Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/774

750 of the people poor and in some countries on the edge of starvation, yet they have only retarded material progress without in any instance stopping it. Among the English-speaking people of Great Britain and her colonies, and the United States, and in the industrious and less warlike countries of Europe—Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland—there has been a steady gain in virility, in stature, in physical condition, and in mental skill and aptitude. In some of the eastern countries of Europe but lately redeemed from the devastating rule of Turkey, the present improved conditions are in more striking contrast with those which prevailed at the beginning of the century.

What, then, is wanting in the logic of the Malthusian conception of the survival of the fittest adopted by Darwin and Wallace? May it not be held that it is only incomplete, being limited to dealing with man as an animal, without giving regard to that prime quality of man by which he is separated distinctly from every other animal in being endowed with progressive desires and with the capacity to provide for his increasing wants?

In an address which I had the honor of making to the graduating class of the State University of South Carolina, June 26, 1889, under the title of Consumption Limited, Production Unlimited, I presented this case in the following terms:

"I have ventured, therefore, to say that on the basis of the statistics compiled in recent years it may soon be proved to be a rule or law of life that the power of man to consume the means of subsistence is limited, while, on the other hand, the power of mankind to produce and distribute the means of subsistence is practically unlimited.

"I have frequently ventured in conversation to try this hypothesis upon different people, and the very surprise with which it has been usually received goes to prove that the theory of Malthus has unconsciously governed the thought of a very large proportion of the thinking people even of this country.

"In support of this rather startling proposition, it may be suitable to point out again that material life is itself only a conversion of material forces into a new form. Man is the only animal that accumulates experience and thereby attains the power to give a new direction of a permanent kind to these forces of Nature; he therefore frees himself from subjection to the law of the survival, either of the strongest, the most subtle, or the most cunning; he attains the power to exist and multiply by dominating the forces of Nature, thereby increasing production and he makes progress by exchanging services with his kindred. Under these conditions the survival of the intelligent and the capable in increasing numbers becomes assured, because they are the fittest to survive."