152 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



cation must be developed ; such modification of the intellect as shall qualify it 

 for its new tasks must take place ; and, above all, there must be gained the 

 ability to sacrifice a small immediate gratification for a future great one. The 

 state of transition will, of course, be an unhappy state. Misery inevitably re- 

 sults from incongruity between constitutions and conditions. All these evils 

 which afilict us, and seem to the uninitiated the obvious consequences of this or 

 that removable cause, are unavoidable attendants on the adaptation now in 

 progress. Humanity is being pressed against the inexorable necessities of its 

 new position — is being molded into harmony with them, and has to bear the 

 resulting unhappiness as best it can. The process must be undergone, and the 

 sufi'eriDgs must be endured. Ko power on earth, no cunningly-devised laws of 

 statesmen, no world-rectifying schemes of the humane, no communist panaceas, 

 no reforms that men ever did broach or ever will broach, can diminish them one 

 jot. Intensified they may be, and are ; and, in preventing their intensification, 

 the philanthropic will find ample scope for exertion. But there is bound up 

 with the change a normal amount of suffering, which can not be lessened with- 

 out altering the very laws of life. . . . 



Of course, in so far as the severity of this process is mitigated by the spon- 

 taneous sympathy of men for each other, it is proper that it should be miti- 

 gated; albeit there is unquestionable harm done when sympathy is shown, 

 without any regard to ultimate results. But the drawbacks hence arising are 

 nothing like commensurate with the benefits otherwise conferred. Only when 

 tins sympathy prompts to a breach of equity — only when it originates an inter- 

 ference forbidden by the law of equal freedom — only when, by so doing, it sus- 

 pends in some particular department of life the relationship between constitu- 

 tion and conditions, does it work pure evil. Then, however, it defeats its own 

 end. Instead of diminishing sufi'ering, it eventually increases it. It favors the 

 multiplication of those worst fitted for existence, and, by consequence, hinders 

 the multiplication of those best fitted for existence — leaving, as it does, less room 

 for them. It tends to fill the world with those to whom life will bring most 

 pain, and tends to keep out of it those to whom life will bring most pleasure. 

 It inflicts positive misery, and prevents positive happiness. — "Social Statics," 

 pp. 322-325 and pp. 380, 381 (edition of 1851). 



The lapse of a third of a century since these passages were pub- 

 lished has brought me no reason for retreating from the position taken 

 up in them. Contrariwise, it has brought a vast amount of evidence 

 strengthening that position. The beneficial results of the survival of 

 the fittest prove to be immeasurably greater than those above indi- 

 cated. The process of " natural selection," as Mr. Darwin called it, 

 co-operating with a tendency to variations and to inheritance of varia- 

 tions, he has shown to be a chief cause (though not, I believe, the sole 

 cause) of that evolution through which all living things, beginning with 

 the lowest and diverging and rediverging as they evolved, have reached 

 their present degrees of organization and adaptation to their modes of 

 life. So familiar has this truth become that some apology seems 

 needed for naming it. And yet, strange to say, now that this truth 

 is recognized by most cultivated people — now that the beneficent 

 working of the survival of the fittest has been so impressed on them 

 that, much more than people in past times, they might be expected to 



