552 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



we see that, wMle the maintenance of positions once acquired 

 depends on the spiritual organisation of a nation ; nevertheless, 

 the expansive power of which the original conquest of those 

 positions, and also the formation of a spiritual organisation, are 

 the results, is itself due to biological capacity. 



But when a nation, or a race, has achieved certain conquests, 

 when it has attained a certain degree of power, it is above all 

 things necessary to prevent retrogression from setting in, as it 

 often does, if those conditions of conflict under which all ex- 

 pansion is produced are allowed, by artificial interference, to 

 relax. This is the great objection to the Communist theory of 

 the State — that it does, indeed, suspend these primordial con- 

 ditions of progress. Mr. Benjamin Kidd has said very truly, with 

 reference to the Communist State, that " the evolutionist who 

 has perceived the application of that development which the 

 Darwinian law of natural selection has undergone in the hands 

 of Weismann, is precluded at the outset from contemplating 

 the continued success of such a society. The evolutionist who 

 has once realised the significance of the supreme fact up to which 

 biology has slowly advanced — ^namely, that every quality of 

 life can be kept in a state of efficiency and prevented from 

 retrograding only by the continued and never-relaxed stress of 

 selection — simply finds it impossible to conceive a society 

 permanently existing in this state. He can only think of it 

 existing at all on one condition : in the first stage of a period of 

 progressive degeneration."^ But the Sociahst State is not the 

 only State in which such a suspension of the primordial condi- 

 tions of progress can take place. A State governed by an 

 oligarchy, or by a plutocracy, is equally liable to degeneration. 

 In our Western society of to-day the stress of competition 

 Vought about by industrialism has not proceeded pari passu 

 with growing integration of society through a disciplined spiritual 

 organisation. For we have seen that it is not only the conditions 

 *■ B. Badd, Social Evolution, p. 296. Macmillan. 



