I have received in a Manchester newspaper rather a good squib, showing that I have proved “might is right,” and therefore that Napoleon is right, and every cheating tradesman is also right.
CHARLES DARWIN to SIR CHARLES LYELL
The age in which Spencer, Sumner, and Ward formulated their philosophies was one of great intellectual insecurity. While, as we have seen, many men were uncertain how much of their religion would be left standing after natural selection had been fully accepted, others were quite as troubled by questions about what Darwinism would mean for the moral life. Spencer and the evolutionary anthropologists promised them that it would mean progress, perhaps perfection.1 The Malthusian element in Darwinism, however, pointed to an endless struggle for existence regulated by no sanction more exalted than mere survival. While some expected a new and higher morality, others feared a complete collapse of moral standards.
Senator Gore, one of the characters in Henry Adams’ novel Democracy (1880), which was set against the dissolute and money-mad atmosphere of Washington in the Gilded Age, expressed the essential aimlessness and sterility of what many men feared would be the dominant values of the future:
But I have faith; not perhaps in the old dogmas, but in the new ones; faith in human nature; faith in science; faith in the survival of the fittest. Let us be true to our times, Mrs. Lee! If our age is to be beaten, let us die in the ranks. If it is to be victorious, let us be the first to lead the column. Anyway, let us not be skulkers or grumblers.2
Men with a deeper sense for traditional ideals hoped for more than this. Did Darwinism really justify brutal self-assertion, the neglect of the weak and the poor, the abandonment of philanthropic enterprise? Did it mean that progress must be dependent upon the ruthless elimination of the unfit, in an expanding population forever pressing upon the bounds of subsistence?
In a nation trained in Christian ethics and fortified by a democratic and humanitarian heritage, such a Nietzschean transvaluation of values was out of the question. Spencer’s reconciliation of evolution and idealism, with its forecast of a transition from militancy to peace and from egoism to altruism was the commonest answer. Yet Spencer often spoke in rude selectionist language which could satisfy few who were not uncompromising defenders of a strictly competitive order or who were not willing to make drastic concessions to a naturalistic ethic, bare of all the warm and familiar theological sanctions. In The Principles of Sociology, he declared:
Not simply do we see that in the competition among individuals of the same kind, survival of the fittest has from the beginning furthered production of a higher type; but we see that to the unceasing warfare between species is mainly due both growth and organization. Without universal conflict there would have been no development of the active powers.3
In the light of all this talk about “unceasing warfare” and “universal conflict,” what was the value to those interested in the here and now of Spencer’s promise of a remote social Nirvana? One philanthropist asked:
Would not mankind take chloroform if they had no future but Spencer’s? No individual continuance, no God, no superior powers, only evolution working towards a benevolent society here and perfection on earth, with great doubt whether it could succeed, and, if it succeeded, whether the end would pay.4
“Herbert Spencer’s ethics will certainly be the final ethics,” wrote another critic, “but the question does press itself upon us, what is to be the ethics for the time now present and passing?”5 “What are we to do,” queried James McCosh, “with our reading youth entering upon life who are told in scientific lectures and journals that the old sanctions of morality are all undermined?”6
In 1879 the Atlantic Monthly published an essay by Goldwin Smith with the significant title “The Prospect of a Moral Interregnum,” which faced the troublesome questions raised by naturalism. Religion, Smith believed, had always been the foundation for the western moral code; and it would be idle for positivists and agnostics to imagine that while Christianity was being destroyed by evolution the humane values of Christian ethics would persist. Ultimately, he conceded, an ethic based upon science might be worked out, but for the present there would be a moral interregnum, similar to those which had occurred in past times of crisis. There had been such an interregnum in the Hellenic world after the collapse of its religion brought about by scientific speculation; there had been another in the Roman world before the coming of Christianity gave it a new moral basis; a third collapse in western Europe following the Renaissance had produced the age of the Borgias and Machiavelli, the Guises and the Tudors; finally, Puritanism in England and the Counter Reformation in the Catholic Church had reintroduced moral stability. At present another religious collapse is under way:
What then, we ask, is likely to be the effect of this revolution on morality? Some effect it can hardly fail to have. Evolution is force, the struggle for existence is force, natural selection is force. . . . But what will become of the brotherhood of man and of the very idea of humanity?7
What would keep the stronger races from preying on the weak? (Smith had heard of an imperialist who said, “The first business of a colonist is to clear the country of wild beasts, and the most noxious of all wild beasts is the wild man.”) Or, if a tyrant should seize the reins of power in any of the great states, what could be said against him, consistently, under the survival doctrine? (Had not Napoleon been selected for survival?) What would happen to nineteenth-century humanitarianism? How were the passions of social conflict to be abated? To these questions Smith had no answer, but he was sure that the impending crisis in morals would bring with it a crisis in politics and the social order.
