212 THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE. 



and partly through the very civilization which it has 

 helped to create, the maligner power must disappear. 

 The Struggle for Life, as life's dynamic, can never 

 wholly cease. In the keenness of its energies, the 

 splendor of its stimulus, its bracing effect on char- 

 acter, its wholesome tensions throughout the whole 

 range of action, it must remain with us to the end. 

 But in the virulence of its animal qualities it must 

 surely pass away. There are those who, without 

 reflecting on this qualitative change, would govern 

 Society by the merely animal Struggle ; those who 

 claim for this the sanction of Nature, and lay down 

 the principle of selfishness as the eternally working 

 law. The eternal law, as -we shall presently see, 

 is unselfishness. But even the selfishness of early 

 Nature loses its sting with time ; the self that is in it 

 becomes a higher self ; and the world in which it acts 

 is so much a better world that if self gave full rein to 

 the animal it would be instantly extinguished. 



The amelioration of the Struggle for Life is the 

 most certain prophecy of Science. If this universe 

 is a moral universe, it was a necessity that sooner or 

 later this conflict should abate, that in the course of 

 Evolution this particular change should come, that 

 there should be put into the very machinery of Nature 

 that which should bring it about. And what do we 

 find? We find the Animal side of the Struggle for 

 Life attacked in such directions, and with such 

 weapons that its defeat is sure. These weapons are in 

 the armory of Nature ; they have been there from the 

 beginning ; and they are now engaged upon the enemy 

 so hotly and so openly that we can discover what 

 some of them are. The first is one which has begun 



