Herbert Spencer, to whom we owe the phrase “the survival of the fittest,” expresses this critical difficulty as follows: “The law that each creature shall take the benefits and the evils of its own nature has been the law under which life has evolved thus far. Any arrangements which, in a considerable degree, prevent superiority from profiting by the rewards of superiority, or shield inferiority from the evils it entails--any arrangements which tend to make it as well to be inferior as to be superior, are arrangements diametrically opposed to the progress of organisation, and the reaching of a higher life.” This is permanently and necessarily true, and in our care for childhood we have to reckon with it. Yet even Spencer himself did not pursue this supremely important enquiry to what I shall in a moment submit to be its logical and almost incredibly hopeful conclusion. Huxley, writing his well-known Romanes Lecture, “Evolution and Ethics,” at a time when, unfortunately, he had somewhat parted company with Spencer, and was too ready to accept any argument that made against Spencer's political views, cuts the Gordian knot in an astonishingly unsatisfactory fashion. He declares that “the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process [that is, the selection of the fittest], still less in running away from it, but in combating it.” This is shallow thinking and very poor philosophy. One wonders how Huxley can have forgotten the great dictum of Bacon that Nature can be commanded only by obeying her. He declares that moral evolution is the direct contradiction and antithesis of the process of organic evolution hitherto. He says, “Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process;” and he declares it to be a fallacy to suppose “that because on the whole animals and plants have advanced in perfection of organisation, by means of the struggle for existence and the consequent survival of the fittest; therefore men in society, men as ethical beings, must look to the same process to help them towards perfection.”