DARWIN'S METAPHORICAL PHRASE 41 



have lost much of their strength, the polar bears 

 because they have to live on seals, creatures more 

 active and intelligent than themselves, and so they 

 cannot run the risk of losing any chance that comes 

 their way. 



Apart from the obtaining of food, the strength, 

 ferocity and weapons of all the higher animals are 

 employed only in defence of themselves, their mates 

 or their young, or in the rivalries of sex, and even in 

 the difficult conditions of captivity males can usually 

 be kept together except in the breeding season. It 

 is, moreover, too obvious a truth for elaboration 

 that civilized man has developed fashions of obtain- 

 ing food, more economic and successful than those 

 involving the slaughter of his fellow-men. 



Looking through the animal kingdom as a whole, 

 and remembering that the vegetable kingdom is as 

 much subject and responsive to whatsoever may be 

 the law of organic evolution, I find no grounds for 

 interpreting Darwin's " metaphorical phrase," the 

 struggle for existence, in any sense that would make 

 it a justification for war between nations. It is my 

 business just now to refute a misconception of the 

 struggle rather than to explain what it is. But, if 

 the latter were my task, I could adduce from the 

 writings of Darwin himself, and from those of later 

 naturalists, a thousand instances taken from the 

 animal kingdom in which success has come about by 

 means analogous with the cultivation of all the 

 peaceful arts, the raising of the intelligence, and the 

 heightening of the emotions of love and pity. 



