worth doing being now done, the facts do not bear him out. He thinks
that the great poems have all been written, that the days of the drama
and the epic are past. Yet one of the greatest plays that has ever been
produced, always excepting the plays of Shakespeare, was produced in
this century; and if the world had to wait nearly two thousand years
after the vanishing of the Athenian dramatists before Shakespeare
appeared, and two hundred years more before Goethe wrote his one great
play, we can well afford to suspend judgment for a few hundred years
at least, before asserting that no country and no language will again
produce another great drama. So it is with the epic. We are too near
Milton, who came three thousand years after Homer, to assert that the
centuries to come will never more see an epic. One race may grow feeble
and decrepit and be unable to do any more work; but another may take
its place. After a time the Greek and Latin writers found that they
had no more to say; and a critic belonging to either nationality might
have shaken his head and said that all the great themes had been used
up and all the great ideas expressed; nevertheless, Dante, Cervantes,
Molière, Schiller, Chaucer, and Scott, then all lay in the future.
Again, Mr. Pearson speaks of statecraft at the present day as offering
fewer prizes, and prizes of less worth than formerly, and as giving no
chance for the development of men like Augustus Cæsar, Richelieu, or
Chatham. It is difficult to perceive how these men can be considered
to belong to a different class from Bismarck, who is yet alive; nor do
we see why any English-speaking people should regard a statesman like
Chatham, or far greater that Chatham, as an impossibility nowadays or
in the future. We Americans at least will with difficulty be persuaded
that there has ever been a time when a nobler prize of achievement,
suffering, and success was offered to any statesman than was offered
both to Washington and to Lincoln. So, when Mr. Pearson speaks of the
warfare of civilized countries offering less chance to the individual
than the warfare of savage and barbarous times, and of its being far
less possible now than in old days for a man to make his personal
influence felt in warfare, we can only express our disagreement. No
world-conqueror can arise save in or next to highly civilized States.
There never has been a barbarian Alexander or Cæsar, Hannibal or
Napoleon. Sitting Bull and Rain-in-the-Face compare but ill with Von
Moltke; and no Norse king of all the heroic viking age even so much as
began to exercise the influence upon the warfare of his generation
that Frederick the Great exercised on his.
It is not true that character of necessity decays with the growth of
civilization. It may, of course, be true in some cases. Civilization
may tend to develop upon the lines of Byzantine, Hindoo, and Inca; and
there are sections of Europe and sections of the United States where we
now tend to pay heed exclusively to the peaceful virtues and to develop
only a race of merchants, lawyers, and professors, who will lack the
virile qualities that have made our race great and splendid. This
development may come, but it need not come necessarily, and, on the
whole, the probabilities are against its coming at all.
Mr. Pearson is essentially a man of strength and courage. Looking into
the future, the future seems to him gray and unattractive; but he
does not preach any unmanly gospel of despair. He thinks that in time
to come, though life will be freer than in the past from dangers and
vicissitudes, yet it will contain fewer of the strong pleasures and
of the opportunities for doing great deeds that are so dear to mighty
souls. Nevertheless, he advises us all to front it bravely whether
our hope be great or little; and he ends his book with these fine
sentences: “Even so, there will still remain to us ourselves. Simply to
do our work in life, and to abide the issue, if we stand erect before
the eternal calm as cheerfully as our fathers faced the eternal unrest,
may be nobler training for our souls than the faith in progress.”
We do not agree with him that there will be only this eternal calm to
face; we do not agree with him that the future holds for us a time when
we shall ask nothing from the day but to live, nor from the future but
that we may not deteriorate. We do not agree with him that there is a
day approaching when the lower races will predominate in the world and
the higher races will have lost their noblest elements. But after all,
it matters little what view we take of the future if, in our practice,
we but do as he preaches, and face resolutely whatever fate may have in
store. We, ourselves, are not certain that progress is assured; we only
assert that it may be assured if we but live wise, brave, and upright
lives. We do not know whether the future has in store for us calm or
unrest. We cannot know beyond peradventure whether we can prevent the
higher races from losing their nobler traits and from being overwhelmed
by the lower races. On the whole, we think that the greatest victories
are yet to be won, the greatest deeds yet to be done, and that there
are yet in store for our peoples and for the causes that we uphold
grander triumphs than have ever yet been scored. But be this as it may,
we gladly agree that the one plain duty of every man is to face the
future as he faces the present, regardless of what it may have in store
for him, and, turning toward the light as he sees the light, to play
his part manfully, as a man among men.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] _The Sewanee Review_, August, 1894.
