A RISTO CRA CY AND E VOL UTION 



Book II 

 Chapter 2 



The social 

 counterpart to 

 the Darwinian 

 struggle for 

 survival is to 

 be found in 

 the struggle of 

 labourers to 

 find employ- 

 ment. 



gress because he is himself more capable than his 

 contemporaries ; the other being that the fittest 

 fulfils his social function by fighting for his own hand, 

 without any reference to others, whereas the great 

 man fulfils his solely by influencing others. We are 

 now coming to a third point, which is, for practical 

 purposes, even more important than the preceding. 



The great-man theory, just like the theory of 

 Darwin, involves a competitive struggle. This 

 struggle is a struggle between great men ; and its 

 existence is a fact of too obvious a character to 

 have escaped the notice of even the most inaccurate 

 of our social evolutionists. But they one and all 

 of them have completely misunderstood its nature. 

 They have hastened to identify it with the Dar- 

 winian struggle for existence, from which it differs 

 in the most vital manner conceivable ; and, obscur- 

 ing it thus by a loose and misleading analogy, they 

 have managed to blind themselves to its entire 

 practical significance. The Darwinian struggle for 

 existence no doubt has its counterpart in the con- 

 temporary competition of labourers to find remunera- 

 tive employment, and in the fact that those who are 

 least successful in finding it would, if left to them- 

 selves, be continually dying off. In a progressive 

 country there is, or there always tends to be, a 

 larger number of would-be labourers than there is of 

 tasks which at the moment can be profitably assigned 

 to them. A struggle therefore is involved in obtain- 

 ing work of any kind ; and for the higher kinds of 

 work the struggle is very keen. But this is not the 



