The Function of Death 79 



conditions. When enemies or accidents or diseases over- 

 whelm a number of individuals with apparent absence of 

 justice, this process will operate more severely upon those 

 less qualified to resist or avoid the attack, and will, in the 

 survivors who escape, increase the average of ability of the 

 race to resist that particular hostility, and therefore will 

 develop the quality which is beneficial — Unavoidably we 

 are compelled to consider the race as well as the individual. 

 Death appears therefore as the means of giving to a life 

 of unsuccessful effort or of less successful effort a pro- 

 portionately short term of tenancy and to the successful or 

 more successful effort a proportionately long term or 

 tenancy. Thus death operates for justice, not only in sum- 

 mary fashion but with effect proportionate and corrective. 

 In a broad view it ceases to be regarded as a mere penalty 

 for individual conduct, yet it still stands as a liability. 

 Although the result is to be the elimination of those least 

 fit and preservation of those more fit, the test of fitness being 

 still, as at first revealed, self -maintenance in a surrounding 

 world of conditions more or less hostile, and the reward 

 being still a tenure of life depending upon continued ability 

 to maintain it and transmit it. This privilege to transmit 

 it, is the door to a justice which to one life is apparently 

 not promised. By that door an indefinite extension is 

 offered as the consequence of continued fitness. Death 

 therefore appears to be the necessary precedent to change 

 the means by which life is compensated. By it is seen 

 access to a system of reward for conduct with a just ap- 

 preciation of varying shades and degrees of goodness. If 

 death did not occur to remove the less fit material structures 



