SOME COMMON ERRORS CONSIDERED 107 



species ; but much can be done, and has been done, 

 in this direction. 



For instance, suppose an alteration, such as has 

 already been effected in many communities, in the 

 environment. Suppose that food and air and 

 space be so provided in the environment that the 

 law of natural selection is limited in its action: 

 universal survival being substituted for the survival 

 of the fittest — evolution will doubtless continue, the 

 racial type will continue to undergo modification, 

 but the course will be different. The weakling, the 

 diseased, the criminal, the imbecile, the insane, will 

 assume a new importance. Under the action of 

 natural selection, and its analogue, social selection, 

 these types would have tended to disappear: now 

 they will tend to persist. Or suppose that by a 

 comprehensive system of " State-feeding " — let us 

 sa y — we ensure that the fittest feed not only their 

 own fit children but the unfit children of the unfit. 

 The fit children must do with less so that the unfit 

 may be fed. Plainly we are doing our best to sub- 

 stitute for the law of the survival of the fittest a 

 law of survival of the unfittest : as Spencer puts it, 

 we are engaged in " destroying the worthy in making 

 worse the unworthy." In these new conditions the 

 fittest of the old conditions are become the unfittest, 

 and conversely. Or, again, once we have spoken of 

 parasitism, let us exercise a little imagination and 

 ask ourselves whether the evolutionary process 

 which leads to parasitism in the bacteria and the 

 intestinal worms has no analogy in the parasitism 

 of some men to-day upon that long-suffering host 

 which we call society. Needless to say this is the 



