sently assuring us that Temperance Legislation is
a vain defiance of Natural Selection, and that the true way to deal with
drunkenness is to flood the country with cheap gin and let the fittest
survive. Cobdenism is, after all, nothing but the abandonment of trade
to Circumstantial Selection.

It is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of this preparation
for Darwinism by a vast political and clerical propaganda of its moral
atmosphere. Never in history, as far as we know, had there been such a
determined, richly subsidized, politically organized attempt to persuade
the human race that all progress, all prosperity, all salvation,
individual and social, depend on an unrestrained conflict for food and
money, on the suppression and elimination of the weak by the strong,
on Free Trade, Free Contract, Free Competition, Natural Liberty,
Laisser-faire: in short, on 'doing the other fellow down' with impunity,
all interference by a guiding government, all organization except police
organization to protect legalized fraud against fisticuffs, all
attempt to introduce human purpose and design and forethought into the
industrial welter, being 'contrary to the laws of political economy.'
Even the proletariat sympathized, though to them Capitalist liberty
meant only wage slavery without the legal safeguards of chattel slavery.
People were tired of governments and kings and priests and providences,
and wanted to find out how Nature would arrange matters if she were let
alone. And they found it out to their cost in the days when Lancashire
used up nine generations of wage slaves in one generation of their
masters. But their masters, becoming richer and richer, were very well
satisfied, and Bastiat proved convincingly that Nature had arranged
Economic Harmonies which would settle social questions far better than
theocracies or aristocracies or mobocracies, the real _deus ex machina_
being unrestrained plutocracy.

THE POETRY AND PURITY OF MATERIALISM

Thus the stars in their courses fought for Darwin. Every faction drew a
moral from him; every catholic hater of faction founded a hope on him;
every blackguard felt justified by him; and every saint felt encouraged
by him. The notion that any harm could come of so splendid an
enlightenment seemed as silly as the notion that the atheists would
steal all our spoons. The physicists went further than the Darwinians.
Tyndall declared that he saw in Matter the promise and potency of