surviving in a warm climate than they; so that an Aryan language may be spoken, where there remains little or no Aryan blood. Are we entitled to maintain, with regard to human races and human individuals, that the fittest always survive, except in the sense in which the proposition is a truism, that those survive who are most capable of surviving?

Further, we must emphasize the fact that the struggle goes on not merely between individual and individual, but between race and race. The struggle among plants and the lower animals is mainly between members of the same species; and the individual competition between human beings, which is so much admired by Mr. Herbert Spencer, is of this primitive kind. When we come to the struggle between kinds, it is to be noticed that

See Art. by Prof. Rhys on "Race Theories and European Politics," in New Frinceton Review, Jan., 1888.

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it is fiercest between allied kinds; and so, as has been pointed out, the economic struggle between Great Britain and the United States is fiercer than elsewhere between nations. But, so soon as we pass to the struggle between race and race, we find new elements coming in. The race which is fittest to survive, i.e. most capable of surviving, will survive; but it does not therefore follow that the individuals thereby preserved will be the fittest, either in the sense of being those who in a struggle between individual and individual would have survived, or in the sense of being those whom we should regard as the finest specimens of their kind. A race or a nation may succeed by crushing out the chances of the great majority of its individual members. The cruel polity of the bees, the slave-holding propensities of certain species. of ants have their analogues in human societies. The success of Sparta in the Hellenic world

was obtained at the cost of a frightful oppression of her subject classes and with the result that Sparta never produced one really great man. How much more does the world owe to Athens which failed, than to Sparta which succeeded in the physical struggle for existence?

But human beings are not merely, like plants and animals, grouped into natural species or varieties. They have come to group themselves in very various ways. Thus an indi

vidual may conceivably belong by descent to one group, by political allegiance to another, by language, and all that language carries with it of tradition and culture, to a third, by religion to a fourth, by occupation to a fifththough in most cases two or more of these will coincide. Now between each of these groups and similar groups there are, as the doctrine of Evolution teaches us if we need to be

taught, struggles constantly proceeding. Race struggles with race, nation with nation, language with language, religion with religion, and social castes based on occupation and on economic status struggle with one another for pre-eminence, apart from the struggle going on between individuals and groups of individuals within each of them. Now, if in each of these cases the struggle were not complicated by the other struggles, we might contentedly assert that natural selection leads to the fittest always succeeding. But a defeated and subject race may impose its language, its civilisation or its religion upon its conquerors; and the apparent failure of a race or a nation does not entitle us at once to pronounce it inferior or less fit, because its failure in warfare may be the prelude to a greater and more lasting success in peace.

On the other hand it is easy to see how the pre-eminence of a caste, based either on race or

on occupation, may be maintained at the cost of the physical and intellectual advance of its members. Where noble may marry only noble and where marriages are "arranged," as the phrase runs (more truthful than most of those current in the fashionable world), the interests of the health and of the intelligence of the race may be sacrificed to the maintenance of a closely coherent class with large estates and social predominance. Such a type of nobility will in the long run inevitably lose power owing to its own internal decay; but superficially plausible arguments from the doctrine of heredity are occasionally brought forward in its favour. The democrat is often told that he is very unscientific; but the evolutionist who points to the aristocratic preferences of history, errs greatly if he thinks the undoubted pre-eminence of a few great individuals and even of a few famous families any sound argument in favour of a hered.