WOODS AND TREES—KRECKER 311 
tism in the field of economics. With changing times come changing 
economic principles. 
Organic evolution with its handmaiden, natural selection, has de- 
stroyed the sociological equalitarianism of the French Revolution. 
All men may be equal before the law; they are not equal before the bar 
of life. Gone, too, is the categorical dictum’as a basis for morality 
and in its place has come racial experience, those standards which have 
survival value for the race. Morality in this light comes to mean 
allegiance to that code which will enable one’s countrymen to live and 
to have life more abundantly. For those who may mourn the passing 
of the categorical standard, let me say that racial survival is a far 
more exacting standard than one which, perchance, permits of com- 
pensation by doing penance. The youthful monkey merrily swinging 
from limb to limb who misjudges his mark gets no second chance and 
leaves no descendants. It is, indeed, easier for a camel to pass through 
the needle’s eye than to cheat the laws of life. 
There is tonight no time, even if this could be considered an appro- 
priate place, in which to trace all the ramifications of our racial expe- 
rience as a standard by which we may order our lives. However, I 
should like to enlarge upon one phase of our experience which does 
appear to be peculiarly applicable to the present state of world affairs. 
Julian Huxley,’ in discussing man’s achievements points out, as have 
others, that “the next step of greater control must be over man him- 
self * * * through (among other methods) doing away with 
nationalistic drives and superimposing an international form of gov- 
ernment on the world.” To a biologist there straightway comes the 
question, what evidence have we that cooperation is any more success- 
ful than isolation as a biological method? Has not the arch isolation- 
ist, Amoeba, survived for millions of years and have not thousands of 
other rugged individualists been successful among the animal hordes? 
That interrogation immediately poses another—what is success? And 
to answer one must differentiate between survival and mastery. An 
animal, all of us, may survive through a variety of devious subterfuges 
and expedients, the common mark of which is that they entail sub- 
servience. However, success in fullest measure is mastery over condi- 
tions. If organic evolution has any significance it is the story of how 
living material has, through the cooperative actions of its subdivided 
units, approached, if it has not yet attained, mastery. 
Tam fully aware of the fact that organic evolution does not of neces- 
sity proceed along a straight-line principle, that life has followed a 
thousand and one devious pathways and on occasion has even retro- 
gressed ; but the fact remains, nevertheless, that at each level on which 
™Man stands alone, 1940. 
619830—45. 21 
