Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/392

376 ," asserts itself in a still more imposing manner. We have hitherto considered only the lives of individuals and of single generations, but we must also regard the lives of peoples. It is manifest in this collective life, in a vastly higher measure than in individual life, that "the wages of sin is death." As Everett has remarked, again, one society may favor the growth of righteousness and honor, another that of knavery and hypocrisy. In one, drunkenness and sensuality, and similar vices, may cause a man to sink to the lowest circles of society; in another, they may raise him till he reaches the highest. But here, at last, we have a principle, to which these social conditions are themselves responsible. The one society will develop one type of character, the other a different one; but according to the type of character which it favors will it stand or fall. In this we find in the facts of history a confirmation of the fundamental difference between right and wrong. What we call justice is the only enduring basis on which society can rest. The nations that do wrong and despise justice, which lose themselves in sensual intoxication, are at last broken up, and a purer, stronger, and less depraved race takes their place.

If the opinion comes to prevail in a society that the struggle for existence justifies or demands a reckless pursuit of one's own interests, the oppression and ruin of the weak by the strong, the destruction of misery by destroying the miserable, the extirpation of the voice of compassion, which protests within us against such a course; if physical strength and refined cunning and selfishness are carefully cherished as the highest ideal, then the days of that commonwealth are numbered, for it has worked for its own dissolution by authorizing a "strife of all against all," which, true to its precepts, may come in at any moment when a community of interests may not be present. Let periods of want and danger, or of war, ensue, and we shall see what will be the fate of a society in which patriotism, devotion, ideal standards, and regard for truth and justice have been objects of ridicule.

All positive human authorities are subject to the authority of life conditions. If they will not adapt themselves to the nature of things when they deal with the bases of social life, their enterprises will at last be shattered under the might of that authority.

Two elements, according to Everett, have contributed more than all else to the success of men in the conflict with animals, and of civilized men in contending with barbarous. One of these elements is knowledge, or the power of thought, the other is the force of the social impulse. Ideas on the one side, a self-forgetting resignation on the other, are what have given the victory to the higher races. Whatever restricts the course of either mental or moral development strikes the hardest possible blow against the stability of the social organism.

The distinction between right and wrong, to use an expression of John Fiske's, has its roots in the deepest foundations of the universe. The cosmical power of natural selection is not against, but for, morals.