NATURAL SELECTION, ETC. 89 



he claimed the privilege of addressing the house, on 

 the proper ground that he had been "brought up 

 among the pigs, and knew all about them " — so we 

 were brought up among cows and cabbages ; and the 

 lowing of cattle, the cackle of hens, and the cooing of 

 pigeons, were sounds native and pleasant to our ears. 

 So " Variation under Domestication " dealt with fa- 

 miliar subjects in a natural way, and gently intro- 

 duced (; Variation under Nature," which seemed likely 

 enough. Then follows " Struggle for Existence " — a 

 principle which we experimentally know to be true 

 and cogent — bringing the comfortable assurance, that 

 man, even upon Leviathan Hobbes's theory of society, 

 is no worse than the rest of creation, since all Nature 

 is at war, one species with another, and the nearer 

 kindred the more internecine — bringing in thousand- 

 fold confirmation and extension of the Malthusian 

 doctrine that population tends far to outrun means of 

 subsistence throughout the animal and vegetable world, 

 and has to be kept down by sharp preventive checks ; 

 so that not more than one of a hundred or a thousand 

 of the individuals whose existence is so wonderfully 

 and so sedulously provided for ever comes to anything, 

 under ordinary circumstances ; so the lucky and the 

 6trong must prevail, and the weaker and ill-favored must 

 perish; and then follows, as naturally as one sheep 

 follows another, the chapter on "Natural Selection," 

 Darwin's cheval de bataille, which is very much the 

 Napoleonic doctrine that Providence favors the strong- 

 est battalions — that, since manv more individuals are 

 born than can possibly survive, those individuals and 

 those variations which possess any advantage, however 



