Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/184

 as the young one is of little "worth either to itself or to others, and benefits received must be inversely as the power or ability of the receiver.

"Throughout the rest of its life each adult gets benefit in proportion to merit, reward in proportion to desert, merit and desert being understood as ability to fulfil all the requirements of life. Placed in competition with members of its own species, and in antagonism with members of other species, it dwindles and gets killed off, or thrives and propagates, according as it is ill-endowed or well endowed. If the benefits received by each individual were proportionate to its inferiority, if, as a consequence, multiplication of the inferior was furthered and multiplication of the superior hindered, progressive degradation would result, and eventually the degenerated species would fail to hold its ground in presence of antagonistic species and competing species." (Page 65.)

"The poverty of the incapable, the distress that comes upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and the shouldering aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many 'in shallows and in miseries,' are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence." (Page 67.)

When the State, guided by a wrongly inspired philanthropy, prevents the application of this wise law, instead of diminishing suffering it increases it. "It tends to fill the world with those to whom life will bring most pain, and tends to keep out of it those to whom life will bring most pleasure. It inflicts positive misery, and prevents positive happiness." ("Social Statics," p. 381, edit. 1851.)

The law that Mr. Herbert Spencer desires society to adopt is simply Darwin's law—"the survival of the fittest." Mr. Spencer expresses his astonishment that at the present day, more than at any other period of the world's history, everything is done to favour the survival of the unfittest, when, at the same time, the truth as revealed by Darwin, is admitted and accepted by an ever-growing number of educated and influential people!

I have endeavoured to give a brief sketch of the line of argument followed by Mr. Herbert Spencer. We will now see what reply can be made to it. I think one chief point ought not to have escaped the eminent writer. It is this: If the application of the Darwinian law to the government of societies be really justifiable, is it not strange that public opinion, not only in England, but in all other countries, is so strenuously opposed to it, at an epoch which is becoming more and more enlightened, and when sociological studies are pursued with so much interest? If the intervention of public power for the improvement of the condition of the working-classes be a contradiction of history, and a return to ancient militant society, how is it that the country in which the new industrial organization is the most developed—that is to say, England—is also the country where State intervention is the most rapidly increasing, and where opinion is at the same time pressing for these powers of interference to be still further extended? There is no other land in which