.SOCIAL EVOLUTION 257 



And why are you as you are ? Merely an incident, 

 what appears to our minds as an accident, that you 

 found a host in the parent in the exceptional position 

 of life in which you were born. 1 Is there much to 

 boast about in this accident ? And at death you are 

 subject to the same inexorable laws as the most abject 

 beggar. What is your future in the regeneration 

 in the Eternity before you ? Is it your lot to be 

 one of those poor wretches which it is now your 

 principle to put your heel on ? Away, we say, away, 

 you must say if you will think, with the condition of 

 human existence which breeds weakness, wretchedness, 

 hopeless unutterable misery. Now, for the first time in 

 the history of mankind, we have a common aim. Let 

 us strive to cultivate it. Nature is helping us. All 

 Nature's efforts are to stamp out, often at the earliest 

 phase, the weakest, the least virile, and intellectually 

 the lowest. Civilization is exterminating savage life. 

 The savage regenerates in the new order of things. 

 We do not yet recognize the fact, but it is there. It is 



1 "It is necessary, if we would understand the nature of the 

 problem with which we have to deal, to disabuse our minds of the 

 very prevalent idea that the doctrines of socialism are the heated 

 imaginings of unbalanced brains. They are nothing of the kind ; 

 they are the truthful unexaggerated teaching of sober reason. Nor 

 can we stop here. It is evident that any organisation of society with 

 a system of rewards according to natural ability can have no ultimate 

 sanction in reason for all the individuals. For the teaching of 

 reason undoubtedly is that as we are all the creatures of inheritance 

 and environment, none of us being responsible for his abilities or for 

 the want of them, so, their welfare in the present existence being 

 just as important to the ungifted as to the gifted, any regulation 

 that the former should fare any Avorse than the latter must be ulti- 

 mately, however we may obscure it, a rule of brute force pure and 

 simple." (" Social Evolution," Benjamin Kidd, 1895, p. 82.) 



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