THE GOSPEL, AND THE SOCIAL CREED OF SCIENCE. 



pass again into communism the final goal of civilization, 

 if society be not previously dissolved. The primitive form 

 of society, according to the historians of evolution, was 

 communistic ; * but without pressing this point of history 

 in the remote past, our present system of unlimited 

 competition is a wholly modern thing, and moreover, 

 corrigible or wholly removable if found hurtful to the 

 total social body. The socialist maintains that the system 

 of competition, the essence of our present industrial and 

 social system, is hurtful and vicious, the fount and source 

 of all our social evils ; so much so indeed, that, being 

 given its bare notion and type, all the dark catalogue 

 of social evils and shames, pauperism, drunkenness, 

 prostitution, could be deduced from it by the thinker 

 in his study, nay, by any man of intelligence, with strict 

 logical and almost mathematical rigour, so close and 

 clear is the dependence of the one on the other of our 

 present evils on our present system. The thinker might 

 deduce our griefs from our present conception of society 

 and its constitution, without taking the trouble of sub- 

 jecting his conclusions to the terrible verification which 

 our criminal statistics, as well as the lanes and alleys of 

 our great cities, so abundantly furnish. 



But our new Evolution-Science, after examining the 

 social maladies with the tranquillity becoming to science, 

 offers for cure and comfort her formula of " the survival 

 of the fittest" in the long struggle of existence pro- 

 tracted for generations. Our evolution doctors, with 

 professional gravity and calmness, write out their pre- 

 scriptions for society's weal of "natural selection and 

 the survival of the fittest." They give us, moreover, the 

 old time-honoured, well-intentioned professional advice, 



* See, on this point, Spencer's Principles of Sociology ; Lubbock's 

 Origin of Civilization ; Maine's Village. Communities. 



