ETHICS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. Z33 



still be a Imnting ground for savages ? Is it better that a country 

 should contain a million red men or twenty millions of civilized 

 whites ? Undoubtedly the moralist will say with truth that the 

 methods of extirpation adopted by Spaniards and Englishmen 

 were detestable. I need not say that I agree with him and hope 

 that such methods may be abolished wherever any remnant of 

 them exists. But I say so partly just because I believe in the 

 struggle for existence. This process underlies morality, and oper- 

 ates whether we are moral or not. The most civilized race that 

 which has the greatest knowledge, skill, power of organization 

 will, I hold, have an inevitable advantage in the struggle, even if 

 it does not use the brutal means which are superfluous as well as 

 cruel. All the natives who lived in America a hundred years 

 ago would be dead now in any case, even if they had invariably 

 been treated with the greatest humanity, fairness, and considera- 

 tion. Had they been unable to suit themselves to new conditions 

 of life, they would have suffered a euthanasia instead of a partial 

 extirpation ; and had they suited themselves they would either 

 have been absorbed or become a useful part of the population. 

 To abolish the old brutal method is not to abolish the struggle 

 for existence, but to make the result depend upon a higher order 

 of qualities than those of the mere piratical viking. 



Mr. Pearson has been telling us in his most interesting book 

 that the negro may not improbably hold his own in Africa. I 

 can not say that I regard this as an unmixed evil. Why should 

 there not be parts of the world in which races of inferior intelli- 

 gence or energy should hold their own ? I am not so anxious to 

 see the whole earth covered by an indefinite multiplication of the 

 cockney type. But I only quote the suggestion for another rea- 

 son. Till recent years the struggle for existence was carried on as 

 between Europeans and negroes by simple violence and brutality. 

 The slave trade and its consequences have condemned the whole 

 continent to barbarism. That undoubtedly was part of the strug- 

 gle for existence. But if Mr. Pearson's guess should be verified, 

 the results have been so far futile as well as disastrous. The negro 

 has been degraded, and yet, after all our brutality, we can not 

 take his place. Therefore, besides the enormous evils to slave- 

 trading countries themselves, the lowering of their moral tone, 

 the substitution of piracy for legitimate commerce, and the 

 degradation of the countries which bought the slaves, the supe- 

 rior race has not even been able to suppress the inferior. But the 

 abolition of this monstrous evil does not involve the abolition but 

 the humanization of the struggle. The white man, however mer- 

 ciful he becomes, may gradually extend over such parts of the 

 country as are suitable to him, and the black man will hold the 

 rest, and acquire such arts and civilization as he is capable of 



VOL. XLIT. 19 



