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of most
fruitful researches, were overshadowed by the masses of facts gathered
for the purpose of illustrating the consequences of a real competition
for life. Besides, Darwin never attempted to submit to a closer
investigation the relative importance of the two aspects under which the
struggle for existence appears in the animal world, and he never wrote
the work he proposed to write upon the natural checks to
over-multiplication, although that work would have been the crucial
test for appreciating the real purport of individual struggle. Nay, on the
very pages just mentioned, amidst data disproving the narrow

Malthusian conception of struggle, the old Malthusian leaven
reappeared-- namely, in Darwin's remarks as to the alleged
inconveniences of maintaining the "weak in mind and body" in our
civilized societies (ch. v). As if thousands of weak-bodied and infirm
poets, scientists, inventors, and reformers, together with other
thousands of so-called "fools" and "weak-minded enthusiasts," were
not the most precious weapons used by humanity in its struggle for
existence by intellectual and moral arms, which Darwin himself
emphasized in those same chapters of Descent of Man.
It happened with Darwin's theory as it always happens with theories
having any bearing upon human relations. Instead of widening it
according to his own hints, his followers narrowed it still more. And
while Herbert Spencer, starting on independent but closely allied lines,
attempted to widen the inquiry into that great question, "Who are the
fittest?" especially in the appendix to the third edition of the Data of
Ethics, the numberless followers of Darwin reduced the notion of
struggle for existence to its narrowest limits. They came to conceive the
animal world as a world of perpetual struggle among half-starved
individuals, thirsting for one another's blood. They made modern
literature resound with the war-cry of woe to the vanquished, as if it
were the last word of modern biology. They raised the "pitiless"
struggle for personal advantages to the height of a biological principle
which man must submit to as well, under the menace of otherwise
succumbing in a world based upon mutual extermination. Leaving
aside the economists who know of natural science but a few words
borrowed from second-hand vulgarizers, we must recognize that even
the most authorized exponents of Darwin's views did their best to
maintain those false ideas. In fact, if we take Huxley, who certainly is
considered as one of the ablest exponents of the theory of evolution,
were we not taught by him, in a paper on the 'Struggle for Existence
and its Bearing upon Man,' that,
"from the point of view of the moralist, the animal world is on about
the same level as a gladiators' show. The creatures are fairly well
treated, and set to, fight hereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the
cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn

his thumb down, as no quarter is given."
Or, further down in the same article, did he not tell us that, as among
animals, so among primitive men,
"the weakest and stupidest went to the wall, while the toughest and
shrewdest, those who were best fitted to cope with their circumstances,
but not the best in another way, survived. Life was a continuous free
fight, and beyond the limited and temporary relations of the family, the
Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of
existence."(2)
In how far this view of nature is supported by fact, will be seen from
the evidence which will be here submitted to the reader as regards the
animal world, and as regards primitive man. But it may be remarked at
once that Huxley's view of nature had as little claim to be taken as a
scientific deduction as the opposite view of Rousseau, who saw in
nature but love, peace, and harmony destroyed by the accession of man.
In fact, the first walk in the forest, the first observation upon any
animal society, or even the perusal of any serious work dealing with
animal life (D'Orbigny's, Audubon's, Le Vaillant's, no matter which),
cannot but set the naturalist thinking about the part taken by social life
in the life of animals, and prevent him from seeing in Nature nothing
but a field of slaughter, just as this would prevent him from seeing in
Nature nothing but harmony and peace. Rousseau had committed the
error of excluding the beak-and-claw fight from his thoughts; and
Huxley committed the opposite error; but neither Rousseau's optimism
nor Huxley's pessimism can be accepted as an impartial interpretation
of nature.
As soon as we study animals--not in laboratories and museums only,
but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains--we at
once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and
extermination going on amidst various species, and