emed at first to show that it was for ever
impossible. Progress, it appeared, had been always due to a ruthless
struggle for life, which must still continue unless progress was to
cease. Pity and love would turn the edge of the struggle, and therefore
would lead inevitably to the degeneration of the species.

This grim conception of an internecine conflict, inevitable and
unending, in which all races must play their part, hung for a generation
after 1859 over the study of world-politics as the fear of a cooling sun
hung over physics, and the fear of a population to be checked only by
famine and war hung over the first century of political economy. Before
Darwin wrote, it had been possible for philanthropists to think of the
non-white races as 'men and brothers' who, after a short process of
education, would become in all respects except colour identical with
themselves. Darwin made it clear that the difficulty could not be so
glossed over. Racial variations were shown to be unaffected by
education, to have existed for millions of years, and to be tending
perhaps towards divergence rather than assimilation.

The practical problem also of race relationship has by a coincidence
presented itself since Darwin wrote in a sterner form. During the first
half of the nineteenth century the European colonists who were in daily
contact with non-European races, although their impulses and their
knowledge alike revolted from the optimistic ethnology of Exeter Hall,
yet could escape all thought about their own position by assuming that
the problem would settle itself. To the natives of Australia or Canada
or the Hottentots of South Africa trade automatically brought disease,
and disease cleared the land for a stronger population. But the weakest
races and individuals have now died out, the surviving population are
showing unexpected powers of resisting the white man's epidemics, and we
are adding every year to our knowledge of, and therefore our
responsibility for, the causation of infection. We are nearing the time
when the extermination of races, if it is done at all, must be done
deliberately.

But if the extermination is to be both inevitable and deliberate how can
there exist a community either of affection or purpose between the
killers and the killed? No one at this moment professes, as far as I
know, to have an easy and perfect answer to this question. The point of
ethics lies within the region claimed by religion. But Chris