THE CONSTRUCTOR 24I 



community are justified in using their strength to con- 

 strain one of their number to contribute his share to 

 the maintenance of it, or even to prevent him from 

 doing his best to destroy it," ] and which would limit 

 the exercise of State rights to the protection of its 

 subjects from aggression. 2 Here, once more, he had 

 stirred up a hornet's nest of criticism from various 

 quarters, the argument often taking the usual form of 

 expletives. But, as he reminded his opponents, his 

 interest in these questions " did not begin the day be- 

 fore yesterday " ; reflection and observation had only 

 deepened conviction, and the later essays on Gov- 

 ernment, Capital, and the Struggle for Existence, em- 

 phasised the position which he had taken up a quar- 

 ter of a century earlier. Now, as then, he went to 

 the heart of the matter in insisting on the funda- 

 mental importance of dealing with the population 

 question, since with short commons and lack of 

 elbow-room there was quick shunting of the ethical 

 process. 



For the effort of ethical man to work towards a 

 moral end by no means abolished, perhaps hardly 

 modified, the deep-seated organic impulses which 

 impel the natural man to follow his non-moral course. 

 One of the most essential conditions, if not the chief 

 cause, of the struggle for existence, is the tendency to 

 multiply without limit, which man shares with all 



1 Coll. Essays, ix. p. 83. 2 lb., i. p. 258. 