[Illustration]
XIV
“SOCIAL EVOLUTION”[22]
Mr. Kidd’s _Social Evolution_ is a suggestive, but a very crude
book; for the writer is burdened by a certain mixture of dogmatism
and superficiality, which makes him content to accept half truths
and insist that they are whole truths. Nevertheless, though the book
appeals chiefly to minds of the kind which are uncharitably described
as “half-baked,” Mr. Kidd does suggest certain lines of thought which
are worth following--though rarely to his conclusions.
He deserves credit for appreciating what he calls “the outlook.” He
sketches graphically, and with power, the problems which now loom up
for settlement before all of us who dwell in Western lands; and he
portrays the varying attitudes of interest, alarm, and hope with which
the thinkers and workers of the day regard these problems. He points
out that the problems which now face us are by no means parallel to
those that were solved by our forefathers one, two, or three centuries
ago. The great political revolutions seem to be about complete and the
time of the great social revolutions has arrived. We are all peering
eagerly into the future to try to forecast the action of the great dumb
forces set in operation by the stupendous industrial revolution which
has taken place during the present century. We do not know what to make
of the vast displacements of population, the expansion of the towns,
the unrest and discontent of the masses, and the uneasiness of those
who are devoted to the present order of things.
Mr. Kidd sees these problems, but he gropes blindly when he tries to
forecast their solution. He sees that the progress of mankind in past
ages can only have been made under and in accordance with certain
biological laws, and that these laws continue to work in human society
at the present day. He realizes the all-importance of the laws which
govern the reproduction of mankind from generation to generation,
precisely as they govern the reproduction of the lower animals, and
which, therefore, largely govern his progress. But he makes a cardinal
mistake in treating of this kind of progress. He states with the
utmost positiveness that, left to himself, man has not the slightest
innate tendency to make any onward progress whatever, and that if the
conditions of life allowed each man to follow his own inclinations
the average of one generation would always tend to sink below the
average of the preceding. This is one of the sweeping generalizations
of which Mr. Kidd is fond, and which mar so much of his work. He
evidently finds great difficulty in stating a general law with the
proper reservations and with the proper moderation of phrase; and so
he enunciates as truths statements which contain a truth, but which
also contain a falsehood. What he here says is undoubtedly true of the
world, taken as a whole. It is in all probability entirely false of the
highest sections of society. At any rate, there are numerous instances
where the law he states does not work; and of course a single instance
oversets a sweeping declaration of such a kind.
There can be but little quarrel with what Mr. Kidd says as to the
record of the world being a record of ceaseless progress on the one
hand, and ceaseless stress and competition on the other; although even
here his statement is too broad, and his terms are used carelessly.
When he speaks of progress being ceaseless, he evidently means by
progress simply change, so that as he uses the word it must be
understood to mean progress backward as well as forward. As a matter
of fact, in many forms of life and for long ages there is absolutely
no progress whatever and no change, the forms remaining practically
stationary.
Mr. Kidd further points out that the first necessity for every
successful form engaged in this struggle is the capacity for
reproduction beyond the limits for which the conditions of life
comfortably provide, so that competition and selection must not only
always accompany progress, but must prevail in every form of life
which is not actually retrograding. As already said, he accepts without
reservation the proposition that if all the individuals of every
generation in any species were allowed to propagate their kind equally,
the average of each generation would tend to fall below the preceding.
From this position he draws as a corollary, that the wider the limits
of selection, the keener the rivalry and the more rigid the selection,
just so much greater will be the progress; while for any progress at
all there must be some rivalry in selection, so that every progressive
form must lead a life of continual strain and stress as it travels
its upward path. This again is true in a measure, but is not true as
broadly as Mr. Kidd has stated it. The rivalry of natural selection
is but one of the features in progress. Other things being equal, the
species where this rivalry is keenest will make most progress; but then
“other things” never are equal. In actual life those species make most
progress which are farthest removed from the point where the limits
of selection are very wide, the selection itself very rigid, and the
rivalry very keen. Of course the selection is most rigid where the
fecundity of the animal is greatest; but it is precisely the forms
which have most fecundity that have made least progress. Some time in
the remote past the guinea pig and the dog had a common ancestor. The
fecundity of the guinea pig is much greater than that of the dog. Of a
given number of guinea pigs born, a much smaller proportion are able
to survive in the keen rivalry, so that the limits of selection are
wider, and the selection itself more rigid; nevertheless the progress
made by the progenitors of the dog since eocene days has been much
more marked and rapid than the progress made by the progenitors of the
guinea pig in the same time.
Moreover, in speaking of the rise that has come through the stress of
competition in our modern societies, and of the keenness of this stress
in the societies that have gone fastest, Mr. Kidd overlooks certain
very curious features in human society. In the first place he speaks
as though the stress under which nations make progress was primarily
the stress produced by multiplication beyond the limits of subsistence.
