SOCIAL EVOLUTION 119 



This is what some writers on science and social 

 questions (like Mr. Benjamin Kidd) forget — or do 

 not know. "Darwinian" progress, or progress by 

 painful struggle and natural selection, is a great 

 fact. But it is a description of the past, not an ideal 

 of the present. It is the method of unintelligent 

 nature, costly and slow. Darwin himself — a very 

 gentle and humane man — drew a distinction between 

 "natural" and "artificial" selection. Natural selec- 

 tion we have seen plenty of. Artificial selection is 

 Vv^hen man breeds new species of pigeons or dogs or 

 sheep. It is intelligent, economical, and speedy. It 

 has been greatly developed in our time, when new 

 fruits and flowers are created speedily and cleanly, as 

 Luther Burbank does in California. Darwin would, 

 of course, have said, if you had asked him, that to 

 set up "nature's" way (that is to say, remember, 

 unintelligent nature's blind way) as a model for 

 intelligent man would be the height of absurdity. 

 But Darwin shrank very naturally from politics — all 

 social work was "politics" or "Radicalism" in his 

 time — and was concerned only with the past or with 

 non-human nature. Darwinism has not the slightest 

 bit of hostility to social idealism. It has nothing to 



do with it. 



What Darwin did not know as well as we do to-day 

 was the importance of social evolution. Dr. Russcl 

 Wallace tried to show this, but his work is rather 

 confused. I pointed out as we went along that dur- 



