he most
formidable in war. But, if we take the opposite alternative, I must ask
how any quality which really weakens the vitality of the race can
properly be called moral. I should entirely repudiate any rule of
conduct which could be shown to have such a tendency. This, indeed,
indicates what seems to me to be the moral difficulty with most people.
Charity, you say, is a virtue; charity increases beggary, and so far
tends to produce a feebler population; therefore, a moral quality tends
doubly to diminish the vigour of a nation. The answer is, of course,
obvious, and I am confident that Professor Huxley would have so far
agreed with me. It is that all charity which fosters a degraded class
is therefore immoral. The "fanatical individualism" of to-day has its
weaknesses; but in this matter it seems to me that we see the weakness
of the not less fanatical "collectivism".

The question, in fact, how far any of the socialistic or ethical
schemes of to-day are right or wrong, depends upon our answer to the
question how far they tend to produce a vigorous or an enervated
population. If I am asked to subscribe to General Booth's scheme, I
inquire first whether the scheme is likely to increase or diminish the
number of helpless hangers-on upon the efficient part of society. Will
the whole nation consist in larger proportions of active and
responsible workers, or of people who are simply burdens upon the real
workers? The answer decides not only the question whether it is
expedient, but also the question whether it is right or wrong, to
support the proposed scheme. Every charitable action is so far a good
action that it implies sympathy for suffering; but if it is so much in
want of prudence that it increases the evil which it means to remedy,
it becomes for that reason a bad action. To develop sympathy without
developing foresight is just one of the one-sided developments which
fail to constitute a real advance in morality, though I will not deny
that it may incidentally lead to an advance.

I hold, then, that the "struggle for existence" belongs to an
underlying order of facts to which moral epithets cannot be properly
applied. It denotes a condition of which the moralist has to take
account, and to which morality has to be adapted; but which, just
because it is a "cosmic process," cannot be altered, however much we
may alter the conduct which it dictates. Under all conceivable
circumstances, the race has to adapt itself to