Other writers concerned themselves with more concrete issues. Francis Bowen, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Harvard, who could never overcome his religious hostility to Darwin, probably expressed the attitude of many old-school Christian conservatives when he attempted to discredit Darwinism by accentuating its dire social consequences. Familiar with the Malthusian genealogy of natural selection, Bowen linked the two as twin errors. Malthusianism had become popular in England, he pointed out, because it had counteracted the revolutionary ideas of men like Godwin; but it had also been used to relieve the rich of responsibility for the sufferings of the poor. Malthus had been proved wrong by the course of events; and just when his theory was dying out in political economy it received fresh support from Darwinian biology. The same arguments against the theory still hold good; for the social process is the opposite of the Darwinian process. It is undeniable that the lower classes are more fertile than the upper, that the unfittest rather than the fittest survive. Thus it is the existence of higher, not lower, forms that is imperiled in the social process. The solution to this can come only from persons of wealth, culture, and refinement, who must violate the canons of Malthus and propagate more freely to promote civilization. Wherever the Darwin-Malthus system is applied its consequences are bad: in sociology a hard-hearted indifference to the sufferings of the poor; in religion, atheism; in philosophy the dark wastes of German pessimism, and a contempt for the value of human life which, like Stoicism in Rome, presages social catastrophe.8
Comparable in its social conservatism, but more congenial to the scientific spirit, was the view of another writer who predicted a great conflict between what he termed “the sympathetic and the scientific theories of government.” The sympathetic party is all for alleviating the condition of the working class by social legislation. No such philanthropic softness is really needed in the United States, where only natural incapacity prevents a man from becoming a capitalist. The masses cannot be artificially saved from their own incompetence without social disaster. American society, under the influence of the philanthropists of the sympathetic party, is being deluged by a flood of immigrants and dragged down by an increasing proportion of incapables. The scientific party would “defend the principle of competition, conformity to the law of supply and demand, and a fair field for the experiment of the survival of the fittest.”9
The doctrines of the “scientific party” were similar to those of the comfortable set whose social prejudices William Dean Howells so coldly examined in A Traveler from Altruria (1894). To Mr. Homos, who was appalled at the apparent rigidity of class barriers in American society, the American explained:
“The divisions among us are rather a process of natural selection. You will see, as you get better acquainted with the workings of our institutions, that there are no arbitrary distinctions here, but the fitness of the work for the man and the man for the work determines the social rank that each one holds. . . .”
I added: “You know we are a sort of fatalists here in America. We are great believers in the doctrine that it will all come out right in the end.”
“Ah, I don’t wonder at that,” said the Altrurian, “if the process of natural selection works so perfectly among you as you say.”10
Within the “scientific party” itself some had doubts about the possibilities of progress. When an essayist in the Galaxy protested against the general blind faith in machines, inventions, and popular reforms, and argued that the panaceas of enthusiasts were impotent in the face of population pressures, he was answered with a blast of evolutionary optimism by George Cary Eggleston in the columns of Appleton’s. There is no need, said Eggleston, to bewail the pressure of population or to limit its growth. The crowding of the world, by stimulating industry and forcing men to develop their capacities, by crushing the unfit, “by casting out the unworthy and raising the worthy to prosperity and power,” acts as the greatest motive power of progress.
