PART II.—THEORETICAL CHAPTER XIII NATURAL SELECTION AMONG ANIMALS While writing the present volume I was led to refer to it during some of the numerous interviews on the occasion of my recent birthday. This led to some misrepresentation of my views, and showed me how few popular press-writers have any real knowledge of the nature and extent of "natural selection," more especially as it affects the human race. There is also the same ignorance as regards "heredity"; and this latter has become almost a word to conjure with, and is thought by most writers to explain many things to which it is quite inapplicable, and as the present work is a very condensed argument founded to a considerable extent upon these great natural laws, I propose devoting two chapters to explaining and demonstrating the effect of natural selection in the case of the lower animals and of man respectively. That such an explanation is necessary may be seen from the following extract from one of our most influential and well-written daily papers, the _Pall Mall Gazette_. After referring to the view of the utter rottenness of our present civilisation, it quotes me as saying: "And the average of mankind will remain the same until natural selection steps in to save it." (What I actually said to the interviewer was "until some form of selection improves it.") The writer then goes on: "These words must have struck the interviewer like the crack of doom. For, stated popularly, the theory of natural selection is the doctrine of 'Devil take the hindmost.' If natural selection had fair play there would be no Children's Care Committees; there would be no Poor Law, no Hospitals; there would be no Old Age Pensions. All the humanitarian effort to care for the weak and to help them along the path of life, every effort to bind up the broken-hearted, every combination of labour to secure equality among the members of a trade, stand condemned as futile or worse by the doctrine which Dr. Russel Wallace thinks can alone raise the average of man. His own remedies for the ills of society—the levelling up which he believes to be impossible without levelling down, the disinheriting of the unborn heir, the 'striking' which he applauds, the universal education which he favours—all these are directly antagonistic to the workings of natural selection."