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36 of the whole social fabric, that law is not an ethical statute, but, for the most part, on the contrary (being opposed to all ethics), is that same law of struggle for existence in a latent and concealed form. It is the same struggle, but transferred from units to their agglomerations. It is not the cessation of strife, but the swinging backward of the arm to hit the stronger. If the law of the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest is the eternal law of all life (and one must perforce regard it as such with reference to man considered as an animal), then such misty arguments as to social progress—supposed to proceed from it, and arisen none knows whence, a deus ex machinâ ethical process to assist us in our need—cannot break that law down. If social progress, as Mr. Huxley assures us, collects men into groups, then the same struggle and the same survival will exist between families, races, and States, and this struggle will be, not only not more moral, but more cruel and immoral than that between individuals, as, indeed, we find it in reality.

Even if we admit the impossible—that all humanity, solely by social progress, will in a thousand years achieve a single unity and will be of one State and nation, even then, not to mention that the struggle suppressed between States and nations will be altered to one between humanity and the animal world, and that that struggle will always remain a struggle—that is, an activity absolutely excluding