A more humanitarian attitude was voiced by the eminent geologist Nathaniel S. Shaler, a scientist in the “sympathetic party,” who questioned the value of numbers in society. Shaler pointed out that it was characteristic of the higher species to be less wasteful in having progeny, that civilization replaced natural selection with selection by intelligence. If natural selection were really operating to full effect in civilization, Shaler would admit the desirability of an increase in population, but in fact humanity dictates the preservation of all, weak or strong, who come into existence, and even modern warfare selects for survival the weak, cowardly, and superannuated and destroys the fit. It would then be better to rely on education to supply the select few that nature would produce in a more wasteful way. Education demands a high standard of comfort, which in turn demands the “limitation of reproduction to the true needs of the race.”11
In such terms as these, unsettled questions made their way into popular forums. Readers who turned to serious books between 1871 and 1900 found much provocative discussion of the meaning of Darwinism for ethics, politics, and social affairs. There were others besides Sumner and Spencer who had a powerful effect upon American intellectual life. One, John Fiske, was a native son, but most were English. Walter Bagehot, Huxley, Henry Drummond, Benjamin Kidd, William Mallock—such men were as much leaders in American thought as almost any American writer. At least one continental thinker also, Prince Peter Kropotkin, received a favorable hearing. The merits of their contributions were unequal, but all were listened to with respect.
Darwin himself offered somewhat confused counsel on the ethical implications of his own discoveries. In the light of his discussion of the moral sense and the role of sympathy in evolution, it is not surprising to find him somewhat hurt at the suggestion that he had proved that might is right. He little suspected that he was fated to be an intellectual Pandora; for, however dismal the Malthusian logic behind his system, it was filtered through his own tender moral sensibilities. True, The Origin of Species was Hobbesian in spirit, and Darwin’s remarks on “Natural Selection as Affecting Civilised Nations” in The Descent of Man were at points reminiscent of the harshest portions of Spencer’s Social Statics:
We civilised men . . . do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. . . . Thus the weak members of civilised society propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.12
Yet this was not characteristic of Darwin’s moral sentiments, for he went on to say that a ruthless policy of elimination would betray “the noblest part of our nature,” which is itself securely founded in the social instincts. We must therefore bear with the evil effects of the survival and propagation of the weak, and rest our hopes on the fact that “the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound.” He also advocated that all who cannot spare their children abject poverty should refrain from marriage; here again he lapsed into Malthusianism with the statement that the prudent should not shirk their duty of maintaining population, for it is through the pressure of population and the consequent struggles that man has advanced and will continue to advance.13
If there were, in Darwin’s writings, texts for rugged individualists and ruthless imperialists, those who stood for social solidarity and fraternity could, however, match them text for text with some to spare. Darwin devoted many pages of The Descent of Man to the sociality of man and the origins of his moral sense. He believed that primeval men and their apelike progenitors, along with many lower animals, were probably social in their habits, that remote primitives practised division of labor, and that man’s social habits have been of enormous importance in his survival. “Selfish and contentious people will not cohere,” he wrote, “and without coherence nothing can be effected.” He believed man’s moral sense to be an inevitable outgrowth of his social instincts and habits, and a critical factor in group survival. The pressure of group opinion and the moral effect of family affections he ranked with intelligent self-interest as biological foundations of moral behavior.14 It was little wonder that when Kropotkin wrote his Mutual Aid he claimed Darwin as a predecessor and blamed others for putting a Hobbesian interpretation on Darwin’s theory.15
Two years after The Descent of Man appeared the first significant work of biologically derived social speculation to break Spencer’s monopoly in that field—Walter Bagehot’s Physics and Politics, more aptly described in its subtitle, Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of “Natural Selection” and “Inheritance” to Political Society. Published in Youmans’s International Scientific Series, Bagehot’s book met an immediate favorable reception in this country, and did much to encourage social interpretation along biological lines. Bagehot attempted to reconstruct the pattern of growth of political civilization in the manner of evolutionary ethnologists like Lubbock and Tylor, from whom he drew some of his data.
