454 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



vidual rights. If it is nothing more than the sum of the lives 

 of citizens, this implication is obvious. If it consists of those 

 many unlike activities which citizens carry on in mutual depen- 

 dence, still this aggregate impersonal life rises or falls according 

 as the rights of individuals are enforced or denied."^ Each 

 individual, according to the Liberal theory, must be free to 

 develop his personality to the utmost of his abihty. In this 

 endeavour he must not be impeded by the State or by any 

 external power whatever. And this proposition, that every man 

 must be free to develop his personality to the utmost, necessarily 

 implies that he must recognise every other man's right to do the 

 same. But, obviously, if the development of a man's personality 

 is to be left solely to his own initiative ; if the Ufe of society 

 is to be carried on by a conflict of individual interests, it is very 

 evident that those who are less able to carry on the conflict, 

 who are weaker, will be trampled down and suppressed by those 

 who are fitter and stronger. And such, indeed, Spencer tells 

 us, will not only be the result of Liberal individuaUsm, but it 

 constitutes the whole object of that polity. Spencer would fain 

 see the development of a strong society at the expense of the 

 weak members of society. The great theorist of Manchester 

 Liberalism never tires of asserting this eradication of the weak 

 to be the object of social polity. " The well-being of existing 

 humanity, and the unfolding of it into ultimate perfection, are 

 both secured," says Spencer, " by that same beneficent, though 

 severe, discipline to which the animate creation at large is 

 subject ; a discipline which is pitiless in the working out of good ; 

 a felicity-pursuing law which never swerves for the avoidance 

 of partial and temporary suffering. The poverty of the incapable, 

 the distresses that come upon the improvident, the starvation 

 of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the 

 strong, which leave so many in shallows and miseries, are the 



1 Herbert Spencer, The Man versus the State, p. 102. Williams and 

 Norgate. 