This, of course, would mean that in progressive societies the number of
births and the number of deaths would both be at a maximum, for it is
where the births and deaths are largest that the struggle for life is
keenest. If, as Mr. Kidd’s hypothesis assumes, progress was most marked
where the struggle for life was keenest, the European peoples standing
highest in the scale would be the South Italians, the Polish Jews, and
the people who live in the congested districts of Ireland. As a matter
of fact, however, these are precisely the peoples who have made least
progress when compared with the dominant strains among, for instance,
the English or Germans. So far is Mr. Kidd’s proposition from being
true that, when studied in the light of the facts, it is difficult to
refrain from calling it the reverse of the truth. The race existing
under conditions which make the competition for bare existence keenest,
never progresses as fast as the race which exists under less stringent
conditions. There must undoubtedly be a certain amount of competition,
a certain amount of stress and strain, but it is equally undoubted that
if this competition becomes too severe the race goes down and not up;
and it is further true that the race existing under the severest stress
as regards this competition often fails to go ahead as fast even in
population as does the race where the competition is less severe. No
matter how large the number of births may be, a race cannot increase if
the number of deaths also grows at an accelerating rate.
To increase greatly a race must be prolific, and there is no curse
so great as the curse of barrenness, whether for a nation or an
individual. When a people gets to the position even now occupied by the
mass of the French and by sections of the New Englanders, where the
death rate surpasses the birth rate, then that race is not only fated
to extinction but it deserves extinction. When the capacity and desire
for fatherhood and motherhood is lost the race goes down, and should go
down; and we need to have the plainest kind of plain speaking addressed
to those individuals who fear to bring children into the world. But
while this is all true, it remains equally true that immoderate
increase in no way furthers the development of a race, and does not
always help its increase even in numbers. The English-speaking peoples
during the past two centuries and a half have increased faster than any
others, yet there have been many other peoples whose birth rate during
the same period has stood higher.
Yet, again, Mr. Kidd, in speaking of the stress of the conditions
of progress in our modern societies fails to see that most of the
stress to which he refers does not have anything to do with increased
difficulty in obtaining a living, or with the propagation of the
race. The great prizes are battled for among the men who wage no war
whatever for mere subsistence, while the fight for mere subsistence is
keenest among precisely the classes which contribute very little indeed
to the progress of the race. The generals and admirals, the poets,
philosophers, historians and musicians, the statesmen and judges, the
law-makers and law-givers, the men of arts and of letters, the great
captains of war and of industry--all these come from the classes where
the struggle for the bare means of subsistence is least severe, and
where the rate of increase is relatively smaller than in the classes
below. In civilized societies the rivalry of natural selection works
against progress. Progress is made in spite of it, for progress results
not from the crowding out of the lower classes by the upper, but on the
contrary from the steady rise of the lower classes to the level of the
upper, as the latter tend to vanish, or at most barely hold their own.
In progressive societies it is often the least fit who survive; but, on
the other hand, they and their children often tend to grow more fit.
The mere statement of these facts is sufficient to show not only how
incorrect are many of Mr. Kidd’s premises and conclusions, but also how
unwarranted are some of the fears which he expresses for the future.
It is plain that the societies and sections of societies where the
individual’s happiness is on the whole highest, and where progress
is most real and valuable, are precisely these where the grinding
competition and the struggle for mere existence is least severe.
Undoubtedly in every progressive society there must be a certain
sacrifice of individuals, so that there must be a certain proportion of
failures in every generation; but the actual facts of life prove beyond
shadow of doubt that the extent of this sacrifice has nothing to do
with the rapidity or worth of the progress. The nations that make most
progress may do so at the expense of ten or fifteen individuals out of
a hundred, whereas the nations that make least progress, or even go
backwards, may sacrifice almost every man out of the hundred.
This last statement is in itself partly an answer to the position taken
by Mr. Kidd, that there is for the individual no “rational sanction”
for the conditions of progress. In a progressive community, where the
conditions provide for the happiness of four-fifths or nine-tenths
of the people, there is undoubtedly a rational sanction for progress
both for the community at large and for the great bulk of its members;
and if these members are on the whole vigorous and intelligent, the
attitude of the smaller fraction who have failed will be a matter
of little consequence. In such a community the conflict between the
interests of the individual and the organism of which he is a part,
upon which Mr. Kidd lays so much emphasis, is at a minimum. The stress
is severest, the misery and suffering greatest, among precisely
the communities which have made least progress--among the Bushmen,
Australian black fellows, and root-digger Indians, for instance.
