tianity,
which at present is the religion chiefly concerned, has conspicuously
failed even to produce a tolerable working compromise. The official
Christian theory is, apparently, that all human souls are of equal
value, and that it ought to be a matter of indifference to us whether a
given territory is inhabited a thousand years hence by a million
converted Central African pigmies or a million equally converted
Europeans or Hindus. On the practical point, however, whether the
stronger race should base its plans of extension on the extermination of
the weaker race, or on an attempt, within the limits of racial
possibility, to improve it, Christians have, during the nineteenth
century, been infinitely more ruthless than Mohammedans, though their
ruthlessness has often been disguised by more or less conscious
hypocrisy.

But the most immediately dangerous result of political 'Darwinism' was
not its effect in justifying the extermination of African aborigines by
European colonists, but the fact that the conception of the 'struggle
for life' could be used as a proof that that conflict among the European
nations for the control of the trade-routes of the world which has been
threatening for the last quarter of a century is for each of the nations
concerned both a scientific necessity and a moral duty. Lord Ampthill,
for instance, the athletic ex-governor of Madras, said the other day:
'From an individual struggle, a struggle of families, of communities,
and nations, the struggle for existence has now advanced to a struggle
of empires.'[114]

[114] _Times_, Jan. 22, 1908.

The exhilaration with which Lord Ampthill proclaims that one-half of the
species must needs slaughter the other half in the cause of human
progress is particularly terrifying when one reflects that he may have
to conduct negotiations as a member of the next Conservative Government
with a German statesman like Prince Buellow, who seems to combine the
teaching of Bismarck with what he understands to have been the teaching
of Darwin when he defends the Polish policy of his master by a
declaration that the rules of private morality do not apply to national
conduct.

Any such identification of the biological advantage arising from the
'struggle for life' among individuals with that which is to be expected
from a 'struggle of empires' is, of course, thoroughly unscientific. The
'struggle of empires' must either be fought out between European troops
alone, o