jo Darwin's Law Misunderstood [1892 



" Constance, Lady Lothian, I knew as a very pretty woman thirty 

 years ago, with her invalid husband (elder brother of my friend 

 Schomberg Kerr), of whom a fine portrait exists by Watts. On our 

 way home we renewed our argument as applied especially to the Irish. 

 ' They ought to have been exterminated long ago,' said Gerald, ' but it 

 is too late now.' He is confident, however, of defeating Home Rule 

 by Constitutional means." 



Gerald's argument, I recollect, was based on an application to inter- 

 racial politics of Darwin's law of the selection of the fittest, or rather 

 of what is an exaggerated interpretation of that law. Those who put 

 forward this view forget that Man by the abnormal development of his 

 reasoning powers and his invention of lethal weapons, has put himself 

 outside the unconscious working of the natural law. Darwin is in no 

 way responsible for this application of his doctrine, as is clearly seen 

 in the sympathy he shows with the backward races of mankind, es- 

 pecially in his "Voyage of the Beagle." Though individual strives 

 with individual in the natural world, there is never a combination of a 

 whole species or race to make war with and destroy a feebler race. 

 This was my argument with Gerald. Three years later he was ap- 

 pointed by Lord Salisbury and his brother Arthur, Chief Secretary for 

 Ireland, and proved a kindly ruler while in office there, being by nature 

 an altogether amiable, kind-hearted man, but infected, as so many of 

 our Imperialists were beginning to be at that date, by the politico- 

 scientific doctrines so crudely preached in Germany. 



On the 7th of August I started on a driving tour, the first of many 

 such I made in after years, taking the northern road as far as Streatley, 

 then crossing the Berkshire Downs westward, and travelling over grass 

 a quite uninhabited country, " as desolate as parts of Mesopotamia, and 

 in the bright sunlight very beautiful, coveys of young partridges run- 

 ning here and there tamely in front of the carriage, and so as far as 

 Chilton, where I had the good fortune to find entertainment at the 

 rectory house of the parson, Morland, a worthy man, living alone in that 

 lonely place and glad to see a stranger, a hospitality rare of its kind in 

 civilized England, and so on to Kelmscott, where I stayed a couple of 

 nights. I found there my friend John Henry Middleton, the Cambridge 

 Professor, an old ally of Morris's, and intimate in former days with 

 Rossetti. Middleton had been a considerable traveller in out-of-the- 

 way places, and he narrated to me in detail what I had already heard 

 him tell, his experience in Morocco with a Moorish magician. This is 

 his account of the incident : 



" He was travelling in 1879 about half way between Tetuan and 

 Morocco, and one evening an old man came to his camp mounted on an 

 ass, with a boy as servant. The man said he was a magician, and 

 proposed to perform three wonders ; the first to throw a ball of twine 



