532 LAWS OP MULTIPLICATION. 



limit this progress tends. So long as the fertility of the 

 race is more than sufficient to balance the diminution by 

 deaths, population must continue to increase. So long as 

 population continues to increase, there must be pressure on 

 the means of subsistence. And so long as there is pressure 

 on the means of subsistence, further mental development 

 must go on, and further diminution of fertility must result; 

 provided that the actions and reactions which have been 

 described are not artificially interfered with. I append this 

 qualifying clause advisedly, and especially emphasize it, be- 

 cause these actions and reactions have been hitherto, and 

 are now, greatly interfered with by governments, and the 

 continuance of the interferences may retard, if not stop, 

 that further evolution which would else go on. 



I refer to those hindrances to the survival of the fittest 

 which in earlier times resulted from the undiscriminating 

 charities of monasteries and in later times from the opera- 

 tion of Poor Laws. Of course if the competition which 

 increasing pressure of population entails, is prevented from 

 acting on a considerable part of the community, such part, 

 saved from the needed intellectual and moral stress, will not 

 undergo any further mental development; and must ever 

 tend to leave a posterity, and an increasing posterity, in 

 which none of that higher individuation which checks 

 genesis takes place. Such State-meddlings with the natural 

 play of actions and reactions produce a further evil equally 

 great or greater. For those who are not self-maintained, or 

 but partially self-maintained, are supplied with the means 

 they lack by the better members of the community; and 

 these better members have thus not only to support them- 

 selves and their offspring, but also to support or aid the 

 inferior members and their offspring. The under-working of 

 one part is accompanied by the over-working of the other 

 part by a working which at each stage of progress exceeds 

 that which the normal conditions necessitate, and results 

 sometimes in illness, premature age, or death, or in lessened 



