THE STRUGGLE FOB THE LIFE OF OTHERS. 265 



initiative, necessity had to be laid upon all mothers, 

 animal and human, to act in the way required. In 

 part physiological, this necessity was brought about 

 under the ordinary action of that principle which had 

 to take charge of everything in Nature until the will of 

 Man appeared Natural Selection. A mother who did 

 not care for her children would have feeble and sickly 

 children. Their children's children would be feeble 

 and sickly children. And the day of reckoning would 

 come when they would be driven off the field by a 

 hardier, that is a better-mothered, race. Hence the 

 premium of Nature upon better mothers. Hence the 

 elimination of all the reproductive failures, of all the 

 mothers who fell short of completing the process to the 

 last detail. And hence, by the law of the Survival of 

 the Fittest, Altruism, which at this stage means good- 

 motherism, is forced upon the world 



This consummation reached, the foundations of the 

 human world are finished. Nothing foreign remains 

 to be added. All that need happen henceforth is that 

 the Struggle for the Life of Others should work out its 

 destiny. To follow out the gains of Reproduction from 

 this point would be to write the story of the nations, 

 the history of civilization, the progress of Social Evolu- 

 tion. The key to all these processes is here. There 

 is no intelligible account of the world which is not 

 founded on the realization of the place of this factor 

 in development. Sociology, practically, can only beat 

 the air, can make no step forward as a science, until it 

 recognizes this basis in biology. It is the failure, not 

 so much to recognize the supremacy of this second 

 factor, but to see that there is any second factor 

 at all, that has vitiated almost every attempt to 