Bagehot did not try to explain the circumstances under which law and political institutions originated. “But when once politics were begun, there is no difficulty in explaining why they lasted. Whatever may be said against the principle of ‘natural selection’ in other departments, there is no doubt of its predominance in early human history. The strongest killed out the weakest as they could.” Since any form of political organization was superior to chaos, an aggregation of families having political leadership and some legal custom would rapidly conquer those that did not. The caliber of early political organization was less important than the fact that it was there at all; its function was to create a “cake of custom” which would bind men together, holding them, to be sure, in whatever place in the social order birth had given them—for organization originates in a regime of status and only long afterward evolves into a regime of contract. The second step, after organization, is the molding of national character. This came about through the unconscious imitation of a chance “variation” displayed by one or two outstanding individuals. The national character is simply the naturally selected parish character, just as the national speech is the successful parish dialect.
Progress, habitually thought of as a normal fact in human society, is actually a rare occurrence among peoples: the ancients had no such conception, nor do orientals; and savages do not improve. The phenomenon occurs only in a few nations of European origin. Some nations progress while others stagnate, because under all circumstances the strongest prevail over others; and the strongest are, “in certain marked peculiarities,” the best. Within each nation the most appealing character, usually the best, prevails; and in the now dominant western part of the world these competitions between nations and character types have been intensified by “intrinsic forces.” Of the existence of progress in the military art there can be no doubt, nor of its corollary that the most advanced will destroy the weaker, that the more compact will eliminate the scattered, and that the more civilized are the more compact. An advance in civilization is thus a military advantage. Backward civilizations, being more rigid in the structure of their law and custom, “kill out varieties at birth,” but progress depends upon the emergence of varieties. “Progress is only possible in those happy cases where the force of legality has gone far enough to bind the nation together, but not far enough to kill out all varieties and destroy nature’s perpetual tendency to change.” Early societies were in a grave dilemma: they needed custom to survive, but unless it was sufficiently flexible to admit variations they were frozen in their ancient mold. Modern societies, living in an age of discussion rather than rigid custom, have found a means of reconciling order with progress.16
Darwin’s task of finding natural roots for man’s moral feelings and for the sympathy that underlies persistent social coöperation was taken up by John Fiske in his Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy (1874) and The Meaning of Infancy (1883). After reading Alfred Wallace’s account of his observations in the Malay Archipelago, Fiske had been struck by the thought that one thing that distinguishes the human race from the other mammals is the very long duration of its infancy. In general there is a correlation between the complexity of a species’ potential behavior and the proportion of its behavior that is acquired by learning after birth. The human infant acquires the smallest proportion of its ultimate capacities during gestation; it is born less developed than the young of other species, and must undergo a long plastic period in which it learns the ways of its race. What makes the human species progressive, Fiske reasoned, is the fact that the infant does not come into the world with its capacities “all cut and dried,” but on the contrary must learn slowly and is therefore able to learn an infinitely wider range of behavior. The necessity of seeing infants through this long period prolongs the years of maternal affection and care and tends to keep father, mother, and child together—in short, to found the stable family and ultimately the clan organization, the first step toward civil society. From being merely gregarious, man becomes social.
Once the clan is organized, natural selection intervenes to maintain it; for those clans in which the primeval selfish instincts were most effectively subordinated to the needs of the group would prevail in the struggle for life. In this way the first germs of altruism and morality, manifest in the mother’s care of the infant, become generalized into wider and wider social bonds until they form sympathies broad enough to support the communal life of civilized man as he is now known. The moral sense has its foundation in the primitive biological unit, the family, and the social cooperation and solidarity of men is nothing if not natural.17
Fiske’s philosophy attempted to give to the higher ethical impulses a direct root in the evolutionary process. A somewhat different—and, to most of his contemporaries, a less satisfactory—note of moral reassurance was struck by T. H. Huxley in his famous Romanes Lecture on “Evolution and Ethics” (1893). Unlike Fiske, Huxley accepted at its face value the Hobbesian interpretation of Darwinism and acknowledged that “men in society are undoubtedly subject to the cosmic process,” which includes, of course, the struggle for existence and the elimination of the unfit. But he flatly rejected the common practice of identifying the “fittest” with the “best,” pointing out that under certain cosmic conditions the only “fit” organisms would prove to be low ones. Man and nature make altogether different judgments of value. The ethical process, or the production of what man recognizes as truly the “best,” is in opposition to the cosmic process. “Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step.”
