392 THE INFLUENCE OF THE DARWINIAN THEORY. 



pleases, without any consideration for the welfare of the society 

 which has enabled him to accumulate his wealth, is one of those 

 customs which, as a result of modern ethical developments, is 

 already undergoing considerable modification. When his accumu- 

 lations consist of what is really unearned increment the injustice 

 becomes more glaring ; and when those to whom he bequeaths his 

 gains are obviously unfitted to use the enormous powers which 

 great wealth places in their hands, the evil effects upon society 

 are still more patent. It is artificial selection carried to an absurd 

 and pernicious extreme, often giving undue advantages to the least 

 desirable types of character. The millionaire is rapidly coming to 

 be regarded not only as a social, but also as a moral, monstrosity. 

 One of the more enlightened ones has already enunciated the doc- 

 trine that no man should die rich. The new ethics, in the interest 

 of the general good, will insist that no man should live unduly 

 rich. It will emphasise the fact that robbery by the individual 

 from the community is as immoral as robbery by the individual 

 from other individuals. And it will point out that such robbery 

 produces depraved and undesirable types in three directions — types 

 v/hich become ethically diseased or depraved by the excessive lux- 

 ury and power which inordinate wealth gives ; other types which 

 become parasitic on the former, and which help to spread through- 

 out the community a truly loathsome spirit of subservience and ser- 

 vility ; and a third type, which is deprived sometimes of the very 

 necessaries of physical health, and often of the opportunity for 

 intellectual and artistic development by the unjust usurpations of 

 the two first-named. To use an expressive phrase of Mr. Ruskin's 

 — just as modern industrial developments exterminated the " crag- 

 barons " of feudalism, so the higher social conscience developed by 

 evolutionary ethics will, in time, exterminate the ** bag-barons " of 

 modern commerce and finance. As a means towards a more intel- 

 ligent natural selection and survival of the most desirable types, it 

 will urge that all unearned increment, whether of land or other 

 forms of wealth, should be handed over to the State and used for 

 the general good, more particularly in the endowment of childhood 

 and the various forms of education, so that the younger members 

 of the community may enter the struggle for existence on fair 

 terms. As Mr. Francis Galton points out : — 



" The best form of civilisation in respect to the improvement of 

 the race, would be one in which society was not costlj^; where in- 

 comes were chiefly derived from professional sources, arid not much 

 through inheritance, where every lad had a chance of showing his 

 abilities, and, if highly gifted, was enabled to achieve a first-class 

 education and entrance into professional life, by the liberal help of 

 the exhibitions and scholarships which he had gained in his early 

 youth." 



It would take me too far afield to attempt to forecast or discuss 

 the great changes which such a policy would bring in the evolution 

 of new industrial, aesthetic, and moral types. It is sufficient to say 

 that progress has two roots — the economic and the spiritual — the 

 latter including the intellectual, aesthetical, and moral relationships 

 of men, each having its separate growths or causal series, and it is 

 by the reciprocal action of the two that human evolution, or moral 

 and social progress, is made not only possible, but, I think I rnay 

 say, inevitable. In any case, it is obvious that just as the evolution 



