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Rh for us—relative justice—such justice as will serve our need from day to day.

Another threat held out is the miserable condition to which human life would be reduced if faith in a future life should disappear—a result that Darwinism is credited with hastening. Let us talk seriously on this subject. If there is evidence of a conscious life for human beings beyond the grave, Darwinism surely can not overthrow it. It may possibly be that heretofore the doctrine of immortality has been taught on very insufficient grounds, and that Darwinism has so far awakened the popular intelligence that the insufficiency has become apparent; but, if so, Darwinism is not to blame. It is simply a question of repairing the breaches in a damaged argument. A true doctrine does not need false supports; on the contrary, no greater service can be rendered to a true doctrine than to throw it back on its legitimate proofs. So far, therefore, as this or any other doctrine is true, Darwinism can only establish it the more firmly by taking away the insecure foundations on which it may provisionally have rested. The question is worth raising, however, whether the invalidation of this theory of a future life—not that we see how Darwinism as such is going to accomplish such a result—would have so disastrous an effect as M. de Laveleye assumes upon human happiness. He imagines some one addressing the toilers of the world, and bidding them, as "there is no compensation elsewhere," to raise their heads, "too long bent to the dust beneath the yoke of tyrants and priests." Is it possible that so distinguished a liberal as M. de Laveleye wants to join himself to tyrants and priests in their endeavors to hold down the working-classes by the promise or the lure of "compensation elsewhere"? Compensation for what? For injustice? But if the next world is to make amends for the injustices of this, then why lament over what the people might do if they rose against the holders of wealth? At the worst they could only work injustice, and the next world will make amends for all that. "Why should not next-world sauce, that is found so admirably adapted for the laboring-man goose, be equally suitable for the capitalist gander? But if it is not injustice, but merely misery, for which a compensation is to be found in a future life, the lesson to be learned, we presume, is that the miseries of this life are to be endured in a patient spirit, and that no particular effort need be made to redress them here and now. But how all this talk about a future life tends to confuse our ideas and paralyze our activities in dealing with present interests! Instead of trying to administer an anodyne to those who suffer by holding out promises of future enjoyment, we should be far more disposed to tell them that their right and duty is to make the best of this world; and