XLI.] NATURAL SELECTION IN HISTORY. 189 



them the civic virtues. It is not very easy to define in The civic 

 what civic virtue consists, bnt it is happily so well known ^'"*"*^^' 

 among us ':hat no definition is needed in order to make my 

 meaning intelligible. Tt may perhaps be defined as the 

 transference of loyalty from a superior to the community. 

 It is shown in all history how the civic virtues form the 

 best and surest bases of political and military power. The 

 republics of Greece and Eorae are the most conspicuous 

 and the most familiar instances of this truth, though by 

 no means the only ones. Holland and England in the 

 modern world are equally good instances. 



Thus virtue gives political and military power. In the "Virtue 

 strife of tribes, of races, and of nations — in the political aSpo^e^^ 

 in the physical world — a process of natural selection goes 

 on, of which the tendency is to give the victory to the best.' 



In the earliest periods it is probable that wars were At first 

 always wars of extermination; and under those circum- ^'"^"^'j^g^^j 

 stances the effect of natural selection must have been races were 

 simply that the inferior races perished and the superior 

 ones survived. This process takes place even at the 

 present day, where the inferior races are unaljle to adopt the 

 ways of civilized life, though not now by means of massacre. 

 It is going on before our eyes in Australia and New Zealand, 

 and the comparatively benevolent disposition which civi- 

 lized men have now acquired appears unable to arrest it. 

 This is exactly the way in which natural selection acts as 

 between contending races of animals — namely, by the 

 destruction of the weakest. But at a later period, when afterwards 

 men had become less brutal and savage, wars ceased to g^J^^^^l^^'^ 

 lie wars of extermination, and became wars of conquest, gated. 

 And when one race is thus subjugated by another without 

 being destroyed, a new set of conditions arises, to which 

 there is nothing at all similar in the animal world. Among 

 men as among animals, the progress of the entire species 

 is ensured by the destruction of the inferior races. i3ut 

 when the inferior races are not destroyed, but only sub- 



' Oil the subject of the tendency of virtue to confer political power, see 

 a rema.rkahle passage in Butler's Analogy of Religion, Part I. chapter iii. 

 (pp. 71 and 72 in Bishop Fitzgerald's edition). 



