300 FOOT-NOTES TO EVOLUTION. 
themselves. With higher civilization and an increasing 
recognition of the value of mutual help it is becoming 
more and more possible for those to live 
who do not help. The descendants of 
these increase in number with the others. 
They are protected by the others. Thus 
the future of hereditary weakness is a growing problem 
in our social organization. 
Of course the conditions of life have never yet made 
the “survival of the fittest” the real survival of the 
best. Fhe growth of civilization ap- 
proaches this end, but has never reached 
it. If this were reached, adaptation to the conditions 
of life would be a nobler process than it now is. It is 
not that the conditions of life-are too hard. We would 
not make them easier if we could. But the welfare of 
humanity demands that they be made more just. An 
easier world would be one in which idleness, vice, and 
inefficiency fare better than now, and energy, virtue, 
and efficiency correspondingly worse. The premium 
natural selection places on self-activity and mutual help 
is none too great at the best and should not be lessened. 
Nature is over-indulgent toward idleness rather than too 
cruel. The degradation of life in the tropics comes be- 
cause in those regions the stress of the human struggles 
is distinctly lowered. The real “City of the Dreadful 
Night” is not noisy, eager, struggling, unjust London. 
It is some city of the tropics where action and virtue 
count for nothing because there is no incentive to live a 
life worth living, and no adequate penalty for stagnation 
and inefficiency. 
It is easy to frame indictments against modern so- 
ciety and its organization. We may see it as weak, 
tyrannical, depressing, artificial, cruel, or unjust, as we 
may give attention to its least favourable manifestations. 
Mutual help 
preserves the 
incapable. 
The easy world. 
