170 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



as the young one is of little "worth either to itself or to others, and 

 benefits received must be inversely as the power or ability of the re- 

 ceiver. 



" Throughout the rest of its life each adult gets benefit in proportion to merit, 

 reward in proportion to desert, merit and desert being understood as ability to 

 fulfil all the requirements of life. Placed in competition with members of its 

 own species, and in antagonism w T ith members of other species, it dwindles and 

 gets killed off, or thrives and propagates, according as it is ill-endowed or well- 

 endowed. If the benefits received by each individual were proportionate to its 

 inferiority, if, as a consequence, multiplication of the inferior was furthered and 

 multiplication of the superior hindered, progressive degradation would result, 

 and eventually the degenerated species would fail to hold its ground in presence 

 of antagonistic species and competing species." (Page 65.) 



"The poverty of the incapable, the distress that comes upon the imprudent, 

 the starvation of the idle, and the shouldering aside of the weak by the strong, 

 which leave so many ' in shallows and in miseries,' are the decrees of a large, 

 far-seeing benevolence." (Page 67.) 



When the State, guided by a wrongly inspired philanthropy, pre- 

 vents the application of this wise law, instead of diminishing suffering 

 it increases it. " It tends to fill the world with those to whom life 

 will bring most pain, and tends to keep out of it those to whom life 

 will bring most pleasure. It inflicts positive misery, and prevents posi- 

 tive happiness." ("Social Statics," p. 381, edit. 1851.) 



The law that Mr. Herbert Spencer desires society to adopt is sim- 

 ply Darwin's law " the survival of the fittest." Mr. Spencer expresses 

 his astonishment that at the present day, more than at any other period 

 of the world's history, everything is done to favour the survival of 

 the unfittest, when, at the same time, the truth as revealed by Dar- 

 win, is admitted and accepted by an ever-growing number of educated 

 and influential people ! 



I have endeavoured to give a brief sketch of the line of argument 

 followed by Mr. Herbert Spencer. We will now see what reply can 

 be made to it. I think one chief point ought not to have escaped 

 the eminent writer. It is this : If the application of the Darwinian 

 law to the government of societies be really justifiable, is it not 

 strange that public opinion, not only in England, but in all other 

 countries, is so strenuously opposed to it, at an epoch which is be- 

 coming more and more enlightened, and when sociological studies 

 are pursued with so much interest? If the intervention of public 

 power for the improvement of the condition of the working-classes be 

 a contradiction of history, and a return to ancient militant society, 

 how is it that the country in which the new industrial organiza- 

 tion is the most developed that is to say, England is also the 

 country where State intervention is the most rapidly increasing, and 

 where opinion is at the same time pressing for these powers of inter- 

 ference to be still further extended ? There is no other land in which 



