While the idea of evolution has thus operated both to encourage and to discipline the Liberal temper, it has also operated to give license to the Tory. The most brutal egoism is supported by pseudo-scientific applications of the theory of the survival of the fittest. Some thinkers find in the mere existence of a governing class a proof that its members were the fittest for their position. Capacity for government has been bred into our aristocracy, as beef is bred into a bullock, or speed into a racehorse, and the poor members of other classes represent the unfit stocks, who have fallen, by the operation of natural laws, into the position best suited to them. Neglect of social reform is justified, in a similar way, on the ground that the economic struggle eliminates unfit types, and that to make life easier for the masses of the people is to preserve undesirable stocks in the race. It is useless, and even positively dangerous, to interfere between landlord and tenant, and master and workman, or to put an end to slums and sweating. These things should be left to themselves. In the apparently dreadful conflict between individuals and their environment, beneficent laws are at work. The fittest men will survive out of this as the fittest {313} organisms survive in the animal kingdom. Good sense and common humanity have generally prevailed over these two applications of the theory. But in foreign policy it has unquestionably dominated modern Toryism. As among primitive invertebrates, so among civilized races of mankind, it is only in struggle that any one can be developed to its highest capacity. International politics should therefore be a system of perpetual antagonism. It is only in war that we can develop those vigorous qualities which are essential to human as to animal progress. Humanity and consideration for others are fatal to that success in the internecine strife, which is necessary for the survival of the fittest among nations. The consideration of evolutionary Toryism in domestic affairs is postponed to the next chapter. It is here necessary only to deal with its connection with what is called Imperialism. At the end of the last century it unquestionably combined with the apparent success of Bismarck to revive and aggravate egoism in foreign policy.