SOCIETAL EVOLUTION 145 



on at the polls. Ballots replace bullets. But selection goes on 

 just the same, so long as there is a competition, with winners 

 and losers. Bagehot 7 has an important chapter on the "Age 

 of Discussion," from which it appears that the voice and the 

 pen have somewhat ousted the sword in the settlement of 

 codes and policies. 



This is not the place to go fully into the various forms taken 

 by societal selection. It is plain enough, however, that there 

 are plenty of them. It is only because they are so much a 

 matter of course, being registered daily in the press for anyone 

 whose attention has been called to their bearing upon societal 

 evolution, that it sometimes comes as a shock, especially since 

 we are nourished so largely upon romance and phantasms, to 

 see that competition is always the indispensable precondition to 

 development. If we think we have got on since primitive 

 times, we may set it down to the diversities produced by varia- 

 tion and shown up in the incessant conflicts between men ad- 

 hering to their differing codes. There is no fault to be found 

 with the effort to minimize the tragedies of competition by 

 setting up rules of the game; but those who dream of universal 

 equalization, communalization, and pacification are proposing 

 to abandon the agencies which have brought us from savagery 

 to the civilization which we now acclaim. 



The recurrent dispute about societal selection is as to 

 whether or not men deliberately plan out and realize society's 

 destiny. The plants and animals are supposed by most people 

 to be under the sway of a vast force which they can in no way 

 control; natural selection is thought to operate over them and 

 to determine their destiny, as it were, from without. So far as 

 they are concerned, they seem to be totally unconscious of 

 what is going on, and have no say about their own destiny. 

 But men do not like to believe that about themselves, nor about 

 the nation to which they belong, nor even about the human 



7 Bagehot, W., "Physics and politics," 1902, ch. V. 



