128 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 



together. I myself think the protective tariff to be a case of 

 retrogression, but that does not prevent me from agreeing with 

 its many ardent and even candid sponsors that it is an im- 

 portant adjustment to life-conditions. I regard the League of 

 Nations as the only practical and working proposition in the 

 field of international relations; others think it a foolish and 

 retrogressive measure; but all of us could agree that it is a 

 widely accepted adjustment, now under test. Slavery was once 

 an adjustment that everyone believed in. The time came when 

 conditions changed and there arose a difference of opinion as 

 to whether it was good or bad, progressive or retrogressive. 

 Now it has come to be regarded as a maladjustment. But, 

 whatever the judgment upon it at various times, anyone can 

 see that it has been one of the ways into which men naturally 

 fell in meeting the conditions of life as presented. 



I have used, perhaps, a disproportionate amount of space 

 in seeking to enforce this point; but I have done so de- 

 liberately, because there is no other range in which people are 

 so wont to set up private and local standards, upon which 

 they then assess all things, as they are in the range of social 

 life. If many are disposed, petulantly or dismally, to despair 

 of organic evolution because it does not support their ideas of 

 progress which it never set out to do, any more than it adver- 

 tised to explain the origin of life how much more darkly 

 would they despair of a social evolution that lays no claim to 

 be progressive. Man's dearest interests are vitally involved 

 in his social life; in fact, what discouraged Adams and others 

 with Darwinism was not its givings in the organic field, but 

 its fallings-short, in promise, of their hopes in the social field 

 into which it was speedily and incontinently dragged by the 

 almost instinctive tendency to "reason from analogy." 



I cannot go into this last matter of how conclusions were 

 drawn concerning the nature and life of human society from 

 the nature and life of organisms. It was partly Darwin's fault 



