54 DARWINISM AND POLITICS. 



reason for surrounding each successive genera- 

 tion of individuals, from their youth upwards, 

 with institutions and laws and customs that 

 will promote good and hinder bad tendencies. 

 The moral significance of the organisation of 

 society can hardly be over-estimated. It is 

 little use preaching kindliness and considera- 

 tion for others and hoping that sympathetic 

 feelings will gradually become innate, if the 

 society into which individuals are born be 

 openly and confessedly a ceaseless struggle and 

 competition. For eighteen centuries a gospel 

 of peace and brotherhood has been preached 

 and talked ; but the child plays with a toy gun 

 and the youth sees the successful millionaire 

 held up as his model for imitation the man 

 who boasts that he is " self-made," and who, 

 as the American remarked, has by that boast 

 " taken a great responsibility off the Almighty."" 

 Not only education, but the very amusements, 

 and healthy exercises of school life are all in- 

 fected and corrupted by this diseased spirit of 

 competition. No wonder that those are scoffed 

 at or denounced who venture to think that a 

 society of rational beings might proceed more 

 rationally. From the fact that human societies. 



