart from man, that diseases are unknown as constant and normal phenomena under those conditions. It is no doubt difficult to investigate this matter, "The Kingdom of Man," p. 32.

since the presence of man as an observer itself implies human intervention. But it seems to be a legitimate view that every disease to which animals (and probably plants also) are liable, excepting as a transient and very exceptional occurrence, is due to man's interference. The diseases of cattle, sheep, pigs, and horses are not known except in domesticated herds, and those wild creatures to which man's domesticated productions have communicated them. The trypanosome lives in the blood of wild game and of rats without producing mischief. The hosts have become tolerant of the parasites. It is only when man brings his unselected, humanlynurtured races of cattle and horses into contact with the parasite that it is found to have deadly properties. The various cattle diseases which in Africa have done so much harm to native cattle, and have in some regions exterminated big game, have per contra been introduced by man through his importation of diseased animals of his own breeding from Europe." Sir E. Ray Lankester adds in a footnote "a similar kind of difficulty, of which many might be cited, is brought about by man's importations and exportations of useful plants. He thus brought the phylloxera to Europe, not realizing beforehand that this little parasitic bug, though harmless to the American vine, which puts out new shoots on its roots when the insect injures the old ones, is absolutely deadly to the European vine, which has not acquired the simple but all-important mode of growth by which the American vine is rendered safe. Thus, too, he took the coffee plant to Ceylon, and found his plantation suddenly devastated by a minute mould (the Himalaya rastatrix), which had lived very innocently before that in the Cingalese forest, but was ready to burst into rapacious and destructive activity when

the new unadjusted coffee trees were imported by man and presented in carefully-crowded plantations to its unrestrained infection." I might cite as instances on the other side the too-successful introduction of the rabbit into Australia and of the English sparrow into the United States.

Nature, however, has her compensations. Beside the nettle grows the dock. If man in the progress of his ascent has evolved for himself and for the poor relations enlisted in his service, many forms of disease, he has also evolved doctors and veterinary surgeons. He does not, however, employ these two classes in the same way. A veterinary surgeon who would allow the humblest animal committed to his charge to drag out an agonized existence, tormented by anguish, to an inevitable end would be liable to punishment for cruelty to animals. The doctor who would terminate torture by precipitating an equally inevitable end would be indicted for manslaughter. In the breeding of his horses and dogs, of his flocks and herds, man improves upon Nature and carries the principle of the extirpation of the unfit to its extreme conclusion. When, however, the future of his own race is in question man ignores the teaching of Nature and leaves the fitness of future generations to Providence or to chance. As with the physical body, so with the body politic. In the one case, as in the other, it is our habit to talk of our "constitution." In the interest of the physical body subject to diseases of his own handiwork man has evolved doctors. For the maladies of the body politic, also to a large extent the result of his own actions, man has evolved politicians. The development of the doctor and of the politician is subject to the same conditions. But there is a marked difference in the rate of progress. Both pass, or should

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pass, through the different stages of empiricism, metaphysics, and science. The primitive herbalist was aware that the bark of the cinchona, of whose properties he knew nothing, would cure diseases, of the causes and nature of which he knew as little, though experience taught him that suffering and death would result if the malady were unchecked. He was folfowed by what may be called the metaphysician, who, imagining causes which were non-existent and attributing to the bark of the cinchona properties which it did not possess, worked out a conclusion which experience had taught him to be true from premises, which for all he had learned from experience might be, and generally were, quite false. Last of all comes the scientific analyst, who, by patient observation and research, discovers that the disease known as malaria is due to the presence in the blood of an infinitesimal organism generically described as a microbe. He finds, further, that for reasons in which he is not immediately interested, the microbe will not live in a solution of quinine too weak to affect the blood injuriously. The microbe dies, the malaria vanishes, and the problem is solved. With the doctors of the body politic the case is different. We are emerging from the purely empirical stage and are just entering the metaphysical, the land of the mirage, the home of the ideologue.

The polit

ical empiric applied his remedies after the fashion of the primitive herbalist.

He administered to his patient what experience had taught him "would do him good." Sometimes, of course, the potion did not do good, and the patient died. That was a new experience and conveyed a warning which repetition confirmed. In his track came the ideologue, with his unproved, untried, and often imaginary scheme of causes and effects, re

lated in his mind by a nexus which no amount of experience would ever break. Talleyrand tells us that during the Consulate he was astonished to see some of the most violent of the Jacobins leaving the study of Napoleon. Napoleon said, "Ah, you do not know the Jacobin. There are two classes of them-les sucrés et les salés. The one you just saw come out was a salé; with these I do what I wish: no one better fit to defend all the daring acts of a new Power. Sometimes it is necessary to stop them, but with a little management it is soon done; but the sucrés Jacobins -they are ungovernable. With their metaphysics they would ruin any government." To-day is the day of the sucré Jacobin. He is particularly interested in the problem of poverty and the inequality of wealth. His fellow, the salé Jacobin, would solve the problem of inequality by rushing at his neighbor with a bludgeon in his hand and shouting, "Sois, mon frère. ou je te tue," and he would settle the unequal distribution of wealth on the same simple and effective principle. The other, however, being cursed with a political conscience, seeks to justify the same ends by metaphysical reasons. The mental process is not very recondite. The problem which presents itself may be stated thus: Poverty and its attendant miseries are due to the struggle for life. If there were no struggle there would be no resultant evil. Inequality in like manner is due to competition, a phase incident to the struggle: if there were no competition there would be no inferiority. The conclusions are obvious. I once heard, many years ago, with my own ears the problem thus nakedly propounded by a fluent demagogue addressing a meeting of badlypaid agricultural laborers. "We are told," he said, "that wages are regulated by the laws of supply and de

