for supposing it will not, and there are countless reasons for
supposing that it will, enormously increase the opportunities and
encouragements for aesthetic and intellectual endeavour.

Sec. 6.

_Socialism would arrest the survival of the Fittest._ Here is an
objection from quite a new quarter. It is the stock objection of the
science student. Hitherto we have considered religious and aesthetic
difficulties, but this is the difficulty of the mind that realizes
clearly the nature of the biological process, the secular change in
every species under the influence of its environment, and is most
concerned with that. Species, it is said, change--and the student of
the elements of science is too apt to conclude that this change is
always ascent in the scale of being--by the killing off of the
individuals out of harmony with the circumstances under which the
species is living. This is not quite true. The truer statement is that
species change because, allowing for chance and individual exceptions,
only those individuals survive to reproduce themselves who are fairly
well adjusted to the conditions of life; so that in each generation
there is only a small proportion of births out of harmony with these
conditions. This sounds very like the previous proposition, but it
differs in this that the accent is shifted from the "killing" to the
suppression of births, that is the really important fact. In any case,
then, the believer in evolution holds that the qualities encouraged by
the environment increase in the species and the qualities discouraged
diminish. The qualities that have survival value are not always what
we human beings consider admirable--that is a consideration many
science students fail to grasp. The remarkable habits of all the
degenerating crustacea, for example, the appetite of the vulture, the
unpleasing personality of the common hyaena, all that less charming
side of Mother Nature that her scandalized children may read of in
Cobbold's _Human Parasites_, are the result of survival under the
pressure of environment, just as much as the human eye or the wing of
an eagle. Let the objector therefore ask himself what sort of
"fittest" are surviving now.

The plain answer is that under our present conditions the
_Breeding-Getter_ wins, the man who can hold and keep and reproduce
his kind. People with the instinct of owning stronger than any other
instinct float out upon the top of our seething mass, and flourish
t