But more than this, the doctrines of Natural Selection and the Survival of the Fittest are beginning to generate a morality of their own, with the inevitable corollary that the proof of superior fitness is to survive--to survive either by force or cunning, like the other animals which by dint of force or cunning have come out victorious from the universal war and asserted for themselves a place in nature. The "irrepressible struggle for empire" is formally put forward by public writers of the highest class as the basis and the rule of the conduct of this country towards other nations; and we may be sure that there is not an entire absence of connection between the private code of a school and its international conceptions. The feeling that success covers everything seems to be gaining ground and to be overcoming, not merely the old conventional rules of honour, but moral principle itself. Both in public and private there are symptoms of an approaching failure of the motive power which has hitherto sustained men both in self- sacrificing effort and in courageous protest against wrong, though as yet we are only at the threshold of the great change, and established sentiment long survives, in the masses, that which originally gave it birth. Renan says, probably with truth, that had the Second Empire remained at peace, it might have gone on forever; and in the history of this country the connection between political effort and religion has been so close that its dissolution, to say the least, can hardly fail to produce a critical change in the character of the nation. The time may come, when, as philosophers triumphantly predict, men, under the ascendancy of science, will act for the common good, with the same mechanical certainty as bees; though the common good of the human hive would perhaps not be easy to define. But in the meantime mankind, or some portions of it, may be in danger of an anarchy of self-interest, compressed for the purpose of political order, by a despotism of force. That science and criticism, acting--thanks to the liberty of opinion won by political effort--with a freedom never known before, have delivered us from a mass of dark and degrading superstitions, we own with heartfelt thankfulness to the deliverers, and in the firm conviction that the removal of false beliefs, and of the authorities or institutions founded on them, cannot prove in the end anything but a blessing to mankind. But at the same time the foundations of general morality have inevitably been shaken, and a crisis has been brought on the gravity of which nobody can fail to see, and nobody but a fanatic of Materialism can see without the most serious misgiving.