70 PROLEGOMENA 



must, sooner or later, reintroduce into the colony that 

 struggle for the means of existence between the colonists, 

 which it was the primary object of the administrator to 

 exclude, insomuch as it is fatal to the mutual peace 

 which is the prime condition of the union of men in 

 society. 



I have briefly described the nature of the only radical 

 cure, known to me, for the disease which would thus 

 threaten the existence of the colony; and, however re- 

 gretfully, I have been obliged to admit that this rigor- 

 ously scientific method of applying the principles of evo- 

 lution to human society hardly comes within the region 

 of practical politics; not for want of will on the part of 

 a great many people; but because, for one reason, there 

 is no hope that mere human beings will ever possess 

 enough intelligence to select the fittest. And I have 

 adduced other grounds for arriving at the same con- 

 clusion. 



I have pointed out that human society took its rise 

 in the organic necessities expressed by imitation and by 

 the sympathetic emotions; and that, in the struggle for 

 existence with the state of nature and with other so- 

 cieties, as part of it, those in which men were thus led 

 to close co-operation had a great advantage. 23 But, 

 since each man retained more or less of the faculties 

 common to all the rest, and especially a full share of the 

 desire for unlimited self-gratification, the struggle for 

 existence within society could only be gradually elimi- 

 nated. So long as any of it remained, society continued 

 to be an imperfect instrument of the struggle for exist- 

 ence, and, consequently, was improvable by the selective 

 influence of that struggle. Other things being alike, the 

 tribe of savages in which order was best maintained; in 

 which there was most security within the tribe and the 



23 Collected Essays, vol. v., Prologue, p. 52. [T. H. H.] 



