The final of this wonderful trinity of _a prioris_ is a repetition of an argument advanced ages ago by Queen Victoria’s Lord Salisbury, when he was President of the British Association. Even then it struck people that he had been poorly coached for the occasion. Assuming that one or two individuals have got all these “survival value” differences in the correct proportions--against which the chances are zero--how by any theory of Natural Selection are we to suppose they will meet, breed, and perpetuate them? So this argument runs. The chances are again declared to be zero, the third zero, and Mr. Belloc, I gather, calls in Design again here and makes his Creative Spirit, which has already urged these two individuals, lions, or liver flukes or fleas or what not, to make an effort and adapt themselves, lead them now to their romantic and beneficial nuptials, while the Theory of Natural Selection grinds its teeth in the background and mutters “Foiled again.” But this third argument reinforces the first, in showing what is the matter with Mr. Belloc’s ideas in this group of questions. He has got the whole business upside down. I rather blame the early Darwinians in this matter for using so inaccurate a phrase as the “Survival of the Fittest.” It is to that phrase that most of Mr. Belloc’s blunderings are due. Yet he ought not to have been misled. He had a summary of modern views before him. He criticises my _Outline of History_, he abuses it, and yet he has an extraordinary trick of getting out of its way whenever it swings near his brain-case. I warn the readers of that modest compendium expressly (and as early as page 16) that the juster phrase to use is not the Survival of the Fittest, but the Survival of the Fitter. I do what I can throughout to make them see this question not in terms of an individual, but in terms of the species. Yet Mr. Belloc insists upon writing of “the Fittest” as a sort of conspicuously competitive prize boy, a favourable “sport,” who has to meet his female equivalent and breed a new variety. That is all the world away from the manner in which a biologist thinks of the process of specific life. He sees a species as a vast multitude of individuals in which those without individual advantages tend to fail and those with them tend to be left to continue the race. The most important fact is the general relative failure of the disadvantaged. The fact next in order of importance is the general relative survival of the advantaged. The most important consequence is that the average of the species moves in the direction of advantageous differences, moving faster or slower according to its rate of reproduction and the urgency of its circumstances--that is to say, to the severity of its death-rate. Any one particular individual may have any sort of luck; that does not affect the general result.