In a companion essay Huxley compared the ethical process to the work of the gardener: the state of the garden is not that of “nature red in tooth and claw,” for the horticultural process eliminates struggle by adjusting life conditions to the plant instead of making the plants adjust to nature. Instead of encouraging, horticulture restricts multiplication of the species. Like horticulture, human ethics defies the cosmic process; for both horticulture and ethical behavior circumvent the raw struggle for existence in the interest of some ideal imposed from without upon the processes of nature.
The more advanced a society becomes, the more it eliminates the struggle for existence among its members. To practice natural selection in a society after the fashion of the jungle would weaken, perhaps destroy, the bonds holding it together:
It strikes me that men who are accustomed to contemplate the active or passive extirpation of the weak, the unfortunate, and the superfluous; who justify that conduct on the ground that it has the sanction of the cosmic process, and is the only way of ensuring the progress of the race; who, if they are consistent, must rank medicine among the black arts and count the physician a mischievous preserver of the unfit; on whose matrimonial undertakings the principles of the stud have the chief influence; whose whole lives, therefore, are an education in the noble art of suppressing natural affection and sympathy, are not likely to have any large stock of these commodities left. But, without them, there is no conscience, nor any self-restraint on the conduct of men, except the calculation of self-interest, the balancing of certain present gratifications against doubtful future pains; and experience tells us how much that is worth.18
What is called the struggle for existence in modern society is really a struggle for the means of enjoyment. Only the desperately poor, the pauperized, and the criminal are engaged in a struggle for actual existence; and this struggle among the submerged 5 per cent of society can have no selective action on the whole, because even the members of this class manage to multiply rapidly before they die. The struggle for enjoyment, while it may have a moderate selective action, is in no way analogous either to natural selection or to the artificial selection of the horticulturist. Then the need of mankind is not acquiescence to nature, but “a constant struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition to the State of Nature, the State of Art of an organized polity.”19
Reminiscent of Fiske’s infancy theory were Henry Drummond’s popular Lowell Lectures on The Ascent of Man (1894). Drummond, a Scottish preacher who had already gained a considerable following with his pseudo-philosophical book, Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883), did not deny the importance of the’ Struggle for Life, but he looked upon it as the villain of the piece rather than the play itself. A second factor in evolution, equally important, is the Struggle for the Life of Others. The Struggle for Life springs from the requirements of nutrition; reproduction and its resulting emotions and relationships are the foundation of the Struggle for the Life of Others. With Fiske, Drummond found in the family the basis of human sympathy and solidarity, for it is there that the Struggle for the Life of Others begins.
Critical of Huxley’s dualism between the cosmic and the ethical, Drummond sought for a natural foundation for moral behavior. His solution was a teleological interpretation of the evolutionary process in which the Struggle for the Life of Others was seen as a Providential device for securing perfection. In this way Drummond killed two birds with one stone: he restored the continuity of natural evolution and morals and saved spiritualism from mechanical interpretations of evolution. “The path of progress and the path of Altruism are one. Evolution is nothing but the Involution of Love, the revelation of Infinite Spirit, the Eternal Life returning to Itself.”20 Drummond recognized the ability to survive as mere fittedness, without reference to ethical values. He acknowledged a certain analogy between the industrial process and evolutionary struggle, and found that industry “is but one or two removes from the purely animal struggle.”21 But with the growing importance of the Struggle for the Life of Others and the advance of technology, the struggle is losing its animal fierceness. While the first few chapters of evolution may be headed the Struggle for Life, the book as a whole is a love story.
