Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/206

196 inferences is—other things equal. Does M. de Laveleye really think, when comparing the state of the last generation with that of the present, that other things are so equal that to the growth of State administrations can be ascribed the decrease of crime? He ignores those two factors, far more important than all others, which have produced a social revolution—railways and free-trade: the last resulting from the abolition of governmental restraints after a long struggle, and the first effected by private enterprise carried out in spite of strenuous opposition for some time made in the Legislature. Beyond all question, the prosperity due to these factors has greatly ameliorated the condition of the working-classes, and by so doing has diminished crime; for undoubtedly, diminishing the difficulties of getting food, diminishes one of the temptations to crime. If M. de Laveleye refers to a more recent diminution, then, unless he denies the alleged relation between drunkenness and crime, he must admit that the temperance agitation, with its pledges, its "Bands of Hope," and its "Blue Ribbon League," has had a good deal to do with it.

Before passing to the chief question let me correct M. de Laveleye on some minor points. He says—

"I think that the great fundamental error of Mr. Herbert Spencer's system, which is so generally accepted at the present day, consists in the belief that if State power were hut sufficiently reduced," &c.

Now I set against this a sentence not long since published by Mr. Frederic Harrison:

"Mr. Spencer has himself just published. . . . 'The Man versus The State,' to which he hardly expects to make a convert except here and there, and about which an unfriendly critic might say that it might be entitled 'Mr. Spencer against all England.'" (Nineteenth Century, vol. xvi. p. 366.)

The fear lest my arguments should prevail, which I presume prompted M. de Laveleye's article, is evidently ill-founded. I wish I saw reason to believe that his estimate is nearer to the truth than the opposite one.

On p. 490, M. de Laveleye writes—

"The law that Mr. Herbert Spencer desires society to adopt is simply Darwin's law—' the survival of the fittest.'"

Perhaps I may be excused for wishing here to prevent further confirmation of a current error. In his article, M. de Laveleye has quoted from "Social Statics" passages showing insistance on the benefits resulting from survival of the fittest among mankind, as well as among animals; though he ignores the fact that the work as a whole is an elaborate statement of the conditions under which, and limits within which, the natural process of elimination of the unfit should be allowed to operate. Here my immediate purpose is to correct the impression which his statement, as above worded, produces, by naming the dates: