“Their carnivorous enemies not only remove from herbivorous herds individuals past their prime, but also weed out the sickly, the malformed, and the least fleet and powerful. By the aid of which purifying process, as well as by the fighting so universal in the pairing season, all vitiation of the race through the multiplication of its inferior samples is prevented, and the maintenance of a constitution completely adapted to surrounding conditions, and therefore most productive of happiness, is ensured.” This is the ideal order of things which, we are told, ought to prevail in human societies, but everything in our present organization (which economists, and even Mr. Spencer himself, admit, however, to be natural) is wholly opposed to any such conditions. An old and sickly lion captured a gazelle; his younger and stronger brother arrives, snatches away his prize, and lives to perpetuate the species; the old one dies in the struggle, or is starved to death. Such is the beneficent law of the “survival of the fittest,” It was thus among barbarian tribes. But could such a law exist in our present social order? Certainly not! The rich man, feebly constituted and sickly, protected by the law, enjoys his wealth, marries and has offspring, and if an Apollo of herculean strength attempted to take from him his possessions, or his wife, he would be thrown into prison, and were he to attempt to practise the Darwinian law of selection, he would certainly run a fair risk of the gallows, for this law may be briefly expressed as follows: Room for the mighty, for might is right. It will be objected that in industrial societies the quality the most deserving of recompense, and which indeed receives the most frequent reward, is not the talent of killing one’s fellow-man, but an aptitude for labor and producing. But at the present time is this really so? Stuart Mill says that from the top to the bottom of the social ladder remuneration lessens as the work accomplished increases. I admit that this statement may be somewhat exaggerated, but, I think, no one will deny that it contains a large amount of truth. Let us but cast our eyes around us, and we see everywhere those who do nothing living in ease and even opulence, while the workers who have the hardest labor to perform, who toil from night to morning in mines, or unhealthy workshops, or on the sea in tempests, in constant danger of death, are paid, in exchange for all these hardships, a salary hardly sufficient for their means of subsistence, and which, just now, has become smaller and smaller, in consequence of the ever-recurring strikes, and the necessary closing of so many factories, mines, &c., owing to the long-continued depression of trade. What rapid fortunes have been made by stock-broking manœuvres, by trickeries in supplying goods, by sending unseaworthy vessels to sea to become the coffins of their crews! Do not such sights as these urge the partisans of progress to demand the State’s