Less popular than Drummond’s book, but more enduring, was Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid (1902). This work was originally conceived as an answer to Huxley’s “Evolution and Ethics,” for Kropotkin had the collectivist’s natural hostility to philosophies that neglected to see cooperation as a major factor in evolution. When Kropotkin had been in Northern Asia he had seen an impressive measure of mutual aid among the rodents, birds, deer, and wild cattle of Siberia, which brought forcibly to his mind the absence of a bitter struggle for means of subsistence among animals belonging to the same species. Some Darwinists had considered internecine strife a critical factor in evolution, but according to Kropotkin, Darwin had been innocent of this because he had recognized unequivocally the element of cooperation.
Kropotkin backed his thesis with an impressive amount of natural and historical lore, culled from a wide range of literature. From ants, bees, and beetles, through all the mammalia, Kropotkin found sociability and cooperation within the species-unit. Birds, even birds of prey, are sociable, and wolves hunt in packs. Rodents work in common, horses herd together, and most monkeys live in bands. Kropotkin followed this with a survey of mutual aid in man—primitive, barbarian, medieval, and modern. On the lessons of biology for human life he concluded:
Happily enough, competition is not the rule either in the animal world or in mankind. It is limited among animals to exceptional periods, and natural selection finds better fields for its activity. Better conditions are created by the elimination of competition by means of mutual aid and mutual support. . . .
“Don’t compete!—competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!” That is the tendency of nature, not always realized in full, but always present. That is the watchword which comes to us from the bush, the forest, the river, the ocean. “Therefore combine—practise mutual aid! That is the surest means for giving to each and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual, moral.” That is what Nature teaches us.22
From other quarters the principle of competition was defended with new subtleties. In the 1890’s, although competition was increasingly thrown on the defensive, two popular writers entered the lists on its behalf and once again attempted to fit competitive ethics into the evolutionary scheme.
Two new currents in the intellectual atmosphere provoked a change in the tone of evolutionary apologetics: the growth of social protest evident in the Henry George and Edward Bellamy movements, the publication of the Fabian essays, and a growing general familiarity with Marxism; and in the field of biology the publication of August Weismann’s researches into the inheritance of acquired characteristics.23 Weismann had developed what he thought was conclusive evidence against such inheritance. If he was right—and most biologists believed he was—the Lamarckian features of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy were no longer tenable; men could no longer hope to evolve an ideal race by gradual increments of knowledge and benevolence handed down to their children; social evolution must be redrawn along stricter Darwinian lines; if there was to be any progress at all it must come from a severe reliance upon natural selection.
Benjamin Kidd, an obscure English government clerk, capitalized upon these problems in his Social Evolution, which appeared in 1894 and became the rage in the Anglo-American literary world. Kidd attempted to set up a theoretical structure based upon Weismann, which would reconcile the competitive process, natural selection, and the trend toward legislative reform initiated by the new protest. His theory started with the familiar dogma that progress results from selection and that selection inevitably involves competition.24 Therefore the central aim of a progressive civilization must be to maintain competition.
For the great masses of men, however, for the underdogs everywhere, the incentives to maintain competition grow slighter and slighter, Kidd realized. Hence the swelling cry of social protest.
[Man’s] interests as an individual have, in fact, become further subordinated to those of a social organism, with interests immensely wider and a life indefinitely longer than his own. How is the possession of reason ever to be rendered compatible with the will to submit to conditions of existence so onerous, requiring the effective and continual subordination of the individual’s welfare to the progress of a development in which he can have no personal interest whatever?25
Why should the red Indian or the New Zealand Maori, undergoing extermination before the advance of more progressive peoples, have an interest in progress? Or, more important for western civilization and its future, what rational sanction can there be for the “great masses of people, the so-called lower class,” to submit to the personal trials and tortures incident to social progress by way of the competitive system? They are already becoming more and more aware that their individual rational interest is clearly to abolish competition, to suspend rivalry, to establish socialism, to regulate population and keep it “proportional to the means of comfortable existence for all.”
This antagonism between the rational interest of the mass-individual and the continued progress of the social organism, Kidd argued, cannot be reconciled by reason. But let philosophy abandon its attempt to find a rational sanction for human conduct—then the problem is seen in a new light. At the same time the social function of religion is made crystal clear.