Moreover, Mr. Kidd does not define what he means by “rational
sanction.” Indeed one of his great troubles throughout is his failure
to make proper definitions, and the extreme looseness with which he
often uses the definitions he does make. Apparently by “rational” he
means merely selfish, and proceeds upon the assumption that “reason”
must always dictate to every man to do that which will give him the
greatest amount of individual gratification at the moment, no matter
what the cost may be to others or to the community at large. This
is not so. Side by side with the selfish development in life there
has been almost from the beginning a certain amount of unselfish
development too; and in the evolution of humanity the unselfish side
has, on the whole, tended steadily to increase at the expense of the
selfish, notably in the progressive communities about whose future
development Mr. Kidd is so ill at ease. A more supreme instance of
unselfishness than is afforded by motherhood cannot be imagined;
and when Mr. Kidd implies, as he does very clearly, that there is
no rational sanction for the unselfishnsess of motherhood, for the
unselfishness of duty, or loyalty, he merely misuses the word rational.
When a creature has reached a certain stage of development it will
cause the female more pain to see her offspring starve than to work
for it, and she then has a very rational reason for so working. When
humanity has reached a certain stage it will cause the individual more
pain, a greater sense of degradation and shame and misery, to steal,
to murder, or to lie, than to work hard and suffer discomfort. When
man has reached this stage he has a very rational sanction for being
truthful and honest. It might also parenthetically be stated that when
he has reached this stage he has a tendency to relieve the sufferings
of others, and he has for this course the excellent rational sanction
that it makes him more uncomfortable to see misery unrelieved than it
does to deny himself a little in order to relieve it.
However, we can cordially agree with Mr. Kidd’s proposition that many
of the social plans advanced by would-be reformers in the interest of
oppressed individuals are entirely destructive of all growth and of
all progress in society. Certain cults, not only Christian, but also
Buddhistic and Brahminic, tend to develop an altruism which is as
“supra-natural” as Mr. Kidd seemingly desires religion to be; for it
really is without foundation in reason, and therefore to be condemned.
Mr. Kidd repeats again and again that the scientific development of
the nineteenth century confronts us with the fact that the interests
of the social organism and of the individual are, and must remain,
antagonistic, and the latter predominant, and that there can never be
found any sanction in individual reason for individual good conduct in
societies where the conditions of progress prevail. From what has been
said above it is evident that this statement is entirely without basis,
and therefore that the whole scheme of mystic and highly irrational
philosophy which he founds upon it at once falls to the ground. There
is no such necessary antagonism as that which he alleges. On the
contrary, in the most truly progressive societies, even now, for the
great mass of the individuals composing them the interests of the
social organism and of the individual are largely identical instead of
antagonistic; and even where this is not true, there is a sanction of
individual reason, if we use the word _reason_ properly, for conduct on
the part of the individual which is subordinate to the welfare of the
general society.
We can measure the truth of his statements by applying them, not to
great societies in the abstract, but to small social organisms in the
concrete. Take for instance the life of a regiment or the organization
of a police department or fire department. The first duty of a
regiment is to fight, and fighting means the death and disabling of
a large proportion of the men in the regiment. The case against the
identity of interests between the individual and the organism, as put
by Mr. Kidd, would be far stronger in a regiment than in any ordinary
civilized society of the day. Yet as a matter of fact we know that in
the great multitude of regiments there is much more subordination of
the individual to the organism than is the case in any civilized state
taken as a whole. Moreover, this subordination is greatest in precisely
those regiments where the average individual is best off, because it
is greatest in those regiments where the individual feels that high,
stern pride in his own endurance and suffering, and in the great name
of the organism of which he forms a part, that in itself yields one of
the loftiest of all human pleasures. If Mr. Kidd means anything when
he says that there is no rational sanction for progress he must also
mean that there is no rational sanction for a soldier not flinching
from the enemy when he can do so unobserved, for a sentinel not leaving
his post, for an officer not deserting to the enemy. Yet when he says
this he utters what is a mere jugglery on words. In the process of
evolution men and societies have often reached such a stage that the
best type of soldier or citizen feels infinitely more shame and misery
from neglect of duty, from cowardice or dishonesty, from selfish
abandonment of the interests of the organism of which he is part, than
can be offset by the gratification of any of his desires. This, be it
also observed, often takes place, entirely independent of any religious
considerations. The habit of useful self-sacrifice may be developed by
civilization in a great society as well as by military training in a
regiment. The habit of useless self-sacrifice may also, unfortunately,
be developed; and those who practice it are but one degree less
noxious than the individuals who sacrifice good people to bad.