20 EVOLUTION AND ETHICS I 



where every plant and every lower animal should 

 be adapted to human wants, and would perish if 

 human supervision and protection were with- 

 drawn ; where men themselves should have been 

 , selected, with a view to their efficiency as 

 \organs for the performance of the functions of a 

 'perfected society. And this' ideal polity would 

 have been brought about, not by gradually adjust- 

 ing the men to the conditions around them, but 

 by creating artificial conditions for them ; not by 

 allowing the free play of the struggle for existence, 

 ) but by excluding that struggle ; and by substitut- 

 ing selection directed towards the administrator's 

 ideal for the selection it exercises. 



.... 



But the Eden would have its serpent, and a 

 very subtle beast too. Man shares with the rest 

 of the living world the mighty instinct of repro- 

 duction and its consequence, the tendency 1<> 

 multiply with great rapidity. The better the 

 measures of the administrator achieved their 

 object, the more completely the destructive 

 agencies of the state of nature were defeated, 

 the less would that multiplication be checked. 



On the other hand, within the colony, the 

 enforcement of peace, which deprives every man 

 of the power to take away the means of ^existence 

 from another, simply because he is the stronger, 