One common characteristic underlies all conceptions of religion: they reveal “man in some way in conflict with his own reason.” The universal instinctive religious impulse serves this indispensable social function: it provides a supernatural, nonrational sanction for progress. All kinds of religious systems are “associated with conduct, having a social significance; and everywhere the ultimate sanction which they provide for the conduct they prescribed is a superrational one.” Religion as a social institution has survived because it performs an essential service to the race: it impels man to act in a socially responsible way. Such an impulse is absent from all merely rational ways of thought.26
For the role of altruism in human affairs, Kidd had a defense notably different from Spencer’s. There is no rational sanction for altruism; its sanction is superrational, and runs counter to individual self-interest. No wonder that it is so often found in close association with the religious impulse. The altruistic impulse should be heeded, and is being heeded, for there is a growing tendency to strengthen and equip the lower and weaker against the higher and wealthier classes of the community. This is the best possible answer to the threat of socialism. Socialism, abandoning competition, would result in degeneracy and inundation by more vigorous societies. The effect of charities, and of the general trend toward strengthening the masses to compete by means of social legislation is to stimulate competitive tension. Thus the social efficiency of western society is increased. All future progressive legislation must lift the masses into this energetic competition. As state interference widens, mankind will paradoxically move further and further away from socialism. The state will never go so far as to manage industry or confiscate private property.27 From all this progressive movement will come a “new democracy” higher than anything yet attained in the history of the race.
It was a peculiar mixture of obscurantism, reformism, Christianity, and social Darwinism that Kidd offered his thousands of readers. Among religious folk who wanted a rational foundation for their beliefs, among social Darwinists of the older laissez-faire stripe, orthodox Spencerians, trained philosophers and sociologists, and rationalists of all kinds, Kidd’s doctrines were anathema. But this hostility did not prevent his having tremendous popular appeal. “His reputation,” complained an eminent American sociologist, “seems to me one of the most humiliating freaks of book-readers’ opinion that has occurred in the generation that put Mrs. Humphrey Ward on a pedestal and is now incoherently Trilby-mad.”28 A more patient explanation was offered by John A. Hobson in the American Journal of Sociology:
There has been a rapidly growing feeling among large numbers of those who still cleave to the orthodox churches, that the intellectual foundations of religion have slipped away. They are not rationalists, most of them have never seriously examined the rational basis of their creed, but the disturbing influences of rational criticism have reached them in the shape of this vague uneasy feeling. Now these people, morally weak because they have relied upon dogmatic supports of conduct, are ready to grasp eagerly at a theory which will save their religious systems in a manner which seems consistent with the maintenance of modern culture.29
A mixed reaction was expressed by Theodore Roosevelt in the North American Review. He approved of Kidd’s assertion that social progress continues to rest upon biological laws; of his attack on socialism as retrogressive; of his conclusion that the state should equalize the chances of competition but not abolish it; of his emphasis on efficiency as a criterion of society, and on character as opposed to intellect. He felt, however, that Kidd overstressed the necessity of competition and understressed the tendency of the unfit, even without organized social aid, to survive and grow more fit rather than suffer elimination. He also argued that Kidd exaggerated the sufferings of the masses; in a progressive community four-fifth or nine-tenths of the people are happy and therefore do have a rational sanction for contributing to progress. Moreover, Kidd valued all religions alike, whereas Christianity is far superior to others in teaching the subordination of the individual to the interests of mankind. Finally, Roosevelt was not happy with Kidd’s view of religion, which he found equivalent to calling it “a succession of lies necessary to make the world go forward.”30
Four years later, William H. Mallock, an English hack writer who was well known in this country for his books and magazine articles, brought out a volume entitled Aristocracy and Evolution, in which he proposed to throw overboard the whole of Kidd’s system, along with the rest of the prevailing evolutionary social theory, and return to pure individualism.
