which its main arguments should be condensed. My personal concern, however, in these matters was diminished by the fact that the argument of this work, as a whole, soon seemed to me susceptible of a more comprehensive statement. I had already, as I have said before, attempted in my novel, _The Old Order Changes_, to unite the problems of industrial and social politics with those relating to religion and the higher forms of affection, whereas in _Labor and the Popular Welfare_ I had confined my attention to pure economics only. I had, indeed, thus confined it in _Social Equality_ also. But it now began to dawn on me that, quite apart from the sphere of religion, the philosophy of modern economics could be, and required to be, extended in what for me was a new direction. A year or two after the publication of _Labor and the Popular Welfare_ a work made its appearance which, although it was couched in the driest terms of philosophy, sold as rapidly as any popular novel, and raised its author at once from absolute obscurity to fame. This was _Social Evolution_, by Mr. Benjamin Kidd. Mr. Kidd's style, apart from certain tricks or mannerisms, was, for philosophic purposes, admirable. But no mere merits of style would account for the popularity of a work which consisted, in form at all events, of recondite discussions of evolution as conceived by the Darwinians on the one hand and the disciples of Weismann on the other. The popularity of Mr. Kidd's book was due to the general drift of it. Just as Darwin's theory of evolution, with its doctrine of the survival of the strongest, provided a scientific basis, unwelcome to many, for aristocracy, Mr. Kidd's aim was to show that evolution in its higher forms was in reality a survival of the weakest, and thus provided a scientific basis for democracy--democracy by constant implications being identified with some form of Socialism. To me this book, which I examined with extreme care, seemed, in the practical bearing, a piece of monumental claptrap, though it was claptrap of the highest order, and was for that reason all the more pernicious. Mr. Kidd, in dealing with the facts of social life, seemed to me to be dealing not with facts, but clouds--clouds which suggested facts, as actual clouds may suggest a whale or weasel, but which yet, when scrutinized, had no definite content. To me this book rendered a very valuable service, I found in it an epitome of everything against which my own mind protested; and I soon set myself to prepare a series of tentative studies in which certain of Mr. Kidd's positions were directly or indirectly criticized. If I remember rightly, these were published at intervals in the _Contemporary Review_; and their substance, expanded and digested, appeared by and by in a volume which I called _Aristocracy and Evolution_.