94 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 



VIOLENCE 



There are those on the other hand to-day who 

 would bring about the reign of equity on earth by 

 violence. Foolish attempt. So long as men will to 

 live under the law of the jungle, the strong must pre- 

 vail over the weak. The clever, the crafty, the un- 

 scrupulous will continue to exploit and prey upon the 

 slow-witted, the single-minded, the honest. Violence, 

 apparently, can never cure these evils. Attempts to 

 wrest away superfluous wealth by violent means will, 

 as in the case of law, only rouse men's latent antagonism, 

 and make them all the harsher in their use and abuse 

 of wealth. Men are born with unequal talents. There 

 is no use evading the fact. It is patent to any one who 

 will open his eyes and look about him. When our 

 Declaration of Independence asserts that all men are 

 created equal, it refers to the equality of every human 

 being before the law, equality of political and civil 

 rights. Even in this restricted meaning of equality 

 it expressed an ideal rather than a fact, seeing that the 

 document was penned by a slave-holder. But it cer- 

 tainly never meant that men are born with equal 

 talents. The clever will always rule in the end. This 

 is what would seem to explain in part the failures of 

 the long line of communistic and socialistic communi- 

 ties which have endeavored to realize the ideal of equal 

 opportunity, of a commonwealth; inasmuch as com- 

 munism, by the very nature of it, cannot outlast more 

 than one or two generations of mankind because (unless 