mand. Let us abolish these unjust laws of supply and demand." This reads, no doubt, like a burlesque: but is it? What is the whole principle which underlies modern Trades Unionism, as distinguished from the old Associations formed to redress the advantages which Capital gave, or was supposed to give, to the employer in dealing with his workmen? The effect is no longer to secure a balance of power so as to make it as disadvantageous to the employer to be oppressive as to the employed to be rapacious. The new Trades Unionism consciously or unconsciously aims at the establishment and endowment of mediocrity by the elimination of competition. To demand, for instance, the legislative restriction of the hours devoted to labor is to deny to the individual of superior physical or mental endowment the opportunity of profiting by that superiority. The infinitely complex system by which it is sought so to control the sub-division of labor that the reward of labor shall be proportionate, not to the skill or industry of the individual, but to the joint amount earned divided by the number employed, is merely a device to equalize artificially that which is naturally unequal. It is not difficult to see what must result from an attempt to ascertain a mean when the maximum cannot be exceeded, and the minimum is left to develop as it will. The inevitable consequence must be that the mean will be perpetually lowered. With the extinction of competition-were that possible the spirit of competition must perish too. But the spirit of competition, if there be any truth in evolution at all, is the source of all that development which we so proudly call progress. What if a man were to contemplate his watch, and to qualify his admiration for its marvellous ingenuity by saying, "It would be perfect but for the bore of

winding it up every night; why do I have to wind it up? Obviously, because of the exhaustion of the mainspring. If, therefore, I remove the mainspring I shall enjoy all the advantages of the timekeeper without the nuisance of having to wind it up." The struggle for life, with all its attendant consequences of inequality and poverty, is the mainspring of civilization. There is no substitute for it, and if it be destroyed, the clock stops. Struggle is not only the cause, but it is the condition of progress. Why, in the history of mankind, have the inhabitants of those favored districts of the earth, where you have only to tickle the soil with a hoe and it laughs with a harvest, been always dispossessed by the hardier inhabitants of less fertile soil? The facile answer is covetousness. Yes, covetousness will supply the appetite, but it will not furnish the means of gratifying the appetite, nor is the phenomenon to be explained by the doctrine of original sin or original weakness. The whole history of Spain is a proof that the hardiest of races deteriorate when the stimulus to struggle is diminished by the slackening of resistance. The Italian colonists of Rome went down before the Visigoths. The Visigoths, hardy barbarians, went out of training and could offer no resistance to the Arabs. The Arabs themselves succumbed to their hardier co-religionists across the Straits and so on and so on. What is true of a particular area of the earth is true of the history of man. Let me refer again to Sir E. Ray Lankester. "Nature's inexorable discipline of death," he says (The Kingdom of Man), "to those who do not rise to a standard-survival and parentage for those alone who do has been from the earliest times more and more definitely resisted by the will of man. If we may for the purpose of analysis. as it were, extract man from the rest

of Nature, of which he is truly a product and a part, then we may say that man is Nature's rebel. Where Nature says 'die' man says 'I will live.' According to the law previously in universal operation, man should have been limited in geographical area, killed by extremes of cold or heat, subject to starvation if one kind of diet were unobtainable, and should have been unable to increase and multiply, just as are his animal relatives, without losing his specific structure and acquiring new physical characters, according to the requirements of the new conditions into which he strayedshould have perished, except on the condition of becoming a new morphological 'species.' But man's wits and his will have enabled him to cross rivers and oceans by rafts and boats, to clothe himself against cold, to shelter himself from heat and rain, to prepare an endless variety of food by fire, and to increase and multiply as no other animal can without change of form, without submitting to the terrible acts of selection wielded by ruthless Nature over all other living things on this globe. And as he has more and more obtained this control over his surroundings he has expanded that unconscious protective attitude towards his immature offspring which natural selection had already favored and established in the animal race, into a conscious and larger love for his tribe, his race, his nationality, and his kind. He has developed speech, the power of communicating, and above all, of recording and handing on from generation to generation his thought and knowledge. He has formed communities, built cities, and set up empires. At every step of his progress man has receded further and further from the ancient rule exercised by Nature. He has advanced so far, and become so unfitted to the earlier rule, that to suppose that man can return

to Nature' is as unreasonable as to suppose that an adult animal can return to its mother's womb." All this tale of achievement is the result of struggle. It is indeed the history of persistent and unremitting conflict. But for this constant competition man would never have emerged "from Naure," and if the struggle be abandoned, man will return not "to Nature" but to death-Nature's penalty for defiance of her laws. If I selected the spirit of new Trades Unionism for my illustration, it is because the new Trades Unionism represents Socialism in operation, and Socialism is the product of the sucré Jacobinism, the metaphysics of politics, which elaborates its system in defiance of the natural laws revealed by the patient industry of scientific observation. It recognizes, no doubt, the fact that life is a struggle, but it fails to appreciate the greater truth that all the blessings of life are the direct outcome of that struggle and are out of all proportion to the evils inseparable from the good. Over the goal of the Socialists' aspirations are written the words invisible to them or unappreciated by them, propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.

There are two methods, both artificial and both effective, by which the advantages derived from this struggle may be checked or even extinguished. They may be applied to the top and the bottom of the struggling mass of humanity. On the one hand, the prizes of success may be artificially reduced until, in the opinion of those who would otherwise be the competitors, they are not worth gaining. And it must be remembered that the value of the prize is what it seems to the competitor to be, and not what a philosopher may deem it ought to be. A fortune, the blue ribbon of the turf, a cup, a peerage, any or all of these rewards for success may seem futile and worthless to the doctrinaire, but

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