the poor as of the business and professional classes. The appetite for success is really never satisfied, and a deeper insight into the conditions of the rivalry reveals that it is necessarily so; it grows with eating, but it remains insatiable.

We shall perceive, when we understand the nature of the forces at work beneath the social phenomena of our time, that in whatever direction we may cast. our eyes, there is no evidence that the rivalry and competition of life, which has projected itself into human society, has tended to disappear in the past, or that it is less severe amongst the most advanced peoples of the present, or that the tendency of the progress we are making is to extinguish it in the future. On the contrary, all the evidence points in the opposite direction. The enormous expansion of the past century has been accompanied by two wellmarked features in all lands affected by it. The advance towards more equal conditions of life has been so great, that amongst the more progressive nations such terms as lower orders, common people, and working classes are losing much of their old meaning, the masses of the people are being slowly raised, and the barriers of birth, class, and privilege are everywhere being broken through. being broken through. But, on the other hand, the pulses of life have not slackened amongst us; the rivalry is keener, the stress severer, the pace quicker than ever before.

Looking round at the nations of to-day and noticing the direction in which they are travelling, it seems impossible to escape the conclusion that the progressive peoples have everywhere the same distinctive features. Energetic, vigorous, virile life amongst them is maintained at the highest pitch of which nature is capable.

They offer the highest motives to emulation; amongst them the individual is freest, the selection fullest, the rivalry fairest. But so also is the conflict sternest, the nervous friction greatest, and the stress severest. Looking back by the way these nations have come, we find an equally unmistakable absence of these qualities and conditions amongst the competitors they have left behind. From the nations who have dropped out of the race within recent times backwards through history, we follow a gradually descending series. The contrast already to be distinguished between the advancing and the unprogressive peoples of European race is more noticeable when the former are compared with non-European peoples. The difference becomes still more marked when the existence of the careless, shiftless, easily satisfied negro of the United States or West Indies is contrasted with that of the dominant race amongst whom he lives, whose restless, aggressive, high-pitched life he has neither the desire to live nor the capacity to endure.

We follow the path of Empire from the stagnant and unchanging East, westward through peoples whose pulses beat quicker, and whose energy and activity become more marked as we advance. Professor Marshall, who notices the prevailing energy and activity of the British people, and who has recently roundly asserted that men of the Anglo-Saxon races in all parts of the world not only work hard while about it, but do more work in the year than any other,' only brings into prominence the one dominant feature of all successful peoples. It is the same characteristic which distinguishes the people of the great AngloSaxon republic of the West whose writers continually 1 Principles of Economics, vol. i. p. 730.

remind us that the peculiar endowment which its people have received from nature is an additional allowance of nervous energy.

A similar lesson is emphasised in the northward movement of rule and empire throughout historic times. The successful peoples have moved westwards for physical reasons; the seat of power has moved continually northwards for reasons connected with the evolution in character which the race is undergoing. Man, originally a creature of a warm climate and still multiplying most easily and rapidly there, has not attained his highest development where the conditions. of existence have been easiest. Throughout history the centre of power has moved gradually but surely to the north into those stern regions where men have been trained for the rivalry of life in the strenuous conflict with nature in which they have acquired energy, courage, integrity, and those characteristic qualities which contribute to raise them to a high state of social efficiency. The shifting of the centre of power northwards has been a feature alike of modern and of ancient history. The peoples whose influence to-day reaches over the greater part of the world, both temperate and tropical, belong almost exclusively to races whose geographical home is north of the 40th parallel of latitude. The two groups of peoples, the English-speaking races and the Russians whose rule actually extends over some 46 per cent of the entire surface of the earth have their geographical home north of the 50th parallel.

Nor can there be any doubt that from these strenuous conditions of rivalry the race as a whole is powerless to escape. The conditions of progress may be interrupted amongst the peoples who have long

held their place in the front. These peoples may fail and fall behind, but progress continues nevertheless. For although the growth of the leading shoot may be for the time arrested, farther back on the branch other shoots are always ready to take the place of that which has ceased to advance. The races who maintain their places in the van do so on the sternest conditions. We may regulate and humanise those conditions, but we have no power to alter them; the conflict is severest of all when it is carried on under the

forms of the highest civilisation. The Anglo-Saxon looks forward, not without reason, to the day when wars will cease; but without war, he is involuntarily exterminating the Maori, the Australian, and the Red Indian, and he has within his borders the emancipated but ostracised Negro, the English Poor Law, and the Social Question; he may beat his swords into ploughshares but in his hands the implements of industry prove even more effective and deadly weapons than the swords.

These are the first stern facts of human life and progress which we have to take into account. They have their origin not in any accidental feature of our history, nor in any innate depravity existing in man. They result, as we have seen, from deep-seated physiological causes, the operation of which we must always remain powerless to escape. It is worse than useless to obscure them or to ignore them, as is done in a great part of the social literature of the time. The first step towards obtaining any true grasp of the social problems of our day must be to look fairly and bravely in the face these facts which lie behind them.

CHAPTER III

THERE IS NO RATIONAL SANCTION FOR THE CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS

HAVING endeavoured to place thus prominently before our minds the conditions under which human progress has been made throughout the past, and under which it, so far, continues to be made in the midst of the highest civilisation which surrounds us at the present, we must now direct our attention to another striking and equally important feature of this progress. The two new forces which made their advent with man were his reason, and the capacity for acting, under its influence, in concert with his fellows in society. It becomes necessary, therefore, to notice for the first time a fact which, later, as we proceed, will be brought into increasing prominence. As man can only reach his highest development and employ his powers to the fullest extent in society, it follows that in the evolution we witness him undergoing throughout history, his development as an individual is necessarily of less importance than his development as a social creature. In other words, although his interests as an individual may remain all-important to himself, it has become inevitable that they must henceforward be subordinated — whether he be conscious of it or not-to those larger social