Natural selection is supposed to depend for its efficacy on the existence of a state of strenuous competition for nourishment, or for the avoidance of foes, in the type out of which the favourable variations emerge. But in recent times the fact of any such competition has been gravely doubted. Let us look back to the beginnings of animal life in the world. The first primitive animal organisms found themselves swimming in a boundless sea of nourishment and had no foes at all! Yet they developed into higher and higher grades of life. Competition did not aid in the development of these higher grades—it was they which ultimately created the state of competition. What Nature then achieved without competition she is equally able to perform now. Even now when the earth is swarming with varied life competition plays a much smaller part than was taken for granted in the first flush of Darwinism. Creatures of the same type but on different grades of organization, like the hive-bee and the humble bee, are constantly found side by side, drawing their nourishment from the same sources, but each holding its own without difficulty. Facts like these were not unobserved by Darwin, who met them by the supposition that competition came chiefly into play at exceptional periods, during a drought, an inundation, a severe winter, or the like, in which the less fitted members of the race perished wholesale. But, as Kropotkin, in his interesting work, Mutual Aid among Animals, has remarked, “If the evolution of the animal world were based exclusively, or even chiefly, upon the survival of the fittest during periods of calamities; if natural selection were limited in its action to periods of exceptional drought, or sudden changes of temperature, or inundations, retrogression would be the rule in the animal world. Those who survive a famine, or a severe epidemic of cholera, or small-pox, or diphtheria, such as we see them in uncivilized countries, are neither the strongest, nor the healthiest, nor the most intelligent. No progress could be based on such survivals—the less so as all survivors usually come out of the ordeal with an impaired health, like the Transbaikalian horses just mentioned, or the Arctic crews, or the garrison of a fortress which has been compelled to live for a few months on half rations, and comes out of its experience with a broken health, and subsequently shows a quite abnormal mortality.”[74] Kropotkin’s book shows good reason to believe that the principle of mutual aid and support plays at least as great a part in the animal world as does that of mutual competition and extermination.