Page:Philosophical Review Volume 7.djvu/332

318 legal or political. On the other hand, to deter from crime is of the utmost political importance. At any rate the deterrent end appeals very strongly to common sense. This conception of punishment may be united with the idea of social justice if we conceive the criminal deliberately placing himself in conditions which by the movement of society—the same society which guarantees him liberty—necessarily result in his punishment. We can then conceive of his act as returning upon himself, and thus explicitly satisfy the demand for justice. But the deterrent theory is being strenuously attacked; prevention in the scientific sense is swallowing it up. Prevention is said to be primary, repression secondary, and in a wide and general sense this may be admitted. But it must be recognized that repression is a social necessity, and a social necessity can never be called unimportant.

The merciless struggle for mere existence is to some extent changed in human society, and the residual competitive process is altered so as generally to become a struggle for domination instead of a struggle for life. The area of competition is also narrowed so as no longer to cover the family circle. Within the family the weakest are protected by the sacrifices of the other members. If, then, it be true that the selective struggle within industrial society is only a prolonged and peaceable version of the cruder struggle for existence in the animal world, what bearing will this fact have upon the social problem—the demand for the betterment of the condition of the lower classes? In the first place it precludes all anticipation that material want and suffering will disappear from society. But, on the other hand, the persistence of the selective process in society sanctions no fatalistic attitude toward social betterment. The most practical aspect of the law of selection is its bearing on concrete projects of social reform. It furnishes us a vantage ground from which we may often view, in true perspective, social issues which taken by themselves are involved in obscurity and doubt. This does not imply that survival in the struggle for existence is regarded as the final norm for conduct. It simply means that selection through struggle is a quantity we cannot expect to eliminate, and that, therefore, we must judge of social duty and conduct with reference to the actual stage on which mankind must act its part.

The socialistic creed, like other creeds, has been subject to the law of evolution. Socialism in its primitive form appeared as a development of Rousseau's principle of equality, and received its most scientific exposition