TO THE POOK. 255 



signifying little. We must not be drunken nor im- 

 prudent ; we must get sound scientific knowledge, above 

 all, of the doctrines of evolution ; we must not rebel against 

 the laws of nature, or of life, or of the social organism. 

 To which the economist adds that the poor must not 

 have large families ; while the evolutionist further moves 

 that the species should not be recruited from its inferior 

 specimens its criminals, idlers, and imbeciles. As to 

 general regimen, we must let Nature have her course ; 

 above all, let natural selection, which is Nature's way, 

 have free and full play. Progress, improvement in the 

 health of society under these conditions, will be sure to 

 follow, though it will be slow. It must, in fact, be slow 

 in order to be sure. There is no hope in revolutions, but 

 only in evolution, and the latter is slow, very slow, we 

 are plainly told. The drastic heroic treatment by revolu- 

 tion is dangerous to the life of the body politic ; if it does 

 not kill, it may permanently debilitate or destroy the 

 constitution. Even legislators can do little to benefit or 

 improve men, certainly no speedy good result need be 

 looked for from their action. Even if legislation con- 

 templates a particular good to be realized, and aims 

 persistently at it, by the perversion and complication of 

 things, or by the irony of fate, a quite different result 

 and one wholly unexpected comes out. So teaches and 

 advises evolution, and the prophet and expounder of 

 evolution doctrine, Herbert Spencer. We* thank Science 

 and her teachers ; but happily also, we remember and 

 may remind the evolutionists of another of their doctrines 

 that there has always been and that there still is 

 another form in which the struggle for existence shows 

 itself, and one, moreover, in which the survivors would 

 not be the same, nor the fittest in the same sense, as in 

 the other form of the struggle approved of by the evolu- 



