610 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the securing of an orderly social life by maintaining these conditions, 

 very few see that their further function, and in one sense more important 

 function, is that of fitting men to fulfil these conditions spontaneously. 

 The two functions are inseparable. From the biological laws we have 

 been contemplating, it is, on the one hand, an inevitable corollary that, 

 if these conditions are maintained, human nature will gradually adapt 

 itself to them ; while, on the other hand, it is an inevitable corollary 

 that, by no other discipline than subjection to these conditions, can fit- 

 ness to the social state be produced. Enforce these conditions, and 

 adaptation to them will continue. Relax these conditions, and by so 

 much there will be a cessation of the adaptive changes. Abolish these 

 conditions, and, after the consequent social dissolution, there will com- 

 mence (unless they are reestablished) an adaptation to the conditions 

 then resulting those of savage life. These are conclusions from which 

 there is no escape, if man is subject to the laws of life in common with 

 living things in general. 



It may, indeed, be rightly contended that, if those who are but little 

 fitted to the social state are rigorously subjected to these conditions, evil 

 will result ; intolerable restraint, if it does not deform or destroy life, will 

 be followed by violent reaction. We are taught by analogy, that greatly- 

 changed conditions from which there is no escape fail to produce adapta- 

 tion because they produce death. Men having constitutions fitted for 

 one climate, cannot be fitted to an extremely-different climate by persist- 

 ently living in it, because they do not survive, generation after generation. 

 Such changes can be brought about only by slow spreadings of the race 

 through intermediate regions having intermediate climates, to which 

 successive generations are accustomed little by little. And doubtless 

 the like holds mentally. The intellectual and emotional natures re- 

 quired for high civilization are not to be obtained by forcing on the 

 completely-uncivilized the needful activities and restraints in unquali- 

 fied forms : gradual decay and death, rather than adaptation, would 

 result. But so long as a society's institutions are indigenous, no danger 

 is to be apprehended from a too-strict maintenance of the conditions 

 to the ideally-best social life ; since there can exist neither the re- 

 quired appreciation of them nor the required appliances for enforcing 

 them. Only in those abnormal cases where a race of one type is sub- 

 ject to a race of much-superior type, is this qualification pertinent. 

 In our own case, as in the cases of all societies having populations ap- 

 proximately homogeneous in character, and having institutions evolved 

 by that character, there may rightly be aimed at the greatest rigor 

 possible. The merciful policy, no less than the just policy, is that of 

 insisting that these all-essential requirements of self-support and non- 

 aggression shall be conformed to the just policy, because failing to 

 protect the better or more-adapted natures against the worse or less- 

 adapted ; the merciful policy, because the pains accompanying the 

 process of adaptation to the social state must be gone through, and it 



