22 Causes of its Success 



among all the Western civilized Powers since 

 1870. 



The universality of the appeal made by the 

 evolutionary ethics of the philosophy of force, has 

 been pointed out by an historian of modem 

 political thought, as follows: 



Darwinism has been pressed into political service by 

 very different parties. Militarists have appealed to 

 the ideas of struggle for existence and selection of the 

 fittest, in order to justify the selective agency of war. 

 Individualists have appealed to the same ideas in 

 order to find justification for an internal policy of 

 laissez-faire, which shall not interfere with the selec- 

 tive activity of the "beneficent struggle." It is in 

 truth an easy procedure to steal Darwin's theory of 

 the natural world, and to apply it, without remember- 

 ing mutare mutanda, to the spiritual world of human 

 relations. It is easy to argue * ' Nature sets her children 

 to compete; let the State set its citizens to do the 

 like: Nature recognizes the strongest species as 

 the right species ; let the human world recognize the 

 strongest nation as the right nation."^ 



But the breadth of its appeal is not limited to the 

 militarist and the individualist, widely as these are 

 separated. Its appeal is to the free-thinker, the 

 positivist, and the monist on the one hand, and to 

 the mystic, the idealist, and the dualist on the 

 other. It satisfies not only the conservatives, who 

 rely wholly on brute force, but also the liberals, 



'Ernest Barker, Political Thought in England from Herbert 

 Spencer to the Present Day, 1915; p. 146. 



