Spencer's Political Prejudices 31 



of evolution is clear. Sir Frederick Pollock has 

 expressed the connection thus : "If the doctrine of 

 evolution is nothing else than the historical method 

 applied to the facts of nature, the historical method 

 is nothing else than the doctrine of evolution 

 applied to hiiman institutions." 



The final outcome of this historical method 

 as embodied in Maine's Popular Government, pub- 

 lished in 1884, in which he aims a blow at the 

 foimdations of the Benthamite faith in democracy, 

 is a somewhat melancholy conservatism. We find 

 a significant foreshadowing of the Nietzschean and 

 other "will to power" philosophies in this book, 

 in which Maine defends aristocracy and the English 

 House of Lords, and makes it a part of his indict- 

 ment of democracy that the multitude evidently 

 dislikes the doctrine of the struggle for existence, 

 to which he refers as 



that beneficent private war which makes one man 

 strive to climb on the shoulders of another and remain 

 there through the law of the survival of the fittest. 



Such was the intellectual atmosphere in which 

 Darwin's biological theory was applied to human 

 society. The process of distortion which occurred 

 in this application has been traced by Kropotkin 

 (who has been called the only true Darwinian in 

 England), as follows: 



It happened with Darwin's theory as it always 

 happens with theories having any bearing upon 



