Accumulations of population and accumulations of capital are alike causes and effects of progress in an industrial age. But you can no more have a north without a south pole, than you can have this progress without its counterpart of suffering. When an educated gentleman was, like the good vicar, Passing rich with forty pounds a year, how many struggles and how many heart-aches were avoided. When ‘merry England’ dwelt in rural hamlets and villages, the ‘bitter cry’ of East London could scarcely have been written. Turn it as you like, increase of population means increase of poverty. Say that only five per cent. fail in the battle of life, from their own or inherited faults; from bad luck, ill-health, weakness of mind, adverse surroundings; five per cent. on thirty millions is a larger figure than five per cent. on ten millions. And the lot of those who fail is aggravated by the success of those who succeed. The scale of living rises, and the cost of living increases, while competition becomes keener. Increase of population in a limited area means increased difficulty of finding employment; and the complex relations of international commerce send panics and crises vibrating throughout the world, which throw millions out of work, or reduce them to starvation wages. In simple forms of society every one accepts the condition in which he finds himself as a matter of course, while in a more complex civilisation the fiend Envy steps in, and teaches the baser natures who are failures, to regard every success as an insult and every successful man as an enemy. Hence Labour rises in mad revolt against Capital; Socialists attack society with dynamite; and Utopian theorists preach a millennium to be attained by abolishing private property and individual liberty. If we turn to the moral aspects of the question, it is still more clear that evolution does not tend solely to the side of virtue. There is doubtless less ferocious savagery, less rude and unconscious or half-conscious crime, in civilised societies, but there is far more deliberate and diabolical wickedness. The very temptations and opportunities which, if resisted, lead to higher virtues, if succumbed to, lead to greater vice. Even the intellectual advance, if perverted, becomes the instrument of greater crimes. A chemist discovers nitro-glycerine, and dynamite becomes a resource of civilisation. There is a saying that there is ‘no blackguard so bad as a Scotch blackguard,’ which, as a patriotic Scotchman, I take to be a tribute to the generally high intellectual and moral character of my countrymen. A powerful polarity is powerful, as the case may be, either for good or evil. Why then should we believe that evolution, which, carried thus far, has developed more strongly the contrast between good and evil, will, if carried a little farther, extinguish it by annihilating the evil?