ppiness of the great
majority. In New Zealand the people and their leaders believe this to
be secured by taxing wealth rather than comparative poverty; by giving
every encouragement to those who will devote themselves to the
cultivation of the land; and by throwing every obstacle in the path of
those who would fain establish and promote the pernicious system of
private landlordism, which everywhere tends to create and perpetuate
class distinctions, with their long train of attendant evils.

In these respects New Zealand presents an object-lesson which can
hardly fail to be of value to other countries, even if their
conditions differ widely from her own. Her successes may be noted with
advantage, her mistakes may be criticised with profit, in every free
country and by all those who see that existing conditions are far from
perfect in any part of the world, and that the safety as well as the
advancement of society may depend largely upon the introduction of
wise and, it may be, far-reaching reforms.

NATURAL SELECTION, SOCIAL SELECTION, AND HEREDITY.

BY PROFESSOR JOHN R. COMMONS,

_Of Syracuse University, N. Y._

The term "natural selection" is a misnomer, as Darwin himself
perceived. It means merely survival. "Selection" proper involves
intention, and belongs to human reason. Selection by man we call
artificial. Natural selection is the outcome of certain physical
facts: 1. Environment: the complex of forces, such as soil, climate,
food, and competitors. 2. Heredity: the tendency in offspring to
follow the type of the parent. 3. Variation: the tendency to diverge
from that type. 4. Over-population: the tendency to multiply offspring
beyond the food supply. 5. Struggle for life: the effort to exclude
others or to consume others. 6. Consciousness of kind: the tendency to
spare and cooperate with offspring and others of like type. 7.
Survival of the fittest: the victory of those best fitted to their
environment by heredity, variation, numbers, and consciousness of
kind.

These biological facts underlie human society, but a new factor enters
with novel results. This is self-consciousness. Society is based not
merely on consciousness of kind, as worked out by Professor Giddings,
but peculiarly on individual self-consciousness.

Self-consciousness is a product of evolution, at first biological as
explained by natural selection, and second, sociological. The
biological character is the prolongation of infancy,