PARTIAL CONCILIATION OF THE NEW AND OLD ETHICS. 401 



pity.* There is the fact of anger, the fact of antipathy, 

 together with a certain hardening of the heart naturally 

 produced as a sort of moral covering or protection by 

 the many shocks incident to our life of probation. There 

 is also, together with competition, the disastrous life of 

 chance, in part the result of overflowing population, in 

 part of our individual regime ; and these facts of com- 

 petition and chance, pressing more heavily on man in 

 modern times than in the days of feudalism, bring home 

 to the individual in the thick of the competitive and 

 pitiless struggle, the fact and the reminder that life is 

 still, in spite of our moral progress, in a real and most 

 serious sense, a struggle of each for himself, and a 

 struggle not merely against his competing fellows, but 

 also against the threatening chapter of contingencies 

 from within and without. Having reached the stage of 

 social progress called individualism, where each one is 

 entrusted with and must take care of himself, such a 

 state of things must exist ; and we must'accept the good 

 and evil of it together, the good being that we have 

 large individual liberty of action, as the natural comple- 

 ment of the state ; the evil that, under this system of 

 universal competition and individualism, where each one 

 thinks first and above all else of " getting on " to use 

 the significant phrase, which marks the essence of the 

 system there is a wider front exposed by the individual 

 to the assaults of the formidable impersonality called 

 Chance, and a consequent greater danger of lapse into 

 the dreaded and dismal social abyss which hides the for- 

 lorn and hopeless host of the failures. 



It is true that the present is only a transitional stage 

 in the great march of social evolution. True also that 

 there are hopeful signs, too many and various to be mis- 

 * See Book I. ch. iii, 



2 D 



