22 EVOLUTION AND ETHICS 



vm 



/ Of the more thoroughgoing of the multitudinous 

 attempts to apply the principles of cosmic evolu- 

 tion, or what are supposed to be such, to social 

 and political problems, which have appeared of late 

 years, a considerable proportion appear to me to 

 be based upon the notion that human society is 

 competent to furnish, from its own resources, an 

 administrator of the kind I have imagined. The 

 pigeons, in short, are to be their own Sir John 

 Sebright. 1 A despotic government, whether indi- 

 vidual or collective, is to be endowed with the 

 preternatural intelligence, and with what, I am 

 afraid, many will consider the preternatural ruth- 

 lessness, required for the purpose of carrying out 

 the principle of improvement by selection, with- the 

 somewhat drastic thoroughness upon which the 

 success of the method depends. Experience cer- 

 tainly does not justify us in limiting the ruthless- 

 ness of individual " saviours of society " ; and, on 

 the well-known grounds of the aphorism which 

 denies both body and soul to corporations, it seems 

 probable (indeed the belief is not without support 

 in history) that a collective despotism, a mob got 

 to believe in its own divine right by demagogic 

 missionaries, would be capable of more thorough 



Not that the conception of such a society is necessarily based 

 upon the idea of evolution. The Platonic state testifies to the 

 contrary. 



