82 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



tends that to add artificial advantage to natural superiority is fatal, 

 because superiority can not be maintained unless the herd, as well as 

 the superior individual, is carefully looked after and improved. The 

 superiority that achieves leadership and domination is usually the 

 power to do some particular thing exceptionally well. It is extreme 

 individuation, and it often is purchased at the cost of race vitality. It 

 is as necessary to maintain the one as to develop the other. Mr. Pear- 

 son therefore finds the socialistic program not incompatible with con- 

 tinuing progress by selection and inheritance. 7 



" To ' wage war against natural inequality ' is clearly a reductio ad 

 absurdum of the socialistic doctrine. So far as I understand the views of the 

 more active socialists of to-day, they fully recognize that the better posts, the 

 more lucrative and comfortable berths, must always go to the more efficient and 

 more productive workers, and that it is for the welfare of society that it should 

 be so. Socialists, however, propose to limit within healthy bounds the rewards 

 of natural superiority and the advantages of artificial inequality. The victory 

 of the more capable, or the more fortunate, must not involve such a defeat of 

 the less capable, or the less fortunate, that social stability is endangered by 

 the misery produced. At the present time a failure of the harvest in Russia 

 and America simultaneously, or a war with a first-class European power, would 

 probably break up our social system altogether. We should be crushed in the 

 extra-group struggle for existence, because we have given too much play to 

 intra-group competition, because we have proceeded on the assumption that it 

 is better to have a few prize cattle among innumerable lean kine than a 

 decently-bred and properly-fed herd with no expectations at Smithfield." 



From this too brief account of the applications thus far made of 

 Darwinian theory to the problems presented by social relationships, 

 including human institutions, we may turn to the question of further 

 scientific possibilities in this direction. It will have been noted that 

 the theories reviewed are not as they now stand entirely consistent with 

 one another, and that none of them carries explanation back to the 

 actual beginnings and causes of group formation. Perhaps if we could 

 more adequately account, in terms of the struggle for existence, for 

 actual social origins, and for successive stages of social evolution, the 

 various fragments of theory which we now possess would fall into 

 orderly correlation. 



Possibly also the most promising starting point for any new at- 

 tempt to achieve these ends may be found in a careful scrutiny of what 

 is involved in the struggle for existence itself. Close readers of " The 

 Origin of Species " know that although Mr. Darwin, when employing 

 the phrase " a struggle for existence," usually meant by it a struggle 

 for subsistence, he uses it also to mean a struggle with the physical con- 

 ditions of life, to which an organism that would survive must be or 



7 "The Chances of Death," Vol. I., pp. 112, 113. In view of the apprehen- 

 sions just now so freely expressed in England, it is, I think, worth while to 

 quote the exact words in which Mr. Pearson more than ten years ago summar- 

 ized his argument: 



