In fact the Limanorans came ages before to see that all public life with its competitions and ambitions, social, artistic, political, military, meant the triumph of cunning or force; it meant the retrogression to the nakedest savagery hidden underneath the gewgaws of civilisation. No real advance could be made by any form of humanity so long as its ablest spirits were drawn into the furious struggle for glory, in which the cruellest and most audacious cunning was bound to win. The founders of new religions and new philosophies have been strong spirits who saw the foul imbroglio before them in public life and shrank back from it. The first aim of the Limanorans, when once they had rid themselves of their more degenerate brethren, was to abolish this contest of might and cunning, and turn their stronger spirits to the true progress of themselves and their race. And little difficulty was experienced in accomplishing this most fundamental reform; the island had been purged of the furiously ambitious, of all who longed for the naked palæstra of civilised savagery. They knew better than most men how much of the essence of life was competition, how necessary to all progress was the struggle for existence, how fundamental was the law of the survival of the fittest. But they realised vividly that nature unguided often chose false directions, that the struggle may be in a myriad various arenas that differ greatly from one another in nobleness or baseness, that the law if left to itself might lead to the survival of the fiercest or cunningest or basest according to the conditions that were to be fitted. The will of man could work on the conditions, so elevating the struggle and leading the law to a nobler issue. They did not, they could not, put an end to the struggle. What they did was to withdraw it from false grounds and false aims, and guard it from any appearance of the lower nature, sensuality, cunning, or force. The competitive energy in every Limanoran’s nature was bent towards his own future and the future of his race, and strove to surpass the past, if it were great and noble, and to cast it out, if it were base and threatened to reappear. To strive upwards, to help the whole people to progress, these were the aims that transformed the everlasting struggle and the ever-working law.