Mallock’s intention was to establish the rights and the social functions of the wealthier classes, which he felt had been inadequately understood in the evolutionary philosophy of Spencer and Kidd. The great fault of current sociology was that it spoke grossly of “mankind” or “the race” or “the nation,” without refining these terms into classes and individuals. With all their talk about the evolutionary progression of the whole mass of society, Spencer and Kidd were particularly guilty of disparaging the great man and losing sight of his contributions and achievements. They fallaciously belittled the stature of great leaders by attributing their deeds to the whole of society and its inherited skills and accomplishments; by the same logic the great masses of men could also be shorn of credit for their petty performances.
The great man, in Mallock’s scheme, was certainly not to be identified with the physically fittest survivor in the struggle for existence. All you could say for the physically fittest survivor was that he manages to live; and while this does undoubtedly contribute to the progress of the race, it is slow and unspectacular. The great man, on the other hand, galvanizes society by acquiring unique knowledge or skill and imposing it on the mass. The physically fittest promotes progress by living while others die; the great man promotes progress by helping others to live. The struggle of ordinary workers to find employment is a social equivalent of the struggle for existence; it contributes but little to progress, for the greatest forward steps in the development of man have been accomplished without any improvement in the breed of its laborers. The industrial struggle that really promotes progress is the battle among leaders, among employers. When one of two competing employers succeeds in conquering the other, the working men of the vanquished are absorbed in the employ of the victor, and lose nothing; but the fruits of the successful leader’s skill are bequeathed to the community. It is, then, not the brute struggle for existence but the war for domination among the well-to-do that results in social progress.
Domination by the fittest is of the greatest benefit to society as a whole. In order to facilitate the process the great man must be impelled by strong motives and granted the instruments of domination. Fundamentally this is an economic problem. The great man can exert his influence by one of two economic means—the slave system and the capitalistic wage system, the one a system of compulsion, the other of voluntary inducement. Socialists, who desire to abolish the wage system, can do so only by founding a slave system. They could not eliminate the struggle for domination; they could only enclose it in their cumbrous and wasteful order. To progress, a social system must retain competition between the directors of labor, the contest for industrial domination. No matter what happens to society, the domination of the fittest great men—capitalistic competition—must be ensured. Such men are the true producers. The fundamental condition of social progress is that these leaders be obeyed by the masses. In politics, as in industry, the forms of democracy are hollow; for while executive agencies are designed to execute the will of the many, the opinions of the many are formed by the few, who manipulate them.31
A reader who had followed with equal devotion and equal credulity the suggestions of all these writers might have felt his confusion growing instead of being resolved. Yet amid all this confusion there was a decided trend, most evident when one considers what was agreed upon by Fiske, Drummond, and Kropotkin. They all endorsed solidarism; they saw the group (the species, family, tribe, class, or nation) as the unit of survival, and minimized or overlooked entirely the individual aspect of competition. It was precisely this which Mallock, an arch-individualist, found objectionable in the current trend of evolutionary thought. Fiske, Drummond and Kropotkin not only agreed that social solidarity is a basic fact in evolution, but believed further that solidarity is a thoroughly natural phenomenon, a logical outgrowth of natural evolution.32 In this respect they differed from Huxley, who shared their concern about the effect of the struggle-for-existence philosophy upon “the social bond.” But Huxley, finding no basis in the “cosmic process” for the “ethical process,” was obliged to tear the two asunder and establish a dualism of facts and values which aroused a great deal of criticism. Even Kidd’s devotion to competition in the abstract was qualified by his acceptance of social legislation in the interest of group efficiency.
The transition to solidarism, which was part of a larger reconstruction in American thought, became apparent in the 1890’s—the period that saw the publication of Drummond and Kidd, of Huxley’s essay, and, in preliminary form, of Mutual Aid. Rising with solidarism were other streams of criticism. In the realm of philosophy, the new spirit was marked by the ascendancy of the pragmatic movement, especially significant because it rejected the cold determinism of Spencer’s philosophy and constructed a new psychology, in part out of Darwinian materials. As social dissent became more vociferous, there arose a new concern with conscious social control. Inspired by events in the political and industrial arena, social science also reassessed its aims and methods. Earlier conceptions of the social significance of Darwinism were undergoing profound changes.