THE TRIUMPH OF THE BEST. 81 



by no means perfect ; but they were more advanced, more 

 moral and better in this respect than any other nation of 

 their time, cultured Greece not excepted. Yet even the 

 strength of the Romans was not the physical force of a 

 ferocious bull ; it was the moral strength of courage. 



It will thus be seen that morality affords the power 

 to survive, and if the primitive savage was not moral in 

 the present acceptation of the word, he was in his time 

 relatively the most moral being on earth, and this gave 

 him more strength than toughness or shrewdness could 

 ever afford. 



Prof. Huxley declares in other passages of the same 

 essay : 



"The history of civilization that is, of society on the other 

 hand, is the record of the attempts which the human race has made 

 to escape from this position. * * * 



"But the effort of ethical man to work toward a moral end by 

 no means abolished, perhaps has hardly modified, the deep-seated 

 impulses which impel the natural man to follow his non-moral 

 course." 



Professor Huxley adds with special reference to the 

 civilization of the English nation of to-day : 



"We not only are, but, under penalty of starvation, we are 

 bound to be, a nation of shopkeepers. But other nations also lie 

 under the same necessity of keeping shop, and some of them deal 

 in the same goods as ourselves. Our customers naturally seek to 

 get the most and the best in exchange for their produce. If our 

 goods are inferior to those of our competitors, there is no ground 

 compatible with the sanity of the buyers, which can oe alleged, 

 why they should not prefer the latter. And, if that result should 

 ever take place on a large and general scale, five or six millions of 

 us would soon have nothing to eat. We know what the cotton 

 famine was ; and we can therefore form some notion of what a dearth 

 of customers would be. 



"Judging by an ethical standard, nothing can be less satis- 

 factory than the position in which we find ourselves. In a real, 

 though incomplete, degree we have attained the condition of peace 

 which is the main object of social organization (and it may, for 

 argument's sake, be assumed that we desire nothing but that which 



