THE MESSAGE AND PEOMISES TO MANKIND. 245 



chief characteristic is the freer scope allowed to individual 

 efforts, and in which the prizes are now more than 

 formerly to individual energy and ability. By the pro- 

 longed process of natural selection, which essentially 

 implies competition, as alone giving Nature's selection 

 free play, those men will infallibly be found and elected 

 to continue the race who have not only brains and bodily 

 organs fitter for the work involving keener competition, 

 but who will also find a special pleasure in the keenness 

 of the struggle.* They will enjoy the contest, as men in 

 ruder ages " drank delight of battle with their peers," in 

 their coarser trials to find the fit for the different and 

 simpler conditions of life. 



It is true, indeed, that natural selection, having in 

 view only the perfection of the type and species, often 

 presses heavily and mercilessly upon the individual. 

 With a grand goal in view, Nature, in steering towards 

 it, seems utterly regardless of the means employed to 

 reach it. Blind and careless, even cruel and merciless, 

 she shows herself to the existing units that are not aids 

 and instruments to her further aims. Her path is con- 

 stantly over the prostrate bodies of the present slain, 

 indifferent, looking only to her goal the happier better 

 species hereafter. And this is her only justification. 

 But in later times and in our own day there has arisen 

 the protest of human nature against f the cruelty of 

 objective impersonal Nature. In the case of men them- 

 selves, Nature as human nature, begins to relent in her 

 severity. There has come a mitigation in the sterner 

 aspects of the fierce competitive struggle, as also in the 

 consequences to the conquered, now less disastrous than 

 in former less humane times. There is quarter to the 

 vanquished in the social battle of life, as there is in 



* See Spencer's Principles of Biology, vol. ii. p. 503. 



