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Rh and robbery and means to elevate public morals and keep people from becoming murderers and robbers. It may charitably do everything in its power to give all human beings a chance. It may even with reason prohibit the use of alcoholic drink, for although the deduction from natural law would be to let drunkards drink themselves to death they may do too much economic and social damage in the process. But Society may not with safety propagate or preserve the unfit. Nor let them have a hand in the management of things under the guise of democracy. Nor may it safely try to nullify the human motive of self interest, which springs from the law of the survival of the fittest, no matter how repugnant to the spirit of idealism that may be. The Earl of Birkenhead in a powerful address before the Institute of Politics at Williamstown, Aug. 25, 1923, pointed out how idealism had failed to solve the economic and social problems resulting from the Great War. In the following trenchant words he summarized much of what I have been feebly trying to say:

For the real truth is that while the whole world requires the encouragement and the light of idealism, the whole world would probably not survive if idealism were given a completely free rein. The same simple illuminating if cynical truth applies to that hideous competition in the world by which every individual who does not inherit a fortune is confronted. The great Bentham long since pointed out that the motive spring, and the necessary motive spring, of human endeavor, is self-interest; and he equally pointed out that the consequences would certainly be obscure, and in his judgment would be unfortunate, if every individual began to regulate his or her life not upon his or her own interests but upon some supposed interest of others. And, indeed, a very cautious mind might stagger before such a possibility. No creature in the world—human, animal, or, it might also be added, vegetable—has ever regulated his, her or its life upon a basis such as that under consideration. And when it is considered that the world has already lasted for some millions (or billions) of years, and that countless billions of billions of breathing creatures have inhabited this world in that period, an experience