is apparent that there is much
justification for this view and that it seems in many cases to be a
necessary stage in the adjustment of interests, but that it is either
inevitable or a permanent necessity is controverted both by experience
and by a more thorough analysis of the relationships involved.

There is no gainsaying the fact that conflict has been one of the chief
agencies of human progress in the past; but neither can it be disputed
that cooperation, or mutual aid, has been of equal importance. Neither
attitude can be conceived as primary or dominant; they have interacted
throughout the history of mankind. Fundamentally, the problem of the
relationship of these two phases of life is much the same as that of the
nature and function of good and evil. The one cannot exist without the
other, and both are relative terms. Our present thought on these
problems has been too largely dominated by a wrong interpretation of the
theory of the survival of the fittest as the primary force in human
evolution. We have assumed, and the German militarists carried the
doctrine to a logical conclusion, that this hypothesis gave the sanction
of a biological law to a competitive struggle between men. But such an
inference was explicitly denied by Charles Darwin,[15] and has no
biological foundation. The struggle he described is between species and
not between members of the same species. On the other hand, we find
throughout nature that those species have been most successful which
have developed the most effective means of mutual aid.[16] Thus our
economic and political thought has been dominated for the past two or
three generations with a blind worship of the dogma of unrestrained
competition, which has no basis of proof either in biological or social
science.

When we examine what has gone on in the older sections of our country
and project the present tendencies into the future, we get a different
point of view, and come to see that only by an adjustment of the
relations of the village and the farm to each other can the best life of
both be secured. We shall have occasion in subsequent chapters to
consider the social and political problems involved, but let us here
discuss merely the economic relations, which have been the chief source
of discord.

In the first place if we examine the situation in the older parts of the
country we find a much more cordial relation between village and country
than farther west, and